Kirkland, Caroline Matilda (1801–1864)

views updated

Kirkland, Caroline Matilda (1801–1864)

American author who was an early exponent of frontier realism. Name variations: (pseudonym) Mrs. Mary Clavers. Born Caroline Matilda Stansbury on January 11, 1801, in New York City; died on April 6, 1864, in New York City; eldest of 11 children and one of two daughters of Samuel Stansbury (an insurance agent, book seller, and inventor) and Eliza (Alexander) Stansbury; attended Quaker girls' schools run by her aunt in Mamaroneck and Manhattan, New York; married William Kirkland (an educator and editor), on January 10, 1828; children: seven (three of whom died in childhood).

Selected works:

A New Home—Who'll Follow? or Glimpses of Western Life (1839); Forest Life (1842); Western Clearings (1845); Holidays Abroad (1849); The Evening Book; or, Fireside Talks on Morals and Manners (1851); Garden Walks with the Poets (1852); A Book for the Home Circle; or Familiar Thoughts on Various Topics, Literary, Moral, and Social (1853); The Helping Hand (1853); Memoirs of Washington (1857); The School-Girl's Garland (1864).

Considered the first author to write about the American frontier in realistic terms, Caroline Kirkland grew up in a comparatively cosmopolitan setting. Born Caroline Stansbury in New York City in 1801, she attended Quaker schools run by her aunt in Mamaroneck and Manhattan, and after completing her own schooling in 1820, assisted her aunt in managing a succession of schools in Poughkeepsie, New Hartford, and Skaneateles, New York. In 1828, after a long engagement, she married William Kirkland, a tutor in classics at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York. Following her marriage, Kirkland assisted her husband in running a girls' school in Geneva, New York, and there gave birth to the couple's first four children. (They would ultimately have seven children, three of whom died in childhood.)

In 1835, the family moved to Michigan, where William took a job as the first principal of the Detroit Female Seminary. In 1836, when William purchased 1,300 acres of marshy land in Livingston County, Michigan, around 60 miles northwest of Detroit, the family moved to Pinckney, a tiny village that turned out to be little more than a clearing in the forest. Over the next six years, Kirkland, whose notions of the American wilderness had been shaped by such romantic authors as Chateaubriand, endured the most primitive of conditions. To ease her isolation and intellectual boredom, she wrote long, amusing letters to her friends back East, recounting her new life. The letters eventually grew into the extended narrative A New Home—Who'll Follow? or Glimpses of Western Life, which was published in 1839 under the pseudonym "Mrs. Mary Clavers." Thinly disguised as a novel, the work is an autobiographical and realistic account of frontier life in "Montacute," a settlement bearing remarkable similarities to Pinckney. Lacking in sentimental convention, the book set a new standard for frontier fiction and was followed by Forest Life (1842), a sequel of sorts, although it was written in the form of a series of essays.

In 1843, the Kirklands proclaimed their real estate venture a failure and returned to New York City, where William took up journalism, first working as an editor for the New York Evening Mirror and then founding and editing the Christian Inquirer, a Unitarian weekly. Meanwhile, Caroline ran a school from her home and pursued her writing, producing a second collection of stories on the frontier theme, Western Clearings (1845). Following her husband's death in October 1846, she became the sole support of her family and thus pursued her career more aggressively. Kirkland succeeded William as editor of the Christian Inquirer, then in 1847 began an 18-month tenure as editor of the Union Magazine of Literature and Art. In 1848, she visited Europe and upon her return published two volumes of letters she had contributed to the magazine during her journey, under the title Holidays Abroad, or Europe from the West. Her later work, including a series of gift annuals and compilations of her stories, as well as some memoirs of her school days, was more conventional.

Described as attractive, energetic, and full of good humor, Kirkland was a central figure in the New York literary community. Her circle of friends included William Cullen Bryant and the novelist N.P. Willis, and she frequently attended the literary salon of author Anne C.L. Botta . Kirkland was also a woman of social conscience. She served on the executive committee of the Home for Discharged Female Convicts and, in 1853, wrote The Helping Hand on its behalf. In 1864, during the Civil War, she devoted three months to the preparation of the Metropolitan Fair to aid the U.S. Sanitary Commission. On April 6, 1864, shortly after the fair opened, Kirkland died in her sleep. She was buried in Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn.