A number of years ago, an English newspaper ran a contest that posed a fascinating question: Can a novelist be a saint? A novelist, Piers Paul Read, won. His answer: No. Read argued that a novelist has to know too much about the dark side of life to be a saint.
Well, of course, vices are generally considered more interesting than virtues. In Character's goal is to enlist the best writers around to show just how interesting virtues are. I hope I can live up to the high standards of IC's previous editors
I come to In Character from the Independent Women's Forum (IWF), where I edited the late Women's Quarterly, a feisty magazine for the best kind of independent woman. My former boss at IWF, Grace Terzian, who is now with the Hudson Institute, generously described me as "a former gossip columnist at home in the world of ideas." Yes, I have a checkered past. It was an art I learned at my mother's knee.
I like to think I absorbed an ethos of small-town virtue growing up in the Mississippi Delta. My maternal grandfather, in whose house I lived as a child, was fond of telling the story of why there was no Klan in our town. It seems that Senator LeRoy Percy (uncle of the novelist Walker Percy) broke up a Klan planning meeting with an immortal rule: A gentleman never does anything for which he must cover his face. Include the distaff element of society, and this seems to me as good a rule of life as I can imagine.
Charlotte Hays is the former editor of The Women's Quarterly, which was published by the Independent Women's Forum. She has been a
feature writer for the Washington Times and was the Washington bureau chief for the National Catholic Register. While at the Register,
she reported from on the ground in Beirut in 1985 and won a first place from the Catholic Press Association for an interview with the
novelist Walker Percy. She has written for National Review, Town & Country, New York magazine, the Wall Street Journal, and the Weekly
Standard. A recovering gossip columnist, Charlotte is also coauthor of two books, Being Dead Is No Excuse: The Official Southern
Ladies Guide to Hosting the perfect Funeral and Somebody Is Going to Die if Lilly Beth Doesn't Catch that Bouquet: The Official
Southern Ladies Guide to Hosting the Perfect Wedding and author of Fortune Hunters, about dazzling marriages. A native of Greenville,
Mississippi, Charlotte received her B.A. from Rhodes College in Memphis, Tenn.
