marion harland (1830-1922)

Marion Harland (1830-1922)Author(s): KAREN SMITHSource: Legacy, Vol. 8, No. 1 (Spring 1991), pp. 51-57Published by: University of Nebraska PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25684413 .

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LEGACY PROFILE Marion Harland

(1830-1922)

KAREN SMITH Pelham, MA

Marion Harland

In 1926, Albert Payson Terhune published

an article about his parents in American

Magazine. Of his mother, Mary Virginia Hawes Terhune, known to millions of readers as domestic expert "Marion Har land," he said, "She won her campaign for the betterment of American homes; but in

winning it she threw away her high vogue as a fiction writer." He declared that it had

galled her "unspeakably" that a younger

generation should look upon her as a kind of super-cook and not as a popular novel ist:

" 'It isn't literature, this household stuff I

write,' she told me once with a whimsical

resignation. 'I know that. But it is in fluence. And it helps people'

" (Terhune

41). Terhune may have been right about his

mother's resigned acceptance of her

reputation. Or, having dedicated his own career as a writer almost exclusively to

popular fiction, he may have been putting a gloss on what he saw as her diminished contribution to American literature. It was

important for him to believe, and to con vince others, that the mother he had revered for half a century had been a

distinguished novelist before sacrificing herself for the sake of American women's homes. Most likely, Terhune had misread his mother, for Marion Harland had a very fair idea of the extent and limitations of her

talents, and an invincible ego. Where her career was concerned she made adjust ments or redirected her energies. She seldom made sacrifices.

Mary Virginia Hawes was raised in rural

Virginia, the third of eight children born to a transplanted Yankee merchant and his aristocratic Virginia bride. In 1844, the

family moved to Richmond, where young Mary Virginia capped off a rather splendid home education directed by her father with two years in a girls' seminary. At fifteen, she began to write for a Richmond religious weekly, the Watchman and Observer, us

ing a male pseudonym to lend authority to

51



52 LEGACY

her evangelical essays and simultaneously to protect herself from the curiosity of friends and neighbors. By the early 1850s, she was submitting stories to Godey's Ladies' Book and other magazines under a

variety of pen names, finally settling on "Marion Harland." In 1854, she published her first novel, Alone, which became an in stant best-seller, and during the next fifteen years she established herself among the nation's top-selling authors of popular woman's fiction. Her novels and stories from this period, like those of Susan

Warner and Maria Cummins, explored the domestic and religious lives of young women. Several novels featured women writers. Each book had at least one roman tic plotline; a number contained sensa tional episodes?murders, fires, accidents and sudden deaths?of the kind familiar to readers of E. D.E.N. South worth, whom Harland admired. In later fiction, Harland

explored depravity and mental illness, which she assumed to be congenital. Madmen and madwomen, alcoholics and

drug addicts appear in True as Steel, Col onel Floyd's Wards, Ruby's Husband, Mr.

Wayt's Wife's Sister, The Carringtons of High Hill and other works.

Many late nineteenth and early twenti

eth-century literary critics, among them

Henry Pancoast, Thomas Nelson Page and Francis Pendleton Gaines, regarded Harland as a plantation novelist, but this is at best a partial categorization, as she was in no way wedded to the form (Wright 394-404). Harland's settings were as fre

quently Southern cities as plantations, and two of her best novels took place in New

York. What is more, though a staunch

Virginian, she was harshly critical of a number of Southern social institutions, especially kin marriage and?somewhat

belatedly?slavery. Marion Harland had already established

her career as a novelist when she married Edward Payson Terhune, a New Jersey minister, in 1856. Shortly thereafter, she and her husband moved permanently to the North. There she continued to write fic tion, turning out an average of one novel

and twelve stories or serial episodes a year, while she bore six children, managed a household and shouldered the multiple responsibilities of her role as a minister's wife and an organizer of charities. She wrote

prolifically, almost feverishly, through the deaths of three of her children and the

agonies of the Civil War, which saw her, a

loyal Unionist, cut off from her parents and terrified for the fate of her brothers, who were fighting for the Confederacy. Be tween 1862 and 1874, only four issues of

Godey's monthly magazine appeared without a story by Marion Harland. Even more than her best-selling novels, this ex

posure in Godey's, with its paid monthly circulation of 100,000-200,000, made Marion Harland a nationally recognized name.

