A Woman of Certain Importance
A Biography of Kathleen Norris
Deanna Paoli Gumina

A storyteller and the chronicler of America's ideal family, Kathleen Norris came to shape that image American women held of themselves. For nearly fifty years, from 1911 until 1959 Kathleen was one of the most widely read and highest paid women writers in the United States. She wrote what became known as feminine fiction, a form of escape literature that was written by women for women. Promoted as "America's Most Popular Writer for Women," Kathleen wrote ninety-three novels, countless magazine articles, short stories, serialized novelettes, plays, hosted a radio talk show and, for twenty years met a weekly deadline for a syndicated newspaper column. In all of her writings she held fast to her message that women had to be strong-minded if she was to survive the moral vicissitudes of her time. Kathleen held firmly that a woman was the backbone of her family and for nearly a century her voice was dominant in idealizing the image of the American woman as wife and mother.
Aside from Kathleen's position as chronicler of womanly values, she married, borne a son, raised her sister’s children and thoroughly enjoyed family life. She and her beloved husband, Charles Gilman Norris, known to all as, "Cigi," were representatives of those turn-of-the-century San Francisco born writers who went to New York City, where publishers paid dearly for their stories. Once they had made their mark, the "literary" Norrises returned to their native California, where they continued to write.

-Kevin Starr, Ph.D.
State Librarian of California, Emeritus
Author of Series
Americans and the California Dream
    ""With the publication of A Woman of Certain Importance, Deanna Gumina has produced a long needed biography of Kathleen Norris (1879-1966), together with an equally needed explication of American women’s literary history; popular fiction in the early twentieth century articulated and shaped by the values of American women. Kathleen Norris was by all agreement the most popular, which is to say, best-selling, female American novelist in the first decades of the twentieth century. She took as her primary theme, moreover, what the American woman should value and how the American woman should live. The biography then constitutes as a welcomed addition to the history of American feminism in the twentieth century, despite the fact that as a feminist Kathleen Norris wrote from the conservative perspective."