Selections from Eliza Leslie

Editor’s Introduction

xi “No writer of fiction in our country has ever had a wider, or more interested circle of readers [than Leslie]; and this is clearly proved by the increased circulation of all those publications in which her name has appeared as a regular contributor.” john s. hart, Female Prose Writers of America, 1852 By her own account, Eliza Leslie (1787–1858) “had begun to copy poetry before [she] was twelve years old—and to scribble it before . . . ten.” Leslie was a seasoned writer and editor when she acknowledged these early “scribbl[ings]” as “foolish attempts” at poetry in a letter to her publisher, Henry Carey Baird. In the years intervening her first copying of verse and this letter, Leslie had become a composer of her own stories and essays as well as a regular contributor to and editor of periodical publications and gift annuals. Her literary ventures also included translating the prose tales and culinary works of others and eventually compiling her own. As publisher John S. Hart wrote of her at midcentury,“an interested circle of readers” looked for works that bore Leslie’s name (26).1 Much sought after for advice about the literary marketplace, Leslie was visited by fans during approximately the last ten years of her life, when she lived at the United States Hotel in Philadelphia. Judging from her correspondence, she appears to have obliged her devotees. For example, during a week in Editor’s Introduction xii Editor’s Introduction October 1847, a Mr. Pierce of New Orleans requested that she sit for the painting of a miniature. He paid the extravagant price of fifty dollars for the portrait, a gift for his daughters, plus at least twelve additional dollars for the frame, since he insisted on “one of the handsomest and newest style.” Leslie indulged him,“though [she] could very ill spare the time”away from her writing, to sit for an hour each morning.The resulting image, according to Leslie, was “by no means so handsome as [Thomas] Sully’s portrait of [her],” yet it was “a more correct likeness” (To Miss Gertrude Leslie). Thomas Sully’s portrait of Leslie, which appeared in Godey’s Lady’s Book in January 1846, also illustrates the height of Leslie’s fame in this decade. Perhaps the foremost portrait painter of antebellum America, Sully was well known for his portraits of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. As Godey’s indicated in an accompanying article, “the writings of Miss Leslie are too well known to require description or enumeration” (“Our Contributors” 2). By bringing together a sampling of Leslie’s writings, as publishers often did in the 1840s, Selections from Eliza Leslie reflects the stature she held in the mid-nineteenth century. After Leslie ’s shorter works appeared in periodicals such as Godey’s, they were often gathered and bound in volumes—an indication that publishers believed a market existed for volumes bearing her name. As Godey’s points out in its essay on Leslie, for example, “The greater portion of her ‘Pencil Sketches’originally appeared in our pages”(“Our Contributors”2). While nineteenth-century publishers such as Carey and Hart of Philadelphia and Monroe and Francis of Boston attempted to use her name to turn a profit, this volume’s goal is instead to introduce contemporary readers to this once-prominent writer and editor with a view more complete and nuanced than any single reprint story, scholarly article, or culinary volume could provide. Thus, this xiii Editor’s Introduction volume collects some of Leslie’s tales for children, instructional essays for girls and women, popular culinary texts, and fictional pieces intended for adult females. Relative to the sheer breadth of Leslie’s oeuvre, the brevity of this collection prevents what might be called a fair, representative selection. A bibliography of Leslie’s works is included to provide readers with a better sense of her pervasiveness in mid-nineteenth century print culture and also to indicate her near absence from twentieth-century literary reprint editions. The bibliography demonstrates the true range of Leslie’s writings . Accompanied by the volume’s reprinted literary works and the information provided in this introduction, it should prompt scholars of nineteenth-century writers to pursue further study of this fascinating literary figure. The selections provide examples of themes, tones, and styles that frequently appeared in Leslie’s works. While this introduction comments upon these aspects of Leslie’s writings, it...