Mabel Herbert Urner Harper was the author of two novels, guide books to antique collecting in Europe, and a 30-year newspaper serial story column. Harper was married to a well-known antiquarian bookseller whose collection formed the nucleus of the University of Michigan’s Special Collection. She was wealthy, socially prominent, and an inveterate antique collector of samplers and English furniture. Her story column featured an ever-bickering couple who themselves collected antiques. Harper’s fans were often collectors of antiques as well. When Harper’s column finally ended, she received hundreds of letters from bereft fans, and amidst their condolences they often described their antiques, their decorating schemes, and their desires for ever-nicer things.
Harper’s narrative structures of adventure and collecting feature an arc of emotional experience in which everyday challenges intersect with antique collecting opportunities. Through these encounters between other people and other object’s, Harper’s central character gradually if incrementally matures.
The fans of this long-lived story column and Harper’s other writings provide intriguing and unique insight into the ways everyday people, both men and women, understood their own relationship to antique collecting, interior decoration, and personal development. Fans framed their own life experiences in terms of Harper’s fictional couple and the ‘real-life’ portrayal of Harper and her husband’s relationship. Narrative structures of collecting antiques mirror a developmental arc of self, and the fan letters to Mabel Urner Harper reveal the ways that everyday Americans structured their own life experiences to mirror fictional representations of collecting activity.
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