∞∞∞∞∞∞∞
3. Caroline M. Kirkland
Caroline Matilda Stansbury Kirkland (1801-1864) was a native of New York City, where her father was employed as secretary company. Her grandfather was Joseph Stansbury, the Tory poet of the Revolutionary War. She received her education chiefly in private schools conducted by an aunt in Poughkeepsie and New Hartford, New York. When her father died in 1822, the family moved to Clinton, New York, where six years later she married William Kirkland, who had recently resigned from the faculty of Hamilton College
From 1828 until 1835 the Kirklands conducted a school for girls at Geneva, New York, and here their son Joseph Kirkland, later a novelist of some note, was born. In 1835 they moved to [page 198:] Detroit to take charge of a female seminary. But Kirkland soon became involved in land speculation which led to the settlement of Pinckney, some sixty miles northwest of Detroit. Here the Kirklands lived for five years. The Michigan frontier provided the background for the three works for which Mrs. Kirkland is now best remembered: A New Home — Who’ll Follow?(1839), Forest Life (1842), and Western Clearings (1845). The first of these appeared under the pen name “Mary Clavers,” which she seldom used afterward.
After their return to the East in 1843, the Kirklands opened school in Nev; York, and both wrote for the periodicals, died in 1846. For eighteen months in 1847-1848 Mrs. Kirkland edited, the Union Magazine.
In her later works Mrs. Kirkland did not return to the Western settings of her first volumes. A trip to Europe resulted in days Abroad (1849). Later publications include A Book of Home Beauty (1852), A Book for the Home Circle (1853) and such compilations as Garden Walks With the Poets (1852) and The School Girl's Garland (1853?).(1)
Poe's acquaintance with Mrs. Kirkland, of minor significance in his career, appears to have begun when Briggs introduced [page 199:] him into New York literary society in her drawing room early in 1845, shortly after the appearance of “The Raven.”(2) Perhaps there were other visits to the Kirkland home; in inviting Evert Duyckinck to an entertainment she was planning for the literati, Mrs. Kirkland asked that he bring Poe.(3) It is also likely that Poe met Mrs. Kirkland at gatherings elsewhere;(4) in 1845 the Kirklands were living on Greene Street,(5) within a few blocks of the homes of Miss Lynch, Duyckinck, and Dr. Francis, and close to Poe's Amity Street residence.
Mrs. Kirkland wrote nothing of a literary nature for the Broadway Journal, but on July 26, 1845, the periodical published over her name an appeal for aid in discharged women prisoners. This was a project of the “Female Department of the Prison Association of New York,” for which Mrs. Kirkland served as corresponding secretary.(6) In the Journal for November 29, 1845, Poe reviewed Western Clearings with enthusiastic approval. He commended her fresh subject matter and the fidelity of her depiction of Western character and manners. Mrs. Kirkland, he wrote — [page 200:]
... has placed before us the veritable settlers of the forest, with all their peculiarities, national and individual; their I’ifree and fearless spirit, their homely, utilitarian views; their ‘shrewdness, and sharp looking out for self-interest; their thrifty care, and inventions multiform; their coarseness of manner, united with real delicacy and substantial kindness, when their sympathies are called into action; in a word, with all the Characteristics that stamp the “Yankee,” in a region where the salient points of character are not smoothed down by contact with society ....
Western Clearings,” we are confident, will sustain the author's high reputation as one of the most original and accomplished of American writers. Even her style has a touch of Western freshness that renders it, and her arch, playful satire, ‘•especially charming. The imaginative or creative faculty is possessed by Mrs. Kirkland in a high degree; but she is unrivalled in power of delineation; and in a marvellous felicity of expression, whereby a world of meaning or humor is conveyed in some brief phrase, she is approached by no female writer in the country.(7)
The “Literati” sketch, a tribute to both the author and the woman, appeared in August, 1846, and into it went most of the Broadway Journal review of Western Clearings. Mrs. Kirkland's style, Poe wrote here, “is admirable, lucid, tense, full of variety, faultlessly pure, and yet bold.”(8) The sketch contains no adverse criticism, but the merit of her work perhaps allowed Poe to praise Mrs. Kirkland with better conscience than he had in writing of many of the female literati.
There is no evidence of association between Poe and Mrs. Kirkland later than 1847, when Poe submitted “Ulalume” for publication in the Union Magazine. She asked the opinion of Richard [page 201:] Henry Stoddard and rejected the poem when he told her that he not understand it.”(9)
[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 198:]
1 Langley C. Keyes, “Caroline M. Kirkland; A Pioneer in American Realism” (unpublished Ph. D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1935); Dorothy A. Dondore's sketch in the Dictionary of American Biography; Wilson, Bryant and His Friends, pp. 401-402; Duyckincks’ Cyclopaedia (1880) II, 460-46I; the National Cyclopedia, V, 356-357; Hale, op. cit., pp. 716-717; and Edna M. Stanley “The Western Sketches of Caroline Mathilda [sic] (Stansbury) Kirkland,” Michigan Historical Collections, XXXIX, 89-124 (1915)
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 199:]
2 Above, pp. 17-18.
3 MS in the Duyckinck Collection, New York Public Library. The letter, dated “Wednes. 3d,” was probably written in September or December, 1845.
4. Above, p. 13.
5 See the advertisement of the Kirklands’ “School for Young Ladies,” Broadway Journal, I, 287 (May 3, 1845).
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 200:]
[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 201:]
9 Derby, op. cit., p. 597. See also Carroll D. Laverty, “Poe in 1847,” American Literature, XL, 163-168 (May, 1948); in a letter to an unknown correspondent, Poe wrote of plans to dispose of a poem “to Mrs. Kirkland [sic].” The poem is later identified as “Ulalume.”
∞∞∞∞∞∞∞
Notes:
None.
∞∞∞∞∞∞∞
[S:0 - PNYL, 1954] - Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore - Bookshelf - Poe and the New York Literati (Reece)