Forwarding Literary Interests: James Redpath and the Authorial Careers of Marion Harland, Louisa May Alcott, and Sherwood Bonner

In 1854, Marion Harland (Mary Virginia Terhune) received a fan letter at her home in Richmond, Virginia, from James Redpath, a New York journalist whom she had never met. Redpath had just read her first novel, Alone, and was inspired to do what he could to promote it in the press. "I write to pledge myself to do all in my power to forward your literary interests," he wrote. "I have influence in more than one quarter, and you will hear from me again" (qtd. in Harland, Marion Harland's Autobiography 264). Soon Redpath began to send Harland clippings about her book from newspapers across the country. His work as an abolitionist reporter and publisher helped him to introduce the book to a national audience. His "forwarding" of Harland's "literary interests" was especially notable because those interests did not coincide with his own. As a radical abolitionist who would eventually champion the revolutionary politics of John Brown, Redpath "detested" Harland's romantic depiction of slavery (Harland, Marion Harland's Autobiography 265). Yet he valued the moral message and artistic power of her book and endorsed it on those grounds.

Harland was not the only woman writer whose "literary interests" Redpath supported. Over the course of his varied career as a reporter, publisher, editor, and manager of a speakers' bureau, Redpath worked with a broad array of female authors. He met nightly with ex-slave Elizabeth Keckley to collaborate on the manuscript of Behind the Scenes, for example (Washington 236). He helped to arrange lecture tours for Julia Ward Howe and Caroline H. Dall, among others. As a managing editor of the North American Review, he negotiated publishing contracts with Elizabeth Stuart Phelps and with Jefferson Davis's wife, Varina. As a mentor, editor, and manager, he helped these and other women to negotiate the increasingly complex world of professional authorship.

As the above examples suggest, Redpath supported southern as well as northern women, including those who were on opposite sides of the slavery issue. His ability to navigate these sectional and political differences is my primary focus in this essay. On the one hand, Redpath elided these differences by mentoring and in some cases befriending southern women whose sectional affiliations were very different from his own. On the other hand, his strong political affiliations had a galvanizing effect on all of the women he supported, regardless of region. Although his mentoring was ostensibly literary, his radical views encouraged these women to think about their own political views—views that often reasserted the sectionalism that his mentoring had initially seemed to overcome. While Redpath was seemingly able to separate his radical politics from his literary and personal affiliations, the women he mentored were ultimately less willing to endorse such a separation. Instead, they increasingly allied their literary art with their political visions. Ironically, one of the ways they represented this alliance was by distancing themselves from Redpath in their writings, establishing him as a kind of marker of their youthful idealism and political naïveté.

To explore this effect, I will examine Redpath's relationship to two southern authors, Marion Harland and Sherwood Bonner (Katharine Bonner McDowell), and one northern writer, Louisa May Alcott. Redpath mentored all three women at the beginning of their literary careers: He promoted Harland's first novel, published Alcott's first major work, Hospital Sketches, and befriended Bonner when she came to Boston from Mississippi to pursue her literary career in the 1870s. Yet these women also had a reciprocal influence on Redpath. He credited Harland's writing with preventing him from committing suicide; he used Alcott's works to advance his own work as a social activist; and he fell in love with Bonner. He also appears in the published writings of all three women. Redpath helped to launch their careers, but they ultimately marked the success of those careers by writing him into their own works. By rendering him a character, they acknowledged his role in their literary development even as they showed that, as successful authors, they no...