Lee, Hannah (Farnham) Sawyer

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LEE, Hannah (Farnham) Sawyer

Born 1780, Newburyport, Massachusetts; died 17 December 1865, Boston, Massachusetts

Daughter of Micajah Sawyer; married George Gardner Lee,1807 (died 1816); children: three daughters

The daughter of a physician, Hannah Sawyer Lee was widowed after nine years of marriage and left with three daughters to raise. Financial pressures may have caused her to begin writing for publication at the age of fifty, because her early works focus on the problems confronting women who need to earn their own livings and who have to manage with limited means. Although it is difficult to identify all that she wrote because she did not sign her name to any of her work, it is clear that from 1837 to 1854 Lee published over 20 novels, collections of tales and sketches, and educational works. These evidently brought her financial security and reputation, but she was not considered a major writer even at the height of her popularity. Her achievements were soon forgotten, and she died in obscurity.

In Grace Seymour (1830) Lee created the first of the strong woman figures for which she deserves to be remembered. Growing up in the period of the American Revolution, the heroine is simple, modest, and neat, her character strengthened by the "vicissitudes of life." Grace stoically endures poverty and isolation with her Tory father, and helps him redeem his reputation, before marrying an officer of the American army who values her "good sense and good feelings."

In her next work, a "continuation" to Joseph Tuckerman's Memoir of Hannah Adams (1832), Lee found a living model for the heroines of her fiction. A solid Christian and virtuous single woman, Adams (as Lee described her) used "careful observation, steady government, and systematical arrangement," to overcome poverty and to become a respected writer of history.

In the novels which followed, Lee used the formula developed in Grace Seymour and Hannah Adams. While not "feminists" (whose aggressiveness earned Lee's disapproval), the heroines in these works are sensible and practical and support themselves and others if need be. Deliberately unromantic, they keep their eyes steadfastly on virtue and accept husbands only if they are worthwhile. Lee is notable for endowing her heroines with the ability to manage money—both to earn it and to live well with it. She argues any able-bodied woman can support herself and that once money is earned, it must be used for "home pleasures," which are "the purest and most satisfying this world affords."

Lee makes this argument forcefully in Three Experiments of Living (1837), the novel with which she achieved success, and in its sequel, Elinor Fulton (1837). The first novel shows the Fulton family as victims of a materialistic value system; success has made them luxury-loving and selfish. Their home life is unhappy, and, when the family loses its money, there are few inner resources to keep it together. Fortunately the daughter Elinor has developed Christian fortitude; in the second novel she is the main character, supporting her mother and three brothers and sisters while her father tries to reestablish his reputation by building up a medical practice in the West.

Lee is clearly not a major writer. Her nonfiction work is unoriginal and excessively didactic. In her novels the characters are mostly flat, the plots contrived, and the moralism pervasive. Yet the fiction is memorable for its heroines: independent, unsentimental, hard-working, intelligent, self-supporting, self-respecting, contented, and moral, these women were realistic models for the many women of the 19th century who wanted to be useful rather than merely decorative members of their society. To the modern reader, these heroines show that the strong, independent woman had a place as a figure of admiration and imitation in the pre-Civil War years.

Other Works:

The Backslider (1835). The Contrast; or, Modes of Education (1837). Fourth Experiment of Living: Living Without Means (1837). The Harcourts (1837). Living on Other People's Means; or, The History of Simon Silver (1837). New Experiments: Means Without Living (1837). Three Experiments of Living (1837). Historical Sketches of Old Painters (1838). The Life and Times of Martin Luther (1839). Rosanna; or, Scenes in Boston (1839). The Life and Times of Thomas Cranmer (1841). Tales (1842). The Huguenots in France and America (1843). The Log Cabin; or, The World before You (1844). Sketches and Stories from Life: For the Young (1850). Familiar Sketches of Sculpture and Sculptors (1854). Memoir of Pierre Toussaint (1854).