When she began writing cookbooks and domestic advice manuals in the 1870s, Harland did not abandon the writing of fic tion, but continued to produce occasional novels and short stories between works in several non-fiction genres for the rest of her life. At its best?The Hidden Path (1855), Sunnybank (1866), Phemie's

Temptation (1869)?her fiction is a lively examination of real issues in women's lives; at its weakest?Ruby's Husband (1868), Jessamine (1873), Mr. Wayt's Wife's Sister (1894)?it becomes weighted in gloom and loses tough with reality: the villany lacks believable motivation and the heroine's

sufferings are pointlessly protracted. Still, Harland always told a good story, and her first fourteen novels, printed in cheap edi tions, continued to sell well into the twen tieth century. What Marion Harland's son did not

understand, or perhaps did not wish to tell his readers, was that all his mother's writing, fiction and non-fiction, was ac tivated not only by a strong sense of mis sion?the need to "influence"?but also by a strong sense of the literary market. Harland wrote what she knew the multi tudes would buy. When the heyday of woman's fiction began to fade after the Civil War, Harland shifted her emphasis to

cookery and household advice. Scenting a



Karen Smith 53

market in the social and economic mobility of the new urban white middle class, she claimed as her own an audience of inex

perienced young housewives who wanted to know what to cook and how to cook it, as well as how to manage their servants, households and social lives. For this clientele she crafted an eclectic American cuisine, with recipes gathered from every region of the United States and dishes that

ranged from the humble to the elegant? from hominy grits to veal cutlets a la maintenon. Her first cookbook, Common Sense in the Household (1871), initially considered a gamble by its publisher, Scribner's, remained in print for fifty years, selling well over a million copies. During its first ten years, the book earned its author some $30,000 (Derby 508). The publisher, of course, made a great deal more.

By the mid-1880s, Marion Harland had become one of the premier domestic author ities in the country. A few years later, she

began to pursue additional markets for her

talents, joining the ranks of summertime

Chautauqua lecturers just as the middle class passion for adult education approached its late nineteenth-century zenith. Amiable, forthright and witty, Harland delighted her

largely female audiences all over the Eastern United States with lectures on the home and family. By the mid-1890s, she had won herself such a following that

anything with her name on it was a

guaranteed seller. For two decades she in

dulged her fame by writing biography and

autobiography as well as long, discursive travel books, and popular histories that were highly opinionated and minimally researched. In the early years of the twen tieth century, when every town or city had a newspaper and some had five or six, she became a syndicated advice columnist.

When she died in 1922, there were scores of obituaries. The editor of Outlook maga zine declared, "There was no American

city so great, no crossroads village so

remote, but the name of Marion Harland was as familiar there as if she had been a

president of the United States" (286). Marion Harland's sense of literary "mis

sion" always operated in tandem with her shrewd market sense, though it, too, changed and refocused over the course of her lifetime. Her earliest published writ

ings, religious editorials illustrated with homilies and anecdotes, were apparently the productions of a young woman de

prived by her gender of a pulpit who had taken to chastising and exhorting unobser vant Christians with her pen. Many of her novels were written with similar evangelical fervor; their messages for women were about Christian duty, strength and resigna tion. In her cookbooks and housekeeping

manuals, her mission?closely paralleling the domestic feminism of Catharine

Beecher?was to redeem women's profes

sion, to elevate housework from drudgery to a divinely-ordained vocation. Overlook

ing, as she always did, the fact that her own choice of a writing career contradicted her advice to other women, she would tell her readers not to "scoff" at the notion of

homemaking as a profession: Call not that common and unclean which

Providence has designated as your life

work ... My dear, [your husband] and

the children, and the humble home, make your sphere for the present, you

say. Be sure you fill it?full! before you seek one wider and higher. (8)

The persona Harland assumed as an ad vice columnist, beginning in her 70th year, was the direct descendant of this cheerful, exhortative domestic expert and the wise, matronly character she had adopted for such books as Eve's Daughters; Common Sense for Maid, Wife, and Mother (1881), and Common Sense in the Nursery (1885). Authority was no mere pose.

