Lydia Sigourney, An Influential American Voice

Lydia Howard Huntley Sigourney (born 1 September 1791)

In her own time, Lydia Huntley Signourney was an extraordinarily popular, productive, and respected American poet. But, later, not so much.

By the time Gordon S. Haight published his 1930 biography, Mrs. Sigourney, the Sweet Singer of Hartford, she had become, in his estimation, a writer of "hack work." His biographical essay on Sigourney in Notable American Women, 1607 to 1950: A Biographical Dictionary (1971), while thoroughly documenting her enormous literary output, fairly oozes with contempt.* 

But, as Sandra Zagarell notes in her own introduction to the work of Sigourney, "The low esteem in which public literature--and most women writers--have long been held has allowed twentieth-century commentators to repeat with contempt her antebellum sobriquet 'the Sweet Singer of Hartford.' Yet her great success and the seriousness with which she pursued her vocation make it worth our while to explore both the nature of her appeal and the potential, as well as the limits, of popular antebellum writing."

As Zagarell suggests, it is "worth our while" to get to know at least a little about Signourney's work. Born in Norwich, Connecticut, in 1791, Lydia Huntley was not the child of wealth and privilege. She was the daughter of a gardener, but she was able to attend a private school with the assistance of her father's employer, a widow, and after her death, members of her wealthy Lathrop family and influential friends in Hartford continued to support Lydia Huntley's education.

After her formal schooling ended, Lydia Huntley was tutored in Latin and Hebrew. She, in turn, contributed to the education of others, focusing on teaching poor children, including African American students. She spent the years between 1811 and 1819 as a teacher in a variety of small schools she established. She also wrote and published Moral Pieces in Prose and Verse (1815).

In 1819 she married Charles Sigourney, who "allowed" his new wife to write--only in her "leisure" time--and to publish, but only anonymously, because he objected to "public authorship." At first she used the proceeds of her writing to support a variety of charitable causes: temperance work, peace societies, the Greek war of independence, and missionary work, especially among the Native American Choctaw and Cherokee peoples.  

But in 1833, things changed. Her husband's business declined, her parents' financial situation also grew dire, and she was identified as the "anonymous" author of a conduct book, Letters to Young Ladies, By a Lady. From this point on, Lydia Huntley Sigourney took charge of her writing career.

She published under her own name, sold articles to popular magazines, negotiated the terms of her literary contracts, and even managed to get her own books adopted as school texts.

As the disapproving Haight observes, "she set out frankly to pursue literature as a trade." 

(Haight also seems to disapprove of the way Sigourney's poetry did what he refers to as "double duty": she sold her poetry to magazines and newspapers, which "made her name familiar everywhere," then she collected her poems and sold volumes of her work. She reissued books "occasionally" under new titles! And, perhaps worst of all, from "1840 to 1842 the publisher Godey paid her $500 a year merely to use her name on the title page of his Lady's Book"!!!!!)

But even the grumpy Gordon Haight concludes his essay on Sigourney by acknowledging that she must be "remembered as one of the first American women to make a successful career of literature."

Lydia Sigourney's literary output is astonishing. For her bibliography, click here. Much of her work is available through the Internet Archive (click here--if for no other reason than to get a sense of her productivity) or via Google Books. I'm particularly interested in conduct books for women, so you might like to begin with her Letters to Young Ladies. 

A selection of Sigourney's poetry is available at the Poetry Foundation website (click here)

Fun link: in an 1840 trip to Europe, Lydia Sigourney met with many literary figures, including Maria Edgeworth. 

*You can access the full text at the Internet Archive with a free account.

Charlotte Lennox and Mothers of the Novel

Charlotte Lennox (died 4 January 1803)

Born around the year 1730 (sources vary), Charlotte Ramsey married Alexander Lennox in 1747, the same year she published Poems on Several Occasions.

The marriage was not a success, nor was Lennox's attempt to launch an acting career, but by 1750 she had published her first novel, The Life of Harriot Stuart Written by Herself, and gained the attention--and support--of the formidable poet, critic, and editor Samuel Johnson and of the most famous novelists of their day, Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding.

Richardson acted as Lennox's adviser for the publication of her most successful novel, The Female Quixote; Or, the Adventures of Arabella, published in 1752. The novel follows Cervantes' Don Quixote in its satire of romance--in Lennox's novel, the sheltered Arabella, brought up by her widowed father in a remote location, entertains and "educates" herself by reading the "Store of Romances" she discovers in her father's library.

(The novels had belonged to Arabella's mother; unhappy with her husband's decision to retire to his isolated castle, she had tried to while away the "disagreeable" time with the novels. Unfortunately for her, her husband disapproved of her romances, "removed them" from her, and locked them up in his library. The unhappy woman died shortly after giving birth to Arabella.)

As Margaret Anne Doody notes in her introduction to the Oxford World's Classics edition of The Female Quixote, "The volumes of romances are Arabella's only inheritance from her mother, and the female inheritance is customarily presented by women in their novels as dangerous or double-edged" (xxi). In this case, after her father's death, the orphaned Arabella attempts to live her life according to what she believes are the "histories" she has discovered in her father's library. 

