A Mother, Wrapped in a Mystery

In the mid-1950s, I was a high schooler living in a big old house in Providence, Rhode Island. My father, Harcourt Brown, a professor of French at Brown University, had a study that overflowed with books. And my adjacent bedroom was in the floodway. So he and my mother, Dorothy Stacey Brown, created an attic suite for me by blending two adjoining rooms into one.

As I moved long-unopened boxes into closets, I was startled to discover a large cache of my mother’s writings. I had no idea that she had been an author in the years before I came along. After graduating from the University of Toronto, in 1923, she wrote columns for Eaton’s News Weekly and placed a few short pieces in the Toronto Star Weekly and Saturday Night. Then, as the stock market crashed in 1929, my parents moved to New York, where my father undertook doctoral studies at Columbia. My mother became...