[In the following review, Whicher recommends A Goodly Fellowship, regretting only that it is somewhat too rosy in its portrait of the teaching profession.]

This book is not a novel, though it reads like one, but a second installment of autobiography. Ten years ago Miss Chase wrote in A Goodly Heritage the story of her childhood in Maine. She now adds the chronicle of her thirty years as a teacher [in A Goodly Fellowship], beginning, after a brief survey of her own education, with her first experience in conducting a district school in her native state, and tracing her gradual rise in the profession through Western boarding schools and advanced study at home and abroad to the secure dignity of a professorship in Smith College. One gathers very quickly that the teaching profession has never been a second choice with her, but from the first a favorite vocation. Far from being a “stickit” writer collapsed into an educator, Miss Chase is a born teacher who has found in teaching a path to the good life and has followed it from strength to strength. From her success as a teacher has come not a little of the confidence and surplus power that have made her a popular novelist and lecturer.

Any one who has assumed that the life of an American teacher is a dull and stifling grind—an attitude that teachers themselves are somewhat too fond of assuming—will find many surprises in Miss Chase's alert and humorous description of her pedagogical experiences. Thirty years have not dimmed the drama of her first day in charge of a district school, where with an outward show of fury masking a sinking heart, she overawed the larger lummoxes intrusted to her care and demonstrated once for all her ability to dominate a class. A very lively chapter recounts the shocks of her first adventures in search of a job, including two weeks among moistly predatory religionists in a Chicago Bible institute. There follow two varied samples of boarding schools, one in Wisconsin of a home school of the kind that occasionally springs up, flourishes for a time, and perishes with its founders, being too sensible and humane in essence to be perpetuated in institutional form, another of a city school for girls of the upper class run by one of the last exponents of the “duty” cult, a figure that might have stepped out of Dickens' pages. Miss Chase does not need to tell us that she has had fun in living over her memories. Indeed, her book may be a portent. If the public has found a romantic interest in the routine work of a country doctor, just wait till they hear from the country school teacher.

The defect of Miss Chase's narrative as she continues with her story of graduate work at the University of Minnesota and her later teaching in university and college is that it lacks relief. Every phase of her experience is too “goodly,” not for credence, but for sustained interest. There should be a villain in the piece. Perhaps Miss Chase has felt the lack, for she devotes a few pages to the dullness of graduate school teaching, remarking sadly that she has come to the conclusion that the most learned teachers are often the most benumbing. But she instantly robs this accusation of its validity by a convincing tribute to the vitality of her professors at Minnesota. One is left wondering where she derived her impression of the stodginess of graduate teaching, since she evidently never encountered it personally.

In addition to her chapters on teaching at various levels, Miss Chase pictures her first journey abroad, in 1913, to study German, first under a female martinet in Berlin, then in a gracious home in the Harz region. Her reminiscences are so characteristic of the period that few scholars in middle life will not feel the urge to supplement them by kindred experiences. A little outside of the routine of teaching, too, are her accounts of a year of convalescence and of experiments in writing in Montana, and of her visits to the College of St. Catherine in Minneapolis, the latter a particularly fine appreciation of the Roman Catholic contribution to higher education in the United States.

This book is addressed to the thousands of teachers who come to their task “as to a sport.” What Miss Chase calls “the presumption always latent … in autobiographical narratives by those relatively unimportant” is not entirely exorcised from her pages, but it is greatly mitigated by her power to communicate a eupeptic enthusiasm for her profession. May she lead many of the same breed to see in teaching a vision of the good life!