Maria Thompson Daviess

[from Harrisburg Telegraph, Fri, May 11, 1917] A young Belgian noblewoman and heiress comes to the United States in order to escape the man her uncle wishes her to marry. Learning that they have followed her and are close on her heels, she jumps off a slow-going train as it passes through the Tennessee mountains. The owner of an old farm, a gentleman farmer, is luckily there and his chivalry is roused at her loneliness and inexperience, and his heart is won by her charm and quaint English. He takes her to a neighbor's, where for the first time in her formal existence she comes close to the actual things of life. The uncle and prince have tracked her, and in spite of the hero's efforts to lead them astray, appear on the scene. Miss Daviess brings her international romance to a sympathetic conclusion.

[from New York Herald, Sun Jun 1, 1919]

The next time you are thinking of going to the theatre change your mind. Buy Blue-Grass and Broadway, by Maria Thomson Daviess, read it yourself, give it to the family, the maid, the telephone girl and the elevator boy and then send it to the soldiers, thus killing two or three hundred birds with one stone. If books can feel, this one will be insufferably conceited at the end of a week or two in camp. It is reported that Marjorie Benton Cooke's Bambi proved so popular in camp that the soldiers or lads or boys or whatever you like to call them were afraid to lay it down between readings. Blue-Grass and Broadway has stormed the camps in just such a manner. Read what one fighting man has to say of it:

"Say, if you see a book called Blue-Grass and Broadway, go to it. It's got all the thrills you want to meet for the next few days -- and then some -- all about the theatre game, inside dope and great stuff at that. And it's got a little girl from Kentucky in it that'll wind your heart around your neck a couple of times before she's done. The genuine article believe me. Oh, boy! But I've got to get back to camp and finish it.
"PRIVATE A E.F."

It is great stuff. Either Miss Daviess has learned the ropes of the theatrical world pretty well or she is just naturally a good sailor. Being a good deal of the playwright herself, besides a farmer and a business woman, she brings a nicely rounded knowledge of the world into her writing. The blue grass grows rather heavily in the middle of Broadway, perhaps, but a Kentucky noveliest who knows all about the women who grow up in it, and knows also how well other people enjoy reading of their charms, can afford to make lavish use of her knowledge.

When Patricia Adair of Adairville writes a plan to lift the mortgage from her home and save her aged grandfather's life, dresses up in her grandmother's clothes and brings her purring voice and long, curling, tearful lashes to New York to clinch the matter, there isn't a woman above the Mason and Dixon line who will be cat enough to wish her anything but success. There is something about these Kentucky girls, as Miss Daviess admits. One thing we must know. If crape myrtle grows in Westchester county, as Miss Daviess says it does, where, oh where, is the spot? Give us a bag and a net and lead the way. Let us have one more spray for old sake's sake.

[review headed with photo of Daviess in rural setting, wearing sunhat, surrounded by four little boys, one on a horse.]