Episode 52: Screaming Among Her Fellows

Kathryn Gehred  00:04

Hello, and welcome to Your Most Obedient and Humble Servant. This is a women's history podcast where we feature 18th and early 19th century women's letters that don't get as much attention as we think they should. I'm your host, Kathryn Gehred. This episode is part of our season on wit. Today I am so excited to be speaking with Dr. Patricia Kalayjian and Dr. Lucinda Damon-Bach of The Catharine Maria Sedgwick Online Letters Project. Dr. Kalayjian is  Professor Emerita of Interdisciplinary Studies at California State University and the editor and project director of the Sedgwick online letters project. Dr. Damon-Bach is an editor of the project and a professor of English at Salem State University. Thank you both so much for being on the show.

Lucinda Damon-Bach  00:49

Thank you.

Patricia Kalayjian  00:50

Thanks so much for inviting us. We're excited to talk about our project.

Kathryn Gehred  00:54

I first heard about this at a conference of the Association of documentary editing. And I thought it just seemed absolutely perfect. And I've been using your website and digging through these letters ever since Pat as the project director, can you tell me a little bit more about the project? How did it come to be?

Patricia Kalayjian  01:11

Well, thanks for asking. Our project is a born digital edition of American author Catharine Maria Sedgwick's outgoing letters. When Cindy and I with our third editorial board member who couldn't be here today, Deborah Gussman started this project, we were really motivated by the absence of scholarly infrastructure for Sedgwick scholars. There is no full biography for example, the bulk of Sedgwick's letters are at the Massachusetts Historical Society. And most of those have been scanned in microfilm. But microfilm doesn't make things easy to access, and so they remain out of reach for most scholars, several 100 more letters are scattered in archives around the country and in Europe. So making Sedgwick's letters available in transcription seemed like a great way to encourage more incisive research and analysis. Because we're trained as literary scholars and not historians, we began by going to camp edit, and editing workshops sponsored by the Association for documentary editing. And then in 2017, we were invited to be a founding edition of a digital hub that is now the primary source cooperative at the Massachusetts Historical Society. And then we received our first National Endowment for the Humanities, it's called the scholarly editions and translations grant, we received that in 2019. And then we were just recently refunded for another two years this past January.

Kathryn Gehred  01:11

When you say board digital, do you mean that you're not planning on publishing a paper edition?

02:43

That is correct. We did think about doing a print edition. And it still may be a little bit in the back of Cindy's head anyway, not mine. With this technology, it just makes things so much easier to access. And it's so much more democratizing than just having print editions in university libraries.

Kathryn Gehred  03:02

I think that makes a ton of sense. So you talked about how it's a little bit difficult to access her papers. And there may be hasn't been a lot of study on Catharine Maria Sedgwick, who was Catherine Maria Sedgwick, and why are we putting her papers online.

03:16

She was the most highly regarded woman writer of the early national period of American literature. By the mid 1820s, she was praised as the nation's premier author us we put that in air quotes. And within the next decade, her work had been republished in England and translated to French and German, Italian, Swedish, Dutch and Danish. She wrote in a lot of different genres. She wrote novels and short stories, sketches, didactic novellas, biography, travel books, and she wrote for a variety of audiences, she wrote for educated adult audiences, juveniles, kind of an elite class working class readers, she really ran the gamut. She published 20 books and more than 150 Short works in her career. And we always like to bring this up as a measure of her really exceptional fame. In 1834, she was selected for inclusion in the first volume of The National Portrait Gallery of Distinguished Americans. She was one of only four writers included, and the only woman besides Martha Washington.

Kathryn Gehred  04:23

Wow. As a former editor of the Martha Washington papers, were in an exclusive club.

Kathryn Gehred  04:30

Why do you think after this sort of exceptional level of fame, she's translated and all these languages? I've never heard of her. I imagine that a lot of our listeners will not have heard of her. Why do you think that is?

04:41

Well, I think in spite of her fame among her contemporaries, Sedgwick's reputation and her work were really this is like so many, like most women writers actually either demeaned or ignored. By the late 19th and early 20th Century Literary historians and and theologist there's a demonstrable, masculines bias in the development of the American literary canon. And it takes a lot of effort over time to change the perception of literary history. Especially after it's been there for like 100 years. So we're working on it. We're trying to change that. But, you know, it takes time. But we think that this is changing. Her work has been a successful part of the women writers recovery movement that was undertaken by literary scholars from about 1980 on and there's growing evidence that she's being reintegrated into the canon and into literary history. The Catharine Maria Sedgwick Society that was founded by Cindy has been going strong for more than 25 years. It encourages scholarship and connects Sedgwick to other writers of her era, both men and women. All six of her major novels are now available in print and scholarly editions and a couple in more popular editions. And her short fiction is now in college level anthologies. These are all big important steps towards making someone canonical. And in fact, one study found her to be among the top 12 authors now taught and 19th century American literature survey courses. So that's great. It's working.

