History of American Women

Caroline Lee Hentz

2012-02-09T16:30:00.000-05:00

Writer and Novelist in Antebellum America

Caroline Lee Hentz (1800–1856) was a nineteenth century novelist and one of the most popular women writers in antebellum America, most noted for her opposition to the abolitionist movement. Her best known novel, The Planter's Northern Bride, was written in response to the enormously popular anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe.

Early Life
Caroline Lee Whiting was born June 1, 1800 in Lancaster, Massachusetts, the youngest of John and Orpah Whiting's eight children. She was very intelligent and had written a poem, a novel and a tragedy by the age of 12. At age 17, she began teaching at the Lancaster Common School.

On September 30, 1824, Caroline Whiting married Nicholas Marcellus Hentz, a Frenchman who had immigrated to the United States in 1816. An entomologist, novelist and artist, Hentz was intellectually gifted but prone to depression and uncontrollable fits of jealousy.

In 1826 the couple moved from Massachusetts to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where Nicholas Hentz was professor of modern languages and belles-lettres (creative writing) at the University of North Carolina from 1826 to 1830.

Literary Career
In 1830, the Hentzes moved to Covington, Kentucky, where Nicholas served as headmaster at a female academy. While there Caroline competed for a prize of $500 that had been offered for a play by the directors of the Arch Street Theatre in Philadelphia. The prize was awarded to her for her tragedy of De Lara, or the Moorish Bride, which was produced on the stage to favorable reviews and afterward published in book form.

Two more of her plays were produced, Constance of Werdenberg, or The Forest League at the Park Theater in New York and Lamorah, or the Western Wild in Cincinnati, where the couple had moved in 1832 to oversee another school for girls. In Cincinnati, Caroline joined a literary group to which the future author Harriet Beecher Stowe also belonged.

While in Ohio, Hentz published her first novel, Lovell's Folly (1833), the purpose of which was to show the incorrectness of the prejudices against southern people. Hentz included unfavorable portraits of recognizable northern citizens. Fearing libel charges, the publisher quickly withdrew the book from circulation.

Although she was born in the North and lived in seven different states, Hentz spent 14 years in Alabama (1834-1848) with her husband and four children. Most of her fiction is set in the South, which she fiercely defended from northern criticism.

In 1834, the Hentzes left Cincinnati following an incident in which Nicholas slapped a man who had sent Caroline a note after a party. It was said of Caroline Hentz that "she was the beautiful, dissatisfied wife of a jealous schoolmaster." Their often stormy marriage near collapse, the Hentzes moved to the frontier town of Florence, Alabama, where they established the Locust Dell Academy.

During the next 14 years, the Hentzes operated girls' schools in Florence (1834-43), Tuscalossa (1843-45) and Tuskegee (1845-48). Caroline continued to publish her work, but most of her time was spent assisting her husband at school, cooking meals for the students and tending to her own children.

In 1848, the Hentzes moved to Columbus, Georgia, to open yet another school, but Nicholas' rapidly deteriorating mental state prompted them to close the school in 1849. Two years later, the Hentzes moved to Marianna, Florida, where Caroline spent her remaining years caring for her husband and writing stories and novels at a feverish pace to support her family.

Hentz wrote her best known works in the 1850s. She was a major literary figure who contributed to the advancement of domestic fiction - novels written by, for and about women that flourished during the mid-nineteenth century. It began with New-England Tale (1822) by Catharine Sedgwick and remained a dominant fictional genre until after 1870.

Along with other southern novelists, such as Caroline Gilman and Augusta Jane Evans, Hentz wrote and helped to popularize domestic fiction. Also called "women's fiction," these novels focus on the daily domestic lives of young, mostly middle-class white girls and deliver life lessons that are considered useful in preparing female readers for their lives as adult women.

Hentz rapidly became one of America's most popular writers. Between 1850 and 1853, Hentz's books sold more than 93,000 copies. Although much of the fiction of this genre has been criticized as overly sentimental, newer generations of feminist scholars have reevaluated the challenges it poses, however subtly, to male domination.

