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Alice Emily Sauerwein Lord

A woman, with the name longest name ever I might add, Alice Emily Sauerwein Lord was called “the literary life of Baltimore” in her obituary published in the Baltimore Sun. Her father’s name was Peter G. Sauerwein. She spent most of her adult life residing in her home on 1728 St. Paul street with her husband Charles.

Charles W. Lord as I previously mentioned was Alice’s husband. Born in Newberry Port Massachusetts, he moved to Baltimore in 1848. He worked for his own firm, not so ironically named Charles W. Lord. Alice was his second wife, he chose to marry her after his first wife’s passing in 1876. Charles seemed like a good fit for Alice, a very accomplished man to compliment a very accomplished woman. He was very generous to many churches, was the head of his own firm, and also was the director in the Baltimore and Cuba Coffee Company, the Maryland Fire Insurance Company and the Peabody Heights Company. Overall he was an extremely active member in the Baltimore community and had many positive impacts on it. I mean we all know that behind every great man is a great woman, right? I’m guessing that Alice was that woman. Charles was 81 year’s old when he passed. Alice stated in his obituary in the Baltimore Sun that this was due to a brief illness caused by extreme stress at work.

Lord was known throughout her life as being strongly related to literature. She was a member of the Woman’s Literary Club of Baltimore (duh), long with the Woman’s Club of Roland Park, an honorary member of the Lend-a-Hand Club of Mount Washington, and also was a member of the Woman’s Club of Mount Washington. This was one busy lady. She was a pretty well known writer. Some of her most famous and influential works include A Symphony in Dreamland and The Days of Lamb and Coleridge.

Her funeral service was held on March 18th 1930 and was conducted at a funeral parlor near Orchard and McCulloh street. The Reverend who held this service was named R.S. Litsinger, who belonged to Lord’s parish of St. John’s Protestant Episcopal Church located in Mount Washington. She is buried in the Green Mount Cemetery, which is conveniently located 11 minutes from Loyola’s campus… oh I feel closer to her already.

Overall finding out information about Mrs. Lord’s life has presented me with a pretty difficult task. Despite this, I will keep searching for more information and hopefully will post again about her again soon.

 

Posted on by Jean Lee Cole

The Life of: Katharine Pearson Woods

Woods, Katharine Pearson (1853–1923)

Katharine Pearson Woods was an American novelist, born Jan 28, 1853, in Wheeling, VA to Alexander Quarrier Woods, a tobacco merchant and Josephine Augusta (McCabe) Woods. She was the oldest of three girls where their parents promoted literature and education. This was a big influence in Miss.Woods works.

In 1874, at the age of twenty-one, she joined the religious organization of the All Saints Sisters of the Poor. Due to illness, she withdrew, but this experience led to her work in charity which encouraged the religious and moral tone of her writings.

In 1889, Miss Woods’s first novel was published. Metzerott, Shoemaker based on the Christian principals who advocated economic reform for the working class. Her other works included; Web of Gold (1890), The Crowning of Candace (1896) The Mark of the Beast: A Romance (1890), The Son of Ingar (1897), and The True Story of Captain John Smith (1901)

Web of Gold, ACrowning of Candace, TheMark Of The Beast: A Romance, TheSon of Ingar, TheTrue Story of Captain John by Katherine Pearson Woods

Woods’ greatest strength in her writings is evident in her description of natural settings and reflection for the love of nature. This strength landed several of her poems to be published in Harper’s Magazine.

Through the years, Katharine Pearson Woods took part in the WLCB, taught school age girls as well as continued with her good deeds and religious practices until her death , February 19, 1923.

Posted on by Jean Lee Cole

Louise Malloy… or should I say Josh Wink

Marie Louise Malloy, more commonly known as Josh Wink was born in Baltimore in the year of 1858. She was she daughter of John and Frances (Sollers) Malloy. She is of Irish decent, her grandparents emigrated to America in the early 1800’s. Louise as a young girl always dreamed of a career in literature and attended school at the convent of the Visitation. In December of 1889 Malloy’s dream came true when she was offered a job at the Baltimore American.

Josh Wink’s Column

Malloy… or should I say “Wink” was a columnist for the Baltimore American for well over 20 years. Louise “specialized in women’s interests, did editorial and feature work, and was a dramatic editor.” She was the first newspaperwoman in Maryland. She wrote short stories, essays, dramas, and poems that usually included a comedic edge. Some of the columns Malloy wrote consistently for the Baltimore American that I have come across were titled “Laughs and The World Laughs with you” and “Notes and Notions”. Here she included multiple lighthearted poems with deeper underlying meanings. I believe that these larger meanings could only be seen by intelligent people reading deeper into the poems, to the average joe these works were just good for a laugh. I mean that’s what a daily humor column is for right?

The way to a woman’s heart may be slightly strenuous, but the road coming from it is the hardest to travel.”

Along with all these amazing accomplishments Malloy’s “efforts led to the establishment of Juvenile Court in Baltimore and also resulted in improvements in the Fire Department.” I do not know much about this information so I am still trying to unearth more facts.