Kathryn Gehred  06:26

That's fabulous. I've been saying Maria as a Catharine Maria Sedgwick,

Patricia Kalayjian  06:30

We don't really know. I say Mariah. You say Maria doesn't matter.

Kathryn Gehred  06:35

What does the Catherine Mariah centric society? Do? Is it like a fan club?

Patricia Kalayjian  06:39

No. Well, yes. And no, it is a fan club. But it says scholarly fan club. Cindy, you should talk about this.

Lucinda Damon-Bach  06:47

Well, our goal was to find each other first in 1997, after our mazing conference on women writers at Trinity College, you know, it was important to meet people who were already familiar with Sedgwick. And now, Susan K. Harris, complimented us at one of conference when she was the keynote speaker and said, you know, now we can say there's such a field as Sedgwick studies. It's pretty, pretty awesome. And we've mentored young scholars now. And they're now not so young and taking lead roles. After 20 years, I finally stepped down. But it's going strong. I think I'm really proud.

Kathryn Gehred  07:24

That's fantastic. You mentioned that your background is in sort of English and literary studies. From that perspective. How would you describe her letters? What do you think is important about making her letters available? And when you first sort of discovered and started working with her letters, what did it tell you about Katherine?

Patricia Kalayjian  07:45

We think that her letters are fascinating on a whole variety of levels. We started with the idea that it would give insight into her work, the situations she found herself in and then were transported into her fiction. But you know, she's just an engaging writer. In her letters. She's smart, and she's witty. She's snarky, at times, very snarky. We, in fact, we joke around that we need to have a tag for her snark. She's really I mean, amazingly open about her feelings, which I think is something that maybe is a lost art to write publicly, if you will, I mean, at least to a reader about how you're feeling. She doesn't seem to have a huge ego. So there's none of that sort of posing, or posturing that you might find in others. In that context of the 19th century or early 19th century. She's a single woman by choice in a world that valued marriage. But she didn't live as a single woman alone. She lived in the family homes of her brothers and sisters. And she seems to have gotten along with just about everybody in her family. She had six siblings, they all married, and I think she had 37 nieces and nephews.

Kathryn Gehred  09:07

wow

Patricia Kalayjian  09:08

And she communicated with a lot of them and helped raise a lot of them. On top of that, so she had this intimate knowledge of the private world of women. But then she also had this public side to her where she was extremely well known. She traveled widely. She was a successful author, and really could have lived independently. She made plenty of money to do that. She just seemed comfortable in that family setting.

Lucinda Damon-Bach  09:37

I think the one that we picked for today is one of the best to use because it touches on her religion as a Unitarian on her social networks, people beyond her immediate family, as well as her intimate relationships with the people she's talking about in the letter. And it talks about what she's reading and what she's translating, which is another whole I'd have her and what she's recently submitted that I was trying to find this morning, an unsigned piece. And it's funny. I mean, we also wish, not just a snarky label, but just one for funny, you know, making jokes. The Cedric family was a fun family, people really liked them. They had great conversations, and they played family games, and were well loved in their towns. And in New York City where she lived. Two of her brothers were lawyers in New York City. So she also talks about village life and urban life, which is pretty extraordinary, as well as life abroad.

Kathryn Gehred  10:33

It's interesting to me that she was so successful and financially stable, and then she sort of chose to live that lifestyle of staying with family members, which and a lot of the other women's letters. So I cover sometimes it seems that women are sort of forced to do that, if their husband dies it or something like that, they end up in debt, they sort of are dependent on family, I imagined, it's just one of the few options that women had at the time period. But that she has such a well connected, interesting family, it's less of something that she's trapped in and might be something that she really enjoyed.

Lucinda Damon-Bach  11:05

I would say absolutely, that she was living in a family totally by choice. She really wanted to have a child this way she got children, for her to be useful was really important and to be contributing member and helping people. And that was just a core of her identity. So she wasn't sitting around being a guest in her siblings houses, she was a crucial piece.

Kathryn Gehred  11:30

Interesting. Do you feel like knowing more about her life and interacting with your letters and editing your letters? Has that changed the way that you interact with her fiction?

Lucinda Damon-Bach  11:39

Definitely. Through her letters, you get to see insights into scenes and her novels and short stories. And also her writing anxiety. She writes a fair number of sketches, and they're closely based on events in her own life. So the conversations and the settings and the current events. It's been really fascinating to me,

Kathryn Gehred  12:02

That's so fascinating. So what goals do you have for the central papers online project?

