Texas Woman of Letters: Karle Wilson Baker (review)

"I am quite content to be obscure while I am living," Karle Wilson Baker once wrote, "but I must be recognized after I am dead" (p. 170). Some wishes are more easily fulfilled than others. Baker (1878–1960) was hardly unknown during her lifetime. A longtime resident of Nacogdoches, she was Texas's most prominent poet during the first half of the twentieth century, and she was the author of two bestselling novels, including Family Style (1937), which chronicled the East Texas oil boom. It was only after her death that Baker's reputation began to fade, and she is almost unheard of today.

In Texas Woman of Letters: Karle Wilson Baker, Sarah Ragland Jackson seeks to revive Baker's literary prestige, and she joins scholars such as Sylvia Grider, Lou Rodenberger, and Betty Wiesepape in recovering women's contributions to early Texas letters.

Jackson's biography is meticulously researched, and it benefits from numerous oral interviews, as well as the access she gained to privately held family papers. Jackson quotes extensively from Karle Wilson Baker's own works, letters, and journal entries, providing readers with some sense of Baker's approach to life and art. Baker experienced a "famine-like craving" (p. 26) to be around other writers, yet as Jackson points out, deep East Texas was hardly a literary center. Baker's success as a writer is a testament as much to her perseverance as it is to her talent.

Jackson's research offers unique insights, as when she charts Baker's relationships with editors and describes Baker's use of ESP to engage "cowriters from the spirit world" (p. 148). Yet a sense of proportionality is often missing from the account. Jackson provides exhaustive detail about relatively trivial matters, such as the secondary sources Baker consulted while writing a historical novel. Yet little attention is given to more substantive issues, such as Baker's relationships with those closest to her, including her husband.

Also missing is any sense of Karle Wilson Baker's dealings with African Americans. Given that she lived and worked in East Texas, this oversight is akin to writing a biography of a South Texas writer without mentioning people of Mexican descent. At times the exclusion seems almost deliberate. Jackson does relate a single episode involving one of Baker's servants, whom she describes only as "the black man." While the man's name is not given in the text, the endnote identifies him as Henry Mathews. Jackson displays no such reticence about providing names a few pages later, when she lists several individuals who attended a Baker reading.

Jackson is clearly enamored of her subject, and Karle Wilson Baker emerges as an appealing, headstrong woman who defied long odds to carve out an impressive literary career. But Jackson, a one-time English professor, is also obligated to make a case for why Baker's work remains relevant today. How, for example, does Baker's novel Family Style inform our current understanding of the East Texas oil boom? How does her work compare to that of Winifred Sanford, a contemporary of hers who is much-admired by Texas literary scholars today? A deeper issue, often unacknowledged by those who seek to resuscitate early literary efforts, is that not all literature deserves to be recovered. Perhaps Karle Wilson Baker's work should be exhumed for modern readers. But in the absence of a compelling argument, or any attempt to place Baker's work within a larger literary context, few will be convinced of that necessity.