Harland really believed she had the answers to most of life's dilemmas, and could tell you from her own experience just how you should manage your affairs. In her last years, though continuing to write

stories, she turned increasingly to religious essays and poetry, becoming the expert on old age and death. At the end of her days, she could have told herself with some

justice that she had led a life of service to womankind and to God. She had also



54 LEGACY

made a good deal of money. Marion Harland's novels have been

discussed by literary scholars in our time as well as in her own. Critics from the earlier

period, largely unprejudiced against wom en authors of popular fiction, treated Har land's works as serious contributions to Southern literature. Contemporary schol ars, Jane Tompkins, Nina Baym and Mary Kelley among them, have sought to rescue Harland and her literary sisters as a group from the obscurity into which the American

literary canon has thrust them. Only now are critics, historians and biographers beginning to examine these nineteenth

century women writers individually. Harland's domestic advice manuals,

especially Eve's Daughters, have received a great deal of attention from women's

historians, for they represent a detailed, conservative, middle-class program for white American women's lives that differs

markedly from the plans and ambitions of feminists of the era. Though much of Harland's advice to girls and women is pro gressive and wholesome, it is peppered with an assortment of less attractive anti

suffrage, nativist, racist and classist sen

timents, almost a secondary text underlying the motherly, common-sense approach to home life that is the stated purpose of her

writing. As yet, there has been little examination

of Harland's cookbooks as literature, though they contain, in addition to iterations of her domestic philosophy, some of her finest

writing. Harland may have given lip service to her own era's trivialization of food

writing, but she treated her cookbooks as if

they were literature, or at least had literary qualities. She adorned them with nuggets of autobiography and lush, sensual de

scriptions of favorite foods. Frequently, in stead of simply listing ingredients and tell

ing the reader how to put them together, she turned her recipes into graceful nar ratives. She peppered her "Familiar Talks," as she called her long asides to the reader, with quotations from Dickens, Thackeray and George Eliot, implying both that she was one of the company and

that great food deserved great writing. Quite simply, Harland loved food: she

loved preparing it, eating it, talking about it and sharing it with other people. Writing about cooking was, for her, a perfect op portunity to marry the two craft traditions to which she had dedicated her life work.

Sometimes, in her enthusiasm, she be came completely carried away. Here, for

example, is the conclusion of a recipe for baked salmon-trout from her first cook book:

[PJour the sauce around him as he lies in state. He will take kindly to the creamy bath and your guests will take kindly to him. Garnish with a wreath of crimson

nasturtium blooms and dainty sprigs of

parsley, arranged by your own hands on

the edge of the dish, and let no sharp spiced sauces come near him. They would but mar his native richness?

the flavor he brought with him from lake and wildwood. Salt him lightly, should he need it, eat and be happy.

Somewhat apologetically she added, "If the above savor of bathos rather than 'common sense,' my excuse is, I have late

ly eaten baked salmon-trout with cream

gravy" (52).

Harland could never resist story-telling or intimacy, even in her food writing. Per sonification of ingredients was only occa

sional, but most of her books in the "Com mon Sense" series were peopled with a

representative American family: the "dear reader," her husband "John," and her children "Mamie," "Tom" and "Susie," whose domestic and familial difficulties the author described anecdotally, and ad dressed with brisk sympathy and solid

good sense. Harland's most memorable asides are short, usually autobiographical vignettes featuring food preparation or

special meals. These word pictures, detailed and evocative, are anchored in a potent appeal to all five senses. As Glenna Mat thews has noted, they possess some of the

qualities of nineteenth-century genre paint ing (167). Inserted within or between reci

pes,they serve to illuminate the essentially functional text.



Karen Smith 55

Unlike novels, cookbooks are generally considered literary ephemera. Tastes change, culinary technology improves, and yester day's best-selling book of recipes becomes

today's historical artifact. Yet Marion Harland's cookbooks had literary qualities beyond mere functionality. Perhaps that is

why so many women bought and treasured them long after they had ceased to read her novels. For Harland, food writing was

not, as her son assumed, a compromise of artistic talent. Rather, it was the liberation of expression, and the opportunity to share with other women her glorified vision of the American home: a place that was hearth-warmed and woman-centered, a

place where everyone might "eat and be

happy."

