Isabel Bolton

Mary Britton Miller (6 August 1883 – 3 April 1975), best known by her pen name as Isabel Bolton, was an American poet and novelist. She achieved her greatest critical success with the publication of three novels after the age of sixty, under her pen name. Many Mansions was nominated for the National Book Award for Fiction. She produced five books between the ages of 63 and 87, dictating them because of failing eyesight.

Their mother's brother, James Rumrill, had married Anna Chapin and through her family, became a vice-president of the Boston-Albany Railroad. He found that their father had left debt rather than wealth. Initially the orphaned children lived with their maternal grandmother Rebecca Rumrill in Springfield, Massachusetts, but she was in her 70s and died after two years. James and Anna Rumrill, who also lived there, assumed guardianship, but Anna kept the children at a remove. She hired Desire Aurelia Rogers to care for them. Rogers and the children lived in a separate residence. Their lives were unstable and the children felt like the poor relations they were. In each of these novels she explored her and her twin sister's lives through fiction.

These three novels, under her pen name Isabel Bolton, were republished posthumously in 1997 in a collection called New York Mosaic.

Books As Mary Britton Miller: Songs of Infancy and Other Poems (Macmillan, 1928), poetry Menagerie (Macmillan, 1928), children's poetry Without Sanctuary (Macmillan, 1932), poetry Intrepid Bird (Macmillan, 1934), poetry In the Days of Thy Youth (Scribner, 1943), novel The Crucifixion: A Poem (Scribner, 1944), poetry Give a Guess: Poems (Pantheon, 1957), children's poetry, illustrated by Juliet Kepes All Aboard: Poems (Pantheon, 1958), children's poetry, illustrated by Bill Sokol A Handful of Flowers (Pantheon, 1959), children's poetry, illustrated by Genevieve Vaughan-Jackson Jungle Journey (Pantheon, 1959), children's poetry, illustrated by Tobias Schneebaum Listen—the Birds (Pantheon, 1961), children's poetry, illustrated by Evaline Ness As Isabel Bolton: Do I Wake or Sleep (Scribner, 1946) The Christmas Tree (Scribner, 1949) Many Mansions (Scribner, 1952) Under Gemini: A Memoir (Harcourt Brace, 1966) The Whirligig of Time (Crown Publishers, 1971) New York Mosaic (Steerforth Press, 1997), posthumous collection of Do I Wake or Sleep, The Christmas Tree, and Many Mansions

Legacy The Millers' father Charles had to overcome his own father, Ezra L. Miller, committing suicide in 1847. He seemed to have done so, especially with his marriage. But the losses of their parents and security in their early years seemed to affect all the Miller children.

The elder Miller children also struggled as adults. Philip, the eldest, became a lawyer and eventually joined a prominent firm. Rebecca married a doctor and lived in Canada for several years. After they moved to New York in the 1920s, where her husband Edward Farrell joined a medical faculty, he became ill and died. Rebecca suffered from extreme depression and died a few years later at a home for incurables. Their youngest brother James had some opportunities with the Chapin family and became a bank president, but he suffered a breakdown and committed suicide in 1916 at Butler Hospital, a sanitarium in Providence, Rhode Island. He shot himself in the head with a revolver as his grandfather Miller had done.

Mary/Bolton never married and continued to explore elements of her life through her novels. In 1943, the year she published her first novel, her surviving brother Philip died of a heart attack at work.