LITERARY FRIENDSHIPS
While in Concord, Austin fraternized with the Hawthornes, Ralph Waldo
Emerson and the Alcotts. In a letter dated December 17, 1863, Austin
complements Emerson on his speech the night before, returns a volume of
poetry he had lent her, and asks for an introduction to The Atlantic,
where Austin later published many stories. While no correspondence
between Austin and Alcott has surfaced, their friendship has been alluded
to many times, for example in Austin's Boston Globe obituary, by
Alcott's biographer Madeleine B. Stern, by a reporter doing a piece on
Concord authors in The Critic in 1906, and by Josephine Swayne in The
Story of Concord as told by Concord Writers. In her August 1963
journal entry, Louisa May Alcott mentions a trip to Clarke Island
(located off Plymouth) with the Austins (Myerson and Shealy 124 note 30).
She also mentions a trip with the Austins in a letter to Benjamin Lyman
(Myerson and Shealy 160 note 10). Jane Goodwin Austin's book
Cipher (1869) has a lengthy dedication to Louisa May Alcott in
which she reminisces about the hours they spent together while Jane was
preparing the book, which includes: "Come, now, and help me launch
another venture, the little craft called 'Cipher,' whose construction you
have watched with such ready sympathy and interest, and to whose freight
you have so largely contributed."
Lousia May Alcott
Austin frequently played hostess to the literary and fashionable crowd in
Boston, particularly to people of Pilgrim descent. She often "read a
paper to some society or join[ed] in an 'Authors' Reading,' a form of
amusement very fashionable at the `Hub'" (The National
Cyclopedia, and as evidenced in letters such as Austin's letter
inviting Mr. Houghton to come for a tea with Mrs. Frank Leslie). Austin
"possessed singularly fascinating conversational powers and a charm of
personality that endeared her to a large circle of friends" (The
Boston Herald 10). Theodore Wolfe thought Austin an important enough
writer to mention in his Literary Shrines: The Haunts of Some Famous
American Authors, published in 1895. In the chapter entitled "In
and Out of Boston" he describes "Close by we find the pleasant house in
which Jane G. Austin wrote some of her famed colonial tales and where she
died not many months ago" (102). According to The Boston
Herald, "Though born in Worcester, she was distinctly a Boston
woman, all of her interests, literary and social, having been centered in
this city" (10).
Nathaniel Hawthorne
One of the three main letters that Houghton Library at Harvard has
written by Jane Goodwin Austin is a letter inviting "My dear Mr.
Houghton" to a "little tea" at Austin's house for Mrs. Frank Leslie, whom
Austin calls "a very old friend of mine" (letter dated Jan 16, 1893).
Mrs. Frank Leslie, whom Austin correctly calls "the most prominent woman
journalist of our country," was well known both as the writer and editor
Miriam Squier, and as she later called herself, Mrs. Frank Leslie. Leslie
was an ardent feminist and flamboyant reporter and journalist who made no
attempt to hide or excuse her highly irregular personal life. She was
legally married at least four times, once being to Oscar Wilde's brother
William, and carried on affairs with men such as William Churchwell, a
Tennessee congressman. Mrs. Frank Leslie was a major editing and
marketing force behind the numerous "Leslie" periodicals in the
nineteenth century as well as the author of several books. (McKerns and
Ashley).
Madeleine Stern notes the relationship between Leslie and Austin in her
biography of Leslie, Purple Passage: The Life of Mrs. Frank
Leslie; in 1877 Austin accompanied Leslie on a trip to Gotham to
Cuba and the Bahamas (p 91). Leslie describes Austin as "the sister of
my soul" (Purple Passages p 92). Austin describes a visit she is having
with Mrs. Frank Leslie in January 1884 as being filled with dinner
parties, operas, and receptions. (letter to Adams 3 January 1884).
That Jane Goodwin Austin, a devout Christian, was such good friends with
such a colorful and liberal personality indicates facets of her character
not normally reported about her (but surfacing in some of her stories).
Aspects of Leslie's agenda obviously influenced Austin, such as her
feminist concerns, resulting in numerous stories concentrating on Pilgrim
"Mothers" and even a contribution to the compilation The National
Exposition Souvenir "What America Owes to Women" Edited by Lydia
Hoyt Farmer with an Introduction by Julia Ward Howe (1893). While Austin
was by no means a "feminist," her concern over an equal position for
women shows in this excerpt from her letter to Emerson dated December 17,
1863:
May I thank you also, with the rest of those who heard them, for your
grand words of last night. We women "stand and wait" and do such work as
lies within our reach, but can we help a little envy of you to whom God
has given so glorious a part in the common labor?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Very interesting is the information cited in Stern's Purple
Passion (p 234-5) and Blanck's Biography of American
Literature (p 105), that a book ascribed to Mrs. Frank Leslie,
California, a Pleasure Trip from Gotham to the Golden Gate may actually
have been written by Austin herself. A copy of the book bearing the
ownership signature of Jane G. Austin (Stern p 234) has the words "By
Mrs. Frank Leslie" crossed out and written instead: "She did not! My
Mother wrote it all! from a few very poor, very poor notes of Mrs.
Leslie's" (Blanck, p 105). Given the fact the Austin did made a
California trip with Leslie, this is indeed possible.
INTRO || BIOGRAPHY
|| WORKS || LITERARY
FRIENDSHIPS || BIBLIOGRAPHY OF SOURCES CONSULTED
|| JGA IN PERSPECTIVE: OUTSIDE LINKS ||
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Images presented here were taken with permission from Paul
Reuben's home page of pictures of famous authors:
http://www.csustan.edu/english/reuben/authorpics.html
Copyright © 1996 Megan Fox. All rights reserved. Megan is
a graduate student at the Simmons College Graduate School of Library and Information
Science. Most of the research on JGA was done while she was a graduate student
in Literature at Boston College. To see more about her, go to Megan's
Home Page
Revised 12/00 fox@simmons.edu
This page is http://web.simmons.edu/~fox/jgalitfriends.html
The ideas presented here are in no way endorsed by Simmons College