Hentz's challenge to Southern patriarchial society was subtle for a reason. She created female characters that are both assertive and independent, but tones them down by the end of her novels. This shows that Hentz thought the cost of coming out strongly against male chauvinism was too steep, and not worth ruining her literary career.

She questioned traditional paternalism but not enough to cause a critical uproar among the mostly male critics of the time. In Eoline, for example, the heroine rebels against her father by refusing to marry his choice of suitor, even though the penalty is the loss of her inheritance. In the end, Eoline marries the chosen suitor of her own free will.

Hentz's work has also been examined for its promotion of Lost Cause ideology. Her most widely known novel, The Planter's Northern Bride (1854) is a chilling rebuttal of Harriet Beecher Stowe's enormously popular antislavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin. On its surface, the novel offers readers a marriage plot that covers a deeper theme of defending the institution of slavery through the eloquent rhetoric of the main male character and idyllic scenes of slave life.

The Hentzes did not live long to enjoy her success, however. When Nicholas's health grew worse, he moved to St. Andrews, Florida to live with their daughter Julia. Caroline stayed in Marianna, traveling to St. Andrews occasionally to tend to her husband.

Caroline Lee Hentz contracted pneumonia and died February 11, 1856, in Marianna, Florida, at the age of 55. She was buried in the cemetery of St. Luke's Church there. Her husband died nine months later and was buried beside her.

After Hentz's death, her sons Thaddeus and Charles served in the Confederate army during the Civil War. In 1846 Hentz's daughter Julia had married Dr. J. W. Keyes. In 1857 they moved to Montgomery, Alabama, where Dr. Keyes became an officer in the Confederate army. After the war they took their family to Brazil, where they joined other southerners attempting to establish a slave-holding society, but they returned in 1870.

Works by Caroline Lee Hentz
Lovell's Folly (1833)
De Lara, or, The Moorish Bride (1843)
Aunt Patty's Scrap-bag (1846)
Linda or, The Young Pilot of the Belle Creole (1850)
Rena, or, The Snow Bird (1851)
Eoline; or, Magnolia Vale; or, The Heiress of Glenmore (1852)
Ugly Effie, or, the Neglected One and the Pet Beauty (1852)
Marcus Warland, or the Long Moss Spring (1852)
Wild Jack, or the Stolen Child (1853)
The Planter's Northern Bride (1854)
The Banished Son and Other Stories of the Heart (1856)
Courtship and Marriage (1856)
Ernest Linwood; Or, the Inner Life of the Author (1856)
The Lost Daughter and Other Stories of the Heart (1857)

SOURCES
Caroline Lee Whiting Hentz
Wikipedia: Caroline Lee Hentz
Encyclopedia of Alabama: Caroline Lee Hentz

Eliza Leslie

2012-01-31T18:35:00.000-05:00

19th century Author of Cooking and Etiquette Books

Writing under the name Miss Leslie, Eliza Leslie (1787–1858) was an American author of popular cookbooks. Her 1837 manual Directions for Cookery: Being a System of the Art, in Its Various Branches, was the most popular book of the 19th century, having gone through fifty printings. Her books on etiquette and domestic management brought her the greatest fame. She also wrote short stories and articles which were published in children's books and women's magazines.

Childhood
Eliza Leslie was born November 15, 1787 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the daughter of Lydia Baker and Robert Leslie, a watchmaker who was a personal friend of Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. She was the oldest of five children.

In 1793, Leslie and her family moved to England for six years, so her father could develop an export business in clocks and watches. A talented man, he was the chief influence on Eliza Leslie's early intellectual life, encouraging her precocious reading ability and teaching her to write and draw.

Leslie loved to read, and advanced rapidly from children's stories to reading literature. She wrote poetry at an early age, though by age fourteen became discouraged. She later stated, "I then for many years abandoned the dream of my childhood, the hope of one day seeing my name in print."

After her return to the United States in 1800, she resided chiefly in Philadelphia. Her first compositions were in verse. When her father passed away in 1803, the family suffered financial hardship. They bore the burden cheerfully; she and her mother earned income by taking in boarders.

