Faraway Women and the "Atlantic Monthly," by Cathryn Halverson

Abstract

Reviewed by: Faraway Women and the "Atlantic Monthly," by Cathryn Halverson Miranda Hickman FARAWAY WOMEN AND THE "ATLANTIC MONTHLY,", by Cathryn Halverson. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2019. 272 pp. $90.00 hardback; $27.95 paperback; $21.99 ebook. Halverson's book, Faraway Women and the "Atlantic Monthly," offers a vivid overview of the work and adventures of four western women writers, all of whom enjoyed what they saw as the good fortune of publishing their life-writing—developed from correspondences and diaries—in the prestigious Atlantic Monthly under the editorship of Ellery Sedgwick, during his long tenure (1908–1938). Halverson's featured writers are Elinore Pruitt Stewart and Hilda Rose, who wrote of homesteading in Wyoming, Idaho, and Alberta; Juanita Harrison, whose My Great, Wide, Beautiful World (1936) follows her travels around the world; and Opal Whiteley, whose diary, supposedly capturing her youth as a child prodigy, was reconstructed by Sedgwick into The Story of Opal (1920). These women contributed to the magazine as newcomers to the profession of writing; appearing in the Atlantic Monthly (publishing in which even acclaimed writers such as Mark Twain and Henry James sought as a plume) brought them new cultural status as bestsellers. Sedgwick sought out such "faraway women," as he called them, to bring to the Atlantic Monthly readership the experiences, expressed in "authentic" prose, of women in parts of the United States remote from the magazine's base in the northeast (p. 39). Sedgwick's [End Page 171] decision to feature the life-writing of many such women writers formed part of his strategy for boosting circulation and re-creating the Atlantic Monthly; he was known for shifting the publication's former emphasis on "literature with a big 'L'" (Sedgwick's phrase), preferred by predecessors such as Bliss Perry, to greater accent on "human interest" and "journalistic" directions (pp. 2, 19). Halverson's richly researched, subtly drawn account brings out the allure such writing held for Atlantic Monthly readers. Halverson herself favors the "faraway" designation since it evokes not only the geographical but also the cultural and socioeconomic distance between these writers and their readers, endowing their narratives with glamour, shaping their style, and conditioning the cultural work achieved by their writing. Their accounts conjured what it was like to pioneer new ground either as homesteader (Stuart and Rose) or traveler and adventurer (Whiteley and Harrison), living beyond received ideas about women's lives. Audiences often felt so connected to such long-distance writers that when Rose wrote of her need for economic assistance in northern Alberta, readers actually sent her provisions and money. Halverson's two previous books—Maverick Autobiographies: Women Writers and the American West (2004) and Playing House in the American West: Western Women's Life Narrative (2013)—likewise brought new serious critical attention to such western women writers, and here she deepens this engagement. Her introduction elegantly articulates the book's contributions. Faraway Women and the "Atlantic Monthly" affords critical revisions of these writers, and it offers the first study focused on early twentieth-century working-class women writers of the American West. Its broader ambition is to provide a "new optic" on western writing by "remapping," "through a sequence of microhistories, the coordinates of American literature," challenging "binary assumptions about East and West, national and regional, cosmopolitan and local, gender and power" (pp. 9, 3). It is also the first study devoted to this era in the evolution of the publication now known as The Atlantic. The book's theoretical framework is constructed from textual scholarship, research on women's partnerships, studies in print culture, and periodical studies. Invoking Jerome McGann, Halverson limns the "textual condition" of these narratives, restoring them to their original periodical context to illuminate their genesis, reception, and impact (p. 10). Her portrait thus features not only these women's writing but also the sociomaterial conditions and collaborative processes generating their work, as well as highlighting both Sedgwick and the powerful cultural phenomenon of the Atlantic Monthly. Tracing the influence of the Atlantic Monthly requires spotlighting Sedgwick himself. Sedgwick's work as editor was crucial to the "making" of these women writers, often right down to the details of preparing their [End...