Caroline M. Kirkland | Biography

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 movement. A New Home--Who'll Follow? Or, Glimpses of Western Life (1839) is the first and by far the best of these, and established her reputation as an energetic and opinionated exponent of the woman's (and wife's) view of an epoch whose delineation was almost exclusively the preserve of male writers. Only Margaret Fuller (Summer on the Lakes, in 1843) and the Canadians Susanna Moodie (Roughing it in the Bush ) and Catharine Parr Traill (The Backwoods of Canada) mark down such clear-eyed perceptions of the distaff response to frontier life.

Born Caroline Matilda Stansbury in New York City, she received her education there and in 1828 married William Kirkland, a teacher and missionary. The first years of her marriage were spent working with him in girls' schools in Geneva, New York, and Detroit, and in bearing four children. In the early 1830s William Kirkland caught what his wife later called "western fever," and having undertaken with several other victims of the epidemic the founding of a city in the wilderness, moved his family in 1837 to a tract of land that he had purchased in the Michigan woods sixty miles northwest of Detroit, the site of the present-day Pinckney (Kirkland's fictional village of "Montacute").

There Caroline Kirkland bore another child, managed the family's affairs, and composed her first book (her husband, if we can read A New Home as essentially autobiographical, seems to have been absent and involved in business deals most of the time, and virtually useless when at home). Upon publication it gained immediate popularity and critical praise. The Kirklands' neighbors in Michigan took umbrage at the sharpness of her portraits, and even though in her next book, Forest Life (1842), she claimed that all her characters were imaginary, social relations in the clearings became somewhat strained. The village's anger, financial pressure, her own increasing disillusion with the quality of rustic life, her desire to further her career closer to the center of literary activity--all conspired to send the family back to New York City in 1843.

Husband and wife quickly established a school in their home. Kirkland's third frontier book, Western Clearings , appeared in 1845; William became the editor of the New York Evening Mirror in 1846. The Kirklands began to move with the literati--Bryant,Willis, Poe, Greeley, the Duyckincks--and to find a measure of prominence and security. Her husband's sudden death, late in 1846, served to concentrate Mrs. Kirkland's energies upon journalism. She continued to teach, but became as well the editor of the newly-founded Union Magazine, turned her home into a literary salon, and began to pour out a stream of miscellaneous writing and editing. She worked vigorously at various projects, none of any great artistic merit, until her death in 1864 from apoplexy, following exhausting efforts to lend her reputation to programs of fund raising for food and supplies to aid the Union cause.

The particular moment of the westward impulse that A New Home so convincingly and entertainingly details (the two later Michigan books, with their unfocused jumble of tale, essay, anecdote, and autobiography, are less successful) is that which contained the transformation of one frontier region after another into "settlements." The risks of land speculation and development replace the dangers of exploration; the map and the prospectus supersede the rifle. Kirkland, writing in A New Home , as later, under the pseudonym of "Mrs. Mary Clavers, an actual settler," presents what is surely a typical version of this experience, yet one that before her time had received little publicity, and certainly not the realistic, humorously personal, and necessarily feminist treatment she was to give it.

Her chosen method is the sketch, her organizing principle randomness; but at her best she can impose a revealing order by the connection of each of her subjects, and each of her digressions, to herself. She is at the center of A New Home, and everything she reports flows through the persona she creates. There is virtually no padding--at least in her first book--none of the expected chunks of guidebook or gazetteer material; the apparent rambling languor of the book is produced by the natural unfolding of her own discoveries and preoccupations. These qualities, which must have contributed to the remarkable contemporary popularity of A New Home in a day when narratives from the West were legion, make it readable still. The book offers not merely adventures and curiosities, but the development of an attractive, sensitive, human character.

Kirkland's narrator moves from condescension to understanding, from observation to participation; her interest, loyalty, and love shift almost visibly away from her audience in the East to her fellow-settlers in Montacute. More than anything else, the quality that makes this process work is Kirkland's sense of humor. Her subjects are simple and homely; her wit is verbal, chiefly a matter of style. Though she is capable of lyrical description or of stuffy moralizing, she is at her most characteristic, and her most penetrating, when she applies herself to the "decidedly low." Then she repeatedly makes delightful ironic, even sarcastic, application of the Romantic preconceptions and high-flown diction she has acquired from her reading (especially in Chateaubriand's novels and Mary Russell Mitford's vignettes of English village life) to give expression to her instinctive though often hesitant acceptance of the rude vitality that surrounded her in the woods. Indeed, her capacity to present the facts of the frontier fairly and specifically, and to uncover an affection for her new home that compels because it is honest, because it is based on her awakening perception of the realities behind the poetry and the advertisements, is the major strength of her best book and the source of its continuing charm.

Her reputation has endured because of her earliest work, as Dana's and Parkman's would have had they left behind them only Two Years Before the Mast and The Oregon Trail. Like them, like the apprentice Melville and the mature Cooper, like so many other greater and lesser writers of the 1830s and 1840s, she seems to have shared, however tentatively, in a fortuitous, collective, unself-conscious insight, that the way to express an authentic sense of American reality must be not from above, by sweeping idealistic generalization, but from within, by precise rendering of the texture of personal experience through the creation of a first-person narrative voice. A New Home was an act of self-discovery in a specific time and place, and happened, for Caroline Kirkland, once only; despite the attenuation of her powers and accomplishments in the succeeding two decades of her professional career, it holds her small contribution secure in the mainstream of American narrative development.