Kirkland, Caroline M(atilda)

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KIRKLAND, Caroline M(atilda)

Stansbury Born 11 January 1801, New York, New York; died 6 April 1864, New York, New York

Also wrote under: Mrs. Mary Clavers, Aminadab Peering

Daughter of Samuel and Eliza Alexander Stansbury; married William Kirkland, 1828 (died 1846); children: four

Caroline Kirkland, an eldest child, came from a literary family (her mother was a writer and her great-grandfather was a Tory poet during the American Revolution). In the Quaker school of her aunt Lydia Mott she received an unusually good education for a girl born at the beginning of the 19th century. After her marriage to Kirkland the couple settled in Geneva, New York, where they established a school. In 1835, they crossed overland to Detroit, an already thriving "metropolis" on the edge of the frontier to direct the newly established Detroit female seminary. The land fever and get-rich schemes circulating through Detroit engaged their imagination, and two years later they located 60 miles west, in the tiny hamlet of Pinckney.

The pioneering experience was the impetus for Kirkland's writing career. A New Home—Who'll Follow? (1839), written by Kirkland under the pseudonym "Mrs. Mary Clavers, an Actual Settler," gives her slightly fictionalized account of the early years of a new community on the frontier. Loosely constructed of character sketches, brief essays on events unique to frontier life, tales, and a few mild adventures, the book covers the development of the town from the log cabin to the community. Though Kirkland claims that nothing very adventurous happens, the life she describes is, in fact, eventful and arduous. In her second book, Forest Life (1842), the device of a tour of Michigan allows Kirkland to comment on the developing institutions of the frontier, to generalize on events, and to describe the natural terrain and the process of the transformation of the diverse aspects of pioneer life into a less precarious existence. Integrating her impressions, Kirkland comments on the scene in retrospect and with accumulated insight.

Kirkland returned to the East in 1843, where her husband would have better professional opportunities and their four children (Joseph Kirkland, the eldest son, later became a well-known novelist) could get proper schooling. After her husband's death in 1846, Kirkland immediately took up his responsibilities at the Christian Inquirer, operated her school for girls, reviewed for Duyckinck's Literary World, and shortly thereafter undertook the editorship of the Union Magazine of Literature and Art. In its earliest days under Kirkland's leadership the Union was considered one of the best family magazines of its kind.

A New Home—Who'll Follow? brought immediate popularity; Forest Life followed to enthusiastic reviews. Poe thought Western Clearings (1845), a collection of sketches leaning toward the short story form, the best of all. Though best known for this Western writing, Kirkland also completed a travel book, a biography of Washington, a novel, and three collections of essays. But the work of the last 20 years of her life remains unexplored and unevaluated.

Though never identified with the women's rights movement, Kirkland's introduction to Reid's A Plea for Women (1845) appeared three years before the first women's rights convention at Seneca Falls. Kirkland advocated equal legal and political rights, and was especially bitter on the problem of women's financial dependence. She was also deeply concerned about the slavery issue and by 1856, after completing her Washington biography, wrote a friend, "I am terribly low-spirited about public affairs. I see nothing but civil war and disunion before us." Though a pacifist, she supported and worked for the Union.

In the early 1850s, her short stories and essays were brought out as gift-book collections: The Evening Book (1852); A Book for the Home Circle (1853); and Autumn Hours (1854). The major topic in each was the correction and improvement of American manners and morals, which she managed to urge with sophisticated, disarming simplicity quite different from the saccharine and somber utilitarianism that characterized most literature on the same topics. In one essay, "Literary Women," a spirited defense of women authors, Kirkland with tongue in cheek suggests shopkeepers not sell pens to women who write, and that women should be excluded from school—at least till they are over forty.

At a time when popular literature consisted of moralizing essays on self-improvement and sentimental tales, Kirkland, in contrast, expressed herself clearly, concisely, and humorously. Her themes, settings, characters, and moral vision were a realist's. Her range of female characters gives a more complete picture of the nature and condition of women than can be derived from the work of the first-ranking American authors of the period. Kirkland wrote, "It has been thought necessary to dress up and render conspicuous a certain class of events, while another class, perhaps far more efficient in producing the real features of the age, are unnoticed and forgotten." Kirkland, with her realist's perspectives, makes a significant contribution to our own times.

Other Works:

Principles of Morality by J. Dymond (edited by Kirkland, 1847). Spenser and the Faery Queen (edited by Kirkland, 1847). Holidays Abroad (1849). The Book of Home Beauty (1852). Garden Walks with the Poets (1852). The Helping Hand (1853). Memoirs of Washington (1857). The School-Girl's Garland (1864). Patriotic Eloquence (1866).

Some of Caroline Kirkland's papers are housed within the Chicago Historical Society.

Bibliography:

Dondore, D. A., The Prairie and the Making of Middle America: Four Centuries of Description (1926). Keyes, L. C., "Caroline M. Kirkland: A Pioneer in American Realism" (dissertation, 1935). Kolodny, A., The Land Before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers, 1630-1860 (1984). Leverentz, D., Manhood and the American Renaissance (1989). Osborne, W. S., Caroline M. Kirkland (1972). Parra, J. M., "Altered Vision: Three Nineteenth-Century Western Authors: Caroline Kirkland, Mary Hallock Foote and Mary Austin" (thesis, 1995). Riordan, D. G., "The Concept of Simplicity in the Works of Mrs. Caroline M. Kirkland" (dissertation, 1973). Roberts, A. J., "The Letters of Caroline M. Kirkland" (dissertation, 1976). Stickney, G., "Oh, the Troubles We've Seen: Women's Pioneering Portrayals of Hardship in the Development of American Literature" (thesis, 1993).