Barbara Hofland's Profession: Questioning the Calling

Abstract

Little known to contemporary readers, Barbara Hofland published one volume of poems, twenty-one novels, and forty-three children's works between 1805 and her death in 1846. While her novels rarely went into second editions, her children's works were widely read on both sides of Atlantic and in French, Spanish, and German translations (Butts 5). (1) Like Charlotte Smith, Felicia Hemans, Eliza Parsons, Mary Russell Mitford, and Letitia Landon, Hofland wrote to support her family. Before her marriage to brilliant but improvident artist, she published occasional verse, and after his death wrote prose to provide for her son. Reflecting her own life, her tales for children depict families encountering similar financial difficulties and solutions: her female characters work as milliners (a craft in which she was trained), teachers (a profession she briefly attempted), piecework sewers, and governesses to support their children or siblings. None of her characters choose writing for their career. Nevertheless, in demonstrating need for both men and women to apply their talents, including artistic talents, for money, Hofland's novellas present sustained defense of her own authorship. In particular, her trilogy of widow novellas, The Officer's Widow and her Young Family (1809). The Clergyman's Widow and her Young Family (1812), and The Merchant's Widow and her Young Family (1814), use occasion of children entering professional life to question what kind of labor positions family in middle classes. Hofland's portrayal of labor and class reflects two publishing traditions. First, following Sarah Trimmer and Hannah More, Hofland joined Evangelical children's authors such as Lucy Cameron, Mary Butt Sherwood, and Elizabeth Sandham in writing moral tales teaching piety and fortitude. (2) Like these Evangelical writers, Hofland portrays willingness to work as sign of virtue. Second, Hofland published at times with William Lane's Minerva Press and with Lane's successor A.K. Newman. Like other Minerva authors she portrays women's work as form of economic empowerment (although rewarding her characters in end with prosperous marriages). (3) Writing from both perspectives, Hofland's Evangelical notions of virtue grant middle class status to laboring women while her ideal of service to gives their work professional characteristics. In her model, all work that serves one's family qualifies as profession, and working women can mark their families' middle class status as well as domestic angels in house. On few occasions in which she discusses her role as author. Hofland suggests that writing for children is simply an extension of acceptable female labors, mothering and teaching. Hofland dedicates Son of Genius to her own son, and distinguishes her children's books from hack writing because she claims they teach virtue: in preface to The Officer's Widow, she insists that she writes to inculcate concepts such as filial duty in her young readers. Nevertheless, Hofland also writes for money, and working for money undermines middle class model of feminine purity that allows her to teach children morality in first place. As Mary Poovey has noted, a woman who wrote for publication threatened to collapse ideal from which her authority was derived (125). In novellas, in defending women's work as whole, she also defends women's literary work. In milliners and piecework sewers. Hofland implicitly portrays writing as productive profitable labor rather than an artistic calling, labor that is compatible with middle-class femininity. While some male contemporaries considered art as otherworldly expressions of genius, Hofland believed that art was worldly profession, theme she explores in her popular The Son of Genius. Mr. Lewis, highly acclaimed but impoverished painter, refuses offers of patronage, although his wife and son are destitute, insisting that the independence of his mind shall never yield to . …