popular nineteenth-century american women writers and the literary

Popular Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers and the Literary Marketplace


Edited by

Earl Yarington and Mary De Jong

CAMBRIDGE SCHOLARS PUBLISHING

Popular Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers and the Literary Marketplace, edited by Earl Yarington and Mary De Jong

This book first published 2007 by

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

15 Angerton Gardens, Newcastle, NE5 2JA, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright © 2007 by Earl Yarington and Mary De Jong and contributors

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or

otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN 1-84718-232-1; ISBN 13: 9781847182326

TABLE OF CONTENTS Foreword.............................................................................................................ix Lisa West Chapter One .........................................................................................................1 Introduction Earl Yarington Chapter Two.......................................................................................................10 “My Dear Unknown”: Advice to Literary Aspirants in Nineteenth-Century Periodicals Mary De Jong Chapter Three.....................................................................................................35 Publication, Science, and Class: Emily Dickinson vs. the Popular Woman Writer Robin Peel Chapter Four ......................................................................................................59 “What’s in a name?”: Negotiating the Literary Marketplace with Anonymous and Pseudonymous Publishing Wendy Ripley Chapter Five.......................................................................................................74 Female-Authored Gothic Tales in the Nineteenth-Century Popular Press Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock Chapter Six.........................................................................................................97 Identifying a Voice: Novelist Eliza Ann Dupuy and the Nineteenth-Century South Allison Simmons Chapter Seven ..................................................................................................118 Sarah Josepha Hale’s Rhetoric of “Mental Improvement” and “Women’s Sphere” in Godey’s Lady’s Book Camille A. Langston

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Chapter Eight ...................................................................................................137 Lydia Maria Child and the Abolitionist Gift-Book Market Valerie Levy Chapter Nine ....................................................................................................153 Margaret Fuller: In and Out of the Borders of the Nineteenth Century Ayse Naz Bulamur Chapter Ten......................................................................................................172 “I Almost Danced Over My Freedom”: Elizabeth Oakes Smith’s Liberation from the Literary Marketplace Rebecca Jaroff

Chapter Eleven.................................................................................................189 The Making of Grace Greenwood: James T. Fields, Antebellum Authorship, and the Woman Writer Lesley Ginsberg Chapter Twelve................................................................................................215 Call Her Ishmael: E. D. E. N. Southworth, Robert Bonner, and the “Experiment” of Self-Made Kenneth Salzer Chapter Thirteen ..............................................................................................236 Trading on the Exploited: Fanny Fern and the Marketplace Rhetoric of Social Justice Cori Brewster Chapter Fourteen..............................................................................................250 Telling the Story: The Devotional Writing of Anna Warner and Elizabeth Prentiss Peggy Kulesz


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Chapter Fifteen.................................................................................................275 A Novel Idea: The Influence of the Literary Marketplace on Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World Dan Colson Chapter Sixteen................................................................................................297 How (and Why) Mary Jane Holmes Saved the New York Weekly, and Other True Stories Lee Ann Elliot Westman Chapter Seventeen............................................................................................318 It’s a Family Affair: Harriet Beecher Stowe and Annie and James T. Fields Jennifer Harris Chapter Eighteen..............................................................................................329 “Unrighteous Compact”: Louisa May Alcott’s Resistance to Contracts and Promises in Moods Nina Bannett Chapter Nineteen..............................................................................................349 Self-Interest vs. Self-Sacrifice: Louisa May Alcott’s Publishers and the Depiction of Contract in A Modern Mephistopheles Alicia Mischa Renfroe Chapter Twenty................................................................................................367 From Century to St. Nick, or How Mary Mapes Dodge Came to Fame Editing the Infamous Frances Hodgson Burnett Mark Noonan Chapter Twenty-One........................................................................................388 Grace King: Southern Self-Representations and Northern Publishers Mary Ann Wilson Chapter Twenty-Two .......................................................................................405 Racial Uplift Ideology and Black Womanhood in Frances Harper’s Serialized Novels Laura Barrio-Vilar

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Chapter Twenty-Three .....................................................................................432 Narrating Nation, Travel, and Gender: Sara Jeannette Duncan’s A Social Departure and/in the Literary Marketplace Heather Milne Chapter Twenty-Four.......................................................................................451 Kate Chopin: The Critics, the Librarians, and the Scholars Bernard Koloski Chapter Twenty-Five .......................................................................................466 Gentlemen Publishers and Lady Readers: Winnifred Eaton’s Negotiations with the Literary Marketplace Rachel Ihara Contributors .....................................................................................................485 Index ................................................................................................................491

FOREWORD

LISA WEST As Mary De Jong reminds us in Chapter Two of this collection, there were

many more women (and men) aspiring to publish in nineteenth-century venues than there were successes. That is, to appreciate more fully the ways in which women writers navigated the interrelated zones of writing, networking, editing, publishing, and maintaining a sense of marketable consistency, it helps to place the successes of such well-known authors as Sarah Josepha Hale, Louisa May Alcott, and Fanny Fern in context with the stories of other writers whose publishing adventures are less well known. This collection of essays does just that. In doing so, it reminds us of the numerous challenges facing women writers and the widely different strategies possible for breaking into the publishing world.

Here is the purpose of the collection: to offer multiple perspectives from multiple scholars about multiple women across the century to see different ways women writers negotiated within the literary marketplace. Common areas of negotiation across the collection include the role of gender in establishing relationships with more typically male editors (and, at times, resistant spouses); ways to mediate a sense of being a woman while being an author; how to define “the author” as a consistent entity, often but not always achieved by the use of pseudonyms; the use of forms of writing within the publishing circle, such as letters of advice, to create a metadiscourse about writing as a woman; the use of metaphors within writing, such as the importance of contracts or reading, to let the writing itself expose some of the writer’s professional difficulties; legal and economic forms of negotiation, such as the debate about writing for money as opposed to writing for art; the definition of “art” in the marketplace; and the differentiation of periodicals to capture different aspects of literary culture, from the Atlantic Monthly’s aspirations to high culture to Hale’s project in the American Ladies’ Magazine to educate “American” women. As these issues suggest, bringing together investigations of different writers not only raises awareness of other popular writers of the past but also reminds us (or our students) that Hale’s, Alcott’s, and Sarah Parton’s successes were not as “natural” as we may in hindsight assume them to be. “Genius” for women writers may very well be more like Hale’s “Genius of Oblivion” than a form of recognizable identity and the very things we remember women writers for--

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particular positions on women’s rights, voices of social critique, sensational imagination—that are as much a part of negotiation with the marketplace as a form of personal genius or talent. We remember what they negotiated, and as writers become better known, we are tempted perhaps to conflate recognition with an identity apart from the marketplace, not one forged from the heat of legal, economic, emotional, or professional need.

