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IN THOSE FIRST YEARS out at the farm, Libertyville was barely a speck on the map of Illinois: by one measure only some thirty miles north of Chicago, a dozen miles inland from the western shore of Lake Michigan, but the terrain was for the most part sparsely populated farmland—what people still called the prairie, at least the outskirts of the prairie. The nearest town of any size or substance was Lake Forest—actually a “village,” not a town—and essentially a weekend retreat for a few rich Chicagoans, one whose origins, as it happens, had much to do with Joe Patterson’s own family. Back in the spring of 1855, Patterson’s other grandfather, his father’s father, the Reverend Robert Patterson, leader of the city’s important Second Presbyterian Church, had taken an expedition of church elders north on the Chicago & Milwaukee Railway, a line so new that the track beyond the Wisconsin border was still in the process of being laid. Ten miles before the line ended at Waukegan, Rev. Patterson and his colleagues had asked the conductor to stop the train and let them off in the middle of a scraggly section of brush and scrub oak, where they stomped around for an afternoon in their frock coats and stovepipe hats until they were satisfied they had found what they were looking for—the site for a model Presbyterian community, which by its arcadian remoteness should be free from both the taints of urbanity and the heresies of rival Presbyterian factions, and which they agreed to name Lake Forest, given that the steely waters of Lake Michigan could be more or less glimpsed through the surrounding trees.

Despite his family’s role in its founding (also in the establishment of Lake Forest College, built with bricks from Rev. Patterson’s church, destroyed in the Great Chicago Fire), Joe Patterson himself had no special fondness for the place, especially as it evolved into a suburb of faux-Tudor mansions for Chicago industrialists. His wife, on the other hand, looked on Lake Forest as an oasis in the bleak landscape of farm country, if not a kind of Camelot at least an aspirational enclave of English gardens and properly countrified ladies and gentlemen: alas so near and yet so far, since to travel the dozen or so miles to get there required two slow challenging hours in a horse cart over corrugated dirt roads, difficult enough in good weather and impossible in bad. Eventually, in fact in the matter of a few years, new asphalt roads would be built across the vanishing prairie, and the railroad that already linked Lake Forest to Chicago would extend a spur inland so as to include Libertyville. But for the time being the four Pattersons, young and old, Tolstoyan and not so Tolstoyan, were very much up there, on their own, on a farm in farm country.

What a grown-up Alicia remembered of her mother from those early days was a slight, cool, determined figure, often a kind of theatrically costumed presence, with her face hidden beneath the wide brim and ribbons of an English gardening hat, her small hands and arms encased in elbow-length gardening gloves. Outdoors, pacing about her “grounds” like a military commander, usually with her gardener, the stoic Mr. McGregor, at her side, she staked out the dimensions of a French orchard and supervised the planting of two long rows of young saplings, which she hoped would one day become an allée of stately elms at a European level of impressiveness, suitable for welcoming the Lake Forest Garden Club. Indoors lay a similar challenge, as she struggled with Higinbotham persistence to effect the transformation of a nondescript red-brick Illinois farmhouse into a proper “country-house,” a place that would have a cedar-lined closet for the good linen, English chests for the good silver, a display case for the good china, and so on, all the while waging a never-ending and mostly useless campaign to persuade, bully, or shame the servants and the rest of her own family into showing some little respect for the niceties of civilized life.

The two children, Elinor and Alicia, seem mostly to have kept out of the way, in their own geographies and routines, maintaining separate orbits from their variously preoccupied parents, and often from each other, since there was a nearly three-year difference in their ages. Day in and day out the Patterson sisters were buttoned into clothes, fed, nudged about, and more or less watched over by a sequence of Swedish farm girls masquerading as maids, also on occasion by suddenly arriving and mysteriously departing French governesses, those ubiquitous mam’selles of the era, whose task it was to teach “deportment” to both girls (that is, table manners, sitting up straight, and other emblems of the well-brought-up child) when not engaged in the ceremonial ritual of brushing Elinor’s hair; for as Elinor had grown in size and loveliness (accompanied by a mostly amiable placidity), so too had the general importance of her hair, her long blond tresses, almost perfect, virtually perfect, but which governesses, Swedish farm girls, as well as Alice Patterson herself were always eager to improve by a fond lashing of fifty strokes with an English hairbrush.

Alicia ready to ride, age seven, at the house in Libertyville, Illinois.

While youthful Elinor, blond and blue eyed, seemed to be growing into the kind of cool, composed, almost languid beauty that caused young and old, males and females, to gush their approval, her younger sister, Alicia, was, from infancy, cast as a supporting player: so sweet, as people said (at least for a while), with her round, wide-open face, her dark eyes and dark hair, so demonstrably untresslike, always flopping this way and that in defiance of English hairbrushes, which in any case were only seldom applied. As did everyone else, Joe Patterson duly noted Elinor’s perfections, her loveliness, what might later be called her star quality, but more often than not it was little Alicia, all knees and elbows and tousled hair, her imperfections cheerfully on display, whom he went out of his way to run after, seize, and toss into the air; “she seems to want to be thrown into the air,” he more than once remarked to his wife, somewhat puzzled.

As for Patterson himself at this point, he might fairly be described as active on many fronts, a jack of several trades though proverbially still master of none. The farm of course took up much of his daytime energy, and while some of it was going well—sometimes quite well, other times not too badly—he was discovering (as had much of humanity before him) that farmwork was never done, that last season’s good luck could just as easily turn bad for no discernible reason, and that just waiting for the alfalfa to grow could somehow cost you money. As for politics, his second (or was it his first?) vocation, despite his heartfelt dreams of social justice he could scarcely pretend much surprise at Socialist candidate Eugene Debs’s disastrous showing in the presidential elections, or for that matter the general rejection of the Socialist ticket across the country. “My impression of the Socialist faction in Illinois,” he wrote in a rueful farewell to the Daily Socialist, “is one of endless bickering, argument, and in-fighting between persons who would rather out-talk one another than advance their cause.” This left a third vocation remaining, one in fact where he was finally beginning to see a little success. For his novel, Little Brother of the Rich, had been published in March 1909, and while its publisher, Reilly & Britton, was a Chicago firm and thus its readership was mainly in the Chicago area, all the same the book had brought appreciative reviews (“A timely and sardonic satire of spoiled Eastern collegiates…,” said one) and sold eleven hundred copies, enough to compel a third edition. There was even talk of a stage adaptation for a trial run in Chicago, before moving east to New York’s Broadway. Out in Libertyville, Joe Patterson now took to disappearing into his study soon after dinner, remaining behind the closed door until late at night, with the only sounds in the dark house, as Alicia remembered, being the “machine-like metallic clatter of the typewriter keys and the almost cheerful ping of the carriage bell.”