Caroline M. Kirkland | Biography

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, slavery, and literary writing. Although many nineteenth-century women wrote both fiction and nonfiction, Kirkland's works differ from most; realism, satire, and feminism--three modes considered "inappropriate" for nineteenth-century women authors--make her writings distinctive.

Caroline Matilda Stansbury, eldest of Eliza Alexander and Samuel Stansbury's eleven children, was born on 12 January 1801 in New York City. Unlike most nineteenth-century girls, Caroline received a relatively sophisticated education; at the age of eight, she was sent to her aunt Lydia Mott's school. Later, Stansbury taught in Utica, New York, at another of her aunt's schools. While teaching, Caroline met William Kirkland, who was also an educator, and married him in 1828. Caroline and William Kirkland opened a seminary in Geneva, New York. They had seven children, four of whom survived into adulthood.

In 1835 William Kirkland moved Caroline and their children to Detroit in order to fulfill his dream of founding a city on the Michigan frontier. The couple worked at the Detroit Female Seminary for two years, William serving as principal and Caroline as a teacher. After acquiring eight hundred acres of woodland and swamp and a substantial capital in 1837, the Kirklands moved to the remote frontier and developed a village they named Pinckney.

While living on the frontier, Kirkland wrote her first novel, A New Home--Who'll Follow" under the pseudonym "Mrs. Mary Clavers." In a series of episodes, she chronicles the difficulties that women from eastern America experienced as they moved to and attempted to adapt to the overly romanticized West. In the novel a well-educated, middle-class, white woman named Mary Clavers struggles to establish a community with her neighbors. Much of the novel describes the hardships frontier women faced as they attempted housekeeping in the wilderness.

Kirkland's novel is unusual in several ways. She satirizes conventional masculine stereotypes of the romantic woman writer. Kirkland's use of satire to build a community of women in both the West and in literature, rather than to advocate women's superiority to men, distinguished her from her feminist contemporaries. Kirkland's use of realism in her description of the West is also atypical. Unlike most nineteenth-century stories about the West, such as those by James Fenimore Cooper, Kirkland does not romanticize the West; instead, she portrays a harsh reality. The construction of Kirkland's novel also deviates from the nineteenth-century norm in that the work has a communal plot. Through a series of sketches, Kirkland traces the formation of the community. In addition, the genre of A New Home--Who'll Follow" defies definition. The work may be analyzed as domestic fiction, travel literature, a precursor to realism, regional writing of the Western frontier, or autobiography.

A New Home--Who'll Follow" was an immediate success. Edgar Allan Poe, in "The Literati of New York City," refers to the book as "an undoubted sensation" filled with "truth and novelty." Margaret Fuller, in her essay "American Literature; Its Position in the Present Time, and Prospects for the Future" for her Papers on Literature and Art (1846), considers A New Home-- Who'll Follow" an "amusing book" that portrays the charm of simple life in its "rude and all but brutal forms." Rufus W. Griswold and John S. Hart, two nineteenth-century editors, also point out Kirkland's writing skill. Hart claims that "these sketches of western life were entirely without a parallel in American literature."

Although Kirkland probably used a pseudonym to keep her identity from her neighbors, the Pinckney citizens quickly identified themselves once the book became a success. Sandra A. Zagarell and other critics attribute the family's 1843 decision to move from Michigan to the outrage of the Pinckney neighbors at Kirkland's vulgar portrayal of them in A New Home--Who'll Follow" After five years of frontier life, during which they were cheated by a land agent and lost much of their money, the Kirklands returned to New York City.

In New York City the Kirklands taught school and contributed to periodicals, which continued to grow in popularity. During this time, Caroline Kirkland wrote for money. In a letter to her daughter, Elizabeth, Kirkland wrote, "I am busy penning some very dull stories for several publications. . . . I know not what we should do without this resource." On 18 October 1846, William Kirkland drowned in the Hudson River near Fishkill, New York, leaving his wife alone to support herself and her children by opening a school, teaching, and continuing to write for magazines.

Because of the literary connections Kirkland had in New York City, Israel Post, owner of the Union Magazine of Literature and Art, asked Kirkland to edit his publication. Kirkland's name added credibility to the periodical and, as a result, several popular nineteenth- century authors--such as William Cullen Bryant, Lydia Maria Child, Robert Lowell, Edgar Allan Poe, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Lydia H. Sigourney, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman--submitted their works for publication.

During the one and a half years she was editor, Kirkland contributed editorials, Western sketches, and essays to the Union Magazine of Literature and Art. She wrote articles on a variety of literary personalities, including Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Susan Warner, and George Sand; Western sketches; and editorials on topics such as female education, reading, and slavery. In her later years, Kirkland increasingly focused on reform literature. In 1845 she wrote a women's rights essay, which served as the introduction to Marian Reid's A Plea for Women. She also wrote on behalf of Native Americans and female convicts.

In 1848 Kirkland went to Europe after agreeing with her publisher, Post, to send back a series of travel impressions. When she returned from Europe in the fall of that same year, she found that the periodical had been sold to John Sartain and William Sloanaker, renamed Sartain's Union Magazine of Literature and Art, and relocated to Philadelphia. Kirkland was surprised to discover that John Hart was assigned as her co-editor and that her editorial duties were reduced to simply making contributions to the magazine.

Kirkland continued contributing essays to Sartain's Union Magazine of Literature and Art and writing articles; during her lifetime, she wrote at least eighty-three articles for periodicals. During her final years, she published collections of her articles, became associated with Putnam's Monthly, continued to teach, and wrote Memoirs of Washington (1857). After preparing a benefit for the Sanitary Commission, a philanthropic organization in support of soldiers, Kirkland died from a stroke on 6 April 1864.

Today, critics acknowledge Caroline M. Kirkland's writing as a precursor to realism and cite her work as an example of local color. In recent years, scholarly research and criticism has focused on her work as an editor and as a prose writer.