Faraway Women and the Atlantic Monthly by Cathryn Halverson (review)

Cathryn Halverson understands "faraway" women as only someone who divides her time between continents might: defined less by geographical distance from a mythical epicenter of culture and comradeship than as a series of negotiations or exchanges—social, fiscal, and artistic—involving self, others, and place. Her book focuses on four women contributors to the Atlantic Monthly and their relationship with Ellery Sedgwick, its editor from 1908–38. At first glance Elinore Pruitt Stewart (Letters of a Woman Homesteader, 1914), Opal Whiteley (The Story of Opal, 1920), Hilda Rose (The Stump Farm, 1927), and Juanita Harrison (My Great, Wide, Beautiful World, 1936) might seem unlikely contributors to a Boston-based literary magazine founded with the implicit goal of shaping American culture. None wrote with the Atlantic's highbrow audience in mind. Their publications originated from personal correspondence and, in Whiteley's case, a diary kept during her Oregonian childhood—in truth a mixture of fact, fiction, and fantasy—which Sedgwick had a heavy hand in editing. Stewart addressed her letters from Wyoming to an employer and friend in Denver, Juliet Coney; Rose corresponded with friends and patrons from Idaho and Alberta, Canada; Harrison similarly recounted her travels in Europe, the Middle East, Scandinavia, Russia, India, Ceylon, Japan, and China to friends and employers, chief among them Myra K. Dickinson. Her impressions, written in nonstandard English and published in journal form, described familiar sites from the unfamiliar perspective of an African American working-class woman. Without the intervention of women who differed from them in class, and in Harrison's instance race, they might never have found their way to Sedgwick and the Atlantic Monthly. Their stories of literary production grounded in community make for one of the many strengths of Faraway Women.

Halverson structures her book with an opening chapter on Sedgwick, whose more elastic definition of the "literary" increased subscriptions, followed by separate chapters on individuals whose western ties continued the Atlantic's earliest tradition of publishing women regional writers. The epilogue, which brings them into conversation with another contributor, Gertrude Stein, upends stereotypes about "western" writing, usually characterized as outside or in contention with an "eastern" aesthetic and "modernism."

Halverson is especially adept at exploring the nuances of relationships, not only between writer and editor but also between these writers and those readers who, supporting their endeavors with monetary gifts and goods, perhaps shaped the writing itself. She calls these exchanges "an operative poetics of the Atlantic Monthly … [in which] the lives of authors and readers entwine in both narrative and actual encounters" (9). From its inception and believing in the transformative power of words, those closest to the magazine considered it a great democratizing machine despite or conceivably because of its perceived imprimatur of culture. Growing from the Ellery Sedgwick papers at the Massachusetts Historical Society and other archives, Faraway Women does much to illustrate the mechanics of literary production and how outsiders not only became part of the Atlantic's community of readers and writers but were vital to its success. Its appeal lies in Halverson's comfort if not delight in exploring seeming paradoxes and ambiguities that shifted over time as these working-class women became schooled in the commercial value of their work and redefined themselves as authors.

Writing about the Atlantic Monthly presents a challenge for any scholar looking to see patterns and deviations in American thought and culture since every grouping of articles can yield a different overarching narrative about topics ranging from literary trends and production to politics and editorial practices. As Halverson modestly notes, her book is one of many, she hopes, about the periodical contributions of women, but it is no less significant for its contribution to the study of such various magazines as the Atlantic Monthly in the first part of the twentieth century and the contributions of western working-class women writers who almost accidentally found their way into its pages.