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A
Sherwood Bonner Sampler, 1869-1884: What a Bright, Educated, Witty,
Lively, Snappy Young Woman Can Say on a Variety of Topics.
Born in Holly Springs, Mississippi, in 1849, Katharine
Sherwood Bonner showed great promise as a Southern storyteller whose
ability to recount insightfully life in her section predates the
contributions of more celebrated Deep South writers, including Joel
Chandler Harris and George
Washington Cable. If she is remembered at all in surveys of Southern
letters, it is in that vein-as yet another female local colorist
whose light shown briefly bright in a collection such as Dialect
Tales (1883), but was appropriately doused by the public’s
improving literary taste. Or she is alluded to because of personal
decisions sensational to Victorian America; she left her husband,
pursued a writing career in Boston (depositing her young daughter in
the care of family), served as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s
amanuensis, and, the rumor mills have had it ever since, possibly
something more.
Anne Gowdy’s
masterfully edited volume, A Sherwood Bonner Sampler, 1869-1884,
counteracts such hasty judgments and superficial controversies, in
part by suggesting that Bonner is one of a number of 19th-century
writers, particularly women, whose reliance on periodicals as the
central outlet for their work has meant that much of their
uncollected material has been unavailable to modern audiences.
Consequently they have been evaluated critically on a narrow range
of their literary production, the result being a limited
understanding of their interests and skills. The availability in
this volume of much of Bonner’s previously uncollected work means
that Gowdy can authoritatively claim that “it is clearly an
oversimplification, in fact, a misrepresentation, to continue to
identify [Bonner] solely or even primarily as a writer of local
color dialect fiction”.
Immediately
obvious, from even a quick perusal of A Sherwood Bonner Sampler,
is the lively variety of Bonner’s writings; a more careful
examination suggests their genuine literary significance. Now we can
read not only her periodically anthologized “Gran’mammy
Tales,” but also some of her nonfiction pieces: lyrical verse,
short fiction for children, experimental romances, and wickedly
satirical poetry, most particularly her lampoon of Boston’s elite
“Radical Club,” a publication for which the city’s leading
intellectual figures subsequently ostracized her. In whatever mode
she wrote, we come to see Bonner through this volume as an author
who produced fiction often influenced by her own struggles as woman,
wife, and female artist. Gowdy thoughtfully considers Bonner as a
Southern woman in transition, one loyal to the images of womanhood
her Southern upbringing had inculcated, but one shaped as well by
her exposure to the expanded opportunities for women her
cosmopolitan rovings beyond the physical and mental boundaries of
Holly Springs, Mississippi, had given her. As such, Bonner provides
in her life and in the subtext of her fiction an early example of
the redefinitions Southern women worked to their
roles in the postbellum era, as male writers were simultaneously
enshrining Southern white womanhood as the eternal flame of the Lost
Cause.
Perhaps most
significant to understanding and appreciating Bonner’s literary
range are her travel letters (1874-1876), written first from New
England back to the Memphis Avalanche and later from Europe to
readers of both the Avalanche and the Boston Times. Here
the persona “Sherwood Bonner” takes shape; the result is a wit
every bit as caustic as Mark Twain’s, but a wit who looks at the
world through distinctly female-and Southern-eyes. No person or event
is too highly esteemed for Bonner’s quick and comic assessment. She
recounts an interview with Ralph Waldo Emerson (“Mr. Emerson’s
direct influence then, while . . . extraordinary, is a limited one”)
and an audience with the Pope (“We got up early in the morning, and
practiced for the coming performance”). Her retellings of both are
laced with an offhand irreverence that will lead readers to appreciate
her as what has traditionally, but mistakenly, been thought that
rarest of finds in 19th-century literature-a funny woman. But although Sherwood Bonner is clearly the focus of this volume, she is not the only writer whose skill makes it a valuable book. Anne Gowdy’s lengthy introduction to the selections usefully supplements Hubert H. McAlexander’s recently reissued biography of Bonner, The Prodigal Daughter, by surveying the range of Bonner’s work (beyond just the stories she actually reprints and including references to the two works of long fiction not excerpted here) and locating it within the context of postbellum American and Southern literature. The volume’s bibliography is surely the most complete listing available of works by and about Bonner and of secondary material related to literary study of the period. But most invaluable are Gowdy’s meticulous footnotes that identify-particularly in Bonner’s journalistic pieces-contextual and literary references otherwise lost to modern readers. Gowdy’s notes are a treasure trove of hard-to-pin-down identifications and links to secondary material that a scholar of the 19th century might read merely for her own edification. Gowdy is to be congratulated on a job impeccably done. Kathryn
McKee |