by Traude Gomez-Rhine

Consider the careers of these ambitious 19th-century American women writers: Rebecca Harding Davis was a pioneer of realist fiction and a nationally acclaimed journalist. Her groundbreaking novella Life in the Iron Mills, first published in 1861 in The Atlantic Monthly, launched a 50-year career that would produce at least 500 published works.

Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’ most famous book, The Gates Ajar, appeared in 1868, selling almost 200,000 copies. Set during the Civil War, her popular novel was translated into several languages.

Julia Ward Howe is best remembered as having penned the lyrics for “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” but was also famous in her lifetime as a poet, essayist, and lecturer. In 1908 Howe was the first woman elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Their legacy? Famous during their lives, these women were largely forgotten thereafter.

Elaine Showalter is on a mission to revive their spirit and move them more prominently into the American literary consciousness. The professor emeritus from Princeton University came to The Huntington last year to do research for a book about American women writers from 1650 to 2000. “This is an American legacy that has been neglected and forgotten,” she says.

The topic, of course, is enormous in scope—350 years of American women writers. In one book? Such ambition is usually reserved for multi-volume projects taken on by a committee of academics. Showalter has already carried out a similar mission for British women writers, publishing A Literature of Their Own: British Novelists from Bronte to Lessing in 1977, which highlighted many minor and forgotten women writers from the 1840s through the 1970s. Her work ultimately helped to launch the field of feminist literary history in the United States and Europe, putting her on the academic map and causing much debate within universities around the world.

Showalter had long hoped to do an American version of the British book but for years was as daunted by the prospect as she was intrigued. “For a long time I just didn’t think it was possible,” she says, adding that a typical American woman writer of the 19th century would publish 50 books. Meanwhile in England, “Emily Bronte writes one great novel and dies. That’s kind of sad, but it makes your life as a critic a lot easier,” she says.

Showalter, however, is not one to shy away from big projects, or controversial ones. During her 20 years at Princeton, she wrote more than 20 books, including The New Feminist Criticism (1985), The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture (1986), and Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Media (1997). She also has maintained a fruitful side career as a journalist, writing for British newspapers such as the Evening Standard and Financial Times and American newsstand perennials Vogue and People magazines. Such an eclectic array of publications might seem strange for a powerhouse academic, but Showalter loves dabbling in pop culture. As often as she has been lauded for her ambition, she also has been lambasted, frequently on the Internet, where a Google search can return a long list of retorts and rebuttals to her books and ideas. Even news interviews with a more “objective” tone carry such headlines as “Who’s Afraid of Elaine Showalter?” and “Elaine Showalter: An Anarchist in Academia.”

Such a formidable reputation arises from Showalter’s willingness to express the frank views of a feminist in the public spotlight and to take on controversial topics. (In her book Hystories, for instance, she candidly expresses her hypothesis about chronic fatigue syndrome, which resulted in some furious responses and even hate mail.) She maintains her direct manner with her current project. “There has been a lot of scholarship on individual [American women] writers, but no one has put it all together,” she says. “I am sure my conclusions will make a lot of people angry. So they will argue with me, but that is what scholarship is about. I am not going to mince words in this book.”

Aware of the difficulty of writing a book while maintaining a full academic schedule, Showalter retired from Princeton in 2003; she has since put many of her journalism assignments on hold. The Showalters—her husband is a French professor retired from Rutgers University—had just sold their New Jersey home of 40 years and moved to Maryland when a letter arrived from the Huntington’s Robert C. Ritchie, the W.M. Keck Foundation Director of Research, inviting Elaine for a 10-month residency as the R. Stanton Avery Distinguished Fellow.

Showalter had planned to use the Library of Congress for the book’s primary research, but Ritchie’s letter changed everything. “Getting that invitation to come out here was just the best thing that ever happened to me in my whole life,” she says. “It was like winning the lottery.” So she and her husband packed the car and headed west.

Once the couple settled into an apartment in Pasadena, Showalter delved into her research, focusing primarily on 19th-century women writers, an area of particular strength in the collections here. “I really didn’t know that The Huntington would have virtually everything that I would need,” she says. “Everything. Amazing. The holdings in American literature pre-1900 are astonishing.”

Many of these volumes were unwittingly collected by Henry E. Huntington, who during his lifetime purchased more than 200 complete libraries. In 1936 the Huntington Library accepted a gift from Josephine P. Everett of about 500 titles concerning women and women’s history. These books formed the core of the holdings in women’s studies and provided the impetus toward collecting more in this area.

But Showalter was aided in her research by forces that stretched beyond the Huntington’s rarified historical collections to the egalitarian realm of the World Wide Web. Getting her hands on actual books is critical, but access to secondary sources is also crucial. Fortunately, a number of libraries have put their holdings online.

This virtual world—coupled with the range of resources all physically situated at The Huntington—contrasts dramatically with Showalter’s experience in the 1970s, when she would spend an entire year traveling from library to library in England in a quest for women writers’ archives, sitting long hours in chilly reading rooms. She has written of this experience, “I was often rewarded by becoming the first scholar to read a harrowing journal or open a box of letters.” Despite the romantic image she conjures up, Showalter says she would never be able to pull off her current project if she had to crisscross the continental United States in the same way. “People don’t think of scholarship as involving physical labor, but if you have to be going all over the place, it can really wear you out. Working at The Huntington really makes it possible to complete this project in a reasonable amount of time.”