Patricia Kalayjian  12:08

Our original goal was to publish the full content of all her outgoing letters on expurgated, we don't make any editorial choices other than Is this a dash or a comma? We really try to stick to the content.

Lucinda Damon-Bach  12:23

I'm quoting Pat, our biggest goal is to rewrite American literary history. She's clearly a crucial piece. And the other goal is who will use them, you know, everyone besides Sedgwick scholars, or even scholars of 19th century women's literature, I think historians, I really hope secondary school teachers, one of the things that encouraged us was there was one addition of her letters published in 1871. As a tribute to her she had died in 1867. I did a search how many people had searched for Dewey's life and letters of Catharine Sedgwick, and I found people from all walks of life, you know, besides doctors and historians, you know, and Women's Studies people, but there were people interested in cooking and travels.

Patricia Kalayjian  13:11

Another goal that we kind of developed as we were doing the digital edition and working with the metadata and tagging and so on is that we've really committed ourselves to identifying women that are mentioned in this sometimes we can only find them and something like Find A Grave, you know, it's not the world's most reliable thing. But women don't appear that much. And, for example, the Library of Congress names authority file, or snack or you know, any of the more formal databases. So we're trying to get as much information as we can about the women, even women that are just mentioned, aren't friends, or you know, they're just mentioned in a letter, we still try to identify them.

Kathryn Gehred  13:52

That's so important. I came across the same thing working with letters of Martha Washington and how many people you'll have to find you could find who their husband is, and it's like, this is just some guy who owned a house. Why does he get it? She doesn't. So the letter we're going to reach Day is a letter from Catharine Maria Sedgwick to Eliza Cabot Follen, who was Follen. And what was the relationship like Eliza Cabot?

Lucinda Damon-Bach  13:52

Not yet Follen. She's gonna get married after this letter. Okay. In the same year, they met in the 1820s through Elisa's cousin, Susan Higgins and Channing, who was a good friend of Sedgwick. So Susan Channing is a little bit older. And Eliza fallin is a year and a half older than Katherine. And at this point, Cedric is 38 Eliza is 39 and a half and about to get married, which is pretty impressive. And it was Catherine Cedric, who actually set her up with her future husband, Charles fallen, who was a German immigrant who said he learned English reading Catharine Sedgwick's. Now we'll read with her second publication and was a Unitarian himself. So they have been corresponding since early 18, twice about six or seven years into the relationship, and she was a family favorite. Eliza was very high spirited and fun loving and good friend of Sedgwick's brother, Robert, and she's an abolitionist. She's a writer herself. She's writing poetry and Sedgwick quotes one of her poems at the beginning of her third novel published in 1827. Hope Leslie, and they, as you'll hear in the letter, they talk about their publication. They really are very, very close. And I think that there might have been romantic feelings. However, we all know from Carol Smith Rosenberg, that that was common. But boy does she gushed in some of her letters about you know how much she misses this other piece of her. She's definitely a very, very close friend.

Kathryn Gehred  15:54

I'm glad to hear you say that because I was picking up on a little bit of that as well. So what's going on in Sedgwick's life at the time that she wrote this letter.

Lucinda Damon-Bach  16:02

We can try piecing that together, maybe together. She's writing from New York, where she is living either with her brother Robert, who is a lawyer, and in partnership with her brother Henry, a little bit older than Robert Robert was the closest to her in age above her, and then she has her younger brother, Charles, you'll hear that she's a little depressed at the beginning of the letter, and I'm guessing it's she's in New York, and she's finished one book, and it's out. What am I gonna do next? I'm just guessing

Patricia Kalayjian  16:30

Her oldest sister had died the previous year, I kind of think she had seasonal affective disorder.

Kathryn Gehred  16:37

I was gonna say it's February.

Patricia Kalayjian  16:38

Exactly. Exactly. And you know, her moods change seasonally, as do most people's.

Kathryn Gehred  16:46

Are there any people mentioned in the letter that you want to introduce that it'll help people understand as we're reading it.

