“Force Them into Fair Dealing”: Poetic Professionalism in Elizabeth Akers Allen’s Letters

Elizabeth Akers Allen’s most famous poem, “Rock Me to Sleep,” was first published in 1866 and reprinted in her 1902 collection The Sunset-Song and Other Verses.¹ In her letters Akers calls “Rock Me to Sleep” “Ball’s poem,” referring bitterly to the controversy over the poem’s authorship. Nearly forty years earlier, Alexander M. W. Ball, a New Jersey businessman turned legislator, claimed that the poem was his. While the scandal tends to be of central importance to scholarship on Akers, it has, as scandals do, also obscured her life and work beyond the controversy. In what follows I will dislodge the scandal from its place of primary importance and reintegrate it into the context of a long literary career that exemplifies the professional judgment and artistic craft of nineteenth-century women poets. Not just the controversy but also Akers’s entire career contributes to our understanding of the gendered publishing practices of the nineteenth century and the major role women played in the editing, publishing, and popularity of literary periodicals.² To do so, I discuss a pair of letters, dated 25 March and 13 June 1902, that Akers sent to her friend Gilbert Tracy just prior to the publication of The Sunset-Song and its reproduction of “Ball’s poem.” These letters contribute to our understanding of the ongoing conflict between the industry-savvy professional poet and the public persona of the woman writer in the long nineteenth century. Jennifer Putzi’s and Angela Sorby’s scholarship on the scandal has already brought this problem of women’s professionalism into focus.³ With the recovery of these two heretofore unexamined letters, I hope to show how the epistolary form provides a new, personal forum for adjudicating Akers’s professional legacy. By illustrating the individuality of the poet, these two letters demonstrate that, for women writers in particular, the personal is the professional and vice versa. Detailing the experiences of gender disparity that inflected her understanding of current publishing practices, Akers reiterates the demand that her talent be justly recognized. While publicly she appeared to expect no recognition, her letters clarify the professional ethos underscoring this persona by dwelling on her literary reputation.

The 25 March and 13 June 1902 letters are located in the Elizabeth Akers Allen Collection at the Maine Women Writers Collection (MWWC) in Portland, Maine, and are among approximately sixteen letters from 1902. The MWWC holds more than seventy letters written by Akers in Tuckahoe, New York, to Tracy in Putnam, Connecticut, from the years 1902 to 1912. In addition, the MWWC also holds the letters Tracy received from Akers’s daughters Grace Barton Allen Cook and Florence Percy McIntyre after Akers’s death in 1911. None of these letters have been transcribed, published, or discussed in scholarship about Akers.⁴ While the MWWC does not have Tracy’s side of the exchange, his esteem for Akers is evident in his careful preservation of the letters. Tracy annotated the envelopes to record when he received, read, and replied to each letter, and on each envelope he also wrote a short summary of the letter’s contents.⁵ Nevertheless, Tracy’s relationship with Akers is not entirely clear.⁶ He appears to be a business manager who assisted her with banking.⁷ He is also a dear friend, and these letters offer a fascinating exchange of gossip and personal beliefs. These insights into Akers’s personal life broach a variety of issues relevant to nineteenth-century life, perhaps most prominently the conditions of epistolary exchange, a topic I will return to at the conclusion of this essay. Because these letters are personal responses to a good friend, they clarify both historical circumstances and conventional practices. Indeed, the letters document the discriminatory conditions that confronted women writers in post–Civil War periodical and literary publishing. At the same time, the emotional tenor of the letters illustrates how personal revelations were rhetorically staged in the epistolary form. In other words, through the conventions of letter writing, Akers sketches the contours of her personal relationship with Tracy...