author
Harriet Stark
1868–1944
A Utah farm wife and mother of eleven, Harriet Stark turned an unusual idea from the world of science into a sharp, imaginative novel. Her sole known speculative work, The Bacillus of Beauty, explores what happens when beauty can be created in a laboratory.
1 Audiobook
The bacillus of beauty : a romance of to-day
by Harriet Stark
About the author
Born on September 23, 1868, in Payson, Utah Territory, Harriet Stark was the daughter of Daniel Stark and Anna Priscilla Beckenhead. She married Lewis William Barry Wride in 1897, and the couple eventually raised eleven children on a Payson farm. Stark made clothing by hand and was known for recreating garments from pictures using newspaper patterns.
Her only known work of speculative fiction, The Bacillus of Beauty, was published in 1900 by Frederick A. Stokes Company. The novel follows a woman transformed by a biological experiment and uses the premise to examine beauty, attraction, and society’s fascination with appearances. Stark reportedly drew inspiration from a demonstration of bacterial culturing she saw at Wesleyan University.
Wride died in 1934, and Stark died in Payson on August 23, 1944, after years of pulmonary tuberculosis and a final bout of pneumonia. Today, The Bacillus of Beauty is recognized as an unusual early science-fiction novel by a Utah author.