Collections have the advantage of ranging widely across related topics without explicitly drawing everything together; the umbrella covering the insights can be larger than that of the traditional monograph. In the previous paragraph, I note common concerns across the chapters. Here I will comment a bit more on the variety rather than commonalities. The most obvious breadth is the close-up coverage of two dozen writers ranging from the antebellum years to the turn of the century. The big divide of the Civil War is spanned because, even though clearly the war changed social, cultural, and economic interests that affected women writers in the marketplace, the nature of those issues themselves remained. So we can have a vision of nineteenth-century women’s writing that does not halt somewhere in the 1860s or begin again somewhere in the 1870s.

Breadth is also evident in theoretical approaches. Some chapters focus on carefully comparing private and public forms of writing; some focus on genre as a mode of investigation; some use gender theorists such as Cixous; some are highly historicized; some rely on reception theory; and there are numerous other approaches to the task of understanding women’s negotiations with the literary marketplace. What emerges are possibilities of combining cultural studies, economic history, feminist theory, and other methodologies in recontextualizing the field of nineteenth-century women’s writing.

In addition to theoretical possibility and methodological breadth, the essays here also suggest possibilities in genre or niche markets. The primary “marketplace” seems to be the periodical industry in the Northeast, personified by James T. Fields, Louis A. Godey, and Robert Bonner, but influenced as well by the “Gentleman Publisher” and anonymous difficult masculine personalities (such as Howe’s husband). Other markets and marketplaces are discussed as well, and one of the brightest consequences of this collection for me is the opportunity to gather information and start to put these other places on the map. The postbellum South emerges as a market with different demands on and opportunities for women writers, devotional writing is discussed as a separate genre but one related to other published work, and there are chapters on children’s literature and the abolitionist gift-book. Much work remains to be done in these areas, and there are other marketplaces to examine to see how women writers envisioned the overlap of social, political, and literary work for varying audiences.


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Because this collection covers so many different authors and genres, it hardly seems fair to call attention to what is not here. But, in the spirit of noting areas where this collection can start another wave of scholarship, I will point out that there are few women of color here and that regional markets do not seem to get the same degree of attention that scholarship in the past decade would suggest.

Lastly, Hawthorne’s infamous phrase that was a rallying cry for a reconsideration of women’s writing in the popular press--“that d---ed mob of scribbling women”--appears fewer than a half-dozen times in the following pages, a testament to the ways in which scholarship on women writers in the nineteenth century and scholarship on the intricacies of publication now have numerous other starting points from which to pursue their investigations.

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

EARL YARINGTON Let me first start by asking a question and making an assumption about

American literature, by which I mean mostly literature from the United States. First, how can one fully understand American literature when the vast majority of that literature is not studied or taken seriously? Second, the cultural elite or whatever entity may control or influence a given culture cannot successfully and consciously make a national literature. Literature happens with or without powerful entities or patriarchies. However, those elites or entities can suppress or minimize literature that they deem unworthy and, in so doing, they suppress and minimize many peoples, be it by racial suppression, gender suppression, ethnic suppression or some other kind of suppression. Of course, all of these have occurred in America. Even the term “American” literature excludes all of South America and Canada, often, and leaves those literatures unnamed, as if “I am American” means that I am from the United States and there is no other America or American in existence. One is left with a false sense of nationhood that is fragmented and troubling. Hence, I use the term “American literature” with great reservation, conscious of its power to exclude.

I became interested in a woman writer while in my bibliography class at my master’s institution. In our classroom was a vast collection of old nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century books on glass-covered shelves. One of my classmates asked the professor, “Who authored so many books?” He answered “Mary Jane Holmes.” The student replied, “Well, are they [the novels] any good?” The professor said, smirking, “Nah, not really.” Needless to say, I was hooked. I made a habit of not listening to my professors’ “advice” even though most came from elite institutions because their being “elite” made me suspicious; something just did not seem quite right. How could a professor minimize the writings of a woman writer who—as I later discovered—was one of the most successful authors during the second half of the nineteenth century with a “Nah, not really”? Three words, or two and a half words, that had the

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power to stop further exploration from scholars. Those words stopped any serious exploration for nearly a century.

Scholars should not be interested only in what is “great,” meaning what is artistic and timeless, set within the thoughtful limits and selected language of a specific male patriarchy. Rather, they should be interested in what is “literature,” and all authors perform this kind of recursive defining, this recursive and oscillating performance, an extension, suppression, mutilation, and enhancement of the self, often, with awful grief, denial, and great happiness. Frequently, this process of literary self-definition occurs under the forceful, guiding, and/or manipulative direction of an editor, the general reading public, and the cultural elite. So the original creation has been lost somehow, but if we investigate long enough, we may pick up the pieces and begin to see the true context of a literature, of a culture, emerging though always in a fog.

I was told by many to avoid women writers, even from a scholar in the field, because “you will surely starve to death.” Then I was informed by one of my professors that if I was determined to write about a neglected woman writer, be sure to put the names of “known” male writers in the chapter titles of my dissertation because I “might” fool hiring committees and “fake it,” and maybe not starve to death after all. Suddenly I had the odd realization, “Maybe this is what it was like to be a woman writer during the nineteenth century.”

To be a woman writer in the nineteenth century meant to be invalidated as a serious writer: at best, to be invisible or socially acceptable as “child-like”; at worst, to be ridiculed. Very few women’s works would be preserved as part of the American artistic experience or literary tradition for nearly a century. But thanks to the dedicated and socially just scholarship of the leading pioneers of feminism and cultural studies—in the 1970s and 1980s—the movement to change or create a new literary canon emerged.1 There was, however, another factor that determined the worth of popular women writers: the popularity of their work within the emerging literary marketplace.2 And so came the tension that persists today. If a work is popular, is it artistic? What qualities should it contain to be considered artistic? These are unnecessary and unending arguments because “popular” art and “elite” art, in essence, contain similar universal characteristics. Both have qualities of timelessness that transcend the context of a cultural period or society, but both have specific traits that limit their full appreciation if the reader or viewer is not aware of the context in

1 See Elaine Showalter, ed., The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature, and Theory (Pantheon: New York, 1985) for essays on many of the leading cultural feminists of the era. 2 See William Charvat, Literary Publishing in America, 1790-1850 (1959; Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993), and The Profession of Authorship in America, 1800-1870 (1968; New York: Columbia University Press, 1992).

