The year was 1949. She was thirty-three years old, had hei own production company in Chicago, wrote daytime soap operas and nighttime freelance shows. From all appearances, she looked as if she were doing quite well, thank you. But Genie Price knew differently.
The Burden Is Light is the story of her unlikely conversion. And what made her story special was her unique personality: "No stuffiness, no staginess, no conventionality (not even in vocabulary), just sheer joy in Christ and the infectious longing to share that joy with others,״ as writer Paul S. Rees described her.
After a chance meeting with a high school girlfriend when she was home on vacation one summer, Price traveled to New Yotk a month later to talk to her again. Genie was very successful but bored with life. Chain-smoking and overweight, she felt she had nothing more to write and nothing meaningful to say. On the way to New York, someone gave her a copy of Thomas Merton's The Seven Storey Mountain, which relates his conversion from atheism. She read it but she wasn't interested in conversion.
In New York her girlfriend took her to hear Episcopal clergyman Samuel Shoemaker, who spoke of the grace of God in Jesus Christ. Back in her hotel room she picked up a Gideon Bible and was brought to tears by Ezekiel's description of the new temple. She started reading the New Testament and when she got to the Gospel of John, she was enthralled. As a fan of the phrasing of Gertrude Stein, she exclaimed, "John is better than Gertie." While the beauty of the writing of Scripture impressed her, she was most impressed with the personality of Jesus Christ. "My attention was completely taken up mentally, emotionally and spiritually by the person of Jesus Christ. . . . And the more I thought about Him, the more real He became to me; and the more real He became, the more I wanted Him to be mine. And
then my simple theology came into being. He seemed to say: 'I'll be yours if you'll be mine.'"
The Burden Is Light records not only her conversion, but also the first years—difficult ones—in her Christian life. She gave up her production company and her radio writing career. Soon she was asked to write a dramatic Christian radio show, Unshackled, based on the conversion stories of men and women. Many of them came from the files of Chicago's historic Pacific Garden Mission on South State Street.
The story line of The Burden Is Light, ends there, before Price's fortieth birthday. But six years later, she "discovered" St. Simons Island off the Georgia coast and was captivated by its history. Selling her Chicago home, she moved to St. Simons, where she r lived with fellow writer Joyce Blackburn until Price's death in
ί11(H 1996 She loved the is!and; she said, because "God walks very
naturally among these people." Her first novel about the area, Beloved Invader, tells the history of Christ Church in Frederica and of her hero, Anson Dodge. With that launching pad, Eugenia Price went on to become one of America's most beloved novelists of the latter part of the century.
At the time of her death in 1996, she. was known as the grande dame of Southern romantic fiction, the author of thirty-nine novels, which appeared frequently on the New York Times bestseller lists, with aggregate sales of more than fifty million copies.
While Grace Livingston Hill amassed great sales statistics by publishing nice stories, Price was a real writer, always working to hone her craft. She developed the genre of the historical romance, which many later writers would add to. While most of her fiction sold in t he secular market, there was always a Christian sensibility to it. Genie Price took her "simple theology" out to the world, shining like a light.