Patricia Kalayjian  16:51

I'll leave some of them out because there are a lot of people mentioned in this letter. And I think that that's indicative of how many intersections lives that Eliza and Catherine had. So even though Katherine lived mainly in Western Massachusetts, and Stockbridge in Lenox, that's where she was raised. And then also in New York, she had a large number of friends in the Boston area, which is where Eliza Cabot lived. And she mentioned several of them. So the first one she mentioned is Susan Channing, who, as Cindy said, was the license cousin and Sedgwick's friend. Then there's another Susan, and a Mary. And those are Eliza, sisters. And Harry, he was pretty much her literary agent. And then Harry's wife, Jane, is originally from Boston, and a part of the circle of friends. That includes another person that's named early on. And that's Caroline Danforth. And then the second set of people that are mentioned tend to be writers and editors. So Eliza was a writer, and a translator, and she's about to launch a serial publication for juvenile readers called the WellSpan hour. So there's some talk back and forth about contributions to them. And then the third intersection is the Unitarian Church, and both Sedgwick and fallin were early and important members of what was then still a relatively new denomination. For example, towards the end of the letter, she talks about what a mess the new congregation is, the New York is in.

Kathryn Gehred  18:28

I appreciate that you put the effort into trying to identify all these people. And I think that does help sort of to understand what's going on. And now let's dig into the letter.

Kathryn Gehred  18:39

Catharine Maria Sedgwick to Eliza Cabot Follen, February 18, 1828 

Kathryn Gehred  18:46

My Dear Eliza,  It is a great while since I have written to you but I have felt assured that you were happy within, & without - ‘in the house, & by the way’ - I have been & am in a torpid condition. Feeling no power to rouse myself, and having nothing to impart, I hope I shall not sink into absolute nonentity. But my tendencies are all that way…  I intended to have answered a very kind and gratuitous letter from Susan Channing before I wrote to you, but when I write to her, as it is a rare occasion, I must call forth my energies, if any poking & raking can enliven them. To you I have the privilege of being as slip-shod & as stupid as I feel & of knowing dear Eliza that you will bear with me.   I received Mary’s very kind letter & was truly rejoiced to know that she was safe in the narrow house & ‘screaming among her fellows.’ I should, you know dear Eliza, rejoice to pillow my head once more on your pillow, & I think I could resign myself to a week of your vigils. But this is not the time for me to go to Boston, for many reasons, & therefore being very reasonable I shall not go.   3d March  I can hardly believe that so much time has passed away since I have written to you. & but for the fixture of the date on my first page I would not believe it. Since then how many sweet letters have I received from you! Not so very many either. But two, worth a gross of mine. I begin to fear dearest E. that, for the punishment of my sins, I am denied ever finishing another letter to you. I was called away yesterday & before I could return again I sprained my thumb - & now I write with very uncomfortable sensations, but I think the pain is easier to bear than to repress the desire to write. You have been very sick but even that, as Jane writes me, has not checked the ever living fountain of your sweet spirit. You have found out & most beautifully expressed in your last letter the secret of happiness. I have no doubt of it, and I believe that a great proportion of the suffering in this world results from a constant opposition to the will of God. Not always know[n] to be such, often, very blind & ignorant, but sometimes alas perverse, wilful. I think if it were only required of us to be passive, to sit still & be acted upon we might always attain acquiescence - but when it comes to resisting our strongest inclinations, to going exactly counter to a course in which we are impelled by a force stronger than wind & tide, then what can get us on but “being fellow workers with God”?

Kathryn Gehred  21:20

there's a little bit of letter damage.

Kathryn Gehred  21:23

I am glad you have undertaken a work, for which no one is so well qualified & which may be so important. It is not affectation in me when I say that I do not consider myself capable of aiding you, or at least as capable as those whose contributions are at your command. If I were in Boston where I could be stimulated and directed I might do something. I do not exactly understand your plan. After I have seen your first Number I shall know better what you want.   I have, simply because you requested it, written a little piece which I shall send to you by the first opportunity. And if it does not suit your purpose dear Eliza… throw it under the table. My author pride is not at stake, & I would not have your partiality for me obscure your editorial [gusto?] though, Heaven knows, there is little of the elder [Brutus?] in your composition.  Do you know anything of poor Mrs. Hale’s fate? She wrote me a piteous letter, asking aid for her magazine. To have refused her would have been sending away a ‘starving beggar’ so I have translated an article for her from the French “Revue Cy-” & partly promised to continue contributions. But Harry tells me the work is a hopeless affair & that to contribute to it is only to protract losses. Her great patron seems to be a Mr. Blake, Rector of some church in Boston, who, judging from a letter he wrote me, has all the complacency of the hierarchy concentrated in himself.   I have just finished a little story for Roy’s ‘Legendary.’ I was provoked with myself after I promised, & being far enough from the working mood it proved a poor affair.  If you can get at the ‘Revue’ do get the Number for September 1827, & read the memoir of Mad Guizot. It is excessively interesting, and will be particularly so to you.  I have just finished Cyril Thornton. There is a good dea of talent & an air of truth and reality about it that makes it deeply interesting. And then the hero tells his own story without one particle of egotism.   Do you Bostonians know any thing about the dismal state of the new church here? Have you not one young man of talent & piety among you? Alas that church tells a far worse tale of us than Lewis Tappan. My Marianne’s criticism was quite piquant on Mr. Tappan. “Why?” she said, “Did he not find out sooner how bad he was?”   What will dear Jeanie do without you & Caroline? I hope you will persuade her to remain till April   I have had a letter from poor Mrs. Howe. She seems calm in sorrow. So deep. So overwhelming.   My best love to Mary & Susan. What is poor Mary to do if both you & Susan are quill-bound. She had better call in my aid for I am quite inclined to return to the distaff. The natural duty of women.   I have received the most exquisite Valentine you ever saw purporting to be from Sir Walter Scott. That it is not from him is too true, & that its graceful couplets are indited by a false Valentine, a woman is true also. But it is exquisite.

