By Bonnie Withers

Are you old enough to remember radio soap operas? Each day, after school, my mom and I would settle in for an hour of fifteen-minute dramas. Road to Happiness, Backstage Wife, and, of course, Stella Dallas. Now, many decades later, I learn that Stella Dallas was the creation of a Unitarian writer, Olive Higgins Prouty, who was born on January 10, 1882. Olive, born to privilege, knew even before she graduated from Smith College that she wanted to be a writer. Writing between the years of women’s suffrage and women’s liberation, Olive questioned notions of the subservience of the woman’s role, and sought to balance family obligations with an independent life of integrity and responsibility.  

Of her novels, Prouty is best known for Stella Dallas (1922), although her greatest achievement was the depiction of mental breakdown and recovery, drawn from her own experience, in Now, Voyager (1941). Prouty endowed a scholarship for young writers at Smith, leading to a complicated relationship with Sylvia Plath which included picking up the tab for Plath’s medical expenses after her suicide attempt in 1953.  Plath (unkindly) later caricatured her in Bell Jar. As for Stella Dallas, Prouty did not approve the sale of the rights, but was unable to stop the transaction. She openly disliked the radio series which, nevertheless, aired for 18 years. 

Olive Prouty was bored by her early religious experience with Congregationalism. The family conversion to Unitarianism  appealed to her personal quest, “searching with fumbling, finite mind … leaping from doubt to bright surmise.” She was a member of First Parish in Brookline, Massachusetts, for 50 years and left the church $50,000 when she died in 1974.