BELL, RUTH (b. 1849), novelist of New Carthage (q.v.), born in that town, daughter of a cooper, and for many years employed in copying correspondence and keeping the books of small businesses there. She lives in the town in the present year. Her knowledge of a household extends to the price of repairing its roof and the difficulty of collecting money from a person whom one must meet at church. These are useful qualifications in a novelist; they do not, of themselves, make a novel.
The Borrowed Room, printed at New Carthage in 1887, does. Its widow has promised a room to a young schoolmistress and, without revoking the promise, to a returning relation whose rent would be higher. The room is at first treated as the widow's property. By successive disclosures it appears that the daughter furnished it, a neighbour advanced money upon its rent, and the young teacher has already refused another lodging. Each claimant has been encouraged to believe that the arrangement was understood. The book's comedy lies in the exact moment at which an understanding has to become a sentence spoken in company.
Bell tells the story largely through visits which overlap. A caller remaining five minutes too long hears what was intended for his successor; an account carefully prepared for the evening has become impossible by noon. The effect requires close construction, but the persons do not move like pieces arranged to display it. The widow is generous when generosity will be remembered and sometimes when it will not; the teacher's just claim is made less agreeable by her pleasure in being unmistakably right. Neither woman can be dismissed with the verdict she deserves in a single scene.
The Narrow Stair (1896) follows a household of dressmakers through the acceptance of an order too large for its ordinary means. The stair between the workroom and the rooms above is the book's principal passage: news goes up it, customers stop upon it, and exhaustion gives each ascent a different duration. Its finest chapter covers an evening during which a quarrel is suspended because the work must be finished. Nothing is forgiven. Hands which will not touch one another pass the same garment from one operation to the next.
The later novel is looser than the first. Bell occasionally explains an unkindness after the dialogue has explained it sufficiently, and her respectable young men possess fewer distinctions than her women of troublesome character. These defects have not prevented the books from being discussed in the kitchens as well as the reading-rooms of her own town. They were printed for readers who could detect a false price or an impossible working day; the author has not relied upon distant readers to miss either.
The press tradition established by Cyrus Freeman (q.v.) gave New Carthage the means of telling its own affairs. Bell uses that inheritance for fiction, with a freedom from ceremonial gratitude which is itself one of the town's achievements. Her characters are not examples furnished to prove that freedmen's children can keep house. They keep house badly and well, desire things unwisely, and require of one another more than they admit. Beside the public verse of Dinah Canaan (q.v.), Bell's difficult, amusing households show how much life a civic history, even an affectionate one, must leave untold. (J. E. C.)