MITCHELL, Agnes Woods

Born circa 1810s, Scotland; death date unknown

In the preface to her only book, The Smuggler 's Son, and Other Tales and Sketches (1842), Agnes Woods Mitchell suggests the only details of her life available today. She defends the settings of her stories and poems as the realistic result of her "Celtic" childhood. Evidently born in Scotland, Mitchell seems to have been conventionally Presbyterian and relatively comfortable. The preface is dated 1842, Jonesboro, Tennessee, and while Mitchell maintains fierce Scottish loyalties, she apparently thinks of herself as an American author writing for an American public, even comparing a beautiful Highland landscape with "Florida's gardens" in "The Bride of Hawthorne Glen."

Mitchell refers to the works in The Smuggler's Son as her "first fruits," and the sometimes vivid stories alternating with unremarkable verse substantiate her implied roughness. However, Mitchell takes responsibility for her writing and emphasizes that the book "was written chiefly with a view to the improvement of the young" and that, despite aesthetic defects, it contains "instruction with amusement." Mitchell offers spoiled, misguided, but likeable heroines who reform and generally marry well. In the title tale, Roderick M'Alpine, the son of Caledonian rustics, finally marries the wealthy orphan, Jane Rutherford, after he has shown her the discipline of education. Similarly, in "The Bride of Hawthorne Glen," motherless Mary Warner, spoiled by her good-hearted governess who neglects her religious training, reads light fiction and finally visits a gypsy caravan, losing there her diamond engagement ring. "Ever the child of impulse," Mary does at last reform and is forgiven at the story's conclusion.

Mitchell is also fond of irreligious young men; in "Carra's Rest," William Murray unwisely reads Cartesian philosophy; his sister strives to recover him from "delusion" but fails. She dies of grief, but William vows reform at her funeral. In "Frederick Gordon," the central character, a passionate, frivolous young man, fails the woman who loves him, marrying instead Corinna, who turns out to be poor and then dies. Devastated, Gordon shoots himself, and Mitchell spares us no details in her vivid description of his body "all mangled and bloody."

Although Mitchell's work lacks technical elegance, she seems to be aware of literary art and sensitive to language. Her tales are clearly structured; Mitchell repeatedly begins with a scene, then introduces a substantial flashback, only returning to the present at the story's end. Her originality stems from her impressive capturing of Scottish dialects, for her characters speak with charming local syntax and vocabulary. Certainly Mitchell's frequently simple tales and predominately narrative poems are didactic and even moralistic, but their interest for the modern reader lies essentially in their elements of local color.

—CAROLINE ZILBOORG