Kathryn Gehred  24:26

And then normally, there's a signature at the end of these, but there's no signature for this one, it's unsaved. I think it's fantastic. I think you get a lot of her personality. Towards the end when she's just adding these little notes. If you can see the actual paper that the letter is written on, she's just throwing in little sentences and ideas and writing all around the edges of the manuscripts and even on the page where she has the address. She's just getting as much as she possibly can into this letter.

Lucinda Damon-Bach  24:53

I had a miserable experience. I was studying her correspondence with Anna Jamison which is 16 years which is really good Exciting. And we have to always use the microfilm first the scan of the microfilm. So it's like third generation to begin with. And it was cross written the entire letter, meaning that she writes horizontally across the page then turns the page 90 degrees and writes slightly larger. Han fills the entire page a second time. My eyes were going crazy. And I went to the mass historical and I said, Can I please see the original, and it came out, and it's always Christmas when you go there. But when the letter came out with brown ink, covered by red ink, I screeched with happiness. I squealed just like the girls in this letter, like, oh, yeah,

Kathryn Gehred  25:40

That was thoughtful of her. Yeah.

Patricia Kalayjian  25:43

The other thing was that paper was expensive, and not easily available. Postage could be pricey. And you know, she used letter sheets that folded into four pages. And she really tried to fill it as much as she can, you can see from actual photograph of it on the third page, she indents. And that's for the sealing wax on the other side, so it doesn't bleed through and ruin the letter. But she's really trying to say as much as she possibly can and make the letter worthwhile because sometimes the letters if they weren't by mail would be paid for by the recipient. So you want to make it worthwhile to your recipient. Somebody jokes at some point, I think it's her youngest brother Charles, who gives her a hard time sometimes about all the marginal writing all over everything and filling every inch of the paper.

Lucinda Damon-Bach  26:31

Well that said, her brother's at least Robert would say that he has reread her letter, and that her letters are like bomb to him. So she really had high standards for what a good letter was and and sometimes that's a subject of self derision. She'll say, oh, my gosh, I have said nothing worthwhile in this letter.

Kathryn Gehred  26:49

I like those letters. That's great. I haven't really thought about that aspect of it of if your page receive a letter, you hope there's something good in it. This is the last episode that we're recording of the season and having it open with a line about how torpid sinking into absolute non entity I fully understand that feeling.

Kathryn Gehred  27:12

I thought that was funny. Yeah. So we talked a little bit how she sort of starts out perhaps it is feels like sort of a seasonal depression just doesn't feel like writing and that comes up again later where she says she wasn't in the mood to write a story. So it turned out to be not a great piece. Do you know anything about that one?

Lucinda Damon-Bach  27:31

Well, that was the rabbit hole I fell into this morning. So the irony here is that Mrs. Hales adventure of editing the Ladies Magazine, which was in Boston at that time before it was turned into Goodey's Lady Book and Philadelphia, that one succeeded. And Nathaniel Willis's she calls it Roy's legendary Well, it was edited by Nathaniel Willis and Roy was the publisher. And his folded after just two volumes. So it took me some time to find the one had just come out was published in December of 1827. So it's just hit the stands. It's a gift book annual. So she can't have been writing the one story that we do know, she submitted to him, which was a very long story. 43 pages. But this morning I was going through after I found the second and last volume, there's a story in there called the stepmother and a scholar in 1959 had attributed it to Sedgwick, but I had no idea of the basis of that. But I can see she's using events and names that she's used before. It's it isn't a very great story, at least on the first read. Now that one's 80 pages long. So I think this is another unwritten joke. I've written a small affair, and it's not very good. Well, it's not very good, in part because it goes on and on and on.