Works Cited

Terhune, Albert Payson. "Why I Think My Mother and Father Were Great." American

Magazine 102 (Oct. 1926). Wright, Mary Hudson. "Mary Virginia Hawes

Terhune ['Marion Harland']: Her Life and Works." Diss. George Peabody College for Teachers, Nashville, TN, 1934.

Derby, J.C. Fifty Years Among Authors, Books, and Publishers. New York: G.W.

Carleton, 1884.

Editorial. Outlook 131 (14 June 1922): 286. Harland, Marion [Mary Virginia Terhune].

Common Sense in the Household. New

York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1871 [1881 ed.].

Matthews, Glenna. Just a Housewife: The

Rise and Fall of Domesticity in America. New York: Oxford UP, 1987.

Selected Bibliography

Manuscript Collections The largest collections of Marion Harland's let

ters are at Duke University (Perkins Library), The University of Virginia (Clifton Waller Barrett division of the Alderman Library) and the Hun tington Library in San Marino, California. Her

only known journal (1846-1853) is in a private collection, as is a memoir written by her grand son in the 1950s. The Alexander Library at

Rutgers University has her husband's journals from 1876-1907. The Schlesinger Library at Harvard has some manuscripts and an outstand

ing collection of Harland's cookbooks.

Selected Primary Works NOVELS Alone. Richmond, VA: Adolphus Morris,

1854. The Hidden Path. New York: Derby and

Jackson, 1855.

Miriam. New York: Derby and Jackson, 1862.

Sunnybank. New York: Sheldon, 1866. Phemie's Temptation. New York: Sheldon,

1869. True as Steel. New York: G.W. Carleton,

1872. Judith, A Chronicle of Old Virginia. Philadel

phia: Our Continent Publishing, 1883. His Great Self. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott,

1892. The Royal Road; or, Taking Him at His Word.

New York: Anson D.F. Randolph, 1894.

When Grandmamma was New: The Story of a Virginia Childhood. Boston: Lothrop, 1899.

SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS Husbands and Homes. New York: Sheldon,

1865. Handicapped. New York: Charles Scribner's

Sons, 1881.

In Our Country: Stories of Old Virginia Life. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1901.

COOKBOOKS AND MANUALS Common Sense in the Household, A Man

ual of Practical Housewifery. New York:

Charles Scribner's Sons, 1871.

Breakfast, Luncheon and Tea. New York:

Scribner, Armstrong, 1875.

Eve's Daughters; or Common Sense for Maid,

Wife, and Mother. New York: Charles Scrib

ner's Sons, 1881.

Common Sense in the Nursery. New York:

Charles Scribner's Sons, 1885.

Bills of Fare for all Seasons of the Year. n.p.: L.M. Palmer, 1889.

House and Home. Philadelphia: P.W. Ziegler, 1889.

Marion Harland's Complete Cookbook: A Prac

tical and Exhaustive Manual of Cookery and Housekeeping. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1903.

The Housekeeper's Week. Indianapolis: Bobbs

Merrill, 1908.



56 LEGACY

TRAVEL, HISTORY, BIOGRAPHY Loiterings in Pleasant Paths. New York: Charles

Scribner's Sons, 1880.

Home of the Bible: What I Saw and Heard in Palestine. Philadelphia: Historical, 1895.

Where Ghosts Walk: The Haunts of Familiar Characters in History and Literature, Series I

and II. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons,

1898, 1910. Colonial Homesteads and Their Stories. New

York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1912.

Charlotte Bronte at Home. Literary Hearth

stones Series. New York: G.P. Putnam's

Sons, 1899.

Hannah More. Literary Hearthstones Series.

New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1900.

Marion Harland's Autobiography: The Story of a Long Life. New York: Harper and Broth

ers, 1910.

Selected Secondary Works

See also Works Cited.

Baym, Nina. Woman's Fiction: A Guide to

Novels by and about Women in America, 1820-1870. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1978.

Cogan, Frances B. All American Girl: The Ideal

of Real Womanhood in Mid-Nineteenth -

Century America. Athens: U of Georgia, 1989.

