Katharine Pearson Woods, Metzerott, Shoemaker, and the Women’s Literary Club of Baltimore

Woods

Who was Katharine Pearson Woods? This modest, retiring woman became a passionate advocate for the working class and for literature as a powerful tool for change. In the decades surrounding the turn of the twentieth century, she published eight novels and also wrote dozens of short stories and poems, sociological studies, and book reviews that appeared in major American magazines and newspapers across the country. A native of West Virginia, Woods spent the majority of her life in Baltimore, Maryland, where her success as a writer helped to inspire the formation of the Women’s Literary Club of Baltimore. This online exhibit provides an introduction to Woods’s life and work and links to her various publications, including an annotated digital edition of her first novel, Metzerott, Shoemaker, which launched her career. Here you’ll also find lesson plans for teaching the novel and recovering the history of women writers and a list of resources for further study and research.

Metzerott, Shoemaker Digital Edition

The digital edition of Metzerott, Shoemaker(1889) includes annotations of historical references, Biblical and literary quotations, and translations of non-English words and phrases. The text was edited and encoded into Markdown by Jean Lee Cole, using a template developed by Karin Dalziel and Emily Rau of the Recovery Hub for American Women Writers.

Other writings by Woods

The works below show the range of Woods’s output, but is by no means a complete list. Here is what we’ve recovered of all the short fiction, poetry, and magazine journalism published by this prolific and–until now–forgotten writer and activist.

Major works

Resources for teaching Metzerott, Shoemaker and literary/historical recovery

The Woman’s Literary Club of Baltimore Archive strives to make scholarship recovering the works and lives of Club members and the historical resources they created accessible to a wider audience. To meet that goal, the project team has created:

Resources for further study

For additional information on Woods, the project team has compiled a resource list. Resources include: biographical sources about Woods, the historical context of Metzerott, Shoemaker, information about Woods and the beginnings of the WLCB, and reviews of Metzerott, Shoemaker.