Kindred Hands: Letters on Writing by British and American Women Authors, 1865-1935
255
Kindred Hands: Letters on Writing by British and American Women Authors, 1865-1935
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Overview
Representing some of the most important female writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including transatlantic correspondents, women of color, canonical writers, regional writers, and women living in the British empire, Kindred Hands will enliven scholarship on a host of topics, including reception theory, feminist studies, social history, composition theory, modernism, and nineteenth-century studies. Moreover, because it represents previously unpublished primary sources, the collection will initiate new discussions on race, class, sexuality, ethnicity, and gender with an eye to writing at the turn of the twentieth century.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781587296628 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Iowa Press |
| Publication date: | 06/15/2006 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 255 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
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Kindred Hands Letters on Writing by British and American Women Authors, 1865-1935
UNIVERSITY OF IOWA PRESS Copyright © 2006 the University of Iowa Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-87745-964-4
Chapter One JENNIFER COGNARD-BLACK
Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896)
That Harriet Beecher Stowe would become, at age forty, the best-known and best-paid author of nineteenth-century America was, in part, the accident of having been born and raised in antebellum New England - a time and a place in which women writers dominated the American literary scene. The seventh child of Roxana Foote Beecher and Lyman Beecher, Stowe was born in Litchfield, Connecticut on June 14, 1811. Roxana was a novel reader, while Lyman practiced evangelical ministry, and this combination came to fruition in the adult Stowe: a natural preacher and a voluminous reader and writer of popular novels. These aspects of Stowe's personality were fostered by her early education and marriage. From 1824 to 1827, Stowe attended Hartford Female Seminary, founded by her sister Catherine. This seminary was unlike any other, operating on a kind of collaborative pedagogy and offering a curriculum commensurate with that taught to boys. Stowe began teaching as soon as she arrived, which enabled her to advocate her liberal Protestantism as well as her love of good books, all to an audience of young girls (future "readers"). In turn, in ?836 after Stowe moved to Cincinnati and married the professor Calvin Ellis Stowe, she gained both the intellectual support of a literary husband and the opportunity, as a woman in charge of her own home, to practice and hone what Stowe's most recent biographer, Joan Hedrick, has termed "parlor literature."
For it is in the parlor that Stowe began her writing career, crafting short stories for a Cincinnati reading club, sending letters to the sick and bereaved, and writing entertaining correspondence for family gatherings - a kind of real-life, epistolary "novel" read out loud. Akin to teaching at the seminary, Stowe's audience was primarily women, and her early writing is indicative of the voice of everyday comfort and virtue that she would later develop in her novels. Throughout the ?830s and 40s, Stowe published a book of local color narratives, Primary Geography for Children (1833); stories and essays in the periodicals Godey's Lady's Book, the Western Monthly Magazine, and the New-York Evangelist; and a collection of fifteen of these stories entitled The Mayflowers (1843). With these early publications, Stowe gained her first national audience, an audience that sought relief from poverty, industrialization, disease, and high mortality rates - especially among children. This audience looked to the kind of parlor-based morality that Stowe offered: feminine, evangelical, and egalitarian.
This morality became the basis for the narrative voice of Uncle Tom's Cabin, which Stowe wrote as a reaction against the ?850 Fugitive Slave Law. Stowe's novel has repeatedly been credited as one of the factors that precipitated the Civil War, and Stowe herself has been called the "voice of the nation" on abolition. Uncle Tom's Cabin appeared as weekly serializations in the National Era from June 1851 through April 1852, and with it Stowe acquired international fame as well as the full-time vocation of an author - "author," here, meaning a pre-professional practice in the antebellum marketplace. Until the late ?860s, parlor literature was precisely what the nation wished to read. As a result, Stowe's books were both profitable and popular: her account of the stories that inspired her to write on slavery, The Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin (1853); her travelogue, Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands (1854); her second slavery novel, Dred (1856); her local color books, The Minister's Wooing (1859), The Pearl of Orr's Island (1862), and Oldtown Folks (1869); her Italian romance, Agnes of Sorrento (1862); and her domestic sketches, Household Papers and Stories (1865-1867) and Little Foxes (1866). In ?853, Stowe had written to an English admirer: "I wrote what I did because as a woman, as a mother I was oppressed & broken-hearted, with the sorrows & injustice I saw, because as a Christian I felt the dishonor to Christianity - because as a lover of my country I trembled at the coming day of wrath." Stowe took for granted that her position of woman, Christian, and citizen provided her with a right to authorship as well as an inherent appeal to her American readers, and these assumptions proved accurate throughout the first three decades of Stowe's career.