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which the piece was produced. Certainly anyone can appreciate the skill of Hawthorne’s descriptive scenes in The Marble Faun, but they will more fully appreciate the text if they know about nineteenth-century Italian culture. The same can be said for popular women writers, by which I mean women who were active writers in the mainstream marketplace and had major success. Most readers can relate to the death scenes and threat of loss, religious faith, and success we see in Mary Jane Holmes’s Cousin Maude, but readers would understand the novel better if they knew how women were educated, lived, worked, and socialized during the nineteenth century.3 What is necessary is not to champion the best examples of literary art alone—since such a determination is wholly subjective; rather, scholars need a more complete context and, therefore, understanding of what being a woman writer was all about. For example, whether some critics approve or not, many nineteenth-century women were novelists. Now scholars should create a more inclusive field, a field that includes women’s writing—whether it be women’s letters, poetry, the domestic novel, romance novel, sensational novel, sentimental novel, or, which is often the case, a hodgepodge of all of these, popular nineteenth-century women’s literature. Each domestic, romance, sensational and sentimental novel, as with poetry and journal writing, is from a specific genre, and these genres use literary devices such as sentimentality, sensationalism, pathetic fallacy, and keepsakes.4 We should not exclude any genre or literary device from serious literary study especially when these genres and devices from women give us a much better understanding of the American literary landscape and, more specifically, the literary marketplace. After all, the archaeologist does not discard a woman

3 See Mary Kelley, Private Woman, Public Stage: Literary Domesticity in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984). See also Nina Baym, Novels, Readers, and Reviewers: Responses to Fiction in Antebellum America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984) and Woman’s Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and about Women in America, 1820-1870. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978). See also Judith Fetterley, The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977) and Susan Coultrap-McQuin, Doing Literary Business: American Women Writers in Nineteenth-Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1990). For sources on mourning, gender and materialism, see Mary Louise Kete, Sentimental Collaborations: Mourning and Middle-Class Identity in Nineteenth-Century America (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999) and Lori Merish, Sentimental Materialism: Gender, Commodity Culture, and Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000). Finally, see Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). 4 On the keepsake tradition, see Barbara J. McGuire, “The Orphan’s Grief: Transformational Tears and the Maternal Fetish in Mary Jane Holmes’s Dora Deane, or; the East-India Uncle,” Legacy 15 (1998): 171-87.

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pharaoh’s skeleton because she was not a serious pharaoh. Nefertiti was a pharaoh, though resented by many, and she is remembered.

This volume contains one of the most comprehensive studies of popular nineteenth-century American women writers and their negotiation with and success in the literary marketplace. The study includes more than two dozen women writers and stretches from the end of the first quarter of the nineteenth century until the first quarter of the twentieth century, with one primary focus: how different women writers negotiated with the literary market.5 What follows, then, is an overview of what this study contains. Within these pages we can discover how women influenced the American literary marketplace from its beginning, helped it grow, and made the market a major contributor to the acculturation of the rest of America. While doing so, some writers became advocates of mores and values; some criticized the oppression of women and persons of color, while others defended white Protestant America. Some writers made fortunes, while others struggled to get by. Moreover, the legal contract emerges from the oral contract, but women still find that their rights are not always protected. There are also examples of the ideal woman-writer-and-Gentleman-Publisher relationship, where both parties benefit in terms of business and in terms of their personal lives. What strikes me most, however, is the notion of performance. What kind of public or authorial self did each writer create? This question is clearer with some than with others, but often the writer’s self is conflicted for multiple reasons, be it from criticism of her work in the mass press, being a “true woman” while attempting to negotiate with the audience and publisher, or an attempt to relate to the reader.

Chapters Two through Five address several women writers, as well as the atmosphere of the period and the trends, perceptions, and influences of the marketplace. In Chapter Two, Mary De Jong shows that the literary market expanded rapidly, and as the market expanded, the possibility of fame and fortune for women who desired to write seemed close at hand. Therefore, women writers and editors of literary periodicals and publishing houses saw a need to educate and advise women on the reality of the marketplace and to guide those who did possess talent. If the possibility of fame and fortune encouraged many women to write, Emily Dickinson entertained no such idea. On the contrary, Robin Peel argues that Dickinson’s approach was influenced by the investigative nature of science and “contemplative writing.” She saw her work as a continuum of ongoing thought and exploration. This may explain her resistance to publish, since her work and the nature by which it was composed would be hard to replicate without an editor’s or publisher’s interference.

5 The “literary market” covers the writer, editors, and readers and their relationships with and influence on one another.

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Though Dickinson shied away from the public market, Julia Ward Howe and Fanny Fern created personas, or what Wendy Ripley calls “strategies of literary identity,” to connect and identify with their readership and the marketplace. Such connections would become common for successful writers and would catalyze new and more daring ideas. In Chapter Five, Jeffrey Weinstock argues that some women writers rewrote the Gothic tale or the ghost story to address both gender and race issues. What we observe, then, is a series of liberating developments for women over one century. First, women found the chance for new careers and were undoubtedly influenced by reading books and stories. During the course of identification with the literary market, women became more educated about the process of publication, and several entered as writers and editors. From these positions, they established connections with the mass readership and were also influenced by the market too. Finally, women began to rewrite some male texts and influenced readers by reinforcing popular ideas and by introducing new ones, such as new professions for women as sea captains, doctors, or businesswomen. Most of the changes were gradual, but a progression of news ideas and attitudes can be found in the many texts explored in this study.

Chapters Six through Nine cover influential literary women who became known before mid-century: Eliza Ann Dupuy, Sarah Josepha Hale, Lydia Maria Child, and Margaret Fuller. Contrary to popular belief, women writers did not write simply for financial need but for a whole host of reasons. Eliza Ann Dupuy, Allison Simmons argues, had talent—talent that the editors of the Southern Literary Messenger stood by—but she also had ambition and established relationships with the editors who published her pieces. In other words, Dupuy knew how to network and possessed the ambition and talent to move her work and ideas forward into the growing literary marketplace. Camille Langston contends that the literary marketplace was shaped by Sarah Josepha Hale’s writing, editorship, and ideas. Credited as the “creator of American women’s literary culture,” Hale, while serving as literary editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book, broke away from the common American periodical practice of reprinting British stories and even while including British fashion ads would accept only original American writings. Her focus was on education and literature for American women readers. Lydia Maria Child, on the other hand, was one of the most outspoken “agitators” of the period. Born out of the influences around her, Valerie Levy argues, Child was ahead of her time as a political agitator. Influenced by abolitionist Maria Weston Chapmen, she challenged both race and gender constructions. Before the 1830s, Levy notes, much of women’s literature was “religious, didactic, and/or practical”; however, Child broke out of these categories with the publication of Hobomok, a novel in which the heroine, Mary Conant, marries a Native American man. Rarely do we

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see interracial marriage addressed in the nineteenth century. Margaret Fuller also anticipated the future in terms of changing gender constructions and expectations. Using the theories of Cixous and Foucault, Ayse Naz Bulamur argues that Fuller strove for gender equality. But Fuller had to struggle to free herself from unequal constructions, for, as Bulamur notes, women often “internalize their gender roles and submit to manpower.”

