Woods, Katharine Pearson

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WOODS, Katharine Pearson

Born 28 January 1853, Wheeling, Virginia (now West Virginia); died 19 February 1923, Baltimore, Maryland

Daughter of Alexander and Josephine McCabe Woods

The oldest of three daughters of a tobacco merchant, Katharine Pearson Woods grew up in Baltimore. Her father was descended from an early Huguenot emigrant to Virginia, and her mother's family of Irish Protestants had been eminent in colonial Pennsylvania before an ancestor moved to Virginia at the time of the Revolution. In Virginia, the McCabes were prominent in literature and education, two important influences in the work of Woods.

In 1874 she became a postulant with the All Saints Sisters of the Poor, and although she withdrew because of poor health, the religious experience led to her work in charity and the religious and moral tone of her writing. For 10 years (1876-86), she taught in girls' schools and worked with the poor. The bulk of her writing was done in the 12 years from 1889 to 1901. After that period, she lived mostly in Baltimore, serving the community in charitable functions, social concerns, and feminist activities. From 1903 to 1912, she worked as a missionary and taught kindergarten. Of particular interest is a paper she read that "awakened" Charleston to the problem of woman suffrage (Woman's Journal, May 1891). In 1893-94, she received a fellowship from the College Settlements Association to study factory working conditions. Results of her investigation were published in the American Journal of Statistics (December 1895).

Woods' first novel, Metzerott, Shoemaker (1889), secretly written and anonymously published, reflects her experience among the German working people of Wheeling. In this and her two other social novels (A Web of Gold, 1890, and From Dusk to Dawn, 1892), Woods advocates a just relationship, based on Christian cooperation, between capital and labor.

John: A Tale of King Messiah (1896), Woods' first religious novel, is based closely on the biblical narrative of the lives and relationships of Christ and John the Baptist, beginning with Christ's rescue of a little girl, Ingar, from a burning village and continuing through the crucifixion and resurrection. There are occasional passages of beauty in her descriptions of the Holy Land, and the drama of the narrative itself is sustained by the biblical source. The flow, however, of the narrative is frequently interrupted by prolonged moralistic and didactic passages directed to the reader.

The Son of Ingar (1897) departs further from biblical sources and takes up the story of the girl, Ingar, and of her son, Theophilus, in the difficult years of the formation of the early Christian church. The first scene of the novel is well constructed and offers promising subtle undertones of an interesting study, but Woods almost immediately retreats into her more usual moral tone and digresses from her tale. The narrative as a whole is not well sustained, and Woods tends to lose some of the strands she has been weaving, leading to a final contrived unraveling.

In The True Story of Captain John Smith (1901), Woods makes a determined effort to redeem the somewhat tarnished reputation of Smith, the founder of Virginia. Family ties to Virginia no doubt influenced her choice of subject. As she explains in the preface, she attempts to "substantiate Smith's account of himself…by…enclosing, so to speak, his autobiography in a framework of the manners and customs of the times." The text includes documentary maps and photographs which are of interest to the student of colonial history. The text itself is readable, but useful only to the history student.

Woods' greatest strength in her fiction is evident in her description of natural settings, reflecting a deep love of nature; that love and appreciation is also evident in her poems, several of which were published in Harper's in the first years of the century. However, characterization in the novels lacks depth, and her narratives are strained. As a whole, her work is limited in literary quality by these formal problems as well as by the didactic moral tone.