Women Writers of the American West, 1833-1927 by Nina Baym

Abstract

 Reviews who deserves enormous credit for her achievements . She generated constant controversy and the appearance of hypocrisy because she advocated “ladylike” behavior for suffragists even as she engaged in questionable internal political manipulations and infuriated many of her contemporaries. Ross-Nazzal’s study helps us understand her difficult position — determined and resourceful but constrained by financial problems and prevailing gender norms — and appreciate the extent of her impressive accomplishments. Rebecca Mead Northern Michigan University Women Writers of the American West, 1833–1927 by Nina Baym University of Illinois Press, Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield, 2011. Bibliography, index. 384 pages. $40.00 cloth. In 1978, at the beginning of what has become a distinguished career,Nina Baym investigated the American domestic novel in Woman’s Fiction : A Guide to Novels by and about Women in America, 1820–70. Compiling the works of forty-eight women authors,some well-known, others obscure, she analyzed plot devices and narrative styles in 130 novels. This focus enabled Baym to speculate on female authors’ understanding of woman’s“self-development,” since most of the texts centered on the process of a young woman’s character formation. Overturning the paradigm that women writers — and their eager audiences — were inconsequential to the nineteenth century’s cultural and intellectual milieu, Baym’s pioneering work (and a subsequent excellent study of antebellum women historians) helped define parameters for literary research and led two generations of scholars to focus on the intellectual lives of women. In her latest work, Baym offers a similar bio-bibliographic approach to exploring women’s writing but moves west beyond the Mississippi River to understand “the subject’s importance to women writers and . . . women writers’importance to the subject in their own day” (p. 1). In the scope of this volume — 343 authors and 640 texts — she far exceeds what she achieved in Woman’s Fiction.And there are methodological echoes to her prior work.Only books are evaluated because, Baym tells us, a book makes a permanent statement and “has iconic status” (p. 2). In Women Writers of the American West, however, the focus is not only on fiction.Baym describes poetry miscellanies, histories,travel writing,and promotional tracts as well as novels. The volume is organized first by sub-region and then chronologically as Anglo-Europeans sought settlement. Baym begins in 1833, citing MaryAustin Holley’s promotional guide,Notes on Texas, as the earliest antebellum western text she unearthed; she ends in 1927 with Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop, “to my mind one of the very greatest of western books” (p. 1). The text thus opens with Texas and Oklahoma in the 1830s and moves to the Pacific Northwest during the same decade.The chapter titled “Upper California and Nevada” leads with women’s writing on the Gold Rush and mining, and “Utah” centers on women’s pro- and anti-Mormon poetry, history, and fiction. In “Colorado,” Baym writes,“women’s writing is about the sublime Rocky Mountains and the transformation of the place in the decade after the discovery of gold in 1858” (p. 116).Subsequent chapters investigate the Great Plains, the High Plains, Southern California and Nevada,and the Southwest; trail and travel narratives receive separate treatment.The book concludes with informative,brief biographical sketches on each author. Baym asserts that her purpose is descriptive and not analytical, and this is obvious in her pithy illustrations. Full plots are not illuminated. But, as she notes, “description  OHQ vol. 112, no. 4 always implies a point of view” (p. 2). Each sub-region,therefore,has a theme.Great Plains writers’ “told of failure repeatedly averted by women’s pioneer tenacity,”while women of the High Plains “saw the area as underpopulated, underdeveloped, and underappreciated” (pp. 135, 165). The Pacific Northwest generally, and Oregon specifically, was apparently populated by whiners: “Women’s Oregon literature took the form of complaint” (p. 43). There are, perhaps, two reasons for her disparaging conclusion , pointing on the one hand to Baym’s methodology, and on the other to a persistent gap in literary scholarship. In evaluating books alone rather than (or along with) women’s newspaper and journal writings (which admittedly would have been an...