Literary Career
Possibly to improve the cooking at the boarding house, Eliza attended the first American culinary school, Mrs. Goodfellow's cooking school in Philadelphia, in the early 1820s. Copying Goodfellow's recipes for friends led to her first publication, Seventy-Five Receipts for Pastry, Cakes and Sweetmeats (1828) - one of the earliest American cookbooks - by "a Lady of Philadelphia."

Like so many of her contemporaries, Leslie was motivated to put pen to page by her love of language and a desire to see her name in print, but also by financial necessity. Her writing was easy to follow, clear in its directions and distinctly American - an important attribute in the ambitious and proud young republic of the United States.

Her publisher, Mr. Francis of Munroe and Francis of Boston, urged her to try her hand "at a work of imagination" and soon published her first series of juvenile stories, The Young Americans; or, Sketches of a Sea-Voyage (1829), which was published anonymously.

The success of her stories in children's books and women's magazines encouraged her to publish under her own name. She began using the name 'Miss Leslie' on her next work, American Girl's Book (1831), and on all the juvenile stories, fiction, magazine articles, editorial work, etiquette guides and cookbooks to follow in the next twenty-five years.

In 1832, after obtaining a prize for her story "Mrs. Washington Potts," which was published in the magazine, Godey's Ladies' Book, Leslie adopted literature as a profession. Her humorous writing style and knowledge of cooking, social manners and housekeeping made her books very popular for many years.

During the 1830s, Leslie served as editor for The Violet and The Gift, annual publications which included contributions from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Elizabeth Ellet, Lydia Sigourney and others. For a time, she was also Sarah Josepha Hale's assistant editor at Godey's.

Leslie produced most of her income through her books on domestic management, volumes such as Miss Leslie's Behavior Book (1834), The House Book (1840), and Miss Leslie's New Cookery Book (1857). Young wives who were separated by hundreds of miles from the guidance of their mothers and sisters looked to Miss Leslie for advice on cooking, etiquette and childrearing.

Leslie is best known for having written the most popular cookbook in nineteenth century America, Directions for Cookery, in its Various Branches (1837), which sold at least 150,000 copies. Her approach to cooking instruction, simple yet comprehensive, is inviting even to the modern reader.

Leslie writes in the Preface of Directions for Cookery:

The author has spared no pains in collecting and arranging, perhaps the greatest number of practical and original receipts that have ever appeared in a similar work; flattering herself that she has rendered them so explicit as to be easily understood, and followed, even by inexperienced cooks.

She included a number of relatively lavish dishes, such as "Rich Brown Soup", which calls for six pounds of lean, boned beef and is "suited to dinner parties." Yet also included are the labor-intensive methods for making butter and several kinds of cheese.

A sequel followed: The Lady's Receipt-Book: A Useful Companion for Large or Small Families (1847). This marked a turn toward a more genteel audience. Half the book is dedicated to cleaning silver, laundering white satin ribbon, preserving white fur and oil-paintings, as well as tips for traveling by sea and writing a proper letter.

Later Years
During the final decade of her life, Eliza Leslie took up residence at the United States Hotel, where she became something of a Philadelphia celebrity. Holding court among the hotel guests, she was venerated by her admiring readers:

She had the reputation of a brilliant woman with a sarcastic wit and heady opinions who frequently offended strangers but was warmly affectionate to relatives and friends and generous to the needy.

During this time Leslie was writing a work about the life of John Fitch, who built the first steamboat in the United States in 1787. She reportedly suffered from being overweight, and could not walk easily.

Eliza Leslie died January 1, 1858, at the age of 70, and was buried in St. Peter's Churchyard in Philadelphia.

Eliza Leslie Cookbooks
Seventy-Five Receipts for Pastry, Cakes and Sweetmeats (1828)
Domestic French Cookery (1832)
Directions for Cookery, in its Various Branches (1837)
The Indian Meal Book (1847)
The Lady's Receipt-Book: A Useful Companion for Large or Small Families (1847)
Miss Leslie's Lady's New Receipt-Book (1850)
Miss Leslie's Directions for Cookery (1851)
More Receipts (1852)
Miss Leslie's New Receipts for Cooking (1854)
Miss Leslie's New Cookery Book (1857)