In 1869, however, Stowe published an article, "The True Story of Lady Byron's Life," in which she accused Lord Byron of an incestuous relationship with his half sister Augusta Leigh - an accusation she made to engage the national debate on woman's rights by holding Lady Byron up as a model of wronged womanhood. Immediately, Stowe received widespread censure from both the British and American press that threatened her prior authorial ethos. Put simply, the press held Stowe to standards of what was fast becoming a professional literary marketplace typified by a growing interest in realism over romance, an objective narrative voice, and a masculine audience of academics, editors, and members of men's clubs. As a result, Stowe's uncontested position as the nation's moral voice came to an end.
During this pivotal time, Stowe sent her first letter to George Eliot, five months before the outbreak of the "Byron whirlwind." Perhaps because Stowe was already working on her article, in this first letter, Stowe asserts her belief in the power of artistic femininity to shape national culture. "What strikes me most in your writings is the morale," Stowe tells Eliot. "[S]ometimes I read your writings supposing you man but come to the contrary con clusions from internal evidence[.] No my sister, there are things about us that no man can know & consequently no man can write - & being a woman your religion must be different from mans[.]" What Stowe seeks in Eliot is a writer after her own heart: a writer whose moral acuity and feminine insight match her own, despite Eliot's choice of a masculine pseudonym.
The key to such sympathy is to receive this fellow writer's spiritual, emotional, and moral teachings through her novels. Time and again, Stowe refers to how supported she feels reading Eliot's work. As part of her initial letter, Stowe lists the novels by Eliot that she has just reread, explaining that "when my soul is walking as it often does alongside of your soul [...], it speaks aloud in a sort of soliloquy - This knowledge of a mind purely from its writings when we have never seen the bodily presence is to me the purest expression of what disembodied communion may be[.]" Over the next decade, reading each other's work becomes a conversation that continues beyond the bounds of the letters themselves. In the correspondence that follows this initial letter, Stowe voices her strong reactions against Tom Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss, Middlemarch's Edward Casaubon, and Daniel Deronda's Mallinger Grandcourt as well as her equally strong approbation of the heroines from Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda, Dorothea Brooke and Gwendolen Harleth. She conflates Eliot's real life with her fictional ones, assuming, for instance, that Casaubon is a thinly veiled complaint against Eliot's own "husband," George Henry Lewes, for being a scholar without the discipline to finish his projects. Stowe even goes so far as to tutor Eliot when her aesthetic or religious teachings "stray" - such as when Deronda becomes a Jew instead of a Christian - from engaging an audience Stowe repeatedly designates as the "children sitting in the marketplace" in need of instruction and guidance.
In turn, Eliot's replies to Stowe are just as warm, intimate, and heartfelt. In her response to Stowe's first letter, Eliot writes that "The best joy your words give me is the sense of that sweet, generous feeling in you which dictated them, and I shall always be the richer because you have in this way made me know you better" (Haight V: 29). Akin to Stowe, Eliot privileges the novel as an ideal means of communication, commenting that "Letters are necessarily narrow and fragmentary, and when one writes on wide subjects are liable to create more misunderstanding than illumination" (V: 3?). Yet Eliot trusts Stowe's capacity for true interpretation, even of her "narrow" and "fragmentary" letter: "But I have little anxiety of that kind in writing to you, dear friend and fellow-labourer - for you have had longer experience than I as a writer, and fuller experience as a woman, since you have borne children and known the mother's history from the beginning" (V: 31). Here Eliot creates a picture of her correspondent that Stowe herself would have cherished. Eliot connects Stowe's artistic sympathy to the compassion of friendship, calling her both a "dear friend" and a "fellow-labourer." In addition, she locates Stowe's distinctive authorial powers in her knowledge and experience as a woman and as a mother.
The warm camaraderie that permeates Stowe and Eliot's correspondence is perhaps surprising, given that Stowe is now studied and taught as a sentimental or political writer, Eliot as a realistic, erudite one. Their mutual banter about America and its dual promises of "future" and "jollitude," or their confessions about respective ailments and personal losses, or their worries over how their work will be received across the Atlantic, or even their disagreements about the form in which the soul lives after death are windows that reveal both their private relationship as well as how these two icons desired to shape their public in similar ways. In the years in which Stowe went through the greatest literary trial of her authorial life - and the years in which she self-consciously attempted to professionalize her voice into a more impersonal, high-culture, and realistic one with such works as Lady Byron Vindicated (1870) or Woman in Sacred History (1874) her letters to Eliot show how dedicated she remained to the pre-professional notion that the novel, not the magazine or newspaper, was the vehicle for bettering hearts and minds; that parlor literature remained the world's best hope for achieving moral uplift; and that the duty of every writer was to speak with the voice of and for the multitude, not the self. In Eliot, Stowe found a kindred voice, one interested in teaching others how to feel right through reading: "[Y]ou are," Stowe insisted to her friend, "as Dorothea said part of the great current for good in our times[.]"
