Caroline Kirkland
Biography
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Born in New York City, the oldest of eleven children, Caroline Kirkland was educated in Quaker schools for over ten years, exposing her to the social philosophies of the Quakers. She worked as a teacher herself, helping to support her family after her father died, before she met her husband, William Kirkland, who was a tutor at Hamilton College in upstate New York. After moving to Michigan to run the Detroit Female Seminary in , the Kirklands purchased land northwest of Detroit. It was the Kirkland&#;s experience on the frontier that precipitated the creation of A New Home, Caroline Kirkland&#;s first book. The book, published in under the pseudonym Mrs. Mary Clavers, was praised for its realism, though some of her neighbors were not happy with their portrayal. She published two other books about frontier life, Western Clearings and Forest Life. After returning to New York City in , Kirkland began teaching again and worked as an editor for the Christian Inquirer and The Union Magazine of Literature and Art. Her writing, which was often satirical, offered social criticism on topics ranging from women&#;s rights and education to prison r
Caroline Kirkland ()
Contributing Editor: Judith Fetterley
Classroom Issues and Strategies
Most of the students I have taught love Caroline Kirkland. They find her eminently contemporary. Her prose style is accessible, she is funny, and she deals with a subject familiar to nearly all Americans--the frontier. Some students are put off by her middle-class bias and perspective; they find her attitudes toward the locals patronizing and they object to the fact that (unlike Jewett) Kirkland provides very little space for the stories of any of these people as told by themselves.
Kirkland's letters sound like they were written yesterday to the students reading the letter. One obvious way of breaking open the text and inviting discussion is to ask students to pick one of her "natives" and have them write what they imagine that person would say about their new neighbor, Caroline Kirkland, if they wrote a letter to one of their friends who has moved farther west.
Students often wonder why they have never heard of Kirkland before. They want to know what else she wrote. They wonder why she is so concerned with issue of manners and ask what happened when she published her boo
Kirkland, Caroline ()
Sources
Writer and editor
New York to the Frontier . Caroline Matilda Stansbury, who would become a pioneering literary realist, was born on 11 January in New York City. Her literary career had its roots in her family upbringing. Her parents nurtured a love of reading, and she was also influenced by the satiric verses of her grandfather Joseph Stansbury, an ardent Loyalist during the American Revolution. In Caroline married William Kirkland, a bright young tutor at Hamilton College. In the couple moved west to Detroit, and then, in , as Michigan boomed and the Western frontier expanded, William purchased land in the new settlement of Pinckney, Michigan. Here, as Caroline later recalled, the Kirklands believed hard work and perseverance would be rewarded with boundless treasures, but life in Pinckney turned out to be less rewarding than the Kirklands hoped. William, like many of his neighbors, was swindled by dishonest land agents. Wildcat banks issued paper notes that turned out to be worthless and then closed, virtually overnight. The Kirklands, along with others who joined them in Pinckney, became poorer, rather than richer in the new se
John S. Hart, ed. Female Prose Writers of America (), plate opposite p.
CAROLINE M. KIRKLAND ( &#; )
A childhood in provided Caroline Kirkland with an urban counterpoint for her later experiences on the western frontier, and she showcased her qualities of East Coast wit and western tenacity in her narrative accounts of her life as a frontierswoman. Educated at her aunt's girls' schools in Mamaroneck and , she studied literature and languages and helped to run the school until her marriage to classics scholar William Kirkland in
After administering a seminary for young ladies in , , for four years, Caroline and William Kirkland moved with their children to , where William had purchased acres of land on which he was determined to build a town. For his wife, life in was dreary; in addition to the physical drudgery of frontier life, she grew bored and lonely, and began to recount the anecdotes and gossip of daily life in long, funny letters to her friends to amuse herself. She stitched these correspondences into a series of novels, and her books earned her commercial success as well as the animosity of her neighbors who recognized themselves in her satire.
Eventua
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