Chapters Ten through Seventeen take us through the mid-nineteenth century and the careers of Elizabeth Oakes Smith, Grace Greenwood, E.D.E.N. Southworth, Fanny Fern (Sara Payson Willis Parton), Anna Warner, Elizabeth Payson Prentiss, Susan Warner, Mary Jane Holmes, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. Immediately, what is clear from these names is both women’s success in the literary market and the magnitude of their success. For example, the popularity of Stowe, Southworth, and Holmes is mind-boggling in terms of the millions and millions of novels they sold. If the earlier literary women created the market, these writers solidified its power and expanded it, and they brought progressive ideas to that market as well. Some of them also proved that women could manage their own public affairs and their own financial success, while others struggled with the complexity of the market and the prejudices and greed of editors and the public.

Elizabeth Oakes Smith was a life-long supporter of equal rights, as Rebecca Jaroff notes. In fact, even though she started as a writer of fiction, she began to advocate, almost exclusively, for women’s rights after attending the first national women’s convention in 1850. Her desire was to blur gendered barriers both within the literary marketplace and between the private and public spheres (if not eliminate them altogether). The presence, success, and influence of women writers take an interesting turn with Lesley Ginsberg’s chapter on Grace Greenwood, who was praised by Caroline Chesebro’ as being equal to writers of male genius of the period. Her genius inspired what Ginsberg argues is her influence in creating a “self-conscious national literature.” However, popularity had its drawbacks for women writers.

E.D.E.N. Southworth, as Kenneth Salzer shows, gained enormous popularity with Self-Made: or Out of the Depths, but the novel’s popularity led to some authors’ and editors’ attempts to claim Self-Made as their own. Recognizing that her work must be protected from copyright infringement, Southworth asked her editor, Robert Bonner, to do so. What developed in many ways became the ideal “literary domestic” and “Gentleman Publisher” relationship.6 Bonner publicly defended Southworth’s authorship of Self-Made and jealously protected her reputation and his own. Another negative aspect of women’s writing is explored in Cori Brewster’s chapter on Fanny Fern. Though Fanny Fern has

6 Coultrap-McQuin, Doing Literary Business, 50.

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been credited as a strong advocate of social justice for women, Brewster argues that Fern supported equality only for white Protestant women and that her popularity contributed to the suppression of other writers who were more interested in justice for women as a group and in racial justice as well. Indeed, Brewster claims that Fern wished to elevate Protestant women “above Irish immigrants and other racialized groups.” In fact, some of her popularity may have come from her negative representation of these groups. Her father was a conservative Protestant deacon and editor. Of course, such a position may have worked against her with twentieth-century critics later on.

Chapters Fourteen through Seventeen consider Anna Warner and Elizabeth Payson Prentiss, Susan Warner, Mary Jane Holmes, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. While examining the careers of Warner and Prentiss, Peggy Kulesz acknowledges that these authors used evangelicalism to empower women as well as their own voices; however, both writers saw their works as “advancing an evangelical declaration” rather than playing any political role. Kulesz argues that feminism and evangelicalism became a vehicle that influenced positive change in the daily lives of the religious. Religion and, more specifically, religious allegory, was also important to Susan Warner, but Dan Colson suggests that what makes Warner’s The Wide, Wide World a noteworthy text is its “strange amalgam of religious belief, economic need, and literary culture that not only transcended but perhaps also even contravened Warner’s intentions.” Here we have a perfect example of the complexity and power of the literary marketplace. If the work of the Warner sisters and Prentiss, among other women writers, was dogmatic, didactic, and contained a strong religious message, Mary Jane Holmes’s approach was far more subtle. Lee Ann Westman points out that while Holmes did not challenge the existing structure of marriage, she saw her work as a catalyst in encouraging good marriages between “equally self-reliant, educated, and ethical people.” Westman argues that “Holmes saw herself as providing wholesome imaginative experiences for a readership with an eye toward self-improvement.” The notion of self-improvement expands toward the improvement of American society in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s work. Jennifer Harris, examining the relationship between Stowe and James T. Fields, argues that, though the two had “commercial ties,” their mutual commitment to each other went beyond the material to include “spouses, homes and—in Stowe’s case—children.” In other words, business transactions and personal transactions become fused.

Writers who emerged at mid-century would become even more influential and public. Mary Jane Holmes is not unlike Sarah Josepha Hale in her desire to improve and educate women; James T. Fields and Harriet Beecher Stowe are not unlike E.D.E.N. Southworth and Robert Bonner in the ways in which their relationship blurred the boundaries of public and private, business and human

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connection. Despite differences between Lydia Maria Child, Elizabeth Payson Prentiss, and the Warner sisters, all begin to do what Elizabeth Oakes Smith had set out to do: tear off the restraints that excluded women from the public scene. Yet, these writers were not without their own limitations, as Ginsberg notes with her discussion on Fanny Fern, and such limitations may affect the future reputations of certain writers who were recovered and applauded by the early wave of feminist scholarship.

The final group of chapters—chapters Eighteen through Twenty-five—take us to the twentieth century and examine Louisa May Alcott, Mary Mapes Dodge, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Grace King, Frances Harper, Sara Jeannette Duncan, Kate Chopin, and Winnifred Eaton. It is here that we see women writers struggling with oral and written contracts and copyright as well as individuals who grappled with negative constructions of race and gender. In Chapter Eighteen, Nina Bannett turns our attention to the subject of oral promises and written legal contracts in Louisa May Alcott’s Moods. The book focuses on the marriage contract between Sylvia and Geoffrey Moor and other promises: between Sylvia and her brother, Sylvia and Adam, and Sylvia and her sister Prudence. What is clear, as Bannett contends, is “Alcott’s desire to focus on the constraints of promises and contracts.” In the following chapter by Alicia Mischa Renfroe, the conversation about Alcott and legal contracts continues by examining A Modern Mephistopheles. Renfroe argues that Alcott had to learn how to negotiate oral and written contracts with her Gentlemen Publishers because women—despite the emergence of written contracts—still found that they had few legal rights or control over their literary careers. In Mark Noonan’s chapter, we turn to the much-needed reevaluation of women writers--specifically, to the relationship between Frances Hodgson Burnett and Mary Mapes Dodge, the editor of St. Nicholas children’s magazine. Known for her children’s fiction, A Little Princess and The Secret Garden, Burnett, a progressive feminist, was maligned by the literary establishment during the nineteenth century. Noonan claims that it was Dodge who saved Burnett from her own despair and helped to reestablish Burnett’s career after the scandal caused by her serialization of Through One Administration. Next, we turn our attention to southern writer Grace King, who, according to Mary Ann Wilson, would never have picked up a pen if it were not for a challenge by editor Richard Watson Gilder of Century Magazine. She took up Gilder’s challenge to write a story out of anger. Gilder supported George Washington Cable, a writer who, in King’s view, portrayed Creole masters and New Orleans negatively; she also charged that Cable favored black people over whites in order to become popular with northern readers who liked to criticize the south. Wilson claims that King “would become a major voice of white postwar New Orleans for the northern literary establishment.” If King became the voice of postbellum

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southern whites in New Orleans, Frances Harper was the voice for millions of blacks, especially black women. Laura Barrio-Vilar explores the racial uplift ideology that Harper used, an ideology that Harper believed educated and nourished “the psychological, intellectual, and spiritual inner self,” regardless of the individual’s socioeconomic condition.

