Mary Tappan Wright’s known published short stories fall into two groups; twelve that initially appeared in Scribner’s Magazine, and ten which appeared in other publications. Of the former, the first six were gathered together as Wright’s first book, A Truce, and Other Stories (1895), her only story collection issued in her lifetime. The goal of the present publisher is to return her short fiction to print, a project initiated with our earlier collections Pro Tempore, and Other Stories (2007), comprising the rest of the Scribner’s stories, and Dead Letters, and Other Pieces (2008), comprising four of the other stories and a couple items of Wright ephemera..
     In compiling Fleabonnet Press’s new collections of Mary Tappan Wright’s stories, it has been my practice to adopt they treatment they might have received had they been collected in her lifetime. The stories in A Truce were arranged according to artistic considerations rather than the order of original publication, with the title taken from its longest component story. The Fleabonnet collections have been compiled on a similar basis.
     The six stories herein are from the earlier portion of Wright’s career. All originally appeared in The Youth’s Companion and Christian Union (later titled The Outlook), both of them religious or family-oriented magazines in contrast to the more adult-oriented Scribner’s. Consequently, their protagonists are generally younger, the settings more adventurous, and the treatments more sentimental than in her other tales. They tend as well to be less enigmatic; Wright’s tendency in her more mature works was to relate much of the vital part of the narrative by hint or allusion rather than in what was actually recounted, making the reader collaborate in the creative process by leaving the full story to be constructed as much in the reader’s mind as in what was set down by the author. The present tales are simpler and more straightforward, as befits their younger audience. Nonetheless, there is no attempt to sugar-coat the harsh realities of life. Her characters are subject to all the vicissitudes of existence, and can and sometimes do make choices with fatal consequences.
     The arrangement of material in this collection is thematic, with two narratives of war (Revolutionary and Civil) from The Outlook and Christian Union followed by a pair of brief, almost anecdotal tales and a couple of stories from Dulwich, Wright’s fictional college town and favorite venue, all from The Youth’s Companion. The overall title is as usual derived from the longest story, in this instance “Beginning Alone.”
     The texts of the stories are by and large taken from their first magazine appearances, photocopied from the bound volumes or microfilm copies of the journals held in Green Library at Stanford University or from PDF reproductions in American Periodicals Series Online 1740-1900 (usually abbreviated APS), a service to which Stanford has electronic access. These copies were then scanned and the scans produced diligently compared against the sources to ensure fidelity. While care was taken to eliminate errors introduced to the text through this process, some may remain; responsibility for these are the present editor’s.
     Editorial practice has been as follows. Spelling, grammar and punctuation, where they differ from current standards, have ordinarily been left untouched. Obvious printing errors have been silently corrected. Typography has been brought into accord with modern practice—this has chiefly meant the elimination of superfluous spacing around exclamation points, question marks, and quotation marks, and the reduction of ultra-long dashes. Four of these stories were serialized in the original publications, in two, four, six or eight parts. I preserved the part designations in some instances, but not in others, as the individual situation seemed to warrant. In two cases the divisions in the text between the serials parts corresponded to no natural breaks in the narrative, and preserving the part numbers in the present edition would have interfered with the flow of the story. In the remaining cases the divisions do correspond to formal discrete breaks in the text, and so have been allowed to stand. One unserialized story also contains formal divisions; these have been preserved as in the original text.
     For most of these stories there was but one copy text for each; that of the original publication, which I have necessarily followed. The situation was different with “His Last,” which was reprinted after its original publication in the anthology A Boy Lieutenant : true stories of life and adventure on land and sea (no indication of editor or date, but from an inscription in the copy of the copy to which I had access it must have been published by about 1905). The subtitle of the anthology raises the possibility that “His Last” may have been derived from a real incident, but given the story’s thoroughly fictional treatment this intriguing notion must, absent any other evidence, be regarded as dubious. There are a number of variances in the magazine and anthology versions of the text, chiefly in titling; in the book, the originally spare, slightly mysterious title blossoms into the fuller and unambiguous “His Last Offence, A Story of College Life.” The book version also expands the unadorned “Part 1” and “Part 2” of the serialized version into fully titled “chapters.” Without any means of gauging which version of the story best represents the author’s intent, I have generally preferred the magazine text. In regard to the titling, I have gone with the original, which appeared to me more in line with Wright’s usual mindset, but I have gladly incorporated the book version’s chapter titles, which well characterize the purpose and character of the story’s two divisions.
     With the exceptions noted, what you are about to read should be identical to that which first came under the eye of Wright’s earliest readers over a century ago.

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