The Worlds of Lucy Larcom, 1824-1893 by Shirley Marchalonis (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS Marchalonis, Shirley. The Worlds of Lucy Larcom, 1824—1893. Athens: The Univ. of Georgia Press, 1989. 326 pp. Cloth: $40.00. Shirley Marchalonis refuses to sensationalize, overinterpret, inflate, or otherwise exaggerate her subject. She lets her narrative quietly follow the contours of Lucy Larcom's life, which Larcom herself sought to keep quiet and still. The happy result is an unusually solid and full portrait of a writer whose life and career matter both for themselves and for the ways in which they reflect many standard white middleclass attitudes and values in the United States in the nineteenth century. Born in New England, Larcom worked as a very young woman in the Lowell Mills, as she would later recount in the book for which she is now best known, A New England Girlhood (1889). She then travelled west with a small group of friends and family to homestead in Missouri. Being no pioneer, she eventually returned East, where she taught for a time at Wheaton Seminary for young ladies in Massachusetts. But she hated teaching, the principal occupation open at the time to a respectable middle-class white woman such as herself. So she finally quit and decided once and for all to try to make her living by devoting herself to writing, the work she loved. She never married, though she could have; and she succeeded handsomely in making a reputation for herself as an author. She became well known for her writing and as the close friend and colleague of the revered poet Whittier, with whom she collaborated on several editing projects. To her irritation, it is worth noting, Larcom found herself exploited in this co-editing in terms of the workload. Still, as Marchalonis points out, Lucy Larcom rejected the notion that she had a career: "It was too harsh and masculine a concept to suit the acceptable image of a woman poet singing her songs" (p. 218). Larcom was, in other words, the perfect (complex) product of her class, culture, region, and gender-socialization, which is what makes this book so valuable. Lucy Larcom worked in a mill, homesteaded in the West, taught school, refused to marry, and wrote herself into the inner circle of the Boston publishing world. But she shuddered from thinking of herself as nonconformist or extraordinary. Indeed, it irritated her to listen to other women parade their past in self-congratulatory fashion. As she wrote late in life to a friend: " 'And don't you think it is getting a little tiresome—this posing as factory girls of the olden time? . . . It is very much like politicians boasting of carrying their dinner in a tin-pail in their youth. What if they did? I declined having anything to do with Factory-Girls' Day at the Mechanics' fair—because I do not believe in looking at them as a separate class. It is undemocratic. I am proud to be a working-woman, as I always have been, —but that special occupation was temporary, and not the business of our lives, we all knew, girls as we were' " (p. 256). To be sure, this is a standard expression of Yankee feminine modesty, and probably snobbishness as well, but it is also honest. Larcom was both unusual and ordinary. Like most people, she achieved what she did in her life, she says, and Marchalonis wisely listens and reproduces, primarily by adapting and conforming. Her life as Marchalonis presents it is an important lesson in the success that certain women in the United States in the nineteenth century could achieve without revolution or outright rebellion. Marchalonis' biography is gracefully written and carefully documented and developed . Offering a thoughtful and substantial portrait of a neglected but significant nineteenth-century writer, it stands as an excellent example of how the new scholarship on women, women writers, and women's cultures continues to deepen and enrich the study of American literature. Tufts UniversityElizabeth Ammons ...