In chapter Twenty-three, Heather Milne reexamines the work of Canadian Sara Jeannette Duncan, known also by her penname Garth Grafton, who wrote popular travel narratives. Under pressure to revise a serialized narrative in an increasingly profit-driven market, Duncan, Milne claims, added a “strong satirical undertone to the text.” Though she benefited from the market, she used her position and her “New Woman” character, Orthodocia, to criticize the establishment by recognizing the many social ills and concerns of the day, including imperialism and materialism. Unlike many of the writers covered in this anthology, Kate Chopin has a good reputation among both scholars and mainstream readers today. Bernard Koloski notes that Chopin was a popular writer during her time and published in the most prestigious magazines; she was well practiced in the literary market. Koloski, however, addresses several questions about Chopin that have remained unanswered: was her work criticized because of its feminist views? Was The Awakening banned from library shelves? Did some of Chopin’s fiction go unpublished due to harsh reviews or actions taken by libraries? Finally, did Chopin contradict her own feminist views by publishing in family magazines? The collection closes with and examination of Winnifred Eaton’s struggle with the construction of orientalism. Both publishers and readers expected such exotic constructions of Asian peoples in her work. Yet she was criticized for making a profit or name for herself by including orientalism in her tales. Rachel Ihara argues that though it seems on the surface that Eaton submitted to the popular expectations of the time, she subversively used her characters to challenge the white male’s position of dominance and power. At the very least, Ihara states, Eaton’s work “reveal[s] an acute awareness of the way that literary constructions of race functioned in the turn-of-the-century literary marketplace.”

In closing, I would like to thank the many people who made this collection

possible. First, I would like to thank Amanda Millar of Cambridge Scholars Press for encouraging me to make this project a reality. I also want to thank Mary De Jong as co-editor; her knowledge, time, and dedication were much needed and appreciated. I would also like to thank Rebecca Jaroff and Camille Langston for their editorial comments and Susan Gatti for encouraging me, while a graduate student, to pursue the nineteenth-century literary marketplace in my studies. And, finally, thanks to all the contributors who made this collection possible.

CHAPTER TWO

“MY DEAR UNKNOWN”: ADVICE TO LITERARY ASPIRANTS IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY

PERIODICALS

MARY DE JONG Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s “Letter to a Young Contributor,” published

in the Atlantic Monthly in 1862, was unique in its influence on the life, if not the poetic form, of a certain literary woman of Amherst, Massachusetts.1 But his “Letter” is one of many representatives of a type of discourse familiar to readers of nineteenth-century periodicals: advice to aspiring authors. Advice literature on a variety of topics was widely popular.2 Editors and other experienced authors published counsel to amateur writers, often in response to direct inquiries. Overworked editors felt compelled to state that they could not reply personally to numerous letters because manuscripts offered for publication occupied much of their time. The editor of a fledgling literary monthly that did not pay the volunteer writers it printed nevertheless complained in 1829 of a vast “dull river” of submissions. The Columbian Ladies’ and Gentleman’s Magazine, another new periodical seeking popularity in 1844, editorialized 1 Higginson, “Letter to a Young Contributor,” Atlantic Monthly 19 (April 1862): 401-11. Higginson spelled out many of the same practical points (make your manuscript legible, bring knowledge to your writing) as did advisors in popular magazines. Unlike them, he offered an excursus on the resources of language that reflects his commitment to enriching American literary culture. For an overview of the poet’s mainly epistolary exchange with this professional literary man, see Theodora V. W. Ward, “Emily Dickinson and T. W. Higginson,” Boston Public Library Quarterly 5 (January 1952): 3-18. The phrase quoted in my title is from Virginia Evertson Smith, “A Word to Young Writers,” Literary World 23 (27 August 1892): 28. 2 Karen L. Kilcup, “‘Essays of Invention’: Transformations of Advice in Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Writing,” Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers: A Critical Reader, ed. Karen L. Kilcup (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1998), 185-87, 190.

“My Dear Unknown”: Advice to Literary Aspirants in Nineteenth-Century Periodicals

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wearily about the “acre of manuscript” that must be perused each month. In the same year, the New-York Tribune—which frequently published a poem in an upper corner of one page—announced that it could not print “several barrels” of unknown poets’ “unsunned effusions.”3 With such remarks, editors sought to convey one of the first lessons the unknown writer had to learn: Even if you have a talent as well as a taste for writing, you are not the only one.

To many editors, necessity dictated the printing of brief “notes” to correspondents (established authors whose regular submissions were invited and usually paid for) and contributors (writers of unsolicited pieces).4 Godey’s Lady’s Book announced in the early 1840s that “regularly engaged and paid writers” took precedence over “voluntary contributors.” 5 Often the “notes” section merely listed titles of pieces received, accepted for publication, and declined, though some editors printed writers’ initials or pen names. Literary editors offered occasional brief commentary or suggestions such as “too long,” “We already have too many poems,” “Try again,” or, a favorite of Godey’s Lady’s Book, “Work and wait.”6 Among prominent antebellum magazines that printed notes—including the Knickerbocker, Columbian, Ladies’ Repository, Broadway Journal, and Union Magazine—Godey’s was the most considerate of 3 “The Editor’s Table,” American Monthly Magazine 1 (February 1830): 799; “Notice to Correspondents,” Columbian Ladies’ and Gentleman’s Magazine 1 (May 1844): 238; “Original Poetry,” New-York Daily Tribune, 9 January 1844. 4 The use of “correspondent” (sometimes meaning “someone who wrote us”) and “contributor” varies somewhat in nineteenth-century periodicals and in recent scholarship. Contributors—both amateur and beginning writers—are my subject. In the body of this essay I use “correspondent” only when quoting primary sources. 5 Godey’s Lady’s Book, April 1840 and December 1840, qtd. in Patricia Okker, Our Sister Editors: Sarah J. Hale and the Tradition of Nineteenth-Century American Women Editors (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995), 97. Beginning writers of the 1840s apparently did not realize that prosperous magazines like Godey’s and Graham’s courted successful authors for regular submissions and paid them well. Some celebrated authors agreed to write exclusively for one magazine. Two consequences of these practices: magazines had limited room to offer novices and experienced amateurs, and publishers declined to pay them. See Ronald Weber, Hired Pens: Professional Writers in America’s Golden Age of Print (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1997), 38-39, 41-42. On the evidence of postbellum and late-century advisory essays, I conclude that beginners of those eras likewise failed to grasp the literary field’s crucial distinctions between professionals and amateurs. 6 Weber, Hired Pens, 40-41, 61. With the exception of “work and wait,” the phrases within quotation marks are my reconstructions of common statements. Editorial notes were eventually replaced by rejection slips, which might offer no useful feedback. Slips were private, however, and did not jeopardize writers’ future chances by publishing their titles, initials, or pseudonyms.

