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  • Mary Rankin 1821-1889
  • Robin L. Cadwallader

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Born and raised in rural west-central Pennsylvania, Mary Rankin is not a writer known to literary scholars today. Plagued by a lifetime of illness, she produced only one book, Daughter of Affliction: A Memoir of the Protracted Sufferings and Religious Experience of Miss Mary Rankin.1 That book, the collaborative product of Rankin, her physicians, and her community, offers readers an example of nineteenth-century conversion and illness narratives, while its attention to the details of life in a small town anticipates the later interests of local color fiction. As such, it is worthy of consideration for what it can tell us today about nineteenth-century rural America and the life experiences of a woman outside of the dominant literary culture of urban New England.2

Barbara Leslie Epstein, in "Domesticity and Female Subordination," argues that middle-class women had two choices in the mid-nineteenth century: marriage or poverty. Women's economic power, she insists, came from marriage, and marriage was an act of social responsibility. Expected to be subservient to [End Page 117] God and to man, many middle-class women of the mid-nineteenth century accepted these constraints gracefully. While Epstein's claims may accurately describe the condition of a limited class of urban white women, they do little to elucidate the conditions of women who were not of elevated social class, who did not live in urban centers, and who did not accept such constraints gracefully. Mary Rankin is one such woman. The daughter of a widowed, working-class mother, Rankin transcended the bonds of marriage and poverty through illness and religion, becoming a beacon of hope for her immediate community and those who read her book.

Due to her illness, Rankin was physically unable to write her narrative. Instead, after much prompting from friends, who presumed her to be on her deathbed, she "permit[ted] notes to be taken, so that a sketch of her life might be published." These notes, recorded between 1842 and 1843 by the Rev. J. D. Willoughby, were lost. Following this loss, Rankin again fell seriously ill. Upon her recovery, she was "repeatedly urged . . . to have the notes rewritten" (Good 9). For some time, she refused, but when she once again fell ill, she decided that it was "the will of her heavenly Father" that she tell her story (Good 10). As a result, she "communicated" her story to D. R. Good, her "friend and physician," through intermittent bouts of illness so extreme that she could not sit up in bed, permit any noise to be made around her, or speak to anyone. In 1857, finding that the cost of printing the memoir would be prohibitive, Rankin explains that she allowed the Rev. I. Potter to condense the text and, following the advice of the Rev. D. X. Junkin, omitted her poetry from the manuscript (160). With the alterations, the United Brethren Publishing House agreed to print her book. Following the sale of all four thousand copies, Rankin determined to republish her story, restoring the parts of the text that had been excised from the first edition and adding a Part Third that offered letters of support from readers throughout the country and continued the narrative to include a relation of events during the twelve years that had passed since the first publication (161). With her revisions, the book was published two more times, each printing apparently as successful as the first.

Taking the form of autobiography, Rankin's memoir opens with an account of her birth and early life:

I was born in Huntington County, Pennsylvania, A.D. 1821. My parents were humble but respectable. My father died when I was very young, leaving a family of seven children. Of my father I scarcely remember anything. . . . Shortly after my father's death, my mother and five of the children (myself among the number,) took fever, of which my second sister died in less than a month. I was, in the mean time, taken by kind friends and cared for, and recovered from the attack much sooner than the rest of the family...

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