To Find My Own Peace: Grace King in Her Journals, 1886-1910

Abstract

These previously unpublished private writings expand our understanding of Grace King (1852-1932) as a writer and as a nineteenth-century, middle-class, white southern woman. A prolific New Orleans author who transcended the local-color genre of her day, King has long been admired for her versatility in many written forms, her depictions of both black and white women in a variety of settings and situations, and her insights into the intricate social structure of her native city. Over a span of forty-six years, King produced four histories, three novels and two novellas, three collections of stories, two biographies, an autobiography, a play, and numerous articles and sketches. At age thirty-four she began a journal to find my own peace in my own life. As Melissa Walker Heidari notes, King's journals offer is so lacking in her published autobiography: humor, irony, and a more candid assessment of herself and others. The Grace King of the autobiography is an interesting subject, but Grace King in her journals is alive and compelling. King's journals became a sourcebook for writing ideas, an outlet for opinions on current issues that she felt uncomfortable discussing publicly, and a record of her experiences at home and on her travels in the northern United States and Europe. She also used her journals as a form of therapy for her grief over the loss of loved ones and for her regrets, both personal and professional. This volume comprises King's journals of 1886-1901, 1904, and 1907-1910. Heidari's introduction puts King's life and work in the context of recent scholarship in women's life narratives and discusses what the journals reveal about such topics as the lives of unmarried women in the nineteenth-century South, the ways Victorian families dealt with diseases like alcoholism and depression, and the challenges facing women writers of the period.