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novices’ sensibilities, often explaining an exclusion for “want of room” and most likely to offer succinct critiques and practical suggestions. The “Editor’s Table,” province of Sarah J. Hale, printed such notes in every monthly issue of the mid-century years I sampled for this study. 7 Hale and other literary editors also printed occasional paragraphs of generic advice in order to inform aspirants of their magazines’ standards and expectations. Prompted by “many letters” she received from women hoping to become paid writers for newspapers and magazines, Harriet Beecher Stowe published a series of four articles in January 1869 in Hearth and Home, a weekly newspaper, while she was co-editor.8

Advisory essays were also published by writers who did not occupy editorial sanctums. Many professionals received more requests for advice than they were willing to answer individually. As Higginson observed in 1887, “Every literary man expects to receive each week or two a letter, generally from a woman,” seeking advice on how to succeed as an author. 9 Essays with titles like “Hints to Young Writers,” “How Should Women Write?,” and “A Sermon to Literary Aspirants” fill countless pages in mid- and late-century periodicals. Ironically, writers who had struggled in vain to establish literary careers managed to publish their own stories of failure—some of them determinedly good-humored, others poignant. One “L. L. H.” related in 1858 that after paying a London firm to publish her “bantling” book, her only proceeds were discouraging criticism and further expenses. She concluded with this exhortation: “May my troubles prove a warning to any of my readers who may be afflicted with the cacoethes scribendi!” 10 7 I examined every issue of Godey’s for 1850, 1851, 1861, 1863, and 1864 in addition to many individual issues from the 1830s onward. In 1861 Hale announced, “we have no time” to answer frequent “questions concerning style, composition, etc. . . . Our ‘Lessons’ are given in the Editor’s Table; read it through the year round, and your case will be met” (“To Our Correspondents,” Godey’s 62 [March 1861]: 272). Caroline M. Kirkland addressed aspiring writers, often helpfully, in her “Editorial Miscellany” in volumes 1-3 (1847-1848) of the Union Magazine. 8 Stowe, “Can I Write?,” Hearth and Home, 9 January 1869, 40-41. To my knowledge, the only intensive study of literary advice is Sarah Robbins, “Gendering Gilded Age Periodical Professionalism: Reading Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Hearth and Home Prescriptions for Women’s Writing,” in “The Only Efficient Instrument”: American Women Writers and the Periodical, 1837-1916, ed. Aleta Feinsod Cane and Susan Alves (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2001), 45-65. 9 Higginson, “The Search After a Publisher,” Women and Men (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1888), 151. In Ch. 3 of Jo’s Boys (1880) Alcott portrays the burden imposed by epistolary admirers and supplicants. 10 “L. L. H.,” “The Vexations of an Author,” Ladies’ Repository 18 (February 1858): 71. See also Anne Ferris Muir, “Related by an Unavailable,” Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine


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But the itch to write persisted, provoking advice in periodicals of every type and region. Essays and briefer statements addressed to ambitious writers were also included in collections of essays by successful authors and public figures such as Higginson, Fanny Fern, Ella Wheeler Wilcox, and T. DeWitt Talmage (a Brooklyn preacher and magazine editor); the autobiographies of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps and Frances E. Willard (president of the W. C. T. U.); and comprehensive vocational advice books like Virginia Penny’s How Women Can Make Money (1870) and Martha Louise Rayne’s What Can a Woman Do; Or, Her Position in the Business and Literary World (1884). 11 The 1880s and 1890s saw the emergence of guides, manuals, and magazines such as Writer, specifically aimed at writers seeking markets for their work. 12

This essay focuses on advice to literary aspirants published in nineteenth-century American magazines, the most important venues for beginning writers.13 Literary historians have demonstrated that as literacy increased and the means of transporting print materials expanded, periodicals multiplied. In 1825 there were under 100 magazines in the United States; by 1860, approximately 575. Thereafter the number burgeoned so rapidly that by 1880 there were 2,400 and 4,400 by 1890. Periodicals articulated ideas about authorship and stimulated ambitions among many hundreds of readers. Would- (September 1889): 377-81. Muir’s many disappointments convinced her that magazines were unlikely to accept beginners. “Unavailable” meant “not wanted for publication.” Susan S. Williams analyzes “the ‘cacoethes scribendi’ plot” in nineteenth-century fiction about amateur writers, observing that female authors also used the “itch” metaphor in essays of advice for aspirants (Reclaiming Authorship: Literary Women in America, 1850-1900 [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006], 21-28). I would add that male authors used the metaphor as well, for the same purpose: to convey that not every scribbler can or should publish. 11 Phelps, Chapters from a Life (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1896), 85-87; Talmage, Around the Tea-Table (New York: Christian Herald, 1895), 259-62; Wilcox, Men, Women, and Emotions (Chicago: W. B. Conkey Company, 1894), 286-95;Willard, Glimpses of Fifty Years: The Autobiography of an American Woman (Chicago: Woman’s Temperance Publication Association, 1889), 512-14. 12 Weber, Hired Pens, 195-204; Ellery Sedgwick, “Magazines and the Profession of Authorship in the United States, 1840-1900,” PBSA 94 (2000): 413-16; Christopher P. Wilson, The Labor of Words: Literary Professionalism in the Progressive Era (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985), 83-84. 13 My primary sources include documents of two kinds: 132 articles and editorial and other advisory documents of at least one paragraph, published in periodicals, 1829-1899; and 122 documents of the “Notes to Contributors” type, published in periodicals, 1801-1864. I also incorporate information and ideas from other nineteenth-century portrayals of authorship (reviews, for example) that are not explicitly marked as “advice”; these documents are not included in the above figures.

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be authors tended to assume that writing was a viable means of livelihood, long before it actually became so in postbellum America. Still, the proliferation of magazines greatly enhanced “the value of literature as a commodity.”14 Writers ambitious for fame and fortune or eager for expression sought access to the pages of magazines. As editor and magazinist N. P. Willis aptly observed in 1843, “Periodical writing seems the natural novitiate to literary fame in our country.”15 Advisors who were professional writers and editors understood, as many aspirants did not, that beginners were more likely to become magazine writers than authors of books. They also knew that they could best reach novices by publishing advice in periodicals.

