BY GWEN THOMPSON
PHOTOS BY DIANE HUDSON

If a picture’s worth a thousand words,
what about a nightgown? Or a sofa?

At the Maine Women Writers Collection, housed in the Abplanalp Library of the University of New England’s Westbrook College Campus, 716 Stevens Avenue, Portland, you can get better acquainted with your favorite Maine women writers not just by reading their published works, but also by examining their very personal effects: rough drafts, rejection letters, homemade Christmas cards, photo albums – even their furniture. You can compare black-and-white photos of May Sarton with a lock of her tawny hair, or browse her record collection. You can sit on Sarah Orne Jewett’s settee to read The Country of the Pointed Firs, or discover what Newberry medalist Elizabeth Coatsworth’s own childhood was like from her early diaries and sketchbooks. Founded in 1959 by Westbrook College literature professor Grace Dow and administrator Dorothy Healy, the MWWC now holds no fewer than 6,000 volumes by more than 500 Maine women writers and maintains an active acquisitions program to augment their 150 linear feet of manuscript material, memorabilia, and personal effects from Maine women writers known and unknown, past and present. Here’s a sampling from the treasure trove.

Above: 1891 photograph of JOSEPHINE DIEBITSCH PEARY wearing Arctic furs

She became the first woman to take part in an Arctic expedition when she accompanied her husband, Robert E. Peary, on his second trip to Greenland, 1891-1892. Josephine was hardly a guest up there – one time she fended off walruses in a boat when her husband broke his leg. Her book recounting her adventures, My Arctic Journal, published in 1893, became an instant bestseller. In addition to summering on Eagle Island, Josephine retired to an apartment on 290 Baxter Boulevard in Portland after Admiral Peary died in 1920 and was well known in Portland society. Her shotgun now hangs on the wall of the MWWC Sarton Room.

Left: Powder puff compact with mirror and inscription: “To Mrs. Robert E. Peary, The ‘brave, noble little woman’ who, by her constant devotion made possible the magnificent achievement of her heroic husband in this discovery of the North Pole April 6th 1909.” In a 1900 letter to her husband, whose whereabouts in the Arctic she knew of only through newspaper accounts, Josephine lamented his absence: “My darling, my darling, where are you, how are you? are questions that nearly drive me wild with fear & anxiety. Sweetheart, sweetheart will I ever see you again alive & happy?...Oh, to see you, to hear you, to feel your touch again my sweetheart.” But she insisted: “I am far too proud of my husband to want him to waive duty for inclination. You have involved others in this scheme & as long as you have health & can see your way clearly it is a matter of duty. If at the end of your leave you have not succeeded I know you will gladly return, but I know too that you will never be satisfied with yourself & it is that which I dread more than your failure.” She sent five copies of the letter north on five different whalers, in hopes that one of them might reach him.

During the first year of their marriage, when the Pearys had only Robert’s lieutenant’s salary to live on, he and Josephine agreed that she could save all their pennies and spend them as she wished. At the end of the year, she had saved $40 to buy a set of teacups she had spied in a shop window, which the family always referred to as “Mother’s penny cups.”

The collection includes a silver umbrella handle (right) Mrs. Peary had affixed to each of her umbrellas as well as two locks of Josephine Peary’s hair, so fresh and auburn in their aspect that they look as if they were clipped yesterday.

PORRIDGE BOWL used by KATE DOUGLAS WIGGIN, Salmon Falls, author of many celebrated Maine novels, including Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm

When I was a little girl! I have said before and very likely shall say again... that these six words are perhaps the most charming in the language... My childhood pleasures were many, though so simple that the little girl of today might think them woefully dull. We played paper dolls, jackstraws and jackstones... We built houses from ‘stickings’ and ‘cut-rounds,’ and gave parties with dishes made of broken china. We pulled hairs from the horse’s tail and put them in the brook to grow into snakes, which, to our surprise and regret, they never did; we waded in the river… we fished for ‘shiners’; we made cakes of rose leaves and brown sugar, folded them in paper and buried them in the earth for a week, when we dug them up... and ate them with much lip-smacking; we snowballed, and coasted down hill; we made snow ice cream, not realizing that later generations would pronounce the product crowded with poisonous microbes; we gathered wild flowers... and we read books, books, books: before breakfast, after playtime, before bedtime... No books were too old for us!”

