Emma Frances Dawson
Emma Frances Dawson (1839–1926) was an American poet and writer of supernatural fiction. She was born in New England, but by 1880 was living in California, eventually in San Francisco, the setting for most of her stories. Following the 1906 earthquake, she moved to Palo Alto.
Dawson wrote short stories and poems, originally printed in regional publications such as the Argonaut and Overland Monthly. Most of her fiction was reprinted in a collection An Itinerant House, and Other Stories. The work is notable not just for its merit as atmospheric supernatural fiction, but for its detailed description of 19th century San Francisco. Ambrose Bierce, who seems to have been a mentor to Dawson in her literary efforts, praised her work as some of the best being written in the West Coast and representative of the region (as well as having similar high praise for verse).
“Love I must forego. I am not a man with an income.”
“Houses seem to remember,' said he. 'Some rooms oppress us with a sense of lives that have been lived in them.”
“I have marked in traveling how lonely houses change their expression as you come near, pass, and leave them. Some frown, others smile. The Bible buildings had life of their own and human diseases; the priests cursed or blessed them as men.”
“Can one man's madness be another's real life?”
“It is as easy to find a lover as to keep a friend, but as hard to find a friend as to keep a lover.”
“Beauty always wins friends.”