renewed in the novels and stories of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps; who
possesses the artist’s responsiveness in a high degree, with but little
of the artist’s restraint. Exquisitely sensitive to the significant
beauty of the world, she is no less sensitive to the appeal of human
pain. In “Hedged In” and “The Silent Partner,” in her stories of the
squalid tenement and the storm-beaten coast, her literary work reflects,
point for point, her personal work for the fallen, the toiling and the
tempted. Her passionate sympathy gives her a power of thrilling, of
commanding the tribute of tears, which is all her own. An enthusiast for
womanhood, she has given us in “The Story of Avis,” and “Dr. Zay”
striking studies of complementary themes; “Avis,” despite certain flaws
of style to which objection is trite, remaining the greater, as it is
the sadder, book. All Miss Phelps’s stories strike root into New
England, though it is not precisely Mrs. Cooke’s New England of iron
farmers and stony farms; and none strikes deeper root than “Avis,” a
natural product of the intellectual region whence “Woman in the
Nineteenth Century” sprang thirty years before. No other woman, among
writers who have arisen since the war, has received in such fullness the
spiritual inheritance of New England’s past.
The changes brought about by the influx of foreigners into the factory
towns of the East, are reflected in the pages of Miss Phelps,
particularly in “The Silent Partner.” A recent worker of the same vein
is Lillie Chace Wyman, whose short stories, collected under the symbolic
title “Poverty Grass,” are marked by sincerity and simple power. Sarah
Orne Jewett roams the old pastures, gathering many pungent handfuls of
the familiar flowers and herbs that retain for us their homely
preciousness. She is attracted also by the life of the coast. Without
vigorous movement, her sketches and stories have always an individual,
delicate picturesqueness, the quality of a small, clear water-color. “A
Country Doctor” is to be noted for its very quiet and true presentation
of a symmetrical womanhood, naturally drawn toward the large helpfulness
of professional life.
A novel which has lately aroused much discussion, the “John Ward,
Preacher,” of Margaret Deland, is, although its scene is laid in
Pennsylvania, a legitimate growth of New England in its problem and its
central character. The orthodox idea of eternal future punishment
receives a treatment somewhat similar to that applied by Miss Phelps, in
“The Gates Ajar,” to the conventional heaven. The hero seems a
revisitant Thomas Shepard, or other stern yet tender Puritan of the
past, miraculously set down in a modern environment. The incisiveness of
portions of “John Ward,” as well as the grace of its side scenes, gives
promise of even more valuable coming contributions to American fiction,
by the poet of the charming “Old Garden.” A still more recent New
England production is the book of stories by Mary E. Wilkins, “A Humble
Romance”; vigorous work, brimful of human nature.
We need not now enter into the circumstances, tending to the
misdirection of intellectual effort, which so affected the work of
Southern women in literature that for some time they produced little of
enduring value. These causes have been of late fully set forth by a
writer of the New South, Thomas Nelson Page; who, in naming the women of
Southern birth or residence most prominent as novelists before the Civil
War, places Mrs. Terhune in a class by herself. “Like the others, she
has used the Southern life as material, but has exhibited a literary
sense of far higher order, and an artistic touch.” Mrs. Rebecca Harding
Davis, a native of West Virginia, has chosen a Pennsylvanian background
for some of her best work; producing, perhaps, nothing stronger than
“Life in the Iron Mills,” published long since in the _Atlantic_; a
story distantly akin to those of Miss Phelps and the author of “Poverty
Grass.” The hopeless heart-hunger of the poor has seldom been so
passionately pictured. A distinguishing characteristic of the work of
Mrs. Davis is her Browning-like insistence on the rare test-moments of
life. If, as in the complicated wartime novel “Waiting for the
Verdict,”—a work of high intention,—the characters come out startlingly
well in the sudden lights flashed upon them, the writer’s idealism is
tonic and uplifting.
It was a woman of the North who pictured, in a series of brief tales and
sketches full of insight, the desolate South at the close of the Civil
War: Constance Fenimore Woolson, the most broadly national of our women
novelists. Her feeling for local color is quick and true; and though she
has especially identified herself with the Lake country and with
Florida, one is left with the impression that her assimilative powers
would enable her to reproduce as successfully the traits of any other
quarter of the Union. Few American writers of fiction have given
evidence of such breadth, so full a sense of the possibilities of the
varied and complex life of our wide land. Robust, capable, mature,—these
seem fitting words to apply to the author of “Anne,” of “East Angels,”
of the excellent short stories in “Rodman the Keeper.” Women have reason
for pride in a representative novelist whose genius is trained and
controlled, without being tamed or dispirited.
