Contrary Mary

Just an old-fashioned love story, the kind that will reach your heart.

"A love story with its heart in the right place." -Life Magazine

"I find it a great book than twenty other novels that I have undertaken to read. If I had been a woman, I think I would like to have something like Contrary Mary, standing up every day on her own feet, using her mind in a womanly and sensibly human way. No one can read Temple Bailey's book without wishing to be able to see the soul in things and to use words that rightly frame the pictures she paints with them." -John Wanamaker, The Bookseller

There is a message in it for you.

"Real authors are very much like other persons, except that some authors are more delightful. Miss Temple Bailey, author of 'Contrary Mary,' is one of these. If you have read her book you suspect somewhere a prototype of her charming heroine. The prototype is Miss Bailey herself - although she would probably be the first to disclaim it. As a matter of fact, she tells you that 'contrary' Mary was such and such a girl - a real girl who lived in Washington. But Miss Bailey is one of those writers whose own personality creeps into what they write, and in consequence her women characters are very real, very human, very lovable, and, with all their independence of mind, decidedly and deliciously feminine....Most of the incidents in 'Contrary Mary,' are true. But they are woven into the fabric of fiction so smoothly and proportionately that you could not say such things actually happen and which are invention outright. The effect is to give the entire result an atmosphere of reality." -The Book News Monthly

The story of a loyal, gracious woman, and an unspoiled man.

"This is a heart story. Its heroine is a Maryland girl whose ancestors were aristocrats, but who teaches school. She believes that work is service, and not ignoble. To out-of-the-way Crossroads come two men, one a writer, with power to sway me, one a physician. Both need Anne. Out of this situation Miss Bailey makes a wholesome, optimistic, old-fashioned love story that you will be glad to read and talk over with a dear friend." -The Progressive Teacher and Southwestern School Journal

"A pleasant old-fashioned novel of sentiment that develops several delightfully quaint love stories. The scene of the story is Washington and matters of national importance figure in the background. The heroine is a sturdy American girl with a decided will of her own....Bits of local color and enthusiastic descriptive passages heighten the romantic appeal of the story and give 'Contrary Mary' a secure place among the attractive fiction of the year." -Review of Reviews and World's Work

"A worth-while story, in which Cupid works long hours. The pages are filled with silken ladies and gallant gentlemen in garden and fireside scenes concerned with matters of life and love and death. Mary Ballard, the heroine, for sake of high ideals works and suffers, refusing wealth and love. But a one-time minister, whose career had ended in tragedy, enters Mary's life and her life takes a turn on which she had not counted." -Continent