Less well known but perhaps more interesting for an American reader, Lennox's 1790 epistolary novel, Euphemia, is set, in large part, in colonial North America prior to the Revolutionary War. The novel begins just after Euphemia Lumley's marriage to a man she does not really know and certainly does not love, a marriage urged on her by her widowed mother. Euphemia's mother believes Mr. Neville is financially secure, he believes Euphemia is an heiress, both are disappointed.

Neville moves Euphemia to New York, then to a fort in Albany, and finally to the remote fort of Schenectedy. This devastating anatomy of eighteenth-century marriage not only contains fascinating views of the land itself, but of the British in North America, of Dutch colonists, of Africans who have been brought to the colonies, and of the indigenous native peoples, in particular the Hurons.

The first-edition title page of
The Female Quixote

Despite the popularity of her novels, Lennox published anonymously. The title page of The Female Quixote did not include her name until after her death. The title pages of her subsequent novels indicated they were "by the author of The Female Quixote." (This is the same authorial strategy used later by Jane Austen.)

Like Maria Edgeworth, Charlotte is one of the "mothers of the novel" whose work precedes and informs Austen's. Indeed, in a letter to her sister Cassandra, Austen describes reading and thoroughly enjoying The Female Quixote, and scholars have recently noted this novel's influence on Northanger Abbey.

In addition to the wonderful editions of The Female Quixote and Euphemia that I've linked to here, Lennox's novels are available for free download at Google Books, and there are inexpensive Kindle editions that are also available. Read! Enjoy!

Maria Edgeworth and Mothers of the Novel

Maria Edgeworth (born 1 January 1767)

In 1970, when I was an undergraduate, I took a course in the history of the novel; although I no longer remember what its title in the official course catalogue was, the syllabus I received was titled "Fathers of the Novel." We began with the work of Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, and Henry Fielding, and we ended with Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy. Although I had read both Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre while I was still in high school, the study of the novel as a literary genre, as far as my college classroom was concerned, was a zone for men only.

Of course, that doesn't mean I didn't find my way to novels written by women. Several years later, while studying for my Ph.D. exams and increasingly tired of Defoe and Dickens, I found my way to the Gothic extravaganza of Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and to the "non-canonical" novels of Fanny Burney--I loved Burney's novels in particular because they were huge--the paperback copy of Camilla (1796) that I bought in 1975 is 900 pages long! And it is still on my shelf today.

But I didn't have any idea of all that I was missing until I discovered Dale Spender's Mothers of the Novel: 100 Good Women Writers before Jane Austen, first published in 1986 and still in print, nearly thirty years later. Spender describes her own process of discovery in the introduction:

     This is not the book I started to write. Half-way through my research, I changed my mind. When I began my work on early women novelists--in the attempt to explore the relationship between women and fiction--I had assumed that women novelists had not really "come into their own" until the entry of Jane Austen, and that the starting point for my work would be somewhere about the middle of the nineteenth century. At that stage, I had no idea that for more than one hundred and fifty years before Jane Austen, women had been writing novels, and that to return to the early days of women's relationship to fiction meant to go back to the seventeenth, and not the nineteenth century. 

Maria Edgeworth, born on 1 January 1767, is just the first of the "mothers of the novel" I will profile in this blog over the coming months. The daughter of an Anglo-Irish gentleman, Edgeworth explored serious social issues in her novels, including class, politics, race, and education, and her work can seem a bit didactic at times. But her novels are also full of sparkling adventures, memorable characters, and real humor.

An 1807 portrait of Maria Edgeworth

Two early novels, Castle Rackrent (1800) and The Absentee (1812), focus specifically on Anglo-Irish issues. The 1817 novel, Harrington, addresses anti-semitism, the novel itself a response to a letter to Edgeworth written by a reader, Rachel Mordecai. 

The Jewish-American Mordecai wondered how Edgeworth, who demonstrated "such justice and liberality" on issues of education, "should on one alone appear to be biased by prejudice." Mordecai had noticed that, whenever a Jewish character appeared in Edgeworth's novels, a "mean, avaricious, and unprincipled" nature was "invariably attached to him." (Mordecai refers specifically to characters in Castle Rackrent, Belinda, published in 1801, and The Absentee.) 

In her response to Mordecai, Edgeworth offers Harrington as "atonement and reparation . . . for the past."

Despite the presence of the Jewish moneylender Solomon in Belinda, this is a wonderful novel with which to start reading Edgeworth. It will allow you to see the unthinking anti-semitism for which Edgeworth will later offer her "atonement." It offers not one but two interracial romantic relationships, insight into the fear of and treatments for breast cancer in the very early nineteenth century, an exploration of jealousy between women, and a lively, often humorous, examination of the perils of the marriage market.

Edgeworth died at the age of eighty-one on 22 May 1849. Her work is readily available in print today. It's also available online in a variety of e-texts. To link to a Google books version of Belinda, click here.