Reinventing Lydia Sigourney

Datos Bibliográficos

ID3761863
AutoresNina Baym (autor de correspondencia)
Año1990
Volumen62
Número3
Páginas385
Fecha de publicación1990-09-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaAmerican Literature (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0002-9831 • E-ISSN: 1527-2117
EditorialJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/2926738
OpenAlexW2316472464
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas13

IFLydia Howard Huntley Sigourney had not existed, it would have been necessary to invent her. In fact, she was invented. As American women writers began to publish in numbers before the Civil War, one of their number would inevitably be construed as an epitome of the phenomenon of female authorship in its range of allowed achievements and required inadequacies. Now, here was a poor, virtuous, essentially self-educated woman whose writing was sponsored by one of the leading families in Hartford, Connecticut, with additional patronage from many other New England aristocrats.1 She published pious poetry on domestic subjects in the major magazines and wrote for the Sunday School League. Having made a good marriage (from the social point of view), she faithfully performed her duties as wife, mother, and hostess; and she began to write for money only after financial reverses put the family under economic duress. Here, in short, was a woman whose example could instruct all would-be literary women as to what they could do, what they should do, and also what they had better not do. Here also was a life in which a modern success story of upward mobility through hard work and self-sacrifice led to an affirmation of traditional class structure. The social construction of Lydia Sigourney began, then, in her own lifetime. And, with Sigourney's canny participation, it continued throughout her lifetime as well. For example, the prefatory advertisement to the I815 Moral Pieces in Prose and Verse, which was written by Daniel Wads

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