Kathryn Gehred  28:49

That completely changes the meaning of that sentence to me now that you found the story and it's 80 pages, that's hysterical. Okay, that's great. For these papers, publishing projects, people are like, Why does it take so long when you're just transcribing a letter? Why can't you just transcribe it and put it online? Well, she's mentioning casually, a magazine that only released two issues. It takes such digging to find these things and identify them. So if you want it to be a usable project, and you want to have any type of useful annotation at all, it can take some time, and then you find these really cool little discoveries. I like when she talks about her friendship with Eliza and she says, You know, when she's writing to her cousin, she feels like she has to be putting on a show. But when she's writing to her, she can be as slipshod and as stupid as I feel. That's a timeless feeling. When you are reading this letter, what's something that sort of struck you as sort of snarky and funny?

Lucinda Damon-Bach  29:44

When she gets a letter from the rector, who is the patron for Susan Hale? Judging from a letter he wrote me has all the complacency of the hierarchy concentrated in himself. It's like, quite to put down

Kathryn Gehred  29:58

So good. The project that she's working on with Mrs. Hale, which magazine was that?

Patricia Kalayjian  30:04

So this is Sarah Josepha Hale. She was an author herself. She wrote at least one novel called Northwood. And she's most famous actually for editing First Lady's magazine, which was the one that Reverend John Blake founded and then sought her out to edit. And she did that for about eight years. And then the ladies magazine and goatees were merged and hailed became the editor of that as well. She was an editor for almost 50 years of the most important, I think it was the highest selling magazine in the United States. It had a huge impact. And Sedgwick was a contributor to it over time, but there were a lot of women writers that contributed to goatees the founder was a congregationalist minister and this Calvinist I can imagine a little pomposity there. I mean, it also points out that Harry wasn't infallible her brother, in His judgment, thinking that hers is bound to fail. And, and then it turns out that the one that Nathaniel Parker Willis, edited was, you know, kind of a big name back then, again, not so well known today. That didn't make it.

Kathryn Gehred  31:17

Yeah thats another thing. So with each of these letters, you're getting one person's perspective at a certain moment. And sometimes that perspective, aligns with reality, and sometimes not, sometimes not so much. When she says, I begin to fear my dear E, that for the punishment of my sins, I'm denied ever finishing another letter to that made me laugh, I imagine she's trying to write this letter. It's been almost a month, and then she hurts her thumb. So she's powering through it, she's gonna write this letter,

Patricia Kalayjian  31:44

and then some other intrusion comes along to to interrupt. She complains about that a little bit. And her letters, especially when she's in New York, that it's difficult for her to sit down and work whether it's writing a story or writing a letter to many social requirements, you know, for a famous woman, and all those nieces and nephew.

Kathryn Gehred  32:09

When she talks about, I received Mary's very kind glitter was rejoice to know that she was safe in the narrow house and screaming among her fellows. Do you know what's going on there?

Patricia Kalayjian  32:20

You know she was happy to be back among friends and so on. The narrow house is the name that they gave to the house that Eliza and her sisters Mary and Susan lived in together as single women. So Mary was just coming home, and screaming among her fellows, her sisters, happy to be back home.

Kathryn Gehred  32:39

Narrow house with all of the women that are all screaming among their fellows. That's a great little image.

Lucinda Damon-Bach  32:45

That would just add that it really was a narrow house, I believe, in part because they had narrowed circumstances, the both parents had died. And that's why they're all living together. So of course, there aren't any extra guest rooms, so and it was common for people to share a bed and share a pillow.

Kathryn Gehred  33:05

And this is the line that made me think a little bit where she says, I should, you know, dear allies rejoice to pillow my head once more on your pillow, and resign myself to a week of your vigils. And like all they're very close,

Kathryn Gehred  33:08

She has the next section talking about resigning yourself to God's will and things like that. And so we've talked several times about her as a Unitarian and Unitarian faith, does that come up a lot in her correspondence?

Patricia Kalayjian  33:08

they are very close.

Patricia Kalayjian  33:28

It does with Eliza, especially about this time period, because they are trying to get a minister into this new church that has started in New York. And Cedric feels like the Boston people had kind of cornered the market on the the great ministers, you know, and needed to be a little bit more generous in sharing the wealth, the real crowd gathering kinds of ministers,

Kathryn Gehred  33:54

Have you not one young man of talent and piety among you?

Patricia Kalayjian  33:57

Yeah, she's actually I mean, she even gets to the point where she's hoping that after Eliza marries Charles Follen, that who was ordained of Unitarian minister as well, that they would move to New York, and kind of share the pulpit. Why she adores Eliza so much I think is she must have had kind of very strong, I hate to use the word spiritual because it has such a vague, foggy meaning to us now. But I think she really thought that Eliza just kind of had the corner on the market of really understanding her place in the universe. And probably she would have said in another life, if she'd known that what was possible today, she would have encouraged Eliza to be minister.

