Slosson, Annie Trumbull

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SLOSSON, Annie Trumbull

Born 18 May 1838, Stonington, Connecticut; died 4 October 1926

Daughter of Gordon and Sarah A. Trumbull; married Edward Slosson, 1867

A popular and critically admired short-story writer, Annie Trumbull Slosson published over 15 collections of short stories between 1878 and 1912 and was a frequent contributor to the Atlantic and Harper's. Her first book, The China Hunter's Club (1878), a collection of dialect stories situated in her native Stonington and the Fraconia Notch area, was considered, along with Sarah Orne Jewett's Deephaven (1877) and Harriet Beecher Stowe's Pogonuc People (1878), to be one of the first identifiable examples of the regional or "local color" genre.

In Seven Dreamers (1891), her second collection of short stories and her first critical and popular success, Slosson introduces a distinctive style and themes that, as a regional writer, she would develop in her later work. There are seven portraits of "dreamers," people Slosson met in small New England villages who function within the restrictive environment of 19th-century rural communities by discarding social conventions and substituting their own system of rituals and beliefs. Her characters are the natural outcasts of society, frequently mentally or physically defective and without family or friends. She portrays their retreat into a private dreamworld as neither pathetic nor grotesque but rather as a practical means of escaping the hard realities of their lives.

Many of Slosson's characters, such as Lucy Ann Breed who thought she'd written Pilgrim's Progress or Miss Prentice who claimed she'd been a pirate, are caricatures of the stereotypical New England eccentric. In her better stories, however, she demonstrated an ability to create more fully realized, realistic characters. In "Deacon Pheby's Selfish Nature," the most powerful story in the collection, she examined the psychological motives behind a young boy's mental disintegration after the death of his sister. Painfully aware of his mother's preference for his deceased sister, he sublimates his own personality and impersonates his sister in the desperate hope of finally winning his mother's love.

In The Heresy of Mehitabel Clark she addressed a question that had concerned other regional writers such as Stowe and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman: how the conscience reconciles its more humanitarian instincts with a faith in Calvinist doctrine. Mehitabel Clark, described as tormented and God-fearing, suddenly abandons orthodox Calvinism and substitutes her own religious system, which involves a benevolent "president" and the "president's son." Although her fellow church members feel conscience-bound to dissociate themselves from Mehitabel, even the devout deacon is forced to admit her conversion has made her "a heap happier, that's the melancholy truth." For Slosson, independent thinkers such as Mehitabel Clark performed an invaluable function by questioning and thereby undermining the accepted beliefs and values of the community.

In Dumb Foxglove, and Other Stories (1893), Slosson examined the innate religious faith of children and their method for reducing the complexity of Calvinist doctrine to a simple system of beliefs applicable to their own lives. In the title story, a terminally ill child refuses to read the catechism and insists instead on concocting curious tales of what her life will be like "when I get to heaven." Eventually the distressed minister realizes her seemingly heretical fantasies are a way of preparing for her imminent death.

Dumb Foxglove was Slosson's last critical and popular success. Like many other regional writers, she was unable to evolve beyond the limited achievement of her early work. Instead she reworked the characters and themes that had succeeded so well in Seven Dreamers and Dumb Foxglove, but she no longer displayed the same artistic control over structure and style. Although contemporary critics had compared her early work favorably with that of Freeman and Jewett, Story-Tell Lib (1900) and A Local Colorist (1912) were faulted for shallow character development and excessive use of dialect.

Other Works:

Fishin' Jimmy (1889). Aunt Leafy (1892). Anna Malann (1894). White Christopher (1901). Aunt Abby's Neighbors (1902). Simples From Master's Garden (1907). A Dissatis-fied Soul (1908). A Little Shephard of Bethlehem (1914). Puzzled Souls (1915). Other People (1918).