The Poor Little Rich Girl

As Gwendolyn stared at the line the reflection of her small face in the mirror grew suddenly all white as if some rude hand had reached out and brushed away the pink from cheeks and lips.

Eleanor Gates was an American playwright who created seven plays that were staged on Broadway. Her best known work was the play The Poor Little Rich Girl, which was produced by her husband in 1913 and went on to be made as films for Mary Pickford in 1917 and for Shirley Temple in 1936.

Excerpt from The Poor Little Rich Girl

Whatever otherwise the pretty virtues of our Amer ican drama, the quality of fanciful imagination is of the catalogue no (or at best, small) part. We have seen amongst us farce writers of light and facile finger; we have seen drama framers of intermittently rugged, if consistently yoke], philosophic vision.

Yet, the writer of exploring phantasies, the writer of caprices that violate the neutrality of the sacrosanct Broadway commonplace, is but dimly silhouetted against the borning native sun.