Back from “That Literary Hell, the Footnote”: Sarah B. Cooper’s Overland Monthly Writings

In an address to the Western Literature Association in 1998, Professor Gary Scharnhorst of the University of New Mexico and long-time editor of American Literary Realism spoke of the challenges of writing literary biography. He concluded his speech with a story about a woman writer named Sarah B. Cooper who began her career in San Francisco following the Civil War. If her name is known at all to literary scholars these days, it is probably as either a proofreader or as a copy editor for Overland Monthly who, in the summer of 1868, tried to kill the now canonical American short story “The Luck of Roaring Camp.” Bret Harte wrote the story while he was editor-in-chief of the Overland, a magazine he had recently helped found and designed to advance California culture and openly compete with Boston’s famous Atlantic Monthly. Allegedly, Cooper’s objection stemmed from the fact that there was the mildest of cursing in the story and that a prostitute gives birth to a child who becomes the center of attention for a group of hard-bitten ’49ers in a gold mining camp. Fortunately, Harte, after much consultation with his publisher and others, ignored the proofreader’s objections and ran his story as he wrote it.

As a result, according to Scharnhorst, Cooper often appears as the “bête noire in Harte scholarship,” variously referred to as a “vestal virgin,” and a “‘prude’ possessed of a ‘meddlesome impertinence’”¹ in such work. Yet he noted how prominent and published Cooper went on to become and how, as a social activist, she was to befriend Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Jane Stanford (wife of Leland Stanford), and Susan B. Anthony. Scharnhorst claimed that by “recovering a few salient details about [Cooper’s] later years, we may at least correct this caricature in Harte scholarship and resurrect her from that literary hell, the footnote. Still, I do not suppose there will ever be a complete life of Sarah B. Cooper. . . . It is, may I suggest, an irreparable loss to literature” (352).

Indeed, Cooper’s own writings for the Overland immediately complicate the picture that previous generations of Harte scholars have drawn for, as even her critics acknowledged over a hundred years ago, whatever her alleged objections may have been to “The Luck of Roaring Camp,” Cooper was a frequent and substantial contributor to the magazine where she was also employed as a copyeditor. This was despite the fact that, as Scharnhorst observes, “According to legend, when Cooper later submitted a story of her own to Harte for publication . . . he returned the manuscript to her with the dismissive comment, ‘I am not editing a Sunday School paper’” (351). Given the fact that for many years Cooper taught the largest adult Sunday School class in the city of San Francisco, this quotation sounds almost too good to be true—perhaps a response, at least in part, to the figure she cut in California in later years. At any rate, her record of publishing in the Overland would seem to belie it. In addition to two Civil War stories, “Brave Mrs. Lyle” and “Old Uncle Hampshire,” Cooper published a short story entitled “Zanie,” a four-part series of essays entitled “Ideal Womanhood,” followed closely by an article entitled “Motherhood” (which amounts to a serialized book), and then a piece on women’s suffrage. Indeed considering this volume of work, Cooper must be credited as one of the foundational voices of the Overland’s heyday. Moreover, her contributions to nineteenth-century social and educational progressivism mark her as one who should have never been condemned to the “literary hell” of the footnote and whose resurrection is long overdue.²

Although Cooper became more involved in educational innovation and eventually gave up her early aspirations of becoming a fiction writer, her two short stories dealing with the Civil War deserve renewed attention. The Overland frequently included war writing that did not fall into line with many of the more popular tropes coming from the Eastern publishing establishment during the Reconstruction Era. Under Harte...