Marion Harland's Autobiography
The Story of a Long Life (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from Marion Harland's Autobiography: The Story of a Long Life

From the time when, as a mere baby, I dreamed myself to slumber every night by "making up stories," down to the present hour, every human life with which I have been associated, or of which I had any intimate knowledge, has been to me a living story. All interest me in some measure. Many enlist my sympathy and fascinate the imagination as no tale that is avowedly fictitious has ever bewitched me.

I hold and believe for certain that if I could draw aside the veil of conventional reserve from the daily thinking, feeling, and living of my most commonplace acquaintance, and read these from "Preface" to "Finis," I should rate the wildest dream of the novelist as tame by comparison.

My children tell me, laughingly, that I "turn everything into a story." In my heart I know that the romances are all ready-made and laid to my hand.

In the pages that follow this word of explanation I have essayed no dramatic effects or artistic "situations." "The Story of My Long Life" tells itself as one friend might talk to another as the two sit in the confidential firelight on a winter evening. The idea of reviewing that life upon paper first came to me with the consciousness - which was almost a shock - that, of all the authors still on active professional duty in our country, I am the only one whose memory runs back to the stage of national history that preceded the Civil War by a quarter-century.

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