In part because professional writers and editors had vested interests in keeping their fraternities and sororities small, advisors as a group portrayed the passion to write for publication as a widespread “mania” that often resulted in frustration for editors and misery for novices who expected prompt wealth and recognition. Willis contemplated America’s fast-multiplying “Fungus race of Rhymers” with dread. In an early issue of his own American Monthly Magazine he flaunted his pleasure in burning rejected verse: “How gloriously the flames circle around that heap of bad poetry burning within the fender!” 16 More merciful editors stated impersonally, if somewhat testily, that unsolicited pieces were periodically “consigned to the fire—en masse.”17 Young Willis once self-indulgently described his relish as a particular “gilt-edged sheet” inscribed with “some sickly rhymes on Fairy-land” was licked up by the flames. (Thus 14 Quotation from Sedgwick, “Magazines and the Profession of Authorship in the United States, 1840-1900,” 399. For figures on magazine circulation and rates of pay, see 402. Sedgwick states that “magazines became the essential formative marketplace for most authors” (400). 15 Willis, “To Callow Chicksters, of Our Feather,” New Mirror 25 (November 1843): 127. For magazines’ role in developing and sustaining careers, see also Weber, Hired Pens, especially 1-4, 13, and Susan Belasco Smith and Kenneth M. Price, “Introduction: Periodical Literature in Social and Historical Context,” Periodical Literature in Nineteenth-Century America, ed. Susan Belasco Smith and Kenneth M. Price (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1995): 3-16. Williams remarks in her study of postbellum women writers that periodicals helped make female authorship visible (Reclaiming Authorship, 42). 16 “Fungus” appears in “The Editor’s Table,” American Monthly Magazine 1 (February 1830): 799. Willis expressed pleasure in burning unwanted manuscripts in “The Editor’s Table,” American Monthly Magazine 1 (November 1829): 586-87. 17 “The ‘Drawer’ Emptied,” The Orion 1 (September 1842): 6. See also “Editor’s Table,” Godey’s Lady’s Book 68 (Feburary 1864): “Every three months we make an auto da fe” of rejected manuscripts (201).


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perished an unsigned manuscript by Edgar Allan Poe.)18 In other issues, Willis—like many editors—encouraged promising individuals. He urged novices to accommodate themselves to public taste and even offered more specific pointers: Magazine prose “should be brief and crisp”; “[p]eriodical readers expect to be amused”; “[a]void the familiar impudence and slang into which smartness so easily degenerates.” 19 Rather than stoop to smart(ing) ridicule of an amateur, some editors recommended another venue; Hale, for instance, periodically suggested that a contributor submit a piece to a newspaper, a lower-status outlet for literary writing. 20

From the 1830s through the 1890s, an age of transformation in the literary marketplace, 21 many of advisors’ themes were consistent.22 In tones flat, pleading, or scolding, editors urged, Do not submit poems and stories you have just dashed off. A Georgia literary magazine mocked the ignorance of “bardlings” who offered “‘the report of my first ride on Pegasus!’—‘my first blossom culled on Parnassus’”—as if such revelations made their effusions more appealing to a stranger who had to read them. This literary man exclaimed sarcastically, “What a privilege!’” 23 Revise carefully, advisors reiterated. Your submissions are verbose. Strike out lines, sentences, and paragraphs, especially those you think uncommonly fine. Stating a principle that transcended boundaries of genre and region, Boston’s Flag of Our Union shouted, 18 “The Editor’s Table,” American Monthly Magazine 1 (November 1829): 586, 587; Arthur Hobson Quinn, Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography (1941; repr. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press), 154, 156. Another editor called published rejection barbaric. Contributors were to understand that a manuscript not announced as accepted could be reclaimed at the publisher’s office (“To Readers and Correspondents,” The Magnolia 1 [August 1842]: 2). 19 “The Editor’s Table,” American Monthly Magazine 1 (March 1830): 866,867. See also [Willis], “To Callow Chicksters,” 127-28. 20 “Editor’s Table,” Godey’s Lady’s Book 62 (June 1861): 559, and Godey’s 63 (November 1861): 443. 21 Smith and Price, “Introduction,” 3-16. 22 Mary Wilkins Freeman’s article “The Girl Who Wants to Write: Things to Do and to Avoid” makes elementary points typical of decades of advice (Harper’s Bazaar 47 [June 1913]: 272.) No wonder she referred to them as “platitudes.” Much as society and the marketplace changed over time, certain lessons had to be learned by each generation, as witness a series of advisory essays in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine in the 1890s. 23 “Poetry and Poets,” The Orion 1 (May 1842): 124. Similar advice is offered kindly in “Editor’s Table: A Word with Our Young Writers,” Godey’s Lady’s Book 61 (December 1860): 556-57. Okker closely examines Hale’s editorial practices; on Hale’s addresses to and remarks on beginning writers in her Ladies’ Magazine as well as Godey’s, see Our Sister Editors, 97-102. Okker observes that Hale used a stricter “voice” in advice columns than in her editorial discourse as a whole, 98-99.

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“Condense, CONDENSE, CONDENSE!”24 Godey’s of Philadelphia called for “short, racy, spirited essays”; brief, well-constructed stories; and poems like “gems coined from the priceless wealth of genius,” “pure, polished, and perfect.”25 Editors’ exasperation sometimes boiled over in complaints about unprofessional presentation and naïve expectations—illegible scrawls, requests that a careless piece be “corrected” or critiqued in detail, demands for prompt payment and publication in the next issue. While some advisors merely discountenanced plagiarism, others were sufficiently outraged to expose perpetrators as thieves.26 Blatant or feckless imitation evoked satire: an editor in the “West” claimed to have received “The Factory in Worsted! Written after The Mill on the Floss.”27 Advisors also stated directly that only fresh, original material was wanted.

Matters that seemed obvious had to be spelled out for literary aspirants throughout the century. Advisors reiterated do’s and don’t’s for the preparation and submission of manuscripts (write legibly on one side only, for the convenience of the editor and printer; pay your own postage and enclose return postage; and for heaven’s sake keep a copy for yourself!) and choice of subject (choose topics you know something about; you must have something to say). Insisting on the necessity of self-improvement by practice and attentive reading, many advisors prescribed lessons from successful authors. In 1848 Caroline M. Kirkland recommended Bryant to prolix young versifiers; Hale urged young women poets of 1863 to “study the works” of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Stowe advised hopeful women magazinists to improve their style by “study[ing]” Thackeray, Hawthorne, Irving, and Holmes.28 (Perhaps I overlooked references to American women as literary models.)29 24 “Good Rules for Writers,” Flag of Our Union (17 February 1849), copied by the Flag from the Olive Branch. 25 “Editor’s Table,” Godey’s Lady’s Book 19 (December 1839): 284. 26 One editor announced that “would-be contributor” A. G. H. had tinkered with a poem by Walter Raleigh, only to make it worse (“Monthly Chat with Readers and Correspondents,” The Orion 2 [November 1842]: 63). A Philadelphia newspaper identified a poem on labor in the National Era as a copy of Frances Osgood’s “Labor,” “with a few verbal alterations” (“Plagiarism,” Saturday Evening Post, 6 October 1849, 2). 27 “An Editor’s Troubles,” Godey’s Lady’s Book 62 (June 1861): 513. 28 Kirkland, “Editorial Miscellany,” Union Magazine 2 (March 1848): 139; “Editor’s Table: Our Poets,” Godey’s Lady’s Book 66 (February 1863): 200; Stowe, “Faults of Inexperienced Writers,” Hearth and Home, 29 January 1869, 71. In “A Word with Our Young Writers,” (note 23 above), 556-57, Hale recommended as models Bryant, Longfellow, Irving, Hemans, Mitford, and Elizabeth Browning. In the 1863 column cited earlier in this note, Hale argued that Browning surpasses Caroline Norton in “tenderness, sympathy, and piety,” exemplifying “the highest model of woman’s poetic


