|
Home: >Browse
Listings >Authors >Bonner,
Sherwood
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
Bostons first Lyceum Bureau, Bonner gained acceptance among
Bostons 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 Granmamys
Last Gift, a story later expanded and collected as Granmammys
Last Gifts in Suwanee River Tales.
Bonners Granmammy tales
appeared in publication from 1875 to 1880. The tales whose
title character was based on Molly Wilson, the black matriarch who
had nurtured Bonners 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 Russells Christmas Night
in the Quarters by three years, Bonners Granmammy
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
engagedand later breaks off that engagementto 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
Chopins The Awakening, of a southern womans 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, Bonners
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 Carolinas 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.
![]()
|
Publications
Fiction:
- Like Unto Like. New York: Harper, 1878; republished
as Blythe Herndon. London: Ward, Locke, 1882.
- Dialect Tales. New York: Harper, 1883.
- Suwanee River Tales. Boston: Roberts, 1884.
Modern Editions:
- Dialect Tales. Facsimile edition. Freeport, N.Y.:
Books for Libraries Press, 1972. Available online at docsouth.unc.edu/bonner/
- Suwanee River Tales. Facsimile edition. Freeport,
N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1972.
- Dialect Tales and Other Stories. Edited, with an
introduction, by William L. Frank. Albany, N.Y.: NCUP, 1990.
- The Uncollected Works of Sherwood Bonner (Katharine Sherwood
Bonner McDowell, 1849-1883): An Annotated Edition. Edited
by Anne Razey Gowdy. Dissertation, University of Mississippi, 1996.
- Like Unto Like. Introduction by Jane Turner Censer.
Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1997.
- A Sherwood Bonner Sampler, 1869-1884: What a Bright, Educated,
Witty, Lively, Snappy Young Woman Can Say on a Variety of Topics.
Edited by Anne Razey Gowdy. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press,
2000.
Letters:
- Biglane, Jean Nosser. An Annotated and Indexed
Edition of the Letters of Sherwood Bonner. M.A. thesis, Mississippi
State University, 1972.
Papers:
Some personal correspondence, an unpublished manuscript
poem, a fragment of a Revolutionary War story, and other miscellaneous
papers of Sherwood Bonner are held by the Mississippi
Department of Archives and History in Jackson. Some Bonner materials
exist in the special
collections of the libraries of the University of Mississippi in Oxford
and Mississippi State University
in Starkville, as well as in the Marshall County Public Library in Holly
Springs.
Bibliography
Bibliographies:
- Biglane, Jean Nosser. Sherwood Bonner: A Bibliography of
Primary and Secondary Materials. American Literary Realism
5 (1972): 38-60.
- Owen, Thomas McAdory. A Bibliography of Mississippi.
Annual Report of the American Historical Association 1 (1900):
654.
Biographies:
- Bondurant, Alexander. Sherwood Bonner Her Life and
Place in the Literature of the South. Publications of the
Mississippi Historical Society 1 (1899): 43-68.
- Frank, William L. Sherwood Bonner. Boston: Twayne, 1976.
- McAlexander, Hubert Horton The Prodigal Daughter: A Biography
of Sherwood Bonner. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University,
1981; republished, with a new introduction, by McAlexander. Knoxville:
University of Tennessee Press, 1999.
Criticism:
- Burger, Nash Kerr, Jr. Katherine Sherwood Bonner: A Study
in the Development of a Southern Literature. M.A. thesis.
University of Virginia, 1935.
- Faranda, Lisa Pater. A Social Necessity: The Friendship
of Sherwood Bonner and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Patrons
and Protegees: Gender, Friendship, and Writing in Nineteenth-Century
America. Ed. Shirley Marchalonis. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers
University Press, 1988. 184-211.
- Frank, William L. Sherwood Bonners Diary for the Year
1869. Notes on Mississippi Writers 3 (1971): 111-30.
- Gilligan, Dorothy. Life and Works of Sherwood Bonner.
M.A. thesis. George Washington University, 1930.
- Gowdy, Anne Razey. Katherine Sherwood Bonner. Dictionary
of Literary Biography, Volume 202: Nineteenth-Century American Fiction
Writers. Ed. Kent P. Ljungquist. The Gale Group, 1999. 47-56.
- Hall, Wade. The Smiling Phoenix: Southern Humor from 1865 to
1914. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1965.
- McAlexander, Hubert, Jr. A Reappraisal of Sherwood Bonners
Like unto Like. Southern Literary Journal 10.2
(1978): 93-106.
- McAlexander, Hubert, Jr. Sherwood Bonner (Katharine Sherwood
Bonner McDowell). American Literary Realism, 1870-1910,
8 (1975): 203-04.
- McKee, Kathryn B. Writing in a Different Direction: Women
Authors and the Tradition of Southwestern Humor, 1875-1910.
Dissertation. University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, 1996.
- Moore, Rayburn S. Merlin and Vivien?: Some Notes
on Sherwood Bonner and Longfellow. Mississippi Quarterly:
The Journal of Southern Culture 28 (1975): 181-84.
- Pajo, Darlene. The Woman Question in the Life and Fiction
of Sherwood Bonner. M.A. thesis. University of Louisville,
1989.
- Skaggs, Merrill M. Southern Compost. Southern Literary
Journal 10.2 (1978): 155-60.
- Sutherland, Daniel E. Some Thoughts Concerning the Love
Life of Sherwood Bonner. Southern Studies 26 (1987):
115-127.
Internet Resources
Works by the Author:
Short works cataloged in the Library of Congress
American Memory Collection:
- Hieronymus
Pop and the Baby. Harpers new monthly magazine.
Volume 61, Issue 361, June 1880. Pages 20-25. View page
images (at Cornell University) or text
(generated by OCR without correction).
- On
the Nine-Mile. Harpers new monthly magazine.
Volume 64, Issue 384, May 1882. Pages 918-928. View page
images (at Cornell University) or text
(generated by OCR without correction).
- The
Revolution in the Life of Mr. Balingall. Harpers
new monthly magazine. Volume 59, Issue 353, October 1879. Pages
753-764. View page
images (at Cornell University) or text
(generated by OCR without correction).
- Two
Storms. Harpers new monthly magazine. Volume
62, Issue 371, April 1881. Pages 728-748. View page
images (at Cornell University) or text
(generated by OCR without correction).
Add
Information to this page
Mississippi Writers
Page Links
About This Site | New Book Info |
News & Events |
Literary Landmarks |
Mississippi Literary History |
Mississippi Publishing |
Other Features |
Other Web Resources
WRITER LISTINGS:
by author |
by title |
by place |
by year |
by genre
SEARCH THE MISSISSIPPI WRITERS PAGE
Ole
Miss Links
UM Home Page |
English Department |
Center for the Study of Southern Culture |
The University of Mississippi Foundation
This page has been accessed
10325 times. About
this page counter.
Last Revised on Monday, November 9, 2015, at 04:35:00 PM CST.
Send comments to mwp@olemiss.edu
Web Design by John B. Padgett.
Copyright ©
2015
The University of Mississippi English Department. |