Other Publications
The Young Americans; or, Sketches of a Sea-Voyage (1829)
American Girl's Book (1831)
Pencil Sketches; or, Outlines of Characters and Manners (1833)
Miss Leslie's Behavior Book (1834)
Althea Vernon, or, The Embroidered Handkerchief (1838)
Henrietta Harrison (1838)
The House Book (1840)
Amelia; or, A Young Lady's Vicissitudes (1848)
The Dennings (1851)
The Behavior Book (1853)

SOURCES
Eliza Leslie
Wikipedia: Eliza Leslie
Feeding America: Eliza Leslie
Appleton's Cyclopedia of American Biography
Portraits of American Women Writers: Eliza Leslie

Catharine Maria Sedgwick

2012-01-23T20:52:00.001-05:00

Writer and Novelist in Antebellum America

Catharine Maria Sedgwick (1789-1867) was one of nineteenth-century America's most prolific women writers. She published six novels, two biographies, eight works for children, novellas, over 100 pieces of short prose and other works. Literary critics and historians have recognized her as a primary founder of a distinctly American literature, along with Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper and Sedgwick's close friend, William Cullen Bryant.

Childhood
Catharine Maria Sedgwick, ninth child of Judge Theodore Sedgwick and Pamela Dwight Sedgwick, was born December 28, 1789 at Stockbridge, Massachusetts, in the house which her father had built four years before. While Catharine loved and respected her mother, Pamela Sedgwick suffered repeated periods of mental illness and does not seem to have been close to her daughter.

Catharine greatly admired her father, though he was often away for his political career, which culminated in his becoming Speaker of the United States House of Representatives. In his absence Catharine was surrounded by her many siblings. As a young woman, Sedgwick attended Payne's Finishing School in Boston.

Sedgwick was particularly attached to her four brothers, who encouraged her to write. Even when they had all married and become lawyers, her brothers remained the central figures in her emotional life. She passed part of every year in the family of one of her brothers, and was a favorite aunt to many children. Together they worked to sustain her often failing self-confidence, and assisted her with contracts and reviews.

As a child, Catharine Sedgwick was cared for by Elizabeth Freeman, a former slave often called Mum Bett. Sedgwick's father helped Freeman gain her freedom by arguing her case in county court in 1781. After winning her freedom, Freeman accepted the offer to work for the Sedgwicks for wages. Catharine is buried next to Mum Bett in Stockbridge.

Writing Career
Much in demand, from the 1820s to the 1850s Catharine Sedgwick made a good living writing short stories for a variety of periodicals. A writer of juvenile fiction, moral tales and domestic literature as well as numerous novels, Sedgwick was a well-respected literary figure in New England before the appearance of her novel Hope Leslie, now her most popular work.

In her writings, Catharine Sedgwick shows a consistent tolerance for members of minority groups. The hero of her first novel, A New-England Tale (1822), was a Quaker. A long section of Redwood (1824) concerns a Shaker community, and although Sedgwick analyzes the psychological pressures keeping members within the group, the religion is never condemned. Similarly, Hope Leslie (1827) shows a sympathetic understanding of Native Americans and their religious beliefs, based partly on the author's research into Mohawk customs.

Unlike James Fenimore Cooper, whose Last of the Mohicans appeared the year before Hope Leslie, Sedgwick accepts marriage between an Indian man and a white woman: the heroine's sister, Faith Leslie, is carried into captivity as a child, marries an Indian, and refuses the opportunity to rejoin the Puritan community. Sedgwick may have been influenced here by the similar legend of her ancestor, Eunice Williams.

Sedgwick's fiction repeatedly emphasizes the political and personal need for liberty and independence. On two occasions Hope Leslie follows her own conscience and frees Indian women from unjust imprisonment. Both Hope and her Indian double Magawisca question political authority which does not include them: Hope, unable as a woman to work through the political system, defies it, and Magawisca denies a Puritan jury's jurisdiction over her people.

Sedgwick was immediately recognized as one of the writers creating an indigenous American literature. A New-England Tale was subtitled Sketches of New-England Character and Manners, and her novels, Hope Leslie, set among the Puritans, and The Linwoods, Or Sixty Years Since in America (1835), set during the Revolution, mingled historical event with fiction.

