From Periodical to Book in Her Early Career: E. D. E. N. Southworth’s Letters to Abraham Hart

E. D. E. N. Southworth’s correspondence with Henry Peterson of the Saturday Evening Post and Robert Bonner of the New York Ledger, both of whom serialized her novels in their weekly story papers, is sometimes dramatic and emotional. In September 1849 Peterson chided Southworth for a “capital literary error” in an installment of her novel The Deserted Wife, in which the Reverend Withers uses his patriarchal authority to maneuver the young, unwilling Sophie Churchill into marriage. The incident would make readers “thro[w] down the tale in disgust,” he warns, and he omitted it from the serialization. In December 1854 he raised objections to a chapter of Miriam, the Avenger in which Marian Mayfield succumbs to Thurston Willcoxen’s demands for a secret marriage. Explaining that publishing the installment “would have ruined you and the Post,” he proclaims, “I stand between you and literary perdition.”¹ In her letters to Bonner, for whose paper she started writing in 1857 after leaving Peterson’s Post, Southworth repeatedly praises Bonner for saving her (implicitly from Peterson). In December 1869, she proclaims, “The first day that you entered my little cottage” fifteen years ago was “a day, blessed beyond all other days of my life.” She dramatically describes herself “as dying from the combined effect of over work and under pay, of anxiety and of actual privation” before he “saved [her] life” by hiring her to write for the Ledger. These letters, part of a substantial collection of Southworth materials held by the Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library at Duke University and available for loan on microfilm, are quoted frequently, including in two influential, multi-figure biographical studies of nineteenth-century women’s authorship, Mary Kelley’s Private Woman, Public Stage and Susan Coultrap-McQuin’s Doing Literary Business. Drawing on these emotional, dramatic letters and others at Duke, scholars have portrayed Peterson as an overbearing villain, Bonner as South-worth’s gentlemanly savior, and Southworth herself as relatively passive, chafing under Peterson’s patriarchal bullying but powerless to improve her situation until Bonner made her a salaried contributor to the Ledger.²

The E. D. E. N. Southworth Papers at Duke include a small number of letters from Henry Peterson to Southworth and many letters from Southworth to Bonner from the late 1850s through 1890. Although few letters from Bonner to Southworth from 1856 and 1857 are present, the collection does not, in any instance, provide both sides of an epistolary transaction with either Bonner or Peterson.³ The Peterson correspondence is particularly fragmentary, consisting of only four Peterson letters from the period during which Southworth actively contributed to the Post (1849 through September 1856) and one additional Peterson letter (from December 1856) that inaugurated what became a public dispute about whether she had contracted to write a serial for publication in the Post in 1857. Crucially, Southworth’s voice is entirely absent from this archive’s sparse coverage of her early career. Nevertheless, based on the two Peterson letters quoted above (supplemented by editorial notices in the Post and with the content of Southworth’s letters inferred from Peterson’s), scholars have drawn vivid pictures of Peterson and Southworth’s conflicts over what he saw as the excessive length and immorality of her serial novels.⁴

This essay introduces Southworth’s ten letters to a third male intermediary, Abraham Hart, her book publisher from 1851 to 1853, in order to complicate this understanding of her authorial practice and her relationship to the literary market. In a recent review essay in Legacy, Elizabeth Hewitt praises a shift in scholarly approaches to authors’ letters, from treating them as “treasure troves of biographical information” (including “compositional practices” and “business negotiations”) to attending to “epistolary writing as a literary genre in its own right” (272). One can hardly imagine less “literary” letters than Southworth’s to Hart, which focus on title pages, engravings, book orders, and contracts. It is scarcely surprising that scholars have preferred the drama and emotion of her correspondence with Peterson and Bonner concentrated in...