In 1772, Phillis considered the prospects of collecting her poems into a volume, and the ever-supportive John Wheatley sent a manuscript and a letter of introduction and biographical information to Archibald Bell in London. Bell and the Countess of Huntingdon, to whom he had shown Phillis’s poems, doubted that an African girl had really written the work and required the testament of no fewer than eighteen prominent Bostonians.
Meanwhile, Phillis’s health weakened, and the Wheatleys reasoned that a trip abroad might bolster her. Accompanied by Nathaniel Wheatley, Mary’s twin, who was on a business trip, Phillis set out to London, where she was an immediate cause célèbre, thanks to an introduction into society provided by the Countess of Huntingdon. She was fèted and flattered in a land free from slavery. According to one account, “Thoughtful people praised her; titled people dined her; and the press extolled the name of Phillis Wheatley, the African poetess.” Her single published book, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, came out in 1773 and was dedicated to none other than the countess. Complete with a portrait of Phillis holding a quill pen drawn by slave artist and poet Scipio Moorhead, it contained thirty-nine poems.
The following year, Susannah Wheatley, the only mother figure Phillis had known in the land of her captors, died. With the Revolutionary War impending, Phillis wrote a letter to General George Washington, who was impressed by the “elegant lines” of her missive and invited her to be received by him and his officers. When John Wheatley passed away, Phillis was set free.
She married a Boston grocer a month later, a handsome free black man who claimed to have worked as a lawyer and physician as well as merchant. His looks and talent are said to have led him to a degree of “arrogance” and “disdain” for work, which allegedly saw the newlyweds into poverty. Two of their three children died, and Phillis labored at a cheap boarding house to support herself and the remaining child. At thirty-one, she died, followed almost immediately in death by her child. They were buried together in a location that remains unknown. The last attention the “African poetess” received for her writing talent was for a poem she wrote about the death of her baby son, published in 1784 in the Boston magazine. This was one of several compositions from the last part of her life, all set to be published in honor of Benjamin Franklin, to whom she had dedicated the book. The manuscript disappeared along with all trace of Phillis Wheatley’s work as a mature poet.
Imagination! Who can sing thy force? Or who describe the swiftness of thy course?
Phillis Wheatley
HARRIET E. ADAMS WILSON provocateur
Like many other literary women, Harriet Wilson was also left out of history books. She was the first Black woman to publish a novel in English and the first Black person, male or female, to publish a novel in America.
Sadly, we know precious little about this author. Harriet E. Adams Wilson is believed to have been born in Fredericksburg, Virginia, in 1807 or 1808 and trained in millinery as her trade; she was then deserted and left in poverty by her sailor husband, who impregnated her before the abandonment. Her son from this relationship, George Mason Wilson, died at age seven, a year after the publication of the one novel it is known that Wilson wrote.
Her groundbreaking work, Our Nig, a title deliberately chosen for its challenge and daring, was printed by George C. Rand and Avery of Boston. It is believed Wilson self-published Our Nig to prove a political point, as evidenced by the full title, Our Nig, or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black, in A Two-Story White House, North, Showing That Slavery’s Shadows Fall Even There, with the author credit to “Our Nig.”
Our Nig was ignored by reviewers and readers and barely sold. Wilson’s work was in the dustbin of lost history until Henry Louis Gates, Jr., discovered it and reissued it in 1983. Gates observed that the provocative title probably contributed to the novel’s near oblivion. The plot, a marriage between a white woman and a Black man, would have alienated many readers.
Example rendered her words efficacious. Day by day there was a manifest change of deportment toward “Nig.”
Harriet E. Adams Wilson
SARA TEASDALE parting the shadows
Poet Sara Teasdale, known now for the evocative intensity of her language, was brought up in the truest Victorian tradition in the late 1880s in St. Louis, Missouri. She was pampered and protected, but like a hothouse flower starved for light, felt smothered by her parents’ watchful restrictions. Imaginative and sensitive, Sara found her only solace in writing. In 1907, when she was twenty-three, Reedy’s Mirror, a St. Louis weekly paper, published her work for the first time.
By age twenty-six, she was desperate to break free of the hampering bonds of dependency on her parents. The only way she could manage this was to marry. She didn’t find the prospects particularly appealing, but it seemed preferable to her stifling life at home.
Her hopes included a serious writing career, which she found incompatible with the role of wife and mother. When she discovered she was pregnant, she had an abortion and obtained a divorce, hoping for the independence she believed would foster her writing. This unfortunate series of events sent her into a depression and failing health. From that point on, she lived the secluded life of a semi-invalid.
Teasdale’s beautiful poetry, bespeaking the secrets of the human heart, created an international reputation, beginning with her early Love Songs. Subsequently, she channeled her painful struggles for freedom from oppressive Victorian mores in Flame and Shadow. She won the highly regarded Columbia University Poetry Society prize, and in 1917 won the Pulitzer Prize for Love Songs, earning her place in history as the first poet to receive this prestigious award. Ultimately, the delicate despair described in her poems won out, and Sara Teasdale committed suicide in 1933.
O, beauty, are you not enough? Why am I crying after love?
Sara Teasdale, “Spring Night”
PEARL BUCK pearl of great price
Pearl Buck was born in West Virginia in 1892 to the Sydenstricker family, deeply religious people who dedicated their lives to missionary work. They chose to spread the word of Christianity in China, and Pearl spent a good portion of her girlhood there. She attended Randolph-Macon Woman’s College in Virginia, but after she graduated hurried back to Asia with her teaching certificate.
She made her living as a teacher until she married John Buck, a fellow American and an agriculturist. They married in 1917 and lived in northern China among the peasants. The Bucks had one child, born mentally handicapped, and adopted another child during Pearl’s tenure at the University of Nanking. In 1922, she started writing during the long hours she spent caring for her ailing mother. Her very first story was published in Asia magazine three years later. Pearl Buck returned to the United States to seek proper care for her daughter and studied for her master’s degree at Cornell. Later, she taught at three different universities in China until anti-foreigner sentiments became unavoidable. While fleeing violence in 1927, Pearl lost the manuscript for her first novel. Still, she continued, publishing East Wind: West Wind in 1930, followed the next year by The Good Earth.
The Good Earth was a global phenomenon from the beginning; in 1932, it won the Pulitzer Prize. A stage play was also written, as well as a script for the Academy Award-winning film. Pearl Buck was a huge success and saw her book translated into dozens of languages and selling millions of copies. In 1935, she left her adopted country, divorced her husband, and returned to the United States. Soon after, she married her publisher, Richard J. Walsh, but that didn’t stop her writing. While her success was generally more popular than critical, that all changed in 1938 when she became the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize. Buck was an amazingly prolific writer who once wrote five books in one year, penning more than eighty-five books in all. Her work includes plays, biographies, books for children, translations, and an autobiography as well as novels. She continued to write novels and articles through her entire life.
During the McCarthy years, she came under suspicion and was forced to write under the pseudonym John Sedges, but she never wavered in her essential beliefs of tolerance and understanding. She founded the East and West Association and was the president of the Author’s Guild, a free speech