Passport photo of Lucy Randolph Cautley when she was 54 years old. From Ancestory.com
Mrs. Cautley, who published under the name of L.R. Cautley was born July 19th, 1854 in Richmond, Henrico, Virginia. Her maiden name is Lucy Randolph Daniel.
It is unclear when she married her husband Richard K. Cautley. But it would be sometime after 1880 census which reordered her as single and living in Virginia still, she was 26 at the time. It is likely that after she married her husband that she moved to Baltimore with him.
Cautley shared a ton of short stories and poems within the Club. However, few of her works were ever published. What I could find was an essay on Rudyard Kipling’s works and a poem titled “Betrayal” that appeared in Harper’s Monthly. The poem used personification to convey emotions in a unique and engaging way. My favorite lines from the poem were,
“And all the little world around her smiled,
By memories of their own fair youth beguiled.”
After her husband, Richard K. Cautley died, she relocated to New York on 0ctober 19th, 1923 to be with her oldest son who worked at Cornell University as an engineering instructor. She was 69 when she first arrived. She had two other sons. In 1911 and 1912 her and two sons were listed as students during the summer sessions at Cornell for those years.
Cautley strongly identifies as a Southern woman. This is evident because she was an officer for at least 6 years (known) for the New York division of the United Daughters of Confederacy.
She was highly educated and mentioned in one of her letters to the editor of the New York Times that she studied in Northern Italy at one point in her life.
Mary Spear Nicholas Tiernan was born on February 14, 1835. Or was it 1836? Was her birthday even in February? Wikipedia thinks so, but the Encyclopedia of Virginia places her birth somewhere in 1836. Mrs. Tiernan’s early life is particularly difficult to pin down. As a charter member of the Woman’s Literary Club of Baltimore and an author whose novels are still available for purchase today, I would think more would be known about her. Unfortunately, the details are quite sparse. What I do know: She was the third wife of Charles Tiernan, a member of the State of Maryland Militia in Baltimore. She is did not have any children. Much of her early life was spent in Richmond, Virginia, where her father was a district attorney. According to a death announcement in the Baltimore Sun from January 14, 1891, her wit “brought to bear upon her literary work the advantages of a scholarly education.” This makes me assume that she did not have any sort of higher education, although I will continue to search for records that could indicate otherwise. In her life, she published short stories in Century Illustrated Magazine, Godey’s Lady’s Book, Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, and Scribner’s Monthly. Her death announcements in The Democratic Advocate of Westminster, MD and The Baltimore Sun state that she was 56 when she passed away from pneumonia on January 13, 1891. On the anniversaries of the club, the women would decorate her grave, along with the graves of Edgar Allen Poe and Sidney Lanier, according to The Baltimore Sun in 1899 and 1900, which indicates how highly she was respected by the other women.
Mary Spear Nicholas Tiernan. Image from Wikipedia
Her southern upbringing appeared to be quite influential in her writing; in fact, out of the seven short stories and novels I have read by her, all seven of them are set in Virginia! Each of them also centers around the Confederacy in some way or another- whether it be the inclusion of Confederate soldiers as characters or references to the Yankees in the north, her stories are set firmly in the Civil War. Her characters were described by reviewers in the November 11, 1885 edition of The Baltimore Sun as “pure and innocent” and I think that captures them perfectly. The majority of her stories center on young women and their suitors, finding an innocent love in the Virginia countryside. She was praised for her ability to make readers interested in her characters in novels like Homoselle and Suzette. I must say, this is true. Tiernan’s women are witty and interesting. A great example of this comes in Homoselle. The eponymous girl has previously expressed her disdain for her family’s British guest, Mr. Halsey. When Halsey expresses his delight after trying his first mint julep, Homoselle responds: “”The inventor of juleps,’ began Homoselle,– and as it was the first remark she volunteered, Halsey listened with interest,– ‘Like the inventor of the guillotine, is said to have fallen a victim to his own invention.’” Her comment is the perfect combination of intelligent and vaguely ominous, making even modern readers like myself get drawn into her charm and wit. Her short stories and novels are full of women who are unafraid to speak strongly despite the fact that they are also bound to societal conventions of docility.
As my last posts have shown, it has been quite the challenge to try to find who some of these women really are. Notably the married women. I was particularly surprised to find that Mrs. John C. Wrenshall, the long lasting president of the Club, was one of these people that was almost impossible to find.
Or so it seemed.
With the help of Hunter we were able to figure out that Mrs. John C. Wrenshall is ACTUALLY Mrs. Letitia Humphreys Yonge Wrenshall. It is definitely a mouthful but also really exciting to find out another lady’s real name.
Her husband, John C. Wrenshall was actually a captain in the Confederate army. John and Letitia were wed November 22, 1866 in Savannah, Georgia.
Another thing to add to the search is the information that we found while on our tour of the Green Mount Cemetery. All of the team was present for our search which we feared might be fruitless from the get-go. Fortunately we were able to find more than we thought. We were able to find the graves of Miss Caroline Barnett (1871-1957), Miss Virginia Woodword Cloud (d. 1938), Miss Eveline Early (1868-1933) and Mrs. John D. Early (otherwise known as Maud Graham Early 1842-1905), Mrs. Charles W. Lord (otherwise known as Alice Emma Lord 1848-1930), Mrs. William M. Powell (otherwise known as Emma B. Powell 1852-1952), and Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull (otherwise known as Francese Litchfield Turnbull 1844-1927).
Just being able to figure out a few more of these names and years keeps the search going. Another interesting thing that we found was that Sidney Lanier’s grave was in the same plot as the Turnbull’s plot. There was the grave for Sidney Lanier but not for Mrs. Sidney Lanier who was a honorary member of the club. We did not know of a connection between the Laniers and the Turnbulls, but we are aware that Mrs. Turnbull was always a big fan of Sidney Lanier and on her grave is a quote of his.
We also are fairly sure that we found the grave of Lydia Crane since we were able to find most of her family but were unable to determine which one was hers due to the weathering of the tombstones. But I know that Katie is going to want to do more hunting to find the truth.
I thought I’d do a little digging on “Mrs. Wrenshall,” the longtime President of the Women’s Literary Club of Baltimore, and found out that Mrs. Wrenshall’s husband, John C. Wrenshall, served as an engineer for the Confederate Army; and that the Wrenshalls had lived in Atlanta (remember Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind– “As God is my witness, I’ll never go hungry again”?) for some years before the decimation of the South during the war forced them north– apparently to Baltimore.
So, yes, the connection between this Club and Confederate sympathies is not only present– I think we will need to address it in a substantive way. Focusing on gender issues and empowerment of women represented by these women’s organizing around intellectual activities should not be a smokescreen for troubling and, speaking frankly, damnable attitudes some? many? all? of these women had about racial minorities, as well as other marginalized groups.
However we decide to present their work, let’s not employ the strategy that Sofia Coppola apparently has adopted in her just-released film about “Confederate wives” during the Civil War, The Beguiled: make it “just about gender.” As I said in our meeting last week, the difficulty will be in doing justice to the entirety of the history, the people, popular/cultural memory, and helping to bend the arc of history toward justice.
