From the Periodical Archives: Susan Warner's "How May an American Woman Best Show Her Patriotism?"

After the January 1851 release of her first and most popular novel, Susan Warner (known by her pen name, Elizabeth Wetherell) spent the rest of her literary career being identified as "the author of The Wide, Wide World." Her literary career before this included just one published piece: an essay in the Ladies' Wreath for December of 1850 by an Elizabeth Witherell, an early version of her future pseudonym, entitled "How May an American Woman Best Show Her Patriotism?" This essay and the circumstances surrounding its appearance provide an important context for understanding Warner's aspirations as a female literary professional, her excessive concern with personal anonymity, and the personal goals that would shape her texts and guide her literary career.

The Ladies' Wreath was founded in 1846 as a monthly women's magazine. Between 1846 and 1851, the Wreath was published primarily by the New York firm of Martyn & Ely (though the magazine would circulate among multiple publishers during its years in print) and edited by Sarah Towne Smith Martyn, a Congregationalist, temperance activist, and prolific author of religious pamphlets for the American Tract Society. Martyn retired from her reform work to edit the monthly and continued in this role until 1852, when the editorship passed to Helen Dodge Irving, her co-editor of several years.¹ The Wreath, with an annual subscription cost of one dollar, boasted of its very healthy circulation of 25,000 in its 1851 subscription renewal notice to its readers. Each issue was thirty-six pages long and contained several colored illustrations, samples of sheet music, and a collection of varied written pieces, over half of which were attributed. Individual volumes of the magazine were also republished at the end of the year as the Ladies' Wreath: An Illustrated Annual by J. M. Fletcher & Co, and with the magazine's miscellaneous contents and emphasis on fine illustrations (many of them of flowers), it strongly resembled many of the popular literary annuals that were published in fine gift editions each December.

The means of access to the Ladies' Wreath for Warner, a previously unpublished writer, was an essay contest. Advertisements in New York newspapers in the fall of 1850 solicited essays in response to the question, "How may an American woman best show her patriotism?" The contest's sponsor and the supplier of its prize, named in the newspaper advertisement, was Lydia Sigourney, herself a prominent and frequent contributor to the Ladies' Wreath. In September 1850, Susan's sister Anna Warner recalls, "Mrs. Sigourney had offered a $50 prize for the best essay on 'Female Patriotism'; the same to be published in a little magazine called 'The Ladies' Wreath'; and my sister was trying for that."² Susan took her essay through multiple revisions, sharing her work with her father and sister, and finally submitting the essay in mid-September. The essay's form reflects a structure popular at the time and widely used by other women writers including Sarah Josepha Hale and Harriet Beecher Stowe: the pedagogical essay as a dialogue sketch within a domestic scene. In Warner's essay, a woman comes across the advertisement for the same essay prize and asks her husband and his sister for advice about what to write. The man, St. John, in responding to the women's questions and statements, outlines a vision of female patriotism that includes advice about fashion, family life, politics, religion, and women's place. The wife, Laura, playfully resists his instructions while the sister, Theresa, proves a much more agreeable and like-minded listener.

Like many contributors to periodical-sponsored essay contests if not to periodicals themselves, Warner was clearly motivated by practical concerns when she turned to writing. Her interest in the essay was closely tied to her plans for the prize money. While in New York at the end of September, Susan Warner wrote a hopeful letter to Anna: "As to the Ladies' Wreath I am apt to conclude they are not overstocked with competitor essays; and if so, hurrah!"³ It is not clear exactly what gave Warner...