Lucinda Damon-Bach  34:43

I just wanted to add to the passage where she says, I believe that a great proportion of the suffering in this world results from a constant opposition to the will of God, not always to know to be such, I think if it are only required of us to be passive to sit still and be acted upon We might always attain acquiescence. And I think this ties to her fiction because she is always saying it is not a woman's role to be passive. We are not required to be passive we are required to be useful and active and transact and but if we have to wait some times it's more of a wait and work rather than being passive. You're still doing something to move forward. And that's where the being fellows workers with God comes in. Cedric is raising money to start a school for poor children, a Sunday school, not a church school as much as it is held on Sunday to teach poor kids how to read and write Eliza two is very active benevolent worker

Kathryn Gehred  35:42

Was Catherine an abolitionist, or Eliza and abolitionist?

Patricia Kalayjian  35:45

Eliza was an abolitionist, Charles Follen was an abolitionist, he got kicked out of the faculty of Harvard for being too ardent, an abolitionist, and a lot of Citrix friends were abolitionists, she was anti slavery.

Lucinda Damon-Bach  35:58

She has a lot of company, I mean, Emerson and Hawthorne and other people like that, because there are other people, especially women at the time, who are really active abolitionists, we think that everybody should have been actually it's interesting. The story that I think she may have written around this time was about a mixed race romance. It turns out to be Sedgwick, I shouldn't even talk about it till I know for sure, but that was definitely on her mind. She has an interracial relationship in her most recent novel in 1827.

Patricia Kalayjian  36:27

I don't know whether it has come up yet or not. Because I'm reading further ahead than where this letter is so hard for me to remember where things land, but Eliza Cabot's brother was in a relationship with a Creole woman in the Caribbean. And in fact, the wife and the stepdaughter came to New York, I think, or Boston, and it was quite a scandal that this member of a very, very influential family, the Cabot's have an interracial marriage. That's so interesting. And Cedric was very sympathetic, didn't seem at all judgy in the letters that pertain to that, but that's another story. Another letter.

Kathryn Gehred  37:06

Wow. And that's why you should go online. Catharine Maria Sedgwick letters.

Patricia Kalayjian  37:11

All right, let me see. I know, I know. You wanted to ask about Madam Guizot.

Kathryn Gehred  37:18

Yes, yes.

Patricia Kalayjian  37:19

Pauline Guizot, was French writer and journalist. And this is speculation, but then that's what we do. But I think Sedwick might have thought that Eliza would enjoy this memoir, Pauline Guizot had recently passed away. And so this was a someone writing a memoir that included her because Pauline married a man who was 14 years younger than she was. And Eliza was about to marry someone who is nine years her junior. So just a guess, but you know, but maybe.

Kathryn Gehred  37:51

That makes sense. Okay. I did want to mention she has the line where she says, returning to the distaff, the natural duty of a woman. What's she saying?

Patricia Kalayjian  38:01

I think it's a joke. Cindy doesn't necessarily I don't think.

Lucinda Damon-Bach  38:04

I'm convinced! She did do a lot of sewing. But I don't know that she ever did any weaving. She did cooking for the family. And she writes about that. But I think this is definitely a joke. Pat convinced me.

Patricia Kalayjian  38:15

It's a reference to the distaff side, the female side of things. I think you wondered if it was a kind of feminist joke. And I'd love to say, I think everybody who studies Sedgwick would love to say that she was an early feminist. And I think in many ways, she is kind of maybe a proto feminist, I think, to call her a feminist is is a bit of a stretch. I mean, she chose to be single. But she also in all of her novels, the women start out, the protagonist start out believing that they are going to be single, and figure out a way to make a meaningful life without marriage, and then they ended up being married at the end. But she did like Cindy said she did do a lot of domestic chores. She sewed, cooked and she nursed the sick. She weaned their babies, for her sisters in law. I think she had more of a choice. It wasn't a necessity, right? She could say, I'll do this for you. I'll help this way, whatever. And a running joke between Katherine and Eliza is that Eliza and her one sister Susan, were artists and writers and doing more traditionally masculine kinds of tasks to earn money because they needed it while Mary was left to do the domestic work. And then it's also that Mary really likes doing the domestic work.

