Books: Mother Danforth's Story

THE CHRISTMAS TREE (212 pp.]—Isabel Bolton—Scribner ($2.75).

At 62, Mary Britton Miller took stock. She had written five volumes of poems and a rather good novel, In the Days of Thy Youth, a story of a deep attachment between twins. Yet Mary Miller had never produced a sound critical success, had never come close to authoring a bestseller. Was she, after all, just another New England spinster with literary inclinations?

Novelist Miller thought that the trouble might be her placid style. She decided to take a completely new course. She picked herself the pseudonym of Isabel Bolton and, in 1946, published a novel...