[In the following review of The White Gate, Williamson praises Chase's memoir of her Maine childhood.]

The doctor next door charged Edward Everett Chase $5 for bringing his second daughter into the world, and $1.50 for each of two post-natal visits to mother and child. Whatever way you look at it, lawyer Chase got a bargain for his $8. For his daughter, Mary Ellen, grew to be a Professor of English Literature at Smith College and author of Windswept and Mary Peters. On a flyleaf of this, her latest book, Miss Chase's publishers list eight of her works, then give up, adding “etc.”

The White Gate is no mere “etc.” It is recollections of a childhood during the final years of the last century in a Maine seacoast village halfway between the Penobscot and Mount Desert. And in words of the title of one of her books, it's a goodly heritage.

Between the very young and the very old is an indefinable bond, invisible but no less real, which bridges the gap of one or even two intervening generations. It may be that when memory fades in the very old, a childlike simplicity takes its place. On the threshold of old age, say in the sixties, childhood memories seem stronger than of youth and middle age, and they tend to crowd out what has gone on in years between. In her creative sixties, novelist Chase writes of her childhood not at a distance as though peering through the wrong end of a pair of binoculars but close to it and alongside it.

The white gate across the driveway to the barn behind their long, rambling white house was the favored vantage point of the Chase children. It “both sheltered and extended the small tight world in which we lived.” Outside, Mr. Finn, the blind man, passed by, hopeful of seeing “our Lord face to face, for once He made the blind to see.” Other passers-by were gypsies, peddlers, the meat man in his white wagon, the scissors-grinder and Indian venders of sweet-grass baskets, Passamaquoddy Painkiller and Kickapoo Indian Sagwaw. From upland pastures came the tinkle of cowbells, but not from Constancy, the erratically wandering milk supply of the Chase family. And in one of those pastures a little girl told a dying tubercular artist of her ambition to be a writer. “I'm sure you will,” he said. “And better luck to you than I've ever had.”

There were relatives like Aunt Mi, who demanded six hot rocks for her winter's bed instead of the usual heated flatirons and soapstone. There were uncles who weren't real uncles, like Uncle Hen, the carpenter, Uncle Henery, the occasional lobsterman, and Uncle Roscoe, the paperhanger who deplored all flowers on wallpaper but hated roses. There were the “kindly animals” in the barn. There was Ezekiel, the stump-tailed rat terrier. Also Dolly Moses, a cat in perpetual state of motherhood or its expectation. In one of her fits she gave a frenzied leap and landed in a tureen of clam chowder on the dining table.

In smooth, seemingly effortless prose that comes only from hard work, Miss Chase recaptures a world that no longer is. There was “a comfortable knowledge of what one's days would be like.” Those days were without telephones, automobiles, electric lights and mechanical refrigeration. They had “no running water, no boughten bread, no paper towels, no soap flakes.” The hired girl, who “since she came from just as good a family as ours was a respected member of our own,” got two dollars a week and thought herself well paid. Yet, with all the hard work in which everyone had a share, there was “a sense of security impossible today, and plenty of time.”

“Plenty of time!” Today's labor-saving devices appear to have killed the leisure which prevailed then. And the phrase “to spend the day” with someone no longer is used “since the increased tempo of life has made such leisurely occupation seemingly impossible.”

Miss Chase “never felt a trace of resentment toward my early upbringing.” She has tried to discover what improvements either in methods or in offspring have been wrought since then. “With the best will in the world, I can detect none.”