Letter 1. Harriet Beecher Stowe to Mary Ann Evans [George Eliot], Mandarin, Florida, 15 April 1869
My Dear Friend
A year ago my friend Mrs. Henry Fields called upon me at my daughter's in Stockbridge, & gave me what was to me most interesting an account of her visit to you - & ended with what was to me most delightful of all a word of kind message from you. Forthwith I resolved then and there that I would write to you immediately and tell you some of the many many thoughts you have caused me - But I was at that time heavily taxed writing a story that I am just now with fear & trembling giving to the English world It is so intensely American that I fear it may not out of my country be understood, but I cast it like a waif on the waters Instead of writing to you, at that time I took Silas Marner and re read carefully pencil in hand & then the Mill on the Floss. Then then Adam Bede & then Romola - I have studied all these more than read them - & you will therefore see why it is that I must begin a note to you "My dear friend" - I have also made careful studies of Scenes from Clerical life - and it is my opinion that some things in those sketches have never been executed in your best works - "Janet's Repentance" is a theme that might have been expanded into a novel of greater length & has in it some of the most effective elements of the great underlying tragedy of life treated in a most original way. What strikes me most in your writings is the morale. You appear to have a peculiar insight into the workings of the moral faculties - and the religious development through all its phases which is very similar to that of Goethe - so complete is the understanding that you seem to have with each phase that one cannot divine which of all that you have drawn is the one with which you yourself most deeply sympathise - but following you through all the lanes & winding high ways & by ways of religious thought one often asks where does this pilgrim find home? - What is the rest of this explorer? I see your footsteps sometimes in places where one is both glad & sorry to see that another has been - glad because the heart always throbs at sympathetic tokens sorry because; there was there no water and no rest -
You are by nature so thoroughly English - Your mind, has in the most airy play of its imagination that English definiteness that refuses to exhale in a mist & turn to a mere cloud - so that I cannot believe that you have come out into pantheism in the German way - It requires pipes & tobacco & indefinite coffe to bring that about - besides you are as thoroughly woman as you are English. For sometimes I read your writings supposing you man but come to the contrary conclusions from internal evidence No my sister, there are things about us that no man can know & consequently no man can write - & being woman your religion must be different from mans - & I often ask myself what is the innermost by which she lives - that that gives her courage to meet life such as a nature like hers must find it to be - to bear what such a nature must bear - & to look forward to death with joy? -
I do not ask you to tell me but when my soul is walking as it often does alongside of your soul up & down paths of thought and suggestion, it speaks aloud in a sort of soliloquy - This knowledge of a mind purely from its writings when we have never seen the bodily presence is to me the purest expression of what disembodied communion may be.
I know your husband only thro the life of Goethe which my husband finds interesting as he is a perfect monomaniac on that subject. He has I believe collected every possible edition of the Faust and is at present busy in most profound studies on the second part which he designs to embody in an article on the Theology of Goethe - I hope he may do it but he is one forever mining delving studying & slow to work out what he gets into the uses of popular language I understand Mr. Lewes has published a philosophy that is to solve & settle all things May he do it! - When they are all right let me know - and I want everything made clear as a looking glass but I dont want to go through the process of doing it -
My husband has just returned from a summer spent in Spain & we have been reading your poem - What a host of capabilities for romance in that old Spain - what intertwisting of possibilities in the three religions all picturesque and then the mystery of the gypsy race But I like prose - English prose better than poetry - I wish you had written it as a romance. Our language is a hard one for poetry - You write exquisite poetry in your prose - some parts of Adam Bede to wit & you are unfettered by metre -
Did you ever think of the rhythmical power of prose how every writer when they get warm fall into a certain swing & rhythm peculiar to themselves the words all having their place and sentences their cadences But in blank verse proper or any form of metrical rhyme the flow of the idea has to be turned backward to suit the fetters - You are a poet - but I dont like English poetry so well as English prose - I wish Mrs. Browning had written more prose -
Shall you ever come to America - If so come & see us? - please do -
When my next book comes out I shall ask the publishers to send you an Early Copy - & if my good husband does get his article on the Theology of Goethe done he will make an offering of it to you
I do wish you would come to America We should give you a hearty welcome & there are things here worth seeing -
I am just now with my son in Florida where we are planting an orange grove and starting a settlement - We live in an orange grove & are planting many more - It is a lovely country - My northern home however is my permanent address -
Box 1217 Hartford Conn I am with true regard & affection Ever Yours HB Stowe
(Continues...)
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