Olive Bowl hand painted by Celia Thaxter, Appledore Island, Isles of Shoals, Maine.

Although she is best known for her horticultural chronicle An Island Garden, illustrated by Childe Hassam, Thaxter was herself a talented visual artist as well as a woman of letters, splashing her favorite plants and flowers across the pages of her poems and onto European china blanks from Haviland and Wedgwood.

“I am painting on china now,” she wrote to Dr. Richard H. Derby in the midst of a five-day hurricane raging over her home on the Isles of Shoals.

“It is most exquisite work, fit for the fairies.”

Her enthusiasm for this new medium brimmed over in a letter to Feroline Fox:

“I have taken to painting – ‘wrastling with art,’ – in the wildest manner... I can scarcely think of anything else. I want to paint everything I see; every leaf, stem, seed vessel, grass blade, rush, and reed and flower has new charms, and I thought I knew them all before... What a resource for the dreary winter days to come!” Or, as her friend Lucy Larcom put it: “Mrs. Thaxter was at Mrs. Fields' painting China plates by the dozen; she seems to have exchanged poetry for pottery.”

Stained-glass artist Sarah Wyman Whitman designed the Art Nouveau covers for most of her friend Sarah Orne Jewett’s novels and made her this Love Conquers All Floral Wreath in glass.

I suppose I think, in some crude, unformulated way, that if two souls really have found each other, in the Divine Economy (by some highest Mathematics) they will count for more together than they ever could apart; and that whatever loss is entailed in this fusion of interests, is more than made good by a new and more complete existence...” – letter from Wyman to Jewett, c. 1884

Aspiring writers today can take heart from the fact that even authors of the stature of Sarah Orne Jewett received their fair share of rejection letters and bewildering editorial cuts. From the Editorial Rooms at Scribner & Co., 1875:

“My dear Miss Jewett,

“Your bright little owl story is accepted with pleasure... though we have taken out one episode which we felt marred the story... Entre nous, though these verses... are so well managed that they might pass, I have more than once rejected mss. on account of a point being made, jocularly, of cooking and eating mice, & have so stated to the authors (my personal friends) & so I hardly feel that it would be ‘fair play’ to make an exception now. This much by way of explanation so that you may acquit me of the possible charge of undue squeamishness.”

Toward the end of her novel Deephaven, Sarah Orne Jewett mused: “We sit in somebody’s favorite chair and look out of the window at the sea, and dream about our wishes and our hopes and plans just as they did before us. Something of them still lingers where their lives were spent... I can’t help wishing that it were possible to keep some of my worldly goods always. There are one or two books of mine and some little things which I have had a long time, and of which I have grown very fond. It makes me so sorry to think of their being neglected and lost.” She needn’t have worried!

Writing case owned by Elizabeth Coatsworth

When she was feeling her way as a poet in 1918, Coatsworth (age 25) sent a sheaf of her work for evaluation to Boston Imagist poet Amy Lowell (age 44), who attributed the flaws she found to youth and inexperience in a letter [that is part of the Maine Women Writers’s collection]. “Your range is very limited at present, but poetry grows by practice, and, considering that you have only been writing three years, I do not think this is at all unnatural... You have a pleasant sense of humour, and only on rare occasions do you fall into the decadent mood which is one of the banes of young poets... I do not think you are quite so successful in atmospheric effects, that is, those poems of yours which portray different places do not seem to be differentiated enough in language, in diction, for the different kinds of scenes and feelings you are giving... The truth is, I suspect, that you are not very old, and that you have not lived a great deal, and that therefore your poetical sense is more in the eye than in the pocket of experience. As you cannot hasten years, I should not worry about it at all...”

