Margaret Ayer Barnes papers

Margaret Ayer Barnes, BMC 1907, was a novelist, playwright, and short story writer. She was born on April 8, 1886 in Chicago, Illinois and attended Bryn Mawr College between 1903 and 1907. She returned to Chicago shortly after graduating. In 1910 she married Cecil Barnes, a lawyer, and between 1912 and 1919 had three sons, Cecil Jr., Edward Larrabee and Benjamin Ayer. In 1920, Barnes was elected alumnae director of Bryn Mawr and served three years. As director, she helped to organize the Summer School for Women Workers in Industry, which offered an alternative educational program for women workers within a traditional institution. Consisting mainly of young, single immigrant women with little to no academic background, the summer program offered courses in progressive education, liberal arts and economics. Women in the program were encouraged to develop confidence as speakers, writers and leaders in the workplace. Barnes was also a public speaker, strongly supporting higher education for women.

In 1925, on vacation in France, Barnes was seriously injured in an automobile accident. During her lengthy convalescence, she was encouraged by her childhood friend and playwright Edward Sheldon to develop her writing. A year later, her first short stories were accepted by the Pictorial Review. Next, Barnes and Sheldon worked together to dramatize Edith Wharton's novel Age of Innocence (1920). The play was produced in 1928 with Katharine Cornell in the lead and was an instant success. In 1929, Barnes again collaborated with Sheldon on Jenny, a comedy, and in 1930 on Dishonored Lady, a melodrama based on the 1857 trial of a British woman, Madeleine Smith, for the murder of her lover. Both of these plays ran for more than a hundred performances on Broadway. Despite the success of Dishonored Lady, Barnes and Sheldon were unable to turn the work into a screenplay. However, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer later purchased the rights to the novel Letty Lynton, by Mrs. Belloc Lowndes, based on the same case and used the material for a movie with the same title. Barnes and Sheldon filed a suit in 1933 claiming that MGM plagarized portions of their play, Dishonored Lady. Seven years later, the case was decided by the Supreme Court in favor of Barnes and Sheldon.

Barnes also had great success as a novelist. In 1928, she published Prevailing Winds, a collection of eight short stories which had originally appeared in the popular magazines Pictorial Review, Harper's, and Red Book. In 1930, Barnes' most successful and best-known novel, Years of Grace, won the Pulitzer Prize. Bryn Mawr College, along with the characters of college presidents M. Carey Thomas and Marion Park figure prominently in this work. The story, beginning in the 1890's and continuing into the 1930s', chronicles the life of Jane Ward Carver from her teens to age fifty-four. This novel follows many of the same themes as Barnes' other works. Centering on the social manners of upper middle class society, her female protagonists are often traditionalists, struggling to uphold conventional morality in the face of changing social climates. In the next eight years, Barnes would publish four additional novels, Westward Passage (1931), Within This Present (1933), Edna His Wife (1935), and Wisdom's Gate (1938).

Barnes had been a prolific writer into her forties, but after the publication of Wisdom's Gate, her writing slowed and then ceased. She lived the remainder of her life quietly and died in Cambridge, Massachusetts on October 26th, 1967. Gift of Edward L. Barnes, Benjamin Ayer Barnes, and the Barnes Family.