Similar surefootedness and mastery of means are displayed by Mary
Hallock Foote in her picturesque western stories, such as “The Led Horse
Claim: A Romance of the Silver Mines,” and “John Bodewin’s Testimony”;
in which a certain gracefulness takes the place of the fuller warmth of
Miss Woolson. One is apt to name the two writers together, since they
represent the most supple and practiced talent just now exercised by
women in the department of fiction. Mrs. Frances Hodgson Burnett,
English by birth and education, and influenced by the Dickens tradition,
though reflecting the tone of her environment wherever fate may lead
her, touches American literature chiefly on the Southern side, through
“Louisiana” and “Esmeralda.” Despite the ambitious character of her
novel of Washington society, “Through One Administration,” her most
durable work is either thoroughly English, or belongs to the
international school. This particular branch of fiction we cannot now
pause to note, though conscious that such books as the beautiful “Guenn”
of Blanche Willis Howard have their own distinct value.
A truly native flower, though gathered in a field so unfamiliar as to
wear a seemingly foreign charm, is Mrs. Jackson’s poetic “Ramona.” A
book instinct with passionate purpose, intensely alive, and involving
the reader in its movement, it yet contains an idyl of singular
loveliness, the perfection of which lends the force of contrast to the
pathetic close. A novel of reform, into which a great and generous soul
poured its gathered strength, it none the less possesses artistic
distinction. Something is, of course, due to the charm of atmosphere,
the beauty of the background against which the plot naturally placed
itself; more, to the trained hand, the pen pliant with long and free
exercise; most, to the poet-heart. “Ramona” stands as the most finished,
though not the most striking example, that what American women have done
notably in literature they have done nobly.
The magazine-reading world has hardly recovered yet from its shock of
surprise, on discovering the author of “In the Tennessee Mountains,” a
book of short stories, projecting the lines on which the writer has
since advanced in “The Prophet of the Great Smoky Mountain” and “The
Despot of Broomsedge Cove.” Why did Miss Murfree prefer to begin her
literary career under the masculine name of “Charles Egbert Craddock”?
Probably for the same reason as George Sand, George Eliot, Currer Bell;
a reason stated by a stanch advocate of woman, in words that form a
convenient answer to the common sneer. “Not because they wished to be
men, but because they wished for an unbiassed judgment as artists.” The
world has grown so much more enlightened on this point, that the biassed
critic is now the exception, and the biassed editor is a myth. The
precaution of disguise cannot much longer remain a necessity, if,
indeed, it was necessary in the case of Miss Murfree.
From whatever cause adopted, the mask was a completely deceptive one.
Mr. Craddock’s vivid portrayal of life among the Tennessee Mountains was
fairly discussed, and welcomed as a valuable and characteristic
contribution from the South; and nobody hinted then that the subtle
poetic element, and the tendency to subordinate human interest to
scenery, were indications of the writer’s sex. The few cherishers of the
fading superstition that women are without humor, laughed heartily and
unsuspiciously over the droll situations, the quaint sayings of the
mountaineers. Once more the _reductio ad absurdum_ has been applied to
the notion of ordained, invariable, and discernible difference between
the literary work of men and that of women. The method certainly defers
to dullness; but it also affords food for amusement to the ironically
inclined.
This review, cursory and incomplete as it is, of the chief
accomplishment of American women in native fiction, serves to bring out
the fact that they have, during the last forty years, supplied to our
literature an element of great and genuine value; and that while their
productions have of course varied in power and richness they have
steadily gained in art. How wide the gap between “Hobomok” and “Ramona”!
During the latter half of the period, the product gives no general
evidence of limitation; and the writers would certainly be placed,
except for the purposes of this article, among their brother authors, in
classes determined by method, local background, or any other basis of
arrangement which is artistic rather than personal.
In exceptional cases, a reviewer perhaps exclaims upon certain faults as
“womanish”; but the cry is too hasty; the faults are those of
individuals, in either sex. It is possible to match them from the work
of men, and to adduce examples of women’s work entirely free from them.
