Contemporary Critics
Jean Lee Cole, February 13, 2018
Guest blogger Cynthia Requardt is a volunteer transcriber and researcher for this project. In addition to transcribing several entire seasons of the Club meeting minutes, she also has contributed a Club history to the WLCB Archive. She is currently transcribing the 1913-1914 season, which spurred her to share:
Reading through the Woman’s Literary Club minutes has reminded me how easy it is to misjudge the members if I look at them with a 21st century perspective.
There is consistency in the Club meetings and it lulled me into complacency. Often members read their own compositions, poems, stories, novel chapters or plays. Or they delve into analysis, usually praise, of well-known authors; Browning and Shakespeare being popular topics. Other times members wrote reviews of music, art, or historical events. When I would read that the Committee on Fiction or the Committee on Art and Artists of Maryland was presenting the program, I thought I knew what to expect. But the program presented by the Committee on Current Literature, December 2, 1913, came as a surprise.
Harriet Lummis Smith wrote short stories, and by 1913 had some success with her standard formula of a young woman overcoming obstacles in her search for a happy marriage. At the December meeting, Smith chose to review the new novel Hagar by Mary Johnston. Johnston had been successful writing historical romances. This novel was a departure for her, and many of her readers, like Smith, found it unsatisfactory. Today, Hagar is considered one of the first feminist novels, with a heroine struggling to lead an independent life as an author. Smith alluded to the feminist tone of the work but seemed most concerned with poor character development noting that “the reader resents the marriage of the heroine to a lover with whom they hardly feel acquainted.”
The following paper on the program was by poet Virginia Woodward Cloud. She also was disappointed in what she saw as new trends in poetry. The 1913 Nobel Prize in Literature had been awarded to Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore which Cloud thought undeserved. He may be revered by his countrymen, stated Cloud, but he would never appeal to the “Anglo-Saxon mind” and his lack of concrete ideas meant his poetry would never be universal.
I was disappointed that both Smith and Cloud seemed to dismiss new ideas in their craft. They seemed to want to hold on to traditional forms and measures of success. It then occurred to me that I needed to remember who these women were and judge them for what they achieved, not what I would like them to have done.
This content was migrated from the The WLCB log: Documenting the Woman’s Literary Club of Baltimore 1890-1941