Fiction Worth More than a "Summary Statement": Three Women Authors of the Early Overland Monthly

Scholars of nineteenth-century American fiction recognize the Overland Monthly chiefly as the publication that launched Bret Harte onto the national literary scene. As the magazine's founding editor from July 1868 through December 1870, Harte not only printed his own short fiction and poems in all but three of the first thirty issues but also set the overall tone for the first incarnation of this periodical (1868–1875).¹ For print historians, the material aspects of the early Overland, described by Frank Luther Mott as having been a "dignified, handsome, literary [periodical]—a Western Atlantic Monthly," provide numerous avenues of inquiry into editing practices, printing, circulation, and readership.² But for scholars interested in the emergence of rural and urban local color, realism, and naturalism, the early Overland provides an important point of access into a literary tradition that developed differently from its Eastern periodical counterparts. While Harte found his niche writing Western tales carefully constructed to give Eastern periodical audiences what they wanted, a cadre of Western women writers supplied the early Overland with tales of stark realism popular with the Western audience but that barely registered with genteel Eastern readers if they registered at all. Perhaps the lack of attention given to these women's stories of the rough life in mining towns was due to their subject matter or treatment; possibly, too, they were slighted because many of these women participated only briefly in the literary marketplace, preferring to support their families and society as teachers and reformers rather than as full-time career authors. The latter is certainly the case with the authors examined in this essay: Lucy Bates Macomber was a minister's wife, Georgiana Bruce Kirby worked tirelessly for the causes of abolition, temperance, and women's suffrage, and Hannah Lloyd Neall was the wife of a prominent merchant and host of the first Quaker meeting on the Pacific Coast.

For whatever reason, these authors' names and unique portrayals of Western life have to a great extent been elided from literary history or been denigrated. When the women authors of the early Overland are mentioned by critics at all, they are usually both discussed and dismissed en masse.³ In 1948, Wallace Stegner famously referred to the women writing during the early Overland era as "a whole generation of lesser local colorists [who] are worth a summary statement, hardly more." Stegner characterizes these authors—whom he does not even name—as approaching "local habits and local characters as a tourist would approach them" and states that "as a group they avoided the commonplace, concerned themselves chiefly with the unusual, were incurably romantic, obsessed with the picturesque, and accurate only to the superficial aspects of their chosen materials."⁴ However, Stegner's assertion that these women were outsiders and thus unable to truly understand and explain the folkways of the region—if they even were inclined to do so—unjustly generalizes the lives and experiences of these women and their work.

The modes of literary production by these women of the early Overland do not, except in a general way, fit easily into a critical infrastructure such as that offered by Richard Brodhead in Cultures of Letters, which casts the production of regional writing as a way to enforce class differences. Neither do they appear to have consciously resisted marketplace imperatives by writing empathetically about their subjects, as Judith Fetterley and Marjorie Pryse in Writing Out of Place assert many women regionalist writers did. The disconnection between Eastern literary consumers and the realities faced by Western authors and their publishers created a fortuitous freedom of expression and ability to experiment with content; the pages of the early Overland contain stories of adultery, prostitution, race relations, greed, degeneration, and death written by women experiencing these events firsthand as they traveled to, lived, and worked with or without their husbands in the Western mining towns and burgeoning metropolis of San Francisco. Neither of Brodhead's binary descriptions of mid-century authors as either "artist-as-professional" or "industrial hand" fit the subset of women authors in...