The central figures in Sedgwick's novels are women, often noted for their independence. In Redwood Aunt Debby, "a natural protector of the weak and oppressed," rescues a young girl held among the Shakers. Aunt Debby had decided to remain single after the Revolutionary War because she was "so imbued with the independent spirit of the times that she would not then consent to the surrender of any of her rights."

In her work, Sedgwick also promoted the ideal of Republican motherhood - an attitude toward women's roles in the emerging United States before, during and after the American Revolution (circa 1760 to 1800). It centered on the belief that the patriots' daughters should be raised to uphold the ideals of republicanism, which stresses liberty and inalienable rights.

Republican motherhood means that children should be raised to value patriotism and to sacrifice their own needs for the greater good of the country. Sons were encouraged to pursue roles in government, while daughters were more educated than they previously had been allowed in order to pass these values on to the next generation. Abigail Adams advocated women's education in many of her letters to her husband, President John Adams.

Sedgwick's Novels
Redwood (1824) is the story of Ellen Bruce, a young woman of mysterious parentage, who learns that her father is the southern slave owner Redwood, who has been kept from her because of the anti-Christian beliefs he picked up by studying Voltaire and David Hume. The novel ends with Redwood's religious conversion and Ellen's marriage to a Southern gentleman.

Hope Leslie (1827) is a historical novel that deals with such varied subjects as Puritan attitudes towards religion, women's role in the new American republic and the relationship between whites and Native Americans. It also revises traditional notions of submissive womanhood by arguing that women must recognize their domestic sphere as empowering and act as agents for the preservation and promotion of moral values. This book earned a large readership and established Sedgwick's reputation in both the United States and Great Britain.

Clarence; or, A Tale of Our Own Times (1830) is a novel of manners - a literary genre that deals with aspects of behavior, language, customs and values characteristic of a particular class of people in a specific historical context. Clarence follows heiress Gertrude Clarence as she negotiates the perils of the marriage market in New York City. In this novel, Sedgwick often satirizes the privileged aristocracy to which her family belonged.

The Linwoods; or, 'Sixty Years Since' in America (1835) is an historical romance concerning social life in New York City during the last two years of the American Revolution and the conflict between a Loyalist father and rebel son. It sheds light on American character and national identity in the early republic by exploring America's relationship with Britain and France.

Live and Let Live; or, Domestic Service Illustrated (1837) depicts the ideal workplaces for working-class women to develop domestic skills. Sedgwick's expression of relations between mistresses and housekeepers reflects a return to aristocratic class relations, but one that includes employer respect for the employee's humanity and political rights.

Sedgwick wrote work in American settings, and combined patriotism with protests against historic Puritan oppressiveness. She created spirited heroines who did not conform to the stereotypical conduct of women at the time. In her final novel, Married or Single (1857), she put forth the bold idea that women should not marry if it meant they would lose their self-respect (but she married off her heroine).

Throughout her life Sedgwick was ambivalent about her position as a single woman. She is said to have refused more offers of marriage than almost any other woman of her time. They were made by statesmen, artists and musicians. However, she felt that she should devote her life to writing.
She told a favorite niece that "so many I have loved have made shipwreck of happiness in marriage or have found it a dreary joyless condition." Even in her final novel, Married or Single? (1857), she reveals her conflict.

Catharine Maria Sedgwick remained single and died at the residence of her nephew William Minot, Jr. at West Roxbury, Massachusetts on July 31, 1867. Her funeral service was held at the Episcopal Church and her remains were followed to the grave by hundreds of loving friends and neighbors. She was buried in Stockbridge, where the burial markers of the Sedgwick clan are arranged in concentric circles known as the Sedgwick Pie.

Catharine Sedgwick was the most famous and successful American woman fiction writer in the first half of the nineteenth century. Although she was neglected by scholars and critics for many years, Sedgwick's work was rediscovered in the 1970s, and since then most attention has been focused on Hope Leslie; or, Early Times in the Massachusetts (1827).

SOURCES
Catharine Maria Sedgwick
Wikipedia: Catharine Sedgwick
Catharine Maria Sedgwick's Hope Leslie - PDF File