Caroline Kirkland (12 January 1801-6 April 1864), a mid-nineteenth-century New York literary woman of quite comprehensive abilities and ambitions, is known today primarily for three early works that illuminate a distinct phase of the American Westering...

Caroline M. Kirkland, most famous for her novel A New Home--Who'll Follow? or, Glimpses of Western Life (1839), edited the Union Magazine of Literature and Art, founded and taught in several girls' schools, and wrote articles on female education,...

Eight years after Caroline Kirkland had first received critical acclaim for her novel A New Home--Who'll Follow? Or, Glimpses of Western Life (1839), she was asked to serve as editor of the newly founded Union Magazine of Literature and Art. The...

The nineteenth-century science of optics may seem incongruous in a discussion of Michigan novelist Caroline M. Kirkland, who is best known for work in three closely connected, mutually reinforcing traditions: regionalism, local color writing, and realism. Kirkland's Michigan-based frontier novel A New Home,...

The nineteenth-century science of optics may seem incongruous in a discussion of Michigan novelist Caroline M. Kirkland, who is best known for work in three closely connected, mutually reinforcing traditions: regionalism, local color writing, and realism. Kirkland's Michigan-based frontier novel A New Home, Who'll...

In the following essay, Kolodny argues that even though Kirkland's success was in large part due to the element of realism in her depiction of the West, her most immediate impact on literature was the fact that her work made the West “available for literary treatment by women.”

In the following essay, Gebhard discusses Kirkland's use of humor and the manner in which it “relates both to the author's own life and to the book's ‘realism' of social type.”

In the following excerpt, Leverenz explores the manner in which Kirkland utilized class conflict to generate humor in A New Home. Leverenz argues that “Kirkland's voice and wit depend on a clash between traditional pastoral and antipastoral.”