I thoroughly enjoy reading her work. I appreciate comedy and her stuff let me tell you is genuinely “lol” worthy.  She is super relatable and I always think it’s ironic that topics she speaks of in her column relate so much to life today. I mean you really could place some of her works in newspapers today and get good feedback from readers. She was popular back then and I understand all of the hype.

https://books.google.com/books?id=hnIEAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA858&lpg=PA858&dq=louise+malloy+josh+wink+biography&source=bl&ots=xARlGfP7e_&sig=627gIDkwrLqw7-leH-_4nQzPKcM&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjVr9T-7sLZAhVJulMKHZpCBw4Q6AEIKTAA#v=onepage&q=louise%20malloy%20josh%20wink%20biography&f=false

https://digital.lib.umd.edu/archivesum/actions.DisplayEADDoc.do?source=MdU.ead.litms.0013.xml&style=ead

https://books.google.com/books?id=tc8xAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA294&lpg=PA294&dq=louise+malloy+baltimore+american&source=bl&ots=8Np81VFhPb&sig=XmB14Vh_dnaSiVzX8wZweyJokzc&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwj0j4zk9sLZAhUNuVMKHWZjByUQ6AEIPjAF#v=onepage&q=louise%20malloy%20baltimore%20american&f=false

 

 

Posted on by Jean Lee Cole

Club authors, team authors

Henrietta Szold
A young Henrietta Szold, at about the time she was a member of the WLCB.

Starting next week, members of the WLCB research team will be posting profiles of the various published authors who were members of the Club. We’ve been collecting their works and discovering that this was a pretty interesting group of women– more interesting, in fact, than the Club meeting minutes made them seem. While the minutes are fascinating in their own right, the varied and sometimes adventurous lives of the actual Club members made us realize that the Club’s desire to appear orderly and unified under the ideals of Southern womanhood imposed a staid– or at least studied– propriety on the entire group.

In this post, I actually want to celebrate the work of our own team members. Yesterday, the Maryland Historical Society published an article by Sydney on one Club member, “Miss Henrietta Szold: A Jewish Idealist in the WLCB.” Sydney encountered “Miss Szold” in the team’s work in the archives last summer. In her piece, she gives us a glimpse into her brief tenure into the Club in the early 1890s, and reflects on the importance of discovering her presence in the Club in the wake of racialized violence and anti-Semitism today.

And the publication of Sydney’s piece also gives me a chance to share with our new team members and followers of the blog the team’s first publication, which appeared last fall: Hunter’s evocative ruminations about the Club’s response– or lack of one– to one of the most momentous events in Baltimore history, the “Great Fire” of 1904.

Both of these essays were published in the Maryland Historical Society’s Underbelly blog, which claims to limn “the Deepest Corners of the Maryland Historical Society Library.” In future weeks and months, we’ll be seeking other ways to get our own works into print– here on this blog, on Wikipedia, in the book we will be publishing that will collect some of the Club members’ works, and who knows where else?

Posted on by Jean Lee Cole

Contemporary Critics

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.

Mary Johnston
Mary Johnston c. 1909. Full image available at Wikipedia.org.

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.”

Tagore
Rabindranath Tagore, 1913 Nobel Prize winner. nobelprize.org.

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.

Posted on by Jean Lee Cole

Final Tally, Recovery Round One

So what did we find?

After a short but intense week of searching through databases, online archives, digital repositories, library catalogs, Wikipedia, and some scattershot Googling, the tally is in: over 320 works published by the 250-odd members of the Woman’s Literary Club of Baltimore during its 50 years in existence. It’s an astounding total by any measure, especially since we also know that we are not finished finding their works.

"Knitting," by Ella Morrow Sollenberger (1918)
This poem by Ella Morrow Sollenberger appeared to have been widely read. Megan found this copy in a volume of Current Events, published by the New York Times, detailing U.S. responses to World War I and published in 1918.

What did they write? Poetry and fiction, to be sure. But also lots of history, plays, anthropological works, translations (from Italian, German, French, Russian, and Hebrew), scientific treatises, songs, operas, children’s books, recipes, even some political commentaries. Despite the fact that many of these women embraced their domesticity—as well as their gentility—their creativity seemed boundless.

In the next few weeks, the class will be diving deeper into the world of American print culture between 1890-1940, looking especially in magazines, newspapers, and bricks-and-mortar archives for additional publications, reviews, and biographical information about these women. Some were well-known society figures; others were recognized intellects, scientists, and authors; and some remained obscure, sharing their writing within the friendly confines of the Academy of Sciences assembly room, where the Club met on Tuesdays for over 40 years, but hidden to the world outside those walls. We hope to bring these works, especially, to the light of day.

Clara, Megan, and I will be building a user-friendly online Virtual Library; for now, you can browse through the listings and do some basic sorting and searching of these texts. Over the next few weeks the class will be reading these works and deciding which ones to publish in an anthology of Club writings. We are also continuing to transcribe the minutes from Club meetings, and will be continuing to post about those oddly fascinating documents too.

Posted on by Jean Lee Cole

When a class is just a twinkle in a professor’s eye

Bizarrely, today in my Facebook feed a “timeline memory” post popped up from 4 years ago, sharing a Loyola Magazine story that describes research on the Woman’s Literary Club of Baltimore done by Courtney Cousins ’14 for a course I taught on the History of the Novel in the US in Fall 2013. Courtney’s project was the genesis of this semester’s class. I thought you all might enjoy this bit of hyper-local history.

And to complete the circle, the author of the Loyola Magazine article, Brigid Hamilton, took one of the first seminars I taught here at Loyola … back in 2003 or 2004, I think. It was on the History of the Book in America, a pre-cursor to the History of the Novel in the US class that Courtney took in 2013.

History repeats itself, as they say!