Lucinda Damon-Bach  39:41

And I do think once this short sketches and stories are stirred into the mix, so that it's not heavily the research and familiarity is not heavily based in novels, but it includes the rest of the body of her work. You're gonna see that she celebrates in her nonfiction sketches you can figure out who It's who she is celebrating single women who did humble things, who helped their community. And she's also featuring feminist men. But Sedgwick really loved being a mother and an aunt. And that was not something she wanted to give up. And one of her brothers did say her eldest brother actually, Theodore said, if you get married, you're not going to have time to write. And so there was some support from her own brothers about choosing her own path. And, and she didn't like being alone all the time. The frustration of being single and number two in people's lives, comes up all the time in her letters.

Kathryn Gehred  40:39

Clearly, it would be inaccurate, to describe her as what we would think of as a feminist. But I think just looking at the way she lived your life and all of that, but she definitely seems like a progressive minded person. And you could look at things she does and make an argument about the place of woman at her time, for sure. The very last thing she writes, that we have is about the Valentine, Valentine, that is not from Sir Walter Scott, do we know anything about what's going on there?

Patricia Kalayjian  41:10

No.

Kathryn Gehred  41:13

That's fair.

Patricia Kalayjian  41:14

I can guess. I know that Susan was something of an artist, Eliza sister. And maybe that's who she's referring to, because she does tell this story, right. And Sedwick was a big fan of Scott and quoted from him a lot. And probably based maybe some of her characters at least were inspired by characters and Scott,

Lucinda Damon-Bach  41:40

Somebody in that three girl household, you know, because she knows it's a woman and she knows whose house it came from. Yeah. Somebody wrote her Valentine.

Patricia Kalayjian  41:48

Someone who would know her well enough to know that she adored Scott, right?

Lucinda Damon-Bach  41:53

Yes. And we'd love the joke. Yeah.

Kathryn Gehred  41:58

But I love the idea that these things are something that was treasured by the family that they would keep reading and rereading. And it's like having the person with you.

Lucinda Damon-Bach  42:06

Yeah and thanks to all her friends and family, every time someone died, they shipped the letters back to the Sedgwick. So we have these correspondences. Yeah, just amazing.

Patricia Kalayjian  42:16

Yeah it's quite a trove of letters. She came from a well known family. But you know, she's really a standalone person. She's not known because she's married to somebody famous. She is known for her work, really.

Kathryn Gehred  42:29

If somebody was interested in reading her fiction, or any of her work, Is there someplace you would recommend for people to start?

Lucinda Damon-Bach  42:39

Well, the one I use frequently in my literature survey classes, ironically, it's not hopelessly which is quite long, but people love that that's our best known novel. Hopelessly, hopelessly. It's sort of third book 1827 set in the Puritan times 25 years before Hawthorne wrote his scarlet letter. But New England tale is 16 chapters, and somewhat autobiographical, seems to be set in her own childhood home. It gives you a sense of how she both is writing. Well, it's a very first attempt. So she's writing to see if she can write more than a short story. But she's also going out of bounds. And I won't spoil it any more than to say, it's not what you think.

Kathryn Gehred  43:19

Intriguing. Yeah. I was thinking, I think one of the ways to popularizer is if we could get the miniseries made out of one of her novels,

Patricia Kalayjian  43:28

Absolutely.

Lucinda Damon-Bach  43:29

Oh, yeah.

Patricia Kalayjian  43:30

And I think hopeless, they would be a great miniseries.

Lucinda Damon-Bach  43:34

But I would also make sure we give a plug to the Sedgwick stories online archive, that I'm co editor of Deborah Gussman started it and then I have been assigning my students to transcribe and make notes. And there are almost 100 stories up maybe 70 stories up there now. So it's Sedgwickstories.org. So they could find a title and read a sketch or a short story.

Kathryn Gehred  43:59

That's great. Yeah. We'll link to that in the show notes so people can check that out, they'll check your project out. I think this is a fantastic way to end our season on wit. It's a great woody letter. And I hope everybody goes and reads all of the Catharine Maria Sedgwick stories that they can.

Patricia Kalayjian  44:13

Katy, it's really been a pleasure to talk to you.

Lucinda Damon-Bach  44:15

Thank you so much for this opportunity, really.

Kathryn Gehred  44:18

Well thank you so much for coming on Pat and Cindy. It's been just a delight. Thank you so much for listening. To my listeners. I am as ever, your most obedient and humble servant. Thank you very much. Your Most Obedient and Humble Servant is a production of R2 Studios part of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. I'm Kathryn Gehred, the creator and host of this podcast. Jeanette Patrick and Jim Ambuske are the executive producers. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to listen to past episodes and check out more great podcasts from R2 Studios. We tell unexpected story He's based on the latest research to connect listeners with the past. So head to R2 studios.org to start listening