Porter, Eleanor H.

Eleanor Hodgman Porter, née Eleanor Hodgman, (born Dec. 19, 1868, Littleton, N.H., U.S.—died May 21, 1920, Cambridge, Mass.), American novelist, creator of the Pollyanna series of books that generated a popular phenomenon.

Hodgman studied singing at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston. She gained a local reputation as a singer in concerts and church choirs and continued her singing career after her marriage in 1892 to John L. Porter, a businessman. By 1901, however, she had abandoned music in favour of writing. Her stories began appearing in numerous popular magazines and newspapers, and in 1907 she published her first novel, Cross Currents. There followed The Turn of the Tide (1908); The Story of Marco (1911); Miss Billy (1911), her first really successful book; and Miss Billy’s Decision (1912).

In 1913 Porter published Pollyanna, a sentimental tale of a most improbable heroine, a young girl whose “glad game” of always looking for and finding the bright side of things somehow reforms her antagonists, restores hope to the hopeless, and generally rights the wrongs of the world. The book’s immediate and enormous popularity—in countless reprinted editions it eventually sold over a million copies—must be attributed to the American reading public’s eagerness for reassurance that rural virtues and cheerful optimism still existed, as well as to Porter’s skill in blending dashes of social conscience and ironic distance into the sentimentalism of her message. Pollyanna, second on the fiction best-seller list for 1914, was followed by Pollyanna Grows Up (1915). It also was made into a Broadway play (1916) starring Helen Hayes and then into a motion picture (1920) starring Mary Pickford (a 1960 version starred Hayley Mills), and it inspired a veritable industry for related books and products. “Glad” clubs sprang up around the country and then abroad as Pollyanna was translated into several foreign languages. The name itself soon entered the American lexicon, albeit in a largely pejorative sense.

Porter’s other books include the best-sellers Just David (1916), The Road to Understanding (1917), Oh, Money! Money! (1918), Dawn (1919), and Mary-Marie (1920). Many of her more than 200 stories were collected in Across the Years (1919), The Tie That Binds (1919), and, posthumously, Money, Love and Kate (1925), Little Pardner (1926), and Just Mother (1927). A series of juvenile Pollyanna books were subsequently written by Harriet L. Smith and Elizabeth Borton.