Springfield native never got to enjoy success of 1952 novel 'The Lemon Jelly Cake'
Madeline Babcock Smith earned her spot in the literary limelight. But she never got to enjoy it.
Smith’s first novel, “The Lemon Jelly Cake,” published Aug. 4, 1952, “enjoyed an immediate and astounding success,” Dan Guillory wrote in his introduction to the 1998 Prairie State Books edition.
New York Times reviewer Jane Cobb called “The Lemon Jelly Cake” “a sophisticated, even urbane novel written by a woman with a perceptive eye for the facts of life.” The novel was a Literary Guild selection, and Woman’s Day magazine serialized it. The Associated Press declared “The Lemon Jelly Cake” a book of the week.
Four months after the novel’s release, however, Smith died of cancer, and “The Lemon Jelly Cake” never reached its commercial potential.
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Smith was born in Rochester in 1887 to Dr. Oliver “O.B.” Babcock and his wife, Emma. The family moved to Springfield when Madeline was five or six years old, but Rochester stuck with her.
“The Lemon Jelly Cake” is set in “Troy,” a small town near Springfield obviously meant as a stand-in for Rochester. The novel’s heroine, 11-year-old Helene Bradford, presumably is likewise a stand-in for Madeline Babcock. Like Madeline, Helene is the only child of a physician, and Helene’s middle name, Merriam, was the maiden name of the real-life Emma Babcock.
While we don’t know whether any of Helene’s fictional adventures mirror Madeline’s real ones, the most obvious difference between the two young women is that in 1900, when the novel is set, Helene, at age 11, still lives in Troy. By the time Madeline was 11, she and her family had been Springfield residents for five or six years.
Madeline Babcock graduated from Springfield High School in 1906 and studied literature at the University of Chicago. She married Sidney Smith in 1910 – in its wedding story, the Illinois State Journal called her “one of the most popular young women in the younger social circles of this city” – and the couple moved shortly afterward to Decatur. The Smiths divorced in 1924.
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Madeline Babcock Smith remained a Decatur resident, but she kept close connections to Springfield, especially to the Springfield Art Association. Newspaper notices show she gave frequent talks here on subjects like antiques, architecture and ceramics.
Smith was 65 when “The Lemon Jelly Cake” came out – “Why has she been holding out on us so long?” the NYT’s Cobb asked – but Smith “had for some time been laying the groundwork for her career as an author,” Guillory wrote in 1998.
“By the time of her death, she had published several chapbooks of her own poetry as well as short stories in the Chicago Daily News and Capper’s Farmer. She had even published a mystery novel – in serial form, in the Decatur Review.”
“The Lemon Jelly Cake” went through five sold-out printings, Guillory reported, and Paramount Pictures was interested in the film rights. But after Smith’s death in December 1952, the novel “slipped into oblivion,” he wrote.
The lemon jelly cake of the title is a metaphor – “Life is in layers,” Helene’s mother says at one point, although she later concludes, “No layer ever won a prize at the fair. It has to be the whole cake or nothing at all.”
Smith is buried at Oak Ridge Cemetery.
For an excerpt from “The Lemon Jelly Cake,” go to SangamonLink.org’s entry on Madeline Babcock Smith. SangamonLink, the online encyclopedia of the Sangamon County Historical Society, has more than 1,400 entries on all aspects of local history.
This article originally appeared on State Journal-Register: Springfield author never got to enjoy success of her 1952 novel