Colonel Higginson has pointed out that the ivory-miniature method in
favor with some of our masculine artists is that of Jane Austen. Wherein
do Miss Sprague’s “Earnest Trifler,” or “The Daughter of Henry Sage
Rittenhouse,” display more salient indications of sex than works of
similar scope by Mr. Henry James?
“The almost entire disappearance of the distinctively woman’s
novel,”—that is, the novel designed expressly for feminine readers, such
as “The Wide, Wide World,” and “The Lamplighter,”—has lately been
commented upon. It is to be observed that this species—chiefly produced
in the past by women, as the Warner sisters, Maria S. Cummins, Elizabeth
Payson Prentiss, the excellent Miss McIntosh—has become nearly extinct
at the very time when women are supplying a larger proportion of fiction
than ever before; and, further, that the comparatively few “domestic
semi-pious” novels very popular in late years have been of masculine
production. The original and suggestive, though perhaps at times
over-subtle, work of Mrs. Whitney, thoroughly impregnated with the New
England spirit, and portraying, with insight, various phases of
girlhood, takes another rank. Whatever may be concluded from the
decadence of fiction written of women, for women, by women, it is
certainly probable that women will remain, as a rule, the best writers
for girls. In connection with this subject must be mentioned the widely
known and appreciated stories of Louisa M. Alcott, “Little Women,” and
its successors,—which “have not only been reprinted and largely sold in
England, but also translated into several foreign languages, and thus
published with persistent success.” We are told that when “Little Men”
was issued, “its publication had to be delayed until the publishers were
prepared to fill advanced orders for fifty thousand copies.”
A like popularity is to be noted of the spirited and artistic “Hans
Brinker, or the Silver Skates,” of Mrs. Mary Mapes Dodge; which “has had
a very large circulation in America; has passed through several editions
in England; and has been published in French at Paris, in German at
Leipsic, in Russian at St. Petersburg, and in Italian at Rome.... The
crowning tribute to its excellence is its perennial sale in Holland in a
Dutch edition.” No name in our juvenile literature so “brings a perfume
in the mention” as that of Mrs. Dodge, who for years has been as “the
very pulse of the machine” in the production of that ideal magazine for
children, which is not only an ever-new delight but a genuine
educational power.
In poetry, the abundant work of women during the last half-century shows
a development corresponding to that traced in the field of fiction. As
the flood of sentimentalism slowly receded, hopeful signs began to
appear; the rather vague tints of a bow of poetical promise. The varying
verse of Mrs. Oakes Smith, Mrs. Kinney, Elizabeth Lloyd Howell, and
Harriet Winslow Sewall, represents, in different degrees, a general
advance. The “little vagrant pen” of Frances Sargent Osgood, as she
confessed, “wandered lightly down the paper,” but its fanciful turns had
now and then a swift, capricious grace. The poems of Sarah Helen
Whitman, belonging to the landscape school of Bryant, are of marked
value, as are also the deeply earnest productions of Mrs. Anna Lynch
Botta; which display anew distinctness of motive, possibly attributable
to the influence of Longfellow. The same influence is felt in some of
the early work of Alice Cary; whose individual strain of melancholy
melody clings to remembrance, its charm stubbornly outliving our
critical recognition of defects due, in great measure, to
over-production. Emily Judson sometimes touched finely the familiar
chords, as in the well-known poem of motherhood, “My Bird.” The tender
“Morning Glory” of Maria White Lowell, whose poems are characterized by
a delicate and childlike simplicity, will be remembered.
In 1873 a critic not generally deemed too favorable to growths of the
present day, recorded the opinion that there was “more force and
originality,—in other words more genius,—in the living female poets of
America than in all their predecessors, from Mistress Anne Bradstreet
down. At any rate there is a wider range of thought in their verse, and
infinitely more art.” For the change first noted by Mr. Stoddard there
is no accounting; the tides of genius are incalculable. The other gains,
like those in fiction, are to be accounted for partly by the law of
evolution working through our whole literature, by the influence of
sounder models and of a truer criticism, and by the winnowing processes
of the magazines; partly also, by the altered position and improved
education of women in general—not necessarily of the individual, since
change in the atmosphere may have important results in cases where other
conditions remain unchanged.
