Katherine Sherwood Bonner McDowell

Katherine Sherwood Bonner McDowell

Until recently, Sherwood Bonner was mostly remembered — when she was remembered at all — for her short fiction published in northern magazines between 1875 and 1884, fiction notable for its humor and local-color dialect. Her reputation well into the 20th century rested largely on two volumes she compiled while literally on her deathbed, Dialect Tales (1883) and Suwanee River Tales (1884), which together are a collection of 29 stories Bonner selected for their popularity in an attempt to provide a financial legacy for her young daughter. The true breadth of her talent as writer, however, is now beginning to be realized as works long out of print are being rediscovered and republished, works that include short fiction, a novella, a novel, two series of journalistic travel letters, celebrity profiles, historical/autobiographical sketches, and poems.

Catherine Sherwood Bonner was born February 26, 1849, in Holly Springs, Mississippi. “Kate,” as she was called, experienced the Civil War first-hand in Holly Springs, which served for a time as headquarters for Union General Ulysses S. Grant during his Vicksburg campaign of 1862-63.

On February 14, 1871, she married Edward McDowell in Holly Springs and on December 10 gave birth to a daughter, Lilian. In an attempt to provide for his family in the postwar South, McDowell took his family to Texas, but they returned to Mississippi in 1873 when his plans failed to blossom. Bonner left her child with relatives and traveled alone by train to Boston in hopes of seeking education and opportunities to earn money. Bonner had published her first story in 1869 and had corresponded with editor Nahood Capun; now, he helped her to get her start in Boston, first as his secretary and later working for temperance reformer Dr. Dio Lewis and poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who would become her literary patron and lifelong friend.

Through her association with Capun, Lewis, and Longfellow, and her friend James Redpath, director of Boston’s first Lyceum Bureau, Bonner gained acceptance among Boston’s literati, and over the next ten years she built a successful freelance writing career, first signing her work as “Katherine McDowell,” and then “Kate McDowell” or “Kate Bonner” before settling on the gender-ambiguous “Sherwood Bonner” in 1875.

Up until that point, she had published in a number of genres and styles, including humorous travel letters, sentimental romances, and satiric poems, and had patterned her works upon similar work by such writers as Mark Twain, Sir Walter Scott, and Edgar Allan Poe. In 1875, however, after a friend criticized her work because “the influence of your reading was noticeable through every composition,” Bonner published “Gran’mamy’s Last Gift,” a story later expanded and collected as “Gran’mammy’s Last Gifts” in Suwanee River Tales.

Bonner’s Gran’mammy tales appeared in publication from 1875 to 1880. The tales — whose title character was based on Molly Wilson, the black matriarch who had nurtured Bonner’s family for three generations before the war — were among the first and most popular black dialect tales published in northern magazines following the Civil War. Preceding such classics in the genre as Joel Chandler Harris’ Uncle Remus by more than a year and Irwin Russell’s “Christmas Night in the Quarters” by three years, Bonner’s Gran’mammy tales were, according to critic Wade Hall in The Smiling Phoenix: Southern Humor from 1865-1914, “probably the first Negro dialect stories widely read in the North,” and Bonner was “the first Southern woman to deal with the Negro, and the first writer to treat him separately from the white man.”

It was in 1878 that Bonner reached the pinnacle of her career when she published her novel Like Unto Like, a regional romance set in the Deep South during Reconstruction but departing significantly from the so-called reconciliation novels of the period in which national union was represented by a marriage between a southern beauty and a northern hero. Instead, the novel follows the romantic involvements of three young women, but most especially Blythe Herndon, a free-spirited intellectual who becomes engaged—and later breaks off that engagement—to Roger Ellis, a former abolitionist and Union soldier. The novel is notable for its strong local color and regional dialects, its frank depiction of post-war politics, and its depiction, twenty years before Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, of a southern woman’s search for herself.

The partially autobiographical novel also revealed some of the problems Bonner faced in acceptance in Boston. Though she was eventually able to bring Lilian to live with her in Boston, her lifestyle and ambiguous marital status scandalized some of the patrons who had initially supported her. She and her husband tried several times to reconcile, but finally, she divorced him in 1881 on the grounds of abandonment and nonsupport.

Soon after the divorce, periods of ill health Bonner had suffered were diagnosed as breast cancer. She returned to her childhood home in Holly Springs, where she died on July 22, 1883.

Though assessing her value as a writer is complicated by her short life, her literary diversity, and the fact that many of her final works were completed hastily during her illness or after her death by an executor, Bonner’s works are increasingly being recognized as the work of a talented writer. In a recent article in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Anne Razey Gowdy recognizes Bonner as “an astute, talented, witty observer of the American scene whose work reveals much about cultural and literary trends during crucial decades of the nineteenth century.” Among the important traits Bonner demonstrated in her writing, Gowdy says, are an “irrepressible sense of humor, lighthearted but not always tempered by discretion,” “candid southern views, broadened but unintimidated by brushes with the elite of New England, [which] provide an alternative perspective for understanding postwar regional differences,” and a “skepticism about organized religion.” Most important, however, is “her articulation of emerging feminist concerns.... New readers of her work will discover that Sherwood Bonner has been too lightly estimated and too narrowly classified.”

—John B. Padgett

(Article first posted February 2002)

Related Links & Info

This illustration, titled “De Parster of de Fust Methodis’ Church, Limited,” is the frontispiece from Dialect Tales, published originally in 1883. This entire text of this book and its original illustrations are available for reading or viewing online as part of the University of North Carolina’s Documenting the American South web site.

The Bonner Home in Holly Springs is featured on this web site about historic homes and buildings in Marshall County, Mississippi. Holly Springs at the time of the Civil War is also explored in this virtual tour of the town on the Civil War Web site.