Kelley, Mary. Private Woman, Public Stage:

Literary Domesticity in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford UP, 1984.

Smith, Karen Manners. "Marion Harland: The

Making of a Household Word." Diss. U of Massachusetts, 1990.

Tompkins, Jane. Sensational Designs: The Cul tural Work of American Fiction 1790-1860. New York: Oxford UP, 1985.

from Breakfast, Luncheon, and Tea, 1875

[Here Marion Harland promoted a modest mealtime reform, urging her urban readers to substitute a light luncheon for the tradi tional heavy midday dinner, which she felt was appropriate now only for farmers and laborers. In the evening, everybody could have "tea." True, the meal was British in

origin, but as the passage below implies it had already been adapted to life in a

democracy, and was filled with the poten tial for gustatory delight.]

I was almost grown before I was in troduced to . . . "a real old New England tea-table." During one delicious vacation I learned, and reveled in knowing what this

meant. Black tea with cream (I have never relished it without, since that idyllic sum

mer); rounds of brown bread, light, sweet, and fresh; hot short-cake in piles that were

very high when we sat down and very low when we arose; a big glass bowl of raspber ries and currants that had been growing in the garden under the back windows an hour before; a basket of frosted cake; a

plate of pink ham, balanced by one of shaved, not chipped beef?and sage cheese! I had never eaten it before. I have never tasted it anywhere else than in that wide, cool tea-room, the level sun-rays flickering through the grape-vines shading the west side of the house, and through the open casements opposite, a view of Boston

Bay?all purple and rose and gold, dotted with hundreds of white sails. This was what we had when, in that old New England farm house, Polly, the faithful . . . ?Polly, whom nobody thought of calling a servant, but who was a "help" in every conceivable sense of the word?had "put the kettle on and we all had tea."

from Bills of Fare for All Seasons of the Year, 1889

[Nostalgia is a major ingredient in Har land's most evocative descriptive writing. She and her mother and sisters often prepared food together in their big Rich mond kitchen in the 1840s. In this passage,



Karen Smith 57

Harland is up to her elbows in chopped fruit, spices and brandy, revelling in the

manufacture of mince pie, always a favor ite food. Like the scene above, this pas sage suggests a painting?one that has been enriched with scent, taste and sound.]

At least ten days before [Christmas], clear decent space and wide, for the ceremony of mince-meat making. A sort of

jocund dignity should attend preliminaries and manufacture. The kitchen must be clean and set in order; irrelevances and distractions . . . shoved out of the way. The middle distance should be occupied by reserves of material. In the foreground, let

mistress and assistants seat themselves at a

spacious table, and, serenely resolute, engage first of all the currants. . . .

The business is tedious and sticky. To enliven the task, two or three may work

together, chatting merrily, or, as was the way of one ingenious family, one of the group may read aloud while the others are

busy. Dickens' Christmas Chimes and The Cricket on the Hearth have always, for the ears of my fancy, the low accompaniment of the "snip-snap" of raisin scissors, the shrill sigh of the December wind between the window sashes, the sough of the draft under the heated plates of the range, the

bubble and savoriness of the beef boiling at the back of the fire. This beef should be a solid chunk of the round. Cook it as you prepare raisins, currants, and citron, the

day before the ingredients are to be com

pounded into a whole of incomparable deliciousness.

On the eventful morrow, chop the meat, clear the suet of strings and membranes, crumb it daintily with cool, deft fingers; select firm, juicy apples?pippins or green ings?pare, slice and mince them when

everything else is ready. Bare your arms, and mix the accumulated riches?from the North, East, South and West?in a mighty bowl. First meat, suet, and apples, then the prepared small fruits and citron, sugar and spices, tossing and turning, but not

bruising or crushing. Finally, add wine and

brandy to mellow and preserve the incor

porate mass. . . .

Make your pie prettier by laying strips of

pastry, notched with a jagging iron, on the full, brown breast of the Mince-Meat. Then let none of the household partake during the holidays and year of aught more intox

icating than that which is bound up in the obtuse angle of our American Christmas Pie, and you will thank, not curse, the humble biographer of this daughter of high degree and ancient ancestry.



marion harland (1830-1922)

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