The poems of Mrs. Howe express true womanly aspiration, and a high scorn
of unworthiness, but their strongest characteristic is the fervent
patriotism which breathes through the famous “Battle-Hymn of the
Republic.” The clear hopeful “orchard notes” of Lucy Larcom—it is
impossible to refrain from quoting Mr. Stedman’s perfect phrase—first
heard long since, have grown more mellow with advancing years.
The dramatic lyric took new force and naturalness in the hands of Rose
Terry Cooke, and turned fiery in those of Mrs. Stoddard; whose
contemplative poems also have an eminent sad dignity of style. The
fine-spun subjective verse of Mrs. Piatt flashes at times with
felicities as a web with dew-drops. Many names appear upon the honorable
roll: Mrs. Fields, Mrs. Spofford,—whose rich nature reveals itself in
verse as in the novel,—Mrs. Margaret J. Preston, Mrs. Mary Ashley
Townsend; Elizabeth Akers Allen, Julia C. R. Dorr, Mrs. Stowe, Mrs.
Whitney, Mrs. Dodge, Mrs. Moulton; Mrs. Thaxter, the sea’s true lover,
who has devoted herself to the faithful expression of a single phase of
natural beauty; Mrs. Mary E. Bradley, Kate Putnam Osgood, Nora Perry,
Mary N. Prescott, and Harriet McEwen Kimball; Mary Clemmer Hudson,
Margaret Sangster, Miss Bushnell, “Susan Coolidge,” “Howard Glyndon,”
“Stuart Sterne,” Charlotte Fiske Bates, May Riley Smith, Ella Dietz,
Mary Ainge De Vere, Edna Dean Proctor, the Goodale sisters, Miss
Coolbrith, Miss Shinn, “Owen Innsley,” Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and
Alice Wellington Rollins. There is a kind of white fire in the best of
the subtle verses of “H. H.”—a diamond light, enhanced by careful
cutting. Generally impersonal, the author’s individuality yet lives in
them to an unusual degree. We may recognize, also, in the Jewish poems
of Emma Lazarus, especially in “By the Waters of Babylon” and the
powerful fourteenth-century tragedy, “The Dance to Death,” “the precious
life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a
life beyond life.” The poems of Edith M. Thomas, with their exquisite
workmanship, mark the high attainment of woman in the mastery of poetic
forms, and exhale some breath of that fragrance which clings to the work
of the young Keats. Miss Hutchinson’s “Songs and Lyrics” have also rare
quality. The graceful verse of Mrs. Deland has been quick to win the ear
of the public. Louise Imogen Guiney, sometimes straining the voice, has
nevertheless contributed to the general chorus notes of unusual fullness
and strength. In other branches of literature, to which comparatively
few women have chosen to devote themselves, an increasing thoroughness
is apparent, a growing tendency to specialism. The irresponsible
feminine free-lance, with her gay dash at all subjects, and her
alliterative pen-name dancing in every melée like a brilliant pennon,
has gone over into the more appropriate field of journalism. The calmly
adequate literary matron-of-all-work is an admirable type of the past,
no longer developed by the new conditions. The articles of Lucy M.
Mitchell on sculpture and of Mrs. Schuyler van Renssalaer on art and
architecture; the historical work of Martha J. Lamb and of Mary L.
Booth, the latter also an indefatigable translator; the studies of Helen
Campbell in social science; the translations of Harriet Waters
Preston—these few examples, given at random, are typical of the
determination and concentration of woman’s work at the present day. We
notice in each new issue of a magazine the well-known specialists. Miss
Thomas has given herself to the interpretation of nature in prose as in
verse; “Olive Thorne” Miller to the loving study of bird-life. Mrs.
Jackson, the most versatile of later writers, possessed the rare
combination of versatility and thoroughness in such measure that we
might almost copy Hartley Coleridge’s saying of Harriet Martineau, and
call her a specialist in everything; but her name will ever be
associated with the earnest presentation of the wrongs of the Indian, as
that of Emma Lazarus with the impassioned defense of the rights of the
Jew.
The just and genial Colonel Higginson expresses disappointment that
woman’s advance in literature has not been more marked since the
establishment of the women’s colleges. “It is,” he says, “considerable
and substantial; yet in view of the completeness with which literary
work is now thrown open to women, and their equality as to pay, there is
room for some surprise that it is not greater.”