Showalter has enjoyed more company in her research on American writers than she had with English ones. A number of American women writers forgotten by history are gaining their due, says Nicolas Witschi, associate professor of English at Western Michigan University and himself a Huntington researcher. Witschi has done significant scholarship on California writer Mary Austin, who had frequented literary salons held at the Charles Lummis home in the Arroyo Seco early in the 20th century, as did the writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Gilman’s work has been brought back to life in the last 30 years, says Witschi, and Austin has gained new acclaim in environmental literary circles for her masterpiece, The Land of Little Rain. But Austin wrote widely in many areas and harbored literary ambitions that were just as fierce as those of her male peers who have received more recognition. “Elaine Showalter, throughout her career, has done tremendous work in drawing attention to the accomplishments of women writers,” says Witschi. “She is no doubt crafting another necessary corrective, to help with the continuing effort to recover the voices of women writers on their own terms.”

Other notable writers in Showalter’s new canon include Catherine Maria Sedgwick, Lydia Maria Child, and Fanny Fern, not exactly household names of the same ilk as James Fenimore Cooper, Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, and Samuel Clemens, but true talents nonetheless.
Critics have long acknowledged Cooper and Irving for ushering in an American literary tradition in the 1820s. Showalter is not simply calling for equal recognition of women like Sedgwick and Child, who wrote during the same period. She argues they were better writers than Cooper and Irving.

By the 1850s, best sellers tended to be written by women. In 1855 Nathaniel Hawthorne famously said, “America is now wholly given over to a d—d mob of scribbling women, and I should have no chance of success while the public taste is occupied with their trash.”

The sentiment was that women—whose books often sold in the thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands—were driving more deserving writers out of the literary marketplace with what could only be drivel. Showalter has a strong distaste for a stereotype that has continued to gain acceptance even today: that women novelists of this period were commercial writers while the men were artists. “Their careers and ambitions were much more complicated than that,” says Showalter.

She hopes her scholarship will have an impact on how American literature is taught while also captivating a wide readership that extends beyond academia. Knopf will publish the book, slated for 2007-8, with an accompanying anthology.

“This is a book I would like Laura Bush and Barbra Streisand to read,” Showalter says. “I want to reach Maria Shriver and Oprah Winfrey.” It will be a book of literary opinions, she says, unabashedly told from her point of view, about a tradition of achievement that has been only partially understood.

Experience has taught Showalter to be prepared for a bumpy ride. After A Literature of Their Own was published, she was widely praised and attacked for the work, so much so that 20 years later she wrote a summation of her experience in the Brown University publication Novel: A Forum in Fiction (1998): “What I did not anticipate was that in feminist literary history and criticism, as in every other field, being first has its disadvantages, because you become the launching pad for subsequent work and the starting point for everyone else’s improvements and corrections. For the past 20 years, I have been attacked from virtually every point on the feminist hermeneutic circle, as separatist, careerist, theoretical, antitheoretical, racist, homophobic, politically correct, traditional, and noncanonical critic.”

Whatever the reception of this book, Showalter ultimately hopes that her scholarship will help to expand the American literary legacy to include these overshadowed women writers, bringing their rich work to new audiences and keeping their voices alive.

Traude Gomez-Rhine is a staff writer at The Huntington.

Crossing Paths in Pasadena

Mary Hunter Austin (1868–1934) first met Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935) in Pasadena in the late 1890s. Both women frequented the artists’ colony at El Alisal, Charles Fletcher Lummis’ adobe home along the Arroyo Seco. The two women shared much in common: both had left unhappy marriages to devote themselves to their writing; both were active in feminist causes; both found personal freedom by moving west and developing a deep kinship with the California landscape.

Mary Austin was born in Carlinville, Ill., and moved with her family in 1888 to the San Joaquin Valley. She was keenly affected and inspired by the region and would later write of it profoundly, most notably in The Land of Little Rain (1903).

Austin came to Southern California in 1899 and described Pasadena as “a city of residences, beautiful as the dream of a poet, but quite staid and sedate, and proud of its quietness.” Here she taught school and joined the literary circle established by Lummis, the noted author and editor, who became a mentor. In 1905 she moved to Carmel, where she helped establish an artists’ colony that included Jack London and George Sterling. She later moved to New York, participating there in feminist causes with Charlotte Perkins Gilman.

Gilman is perhaps best known for her 1890 short story “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Written while Gilman lived in Pasadena, it narrates a young wife and mother’s descent into madness and is considered her most autobiographical work. Gilman’s major concern during her lifetime was feminism—women’s suffrage as well as women’s economic independence—and she achieved international fame with the 1898 publication of her seminal work, Women and Economics: The Economic Relation Between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution.

Gilman was born in New England, a descendant of the prominent and influential Beecher family—she was the great-granddaughter of another writer, Harriet Beecher Stowe. Despite this famous ancestry, her family lived in poverty. In 1888 she left her husband, Charles Walter Stetson, and moved with her daughter to California. She rented a cottage on Orange Grove Boulevard for $10 a month and wrote, “To California, in its natural features, I owe much. Its calm sublimity of contour, richness of color, profusion of flowers, fruit and foliage, and the steady peace of its climate were meat and drink to me.” In 1932 Gilman learned she had breast cancer. She spent the rest of her days completing her autobiography, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman. With no hope for recovery, she took her own life on Aug. 17, 1935.

The Huntington holds the Mary Austin Collection, purchased from the Austin estate. Within it are approximately 11,000 items—letters, manuscripts, and research materials such as her extensive documentation on the Indians of the Southwest and Spanish American folklore.