Mary Edwards Bryan: Her Early Life and Works by Canter Brown and Larry Eugene Rivers (review)

Canter Brown Jr. and Larry Eugene Rivers have written extensively on the history of Florida. With this literary biography they join a group of scholars who are rediscovering the popular periodical literature of the nineteenth-century South, a body of materials once considered so trivial as to merit no interest. However, that literature, much of it written by women, was abundant, widely read, and influential. Rivers and Brown are among those determined that the work should not continue to be “lost.” Mary Edwards Bryan: Her Early Life and Works recovers one woman’s story, interspersing selections of Bryan’s writing with her biography and the history of Florida, Georgia, and Louisiana between the 1830s and the 1880s. These years represent only a portion of Bryan’s life, the period when she wrote for and edited southern periodicals but before she became a popular novelist with a northern publisher. Brown and Rivers write about Bryan during the years of upheaval in her own life and in her native South, judging her later life and novels to be of less interest.

Born in 1839, during the Second Seminole War, Mary Edwards Bryan spent her childhood in frontier towns in the Florida panhandle and southern Georgia. At the age of fourteen, already a published writer, she eloped with Iredell Edward Wyche Bryan, the ne’er-do-well son of a Louisiana planter. Almost immediately, she regretted her choice, but her father and husband conspired to prevent her from getting a divorce. She published an essay about being trapped in a loveless marriage, and subsequent pieces focused on accepting one’s fate. These pieces, like many essays and stories about women’s dilemmas written later in her career, managed to avoid autobiography. Whatever she wrote, she consistently protected her persona as a southern gentlewoman and a professional writer.

Bryan and her husband and children lived on the Red River near Coushatta, Louisiana. Bryan continued to publish lively essays and stories through the death of a son; droughts, floods, and crop failures; the deaths of men she might have loved had she had other choices; the Civil War and Reconstruction; epidemics; economic disasters; and the rise of white supremacist groups that terrorized her neighborhood. These years of turmoil became fodder for stories and essays.

The on-and-off editor of The Sunny South and other magazines, Bryan finally moved to Atlanta where she undertook full-time editorial work, supporting the entire family. She also lived for a time in New York, writing sentimental novels that gained her a national readership. It was, however, the stories of everyday southern life in Bryan’s periodical publications that made her a favorite author throughout the South.

Like Bryan’s output, the research for this book was prodigious. Among other things, Brown and Rivers conducted research in more than 120 southern periodicals. The resurrection of forgotten women writers and popular periodicals of the nineteenth-century South is in its early stages. Mary Edwards Bryan demonstrates one workable approach to a very big task. As a bonus, and thanks in part to the inclusion of pieces of Bryan’s energetic prose, it is a pleasure to read.