Inglis Fletcher: The Christian Hill-Born Novelist
by
Inglis Fletcher
Minna Inglis Clark Fletcher — Inglis Fletcher, as she would later be known to her readers — was born at 410 Prospect Street in the Christian Hill Disrict of Alton, Illinois. In an earlier America, it was fashionable for a woman, particularly one who enjoyed a national reputation, to shave a few years from her age. Fletcher usually gave her year of birth as 1888, but some researchers believe it may well have been a decade earlier. The eldest of three children, her father worked for the Chicago and Alton Railroad.
“Peggy” Fletcher, as her friends called her, later said that some of her earliest childhood memories were images of boats plying the Mississippi River, which she could watch from the windows of her home. She also remembered Alton as a place of bustling railroads, probably from her father taking the little girl to where he worked. When her father changed jobs, the family moved to Edwardsville, Illinois. Fletcher’s father later left the railroad and bought the Leland Hotel in Edwardsville.
Fletcher’s uncle had served in the Union army, while her grandfather was a veteran of the Black Hawk War. Their stories surely whetted her interest in the past and played a role in her decision to write historical fiction.
She graduated from Edwardsville High School and enrolled in Washington University in St. Louis, where she studied sculpture under Robert Bringhurst. She left college without receiving a degree, however. The future novelist married mining engineer John Fletcher in 1902 at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Edwardsville. Peggy Fletcher accompanied her husband as his work took him to mining camps in California, Oregon, Washington and Alaska.
While in Spokane, Washington, Fletcher met the arctic explorer, Vilhjalmur Stefansson, who encouraged her to pursue writing as a career. Her first literary success occurred in 1920 when she sold The Western Gate, a movie script, to Robertson-Cole Pictures Corporation. Fletcher’s debut novel, a work of juvenile fiction titled The White Leopard, appeared in 1931. The work was based on research she conducted while traveling through Africa and the Mideast in 1928. Red Jasmine, also set in Africa, followed in 1932.
But Fletcher wanted to write historical fiction and spent almost a decade researching life in eighteenth-century North Carolina. Raleigh’s Eden, which chronicled some plantation families from 1765 to 1782, appeared in 1940 and garnered Fletcher an international reputation. Raleigh’s Eden was followed by eleven novels that dealt with North Carolina history from 1585 to 1789. These twelve works became known as the Carolina series. They sold millions of copies and were published in seven languages.
Fletcher achieved an extraordinary degree of historical accuracy in her novels. She typically spent one year in research and the next year writing the book. Some of her characters appeared in successive novels.
The Fletchers moved to North Carolina shortly after the publication of Raleigh’s Eden. Inglis Fletcher loved her adopted state with a passion and attended virtually every historical and literary meeting held in North Carolina. Yet she always recalled her youth in Alton and Edwardsville with nostalgia and once wrote that she wished that all children could grow up in such towns. She died in 1969.
Bibliography:
“Novelist recalls life in Alton.” The [Alton, IL] Evening Telegraph; July 2, 1976.
http://digital.lib.ecu/special/ead/findingaids/2002; accessed 1/22/07, 3:46 p.m.
http://www.ncwriters.org/services/lhof/inductees/ifletche.htm; accessed 1/22/07, 3:55 p.m.