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Many advisors broke worse news to the innocent and egotistical. You must expect many rejections. Understand that most writing is not good enough for publication. Few aspirants become successful, almost none without a long apprenticeship during which they have much to learn. Even the most elementary principles of rhetoric were articulated. Select an appropriate venue. Know your audience. In 1857 Graham’s Magazine instructed amateurs to make themselves familiar with the magazine before submitting their writings.30 Under the heading “Employment for Women: A Few Words to Those Who ‘Write for the Papers,’” the Springfield Republican—Emily Dickinson’s favorite newspaper—stated in 1865 that too many “girls” were writing “stuff” about their “’Unanswered Longings” or “‘Beautiful Visions.’” Of such scribblers just one in ten was qualified for authorship, this advisor declared; she would “learn genius.” “Man,” Hale continued, “has a different standard . . . . measured by its moral power, it is often lower; but there is no need of comparisons” (200). Thus even brief instructions could be gendered. In accordance with the still-prevalent antebellum view of female authorship, Hale focused on womanly feeling and moral purpose rather than artistry. 29 Anne E. Boyd demonstrates in Writing for Immortality: Women and the Emergence of High Literary Culture in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), that women who aspired to literary art looked to European women’s Kunstlerromane for “the pre-texts” they needed (82-104). American Fanny Fern was cited as an exemplar of speaking out. Arguing that women should use their “mighty” pens to “reform and rebuke” social ills, Mary E. Bryan commended Fern’s unusual courage in transgressing patriarchal bounds for women writers, yet withheld full approval because Fern was “actuated by no fixed purpose” (“How Shall Women Write?” [1860], Southern Field and Fireside, in Hidden Hands: An Anthology of American Women Writers, 1790-1870, eds. Lucy M. Freibert and Barbara A. White [New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1985], 369, 370). Again, as in Hale’s assessment of Browning (n. 28), style goes unmentioned in deference to substance and motive. Early in Fern’s career, Louis Godey praised her “great terseness and acuteness of observation” and predicted still greater popularity—“if she minds her p’s and q’s, and does not become too much of a coquette” (“Godey’s Arm-Chair,” Godey’s Lady’s Book 45 [November 1852]: 490). Notice the odd mixture of gendered traits—“terseness” was not associated with women, but powers of observation were (hence their success, critics explained, as writers of letters and fiction)—and the conventional warning against feminine coquetry. A late-century women’s magazine used Fern to support a case that even spectacular careers begin modestly: she “began writing for fifty cents a column, and ended with a hundred dollars for less than one” (H., “Literary Beginners,” Arthur’s Home Magazine 50 [July 1882]:441). 30 “To Readers and Correspondents,” Graham’s Magazine 50 (June 1857): 561. Novices who sought publication in magazines were offered the same advice decades later: F[rederic] M B[ird] instructed them not submit to periodicals they had not read (“Don’t: to Young Contributors,” Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine [September 1893]: 382).

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to appreciate better the wants of the public, and to respect its judgment more.” The other nine ought to “work at some useful occupation, the homelier the better.” 31 (Perhaps I overlooked mid-century and postbellum advisors who specified that most writing men should engage in “useful” work.) 32 Still more unfavorable odds than the Republican’s one in ten were estimated in 1875 by Peterson’s Magazine, intended primarily for women. An editor replying to women’s queries about their chances for literary careers replied that for one successful author there were fifty failures.33

Combating the romantic myths of inspiration and spontaneity and the “fantasy of ease of publication,” 34 advisors doggedly explained that writing for the 31 “Employment for Women,” Springfield Republican, 6 December 1865: 1. 32 The ideology of womanly usefulness, especially in domestic contexts, is periodically invoked in advice to and commentary on women writers. The New York Observer counseled women authors of unsuccessful novels to do laundry, sew, “do anything honest and useful” rather than write (qtd. and rebutted by Thrace Talmon, “The Latest Crusade: Lady Authors and Their Critics,” National Era 11 [25 June 1857]: 101, emphasis added). Williams identifies Talmon as Ellen Tryphosa Harrington (Reclaiming Authorship, 20, 202 n. 12). Rose Terry Cooke’s “Matilda Muffin” voiced a common view that “no woman should use her head who can use her hands” (“The Memorial of A. B., or Maltilda Muffin,” Atlantic Monthly 5 [February 1860]: 186, emphasis added). See also “With the Trade,” Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine (July 1890): most “girls” who fancy themselves poets should commence “every-day vocations . . . much more useful than spoiling good paper to produce bad verses” (144, emphasis added). Early nineteenth-century critics expected male writers to be “virile” and “vigorous,” which perhaps implies usefulness; men could be denigrated as “effeminate” (John Paul Pritchard, Literary Wise Men of Gotham: Criticism in New York, 1815-1860 [Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1963], 20-21). It seems likely that usefulness was not shoved at men because advisors assumed that adult males generally had paid occupations. Even well-known authors usually held other jobs that supported their literary activity. Wilson discusses the “masculine” style and “ideal of authorship” characteristic of male professional writers—the “popular naturalists”—of the Progressive Era (Labor of Words, xiv. See 56-60, 142-43). 33 Editorial Table,” Peterson’s Magazine 68 (July 1875): [76]. Estimates of course varied. A woman employed by an inexpensive woman-oriented magazine wrote, “where one [aspirant] succeeds a thousand fail” (V[irginia] F. T[ownsend], “Plain Talk to Young Writers,” Arthur’s Home Magazine 26 [September 1865]: 27). According to a magazine more literary than Peterson’s or Arthur’s, “Not one author in twenty can live on his authorial earnings” in the U. S., largely because “[c]opyright is contemptibly small.” This commentator was thinking about men, specifically those who published books, for only one woman, Elizabeth Browning, was mentioned (“Topics of the Time: The Rewards of Literary Labor,” Scribner’s Monthly 8 [October 1874]: 748). 34 The qtd. phrase is from Williams, Reclaiming Authorship, 89. She explores other bases for women’s “fantasy” and “illusion” that authorship is easy (46-48, 50-53, 89-90).

popular nineteenth-century american women writers and the literary

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