Which would seem to have been good advice, because by 1923 Lowell was writing to Coatsworth: “I have seen some awfully good poetry of yours lately... You certainly have a remarkable feeling for atmosphere” and reversing their literary exchange with due deprecation: “I trust there are some [poems] you will like and think it worth while my having forced them on you... I am rather sorry for you, plowing through all these... You will not find in this bundle any very considerable poems... either in length or scope – because I have not had time to write any.”

Coatsworth is the mother of celebrated contemporary poet Kate Barnes (Where the Deer Were). One of Coatsworth’s delightful and intimate poems begins, “I am fox-bewitched!”

Typewriter owned by Ruth Moore

From the cantankerous typewriter of Bass Harbor novelist Ruth Moore: “I have a problem – I live too near the highway, and not far from Acadia National Park. Past the house, starting in April and ending at the close of hunting season in November, goes a procession of three million people... If you get your name in the paper and become one of the Sights To See While In The Vicinity, you might better be dead. Because your privacy is. And I am always thunderously busy and need it... Of course I like recognition as much as any writer does, but the Decade of the Winnebago and the back-packers has really got me on the run. Down East has been cooking an interview with me taken some two-three? years ago, and I pray God they don’t use it until I am done. For an obituary, maybe... Sometimes I wish that [Bass Harbor Head] lighthouse, the sweetheart of the Maine Publicity Bureau, would crack off and sink in the sea...”

– from two letters to Sandy Phippen

The Only Extant Daguerreotype of Novelist Madam Wood

Also known as Sarah “Sally” Sayward Barrell Wood, 1759-1854), Maine’s first – and possibly most modest – novelist. In an era when ladies’ literary endeavors were severely frowned upon by no less a man of letters than Thomas Jefferson, and novel-reading condemned as “a Cause of Female Depravity,” Wood’s pen proved mightier than her own misgivings. Writing first under the pen name “A Lady of Massachusetts” and later as “A Lady of Maine,” Wood disclaimed in her novel Dorval: “No one will suppose that I entertain ideas so fallacious as to imagine it necessary for a female to be a writer, far from it.” Yet during the lull between her first and second marriages, she produced four Gothic novels in as many years, assuring detractors that “not one social, or one domestic duty has been sacrificed or postponed by her pen.”

Photo, c. 1955, May Sarton I am really an exhausted being at the moment... easily drunk on a sip of almost anything such as the Sound this morning, dark blue with ruffles of white, and a whiff of autumn in the air...” – from a letter to Elizabeth Coatsworth

EINE KLEINE SNAILMUSIK

What soothes the angry snail?
What's music to his horn?
For the "Sonata Appassionata,"
He shows scorn,
And Handel
Makes the frail snail
Quail,
While Prokofieff
Gets no laugh,
And Tchaikovsky, I fear,
No tear.
Piano, pipe, and harp,
Dulcet or shrill,
Flat or sharp,
Indoors or in the garden,
Are willy-nilly
Silly
To the reserved, slow,
Sensitive
Snail,
Who prefers to live
Glissandissimo,
Pianissimo.

Among her many literary accomplishments, best-selling 19th-century novelist ANN S. STEPHENS was founding editor of the first Portland Monthly in 1834 and author of the first Beadle Dime Novel in 1839. After Stephens and her husband moved to New York City in 1837, Edgar Allan Poe assessed her work as part of a series on “The Literati of New York City” that he wrote for Godey’s Lady’s Book in 1846: “She is fond of the bold, striking, trenchant--in a word, of the melodramatic; has a quick appreciation of the picturesque, and is not unskillful in delineations of character...Her style is what the critics usually term "powerful," but lacks real power through its verboseness and floridity...Her sentences are, also, for the most part too long; we forget their commencements ere we get at their terminations. Her faults, nevertheless, both in matter and manner, belong to the effervescence of high talent, if not exactly of genius.” Poe in fact seemed more taken with Stephens’ person than her prose, concluding his account: “She is tall and slightly inclined to embonpoint...Her forehead is somewhat low, but broad; the features...full of life and intellectuality. The eyes are blue and brilliant; the hair blonde and very luxuriant.”

©2003 Portland Magazine Colin Sargent, Editor & Publisher editor@portlandmonthly.com Click here to subscribe

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