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Three: A Literary Life, 1870–1890
- University of Missouri Press
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38 Three A Literary Life, 1870–1890 By the time she returned to St. Joseph in 1869, Mary Alicia Owen seems to have set her sights on a career as a writer. She was fortunate in that her family’s circumstances afforded her the leisure to make life choices based on her interests rather than on the pursuit of financial stability. Women of her social standing had to be careful in pursuing a career because they faced the real prospect of losing their status if it became known that they worked outside the home. Historian Janice Brandon-Falcone has observed that this was especially difficult for women of Owen’s social class who, for one reason or another, were unable to support themselves. Because wage labor was judged to be beneath women of status, those who were forced to work out of necessity found few options open to them. BrandonFalcone notes that the St. Joseph culture maven Constance Runcie faced this dilemma after her husband James, a minister in the Christ Episcopal Church, died in the late 1880s. For a woman of Runcie’s standing, who could not make ends meet without her husband’s income, only occupations that could be performed inside her home were acceptable. While some women augmented their incomes by teaching students or by giving music lessons, Runcie survived by presenting concerts and lectures inside her large house. For Owen, who appears to have decided early in life to forgo marriage and the prospect of dependence on a man, a literary career was ideal. It allowed her to engage her intellect and imagination even as she remained at home on Ninth Street with her parents and siblings. In her early career as a writer, Owen most often submit- A Literary Life 39 ted her stories to publishers under the pseudonym Julia Scott. This leads us to wonder if Owen, or members of her family, worried that even writing might be considered to be an unseemly occupation for a woman of standing.1 Before leaving for Vassar, Owen had begun to give readings at meetings of one of the young women’s social clubs to which she belonged . According to Brandon-Falcone, nineteenth-century study and literary clubs provided women with an outlet for their creativity and intellectual interests. The clubs created “a safe, nonpublic place where they could present to one another essays, poetry and stories they had written.”2 While the gregarious Owen likely enjoyed the opportunity to speak in front of others, the readings also allowed her to commit some of her own story ideas to paper. “It was natural , I think, that [Mary] began to write when she returned from Vassar ,” Juliette Owen told a newspaper reporter in 1941. “She started by contributing a column on old settlers to a weekly newspaper, The Saturday Democrat, I believe it was called, and by composing bits of verse . . . Soon, she was trying her hand at letters of travel, book reviews and short stories.” George E. King, an Indiana native who had practiced law and taught school in Missouri, published the St. Joseph Saturday Democrat for only four years, from about 1879 to 1883. Because the paper was short-lived and copies are difficult to find, scholars have yet to identify the writings Owen produced for it.3 In time, Mary recognized that new opportunities in the expanding world of publishing allowed her to write for a broader regional and even national audience. After the Civil War, the popular press exploded with a new array of periodicals, many of which were looking for writers to contribute short stories. Owen discovered that she had a knack for producing two kinds of stories for which magazine publishers had a need. She was able to write stories with romantic plots that were aimed specifically at the growing audience of women readers. Owen also found that she was adept at drawing upon her experiences as a Missourian to write what were known at the time as local-color stories. Beginning in 1870, Owen, usually writing under the name Julia Scott, published poems and short fiction in magazines such as The Century, Ballou’s Monthly Magazine, Prairie Farmer, and Overland Magazine. While Owen’s biographers have often alluded to her early poems and stories, the works themselves have been overlooked. Perhaps [44.201.99.133] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 07:37 GMT) 40 Mary Alicia Owen because a complete bibliography of Mary Alicia Owen’s published stories and poems has...