The proper fruit of the women’s colleges in literature has, in fact, not
yet ripened. It may at first seem strangely delayed, yet reflection will
suggest the reasons. An unavoidable self-consciousness hampers the first
workers under a new dispensation. It might appear at a casual glance
that those released from the burden of a retarding tradition were ready
at once for the race; but in truth the weight has only been exchanged
for the lighter burden of the unfamiliar. College-bred women of the
highest type have accepted, with grave conscientiousness, new social
responsibilities as the concomitant of their new opportunities.
“Pealing, the clock of Time
Has struck the Woman’s hour;
We hear it on our knees,”
wrote Miss Phelps for the graduates of Smith College ten years ago. That
the summons has indeed been reverently heard and faithfully obeyed,
those who have followed the work of the Association of Collegiate Alumnæ
can testify. The deed, and not the word, engages the energy of the
college woman of to-day; but as these institutions grow into the life of
our land, that life will be everywhere enriched; and the word must
follow in happy time. Individual genius for literature is sure sooner or
later to appear within the constantly widening circle of those fairly
equipped for its exercise. It would be idle to expect that the cases in
which native power and an adequate preparation go hand in hand, will be
frequent; since they are infrequent among men. The desirable thing was,
that this rare development should be made a possibility among women. It
is possible to-day; some golden morrow will make it a reality.
VI.
WOMAN IN JOURNALISM.
BY
SUSAN E. DICKINSON.
The pioneer woman in American journalism was Mrs. Margaret Craper, of
the _Massachusetts Gazette and News Letter_, in the years of the
Revolutionary War. After her to the year 1837 must be referred the first
entrance of any American woman into the field of active journalism. At
that time Mrs. Ann S. Stephens accepted the duties of editorial writer
and literary critic in the columns of the _New York Evening Express_.
Her connection with that paper continued for thirty years, but after
1857 it was limited to the editorial pages by the press of exacting
duties elsewhere. In the last named year Mrs. Elizabeth F. Ellet
succeeded her as literary editor of the _Express_, sustaining well the
reputation which Mrs. Stephens had gained for it of a just and high
standard of criticism. But in the intervening twenty years other women
had followed Mrs. Stephens’s lead, and made their mark in journalism
with a freshness, a vigor, and a brilliance unsurpassed by any of the
numerous later comers. During the thirties Mrs. Sarah Josepha Hale and
the once famous Grimké sisters, Sarah and Angelina, availed themselves
of the opportunities offered for special writing by New York and
Philadelphia papers. In 1841 Mrs. Lydia Maria Child, one of the most
widely known authors of the day, made her appearance in the arena of New
York journalism as editor of the _Anti-Slavery Standard_, a weekly
newspaper published by the American Anti-Slavery Society. Mrs. Child had
already demonstrated her editorial ability in the establishment and
conduct, for eight years, of the _Juvenile Miscellany_, the pioneer
children’s magazine of America. For two years Mrs. Child conducted the
_Standard_ alone; then, for six years more, in conjunction with her
husband. But her best work during these years was done in 1842–’3–’4 as
special New York correspondent for the _Boston Courier_, then edited by
Joseph T. Buckingham. These weekly letters of hers, original, sparkling,
thoughtful, vigorous, depicting the social, literary, musical, and
dramatic life of the metropolis, were afterwards republished in two
volumes, which hold a wonderful fascination still, when read after the
lapse of more than a generation.
It was while Mrs. Child’s letters were forming one of the greatest
attractions of the _Boston Courier_, in 1843, that Miss Cornelia Wells
Walter took charge of the editorial columns of the _Boston Transcript_,
doing her work as ably and faithfully as any of her masculine fellow
journalists. And in the next year, 1844, Margaret Fuller, who in 1840
had founded, and for two years edited, that famous quarterly, the
_Dial_, came from Boston to New York at the request of Horace Greeley to
fill the position of literary editor of the _Tribune_. Here she set the
standard of criticism at high-water mark, and made its literary notices
famed for a discrimination, sincerity, justness, and fearlessness of
judgment and utterance which contributed largely to the influence of the
paper. In the summer of 1846, when she sailed for Europe, its review
columns had in her hands attained a reputation which in after years the
scholarly editing of Dr. Ripley did but sustain.