Poetry Hall's first published book was
Verses, in 1890. More volumes of poetry followed.
Bliss Carmen responded to her work with a long article in
The Chap-Book; about her untitled poem that begins, "A fair king's-daughther once possessed," Carmen wrote: "Such a thing is surely worthy of
Blake, with his tenderness and his insight—yes, and his peculiar cadence, too.…I cannot find the need to temper praise of so supreme a thing with any adjective, with any reservation, however delicate." With the artist
Oliver Herford, Hall collaborated on the collection
Allegretto (1894); verses and illustrations are interwoven throughout the book.
Louise Chandler Moulton wrote that both components were "equally bright, original and charming; one never saw pictures and poems that seemed so born of each other." Herford illustrated other works by Hall, including poster art for the short story collection
Foam of the Sea and illustrations for her short stories "The Passing of Spring," "Vert and Gules" and "The Three in Green" in the magazine
The Cosmopolitan. In 1918,
T. E. Rankin called her "our present-day poet of the quaint, the fanciful, the wistful.…Many of her poems are of nature and many of human love, and are as irresistible as the things they celebrate."
Fiction Her first book of fiction was the short story collection
Far from To-Day (1892).
Louise Chandler Moulton called the book "a work of real genius, Homeric in its simplicity, and beautiful exceedingly";
Harriet Prescott Spofford said the book gave "evidence of surprising genius….I recall no short stories at once so powerful and subtle as these." A second collection,
Foam of the Sea, followed in 1895. Both books contained stories set in the distant past, and several of these featured elements of the fantastic.
The New York Times compared Hall to
Walter Pater and
Théophile Gautier, and praised her "wonderful gift of language" and the "genuine power" of her storytelling. A review in
The Critic compared her writing to sorcery: "The style is quietly, deliberately hypnotic.…This mediaeval maiden is a witch, and if she had really lived in the times she writes about, she would have been hung with the highest appreciation—or beheaded—according to local color. The evolution of the broomstick is the pen." A third collection, featuring contemporary settings,
The Hundred and Other Stories, followed in 1898. in 1900, with ''April's Sowing
, Hall moved to writing contemporary novels of manners with romantic themes. The Unknown Quantity
(1910) and The Truth about Camilla
(1913) followed. Aurora the Magnificent
(1917), about a nouveau-riche'' American who takes up residence in the Anglophone community at
Florence before
World War I, "won much acclaim." Her last novel was
Miss Ingalis (1918), set at "the end of the nineteenth century," about an idealistic young woman who finds herself at odds with the values of her wealthy fiancé's family.
The New York Times wrote: In its material happenings the tale is slight, almost diaphanous, but in its spiritual drama—a far more difficult thing to make real and impressive—it is keenly interesting, skillfully and logically worked out, and carries the reader along so absorbed in what is going to be the fate of the heroine that he is likely to miss some of the artistic skill with which it is done and will want to go back and linger over it to get the full flavor of its quality.
Tales of the fantastic Hall's novels and a number of her short stories have contemporary settings. Another group of short stories have historical settings. A third group of short stories are fantastic in nature. "Foam of the Sea" set in prehistory, employs a stark, highly stylized narrative to capture the magical thought-world of the protagonists. "The Sons of Philemon" takes place in Homeric Greece. In both of these stories, actual elements of the fantastic as marginal, such as an oblique mention of centaurs. "Sylvanus" is the story of a faun stolen from his mother and raised by humans. In "The Three in Green" (subtitled "Märchen," a German word for
fairy tale), a woodsman inadvertently fells three trees inhabited by female sprites. "Garden Deadly" anticipates the
sword and sorcery genre with the tale of a blighted kingdom, an enchantress who turns men into animals, and a brash, brawny hero who sets out to save the day. "Paula in Italy," set in contemporary Florence, has a supernatural twist.
Nonfiction and translations for
Poems of Paul Verlaine (1895) In 1907 Hall published
The Wagnerian Romances, based on the stories of Wagner's operas; the book "is not critique or commentary," she wrote in the introduction, "it is presentation, picture, narrative."
Ida Tarbell wrote that "Miss Hall has given us the very heart of the poems." The book was reissued in 1926 with an introduction by
Willa Cather, who ranked it alongside
Bernard Shaw's
The Perfect Wagnerite. "This book of Miss Hall's is beautifully written, and the writer is a discerning critic who has spent her life among musicians of the first rank," who "has the rare gift of being able to reproduce the emotional effect of the Wagner operas upon the printed page; to suggest the setting, the scenic environment, the dramatic action, the personality of the characters. Moreover, she is able, in a way all her own, to suggest the character of the music itself." Hall also translated works from the French by playwright
Edmond Rostand and by poets
Alphonse Daudet and
Paul Verlaine.
The New York Times, while asserting that Verlaine's verses were untranslatable, said that Hall's English versions were "singular, original, and profound." Five years after the death of her husband in 1928, Hall authored and edited the volume
William Crary Brownell, an Anthology of His Writings Together with Biographical Notes and Impressions of the Later Years (1933).
Louis Kronenberger in
The New York Times called it "a tribute to Brownell's memory" and "a distillation of his critical essence." ==Personal life==