Kinney, Elizabeth (Clementine)

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KINNEY, Elizabeth (Clementine)

Dodge Born 18 December 1810, New York, New York; died 19 November 1889, Summit, New Jersey

Wrote under: Mrs. E. C. Kinney, Mrs. E. Clementine Kinney, Mrs. E. C. Stedman

Daughter of David and Sarah Cleveland Dodge; married Edmund B. Stedman, 1830 (died); William B. Kinney, 1841

Elizabeth Dodge Kinney's father was a prosperous New York merchant. Her first son was Edmund C. Stedman, American anthologist, literary critic, and poet. After her first husband's death at sea in 1835, she became a regular contributor of poems and articles to popular magazines such as Graham's, Sartain's and the Knickerbocker. In 1841 she married William B. Kinney, "the leading political writer in the state of New Jersey" and owner and editor of the Newark Daily Advertiser, and combined work on essays and criticism for his paper with her duties as mother of a growing family. Her husband was appointed chargé d'affaires at Sardinia in 1850. For three years, the Kinneys lived in Turin, and then, for more than 10 years, they lived in Florence, before returning to New Jersey in 1865.

Felicità: A Metrical Romance (1855), Kinney's first work, is the supposedly true story of an unfortunate young French girl who is sold as a slave by her miserly father. It is long on bad rhymes and strained meters but short on credible characters or motives. Bianca Cappello: A Tragedy (1873), set in Venice and Florence in the latter part of the 16th century, is based on historical sources and told in blank verse, complete with comic scenes. The leading character, Bianca, is both desirous of power (she is involved in the murders of three people) and very much in love, and therefore her motives are often unclear.

So prolific was Kinney that even her collection of Poems (1867) omits many of her contributions to magazines and newspapers from the 1830s through the 1850s. In 1854 critic Caroline May wrote of Kinney's poems, "There is much genuine feeling, a delicate perception of the beautiful, and an honest love for the simple and true, in her effusions, which cannot fail to please." To modern tastes, her verses mix bromide and saccharin, and only a few rise above the general mediocrity. "The Infant's Miniature" (Knickerbocker, July 1842) manages to suggest some particularity and freshness, as does the topographical poem "Mount Hope Cemetery, Rochester" (Knickerbocker, Sept. 1840).

Her tales, like her poems, suffer today because they suited all too well the popular taste of her era. Kinney's journalism and travel pieces such as "A Sabbath Among the Mountains of Pennsylvania" (Graham's, July 1845) retain far more interest.

Kinney's best writings now seem to be her accounts, in letters and journals, of Italy and of the people she knew there. Her journal records a revelatory dispute between the Brownings, whom the Kinneys knew in Florence, and Kinney over George Sand's morality or immorality, and many comments on Elizabeth Barrett Browning's dabblings in spiritualism.

Most of Kinney's works published during her lifetime are now of interest chiefly as indices of mid-19th-century American popular taste; her letters, "Journal," and "Personal Reminiscences" retain more lasting charm and power to please.