Illinois women's novels at the Woman's Building Library.(Chicago World's Fair Woman's Building Library)

This article analyzes the fifty-eight novels by Illinois women selected for the Woman's Building Library and reveals their significance within the larger cultural context. The Illinois fiction provides an important example of the way a culture thinks, speaks, and plans for itself at a particular historical moment. The novels are especially relevant to understanding the religious beliefs, social practices, and economic and political environment that produced them. Yet the Illinois fiction is not a mere artifact that reflects its period. It is also serious literary work that calls the assumptions of the later nineteenth century, and our own assumptions about it, into question.

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Chicago in 1893 was rapidly becoming a major literary center for the United States. By the time of the World's Columbian Exposition ground had been broken for a central library that would house close to 200,000 volumes collected since the 1871 fire, making Chicago's collection the seventh largest in the nation. Six branch libraries were already operative in the city, as were the Newberry Library, the library at the University of Chicago, and the new Chicago Historical Society. Twenty-nine daily newspapers were available, and more than fifty publishing houses called Chicago their home. Women writers and their readers had already assumed a prominent place in the cultural life of the region and staunchly supported these libraries as well as literary clubs like the Fortnightly and the Friday Club. It was understandable, therefore, that Bertha Palmer and the Lady Managers would receive an enthusiastic response to their call for books written by Illinois women to be included in the Woman's Building Library.

Committees of Literature were formed throughout the state, and letters were sent to libraries, publishers, and literary clubs. Mrs. Francis L. Gilbert, chair of the Illinois Woman's Committee of Literature, noted that statewide Columbian County Clubs responded helpfully and enthusiastically by sending close to five hundred volumes from various genres, one of the largest collections exhibited in the Woman's Building Library.

The fiction from this group provides a unique and particularly vivid glimpse of how women thought, spoke, and planned for themselves at this historical moment. The novels are valuable because they are relevant to understanding the important religious beliefs, social practices, and economic and political environment that produced them. More important, they are serious literary works, full of surprises and in many instances provide startling social critiques. Finally, the Illinois women's novels call the assumptions of American culture during the second half of the nineteenth century, and our own assumptions about it, into question.

The Illinois Woman's Committee of Literature selected fifty-eight novels written between 1854 and 1893 for the Woman's Building Library. They considered these works to be "representative" of the best efforts of their women writers, but what the novels seem to represent is more of a debate than a consensus.

Most of the Illinois women authors wrote in a fictional form that can be categorized as romance or, more specifically, as the kind of romance that combines a realistic social setting with an idealized love plot. Writers used the conventional courtship framework of meeting, involvement, estrangement, reconciliation, and marriage, but the romantic plot was inevitably--even mainly--a superstructure on which other social issues of greater or lesser consequence were hung. There is frequently a tension between the "romantic" structure and the "realistic" material, for these women writers, like many of their male contemporaries, seem to be torn between their desire to write the romance and the need, as William Dean Howells articulated most influentially, to be honest about experience. This tension causes the novels to expand, deepen, question, and inform the standard critical categories of romance and realism. Whether historical romance with a foreign setting or a contemporary discussion of life on the prairie, in a small town, or in the city, the romances these women wrote differed from those of their male counterparts. Regardless of the publication dates of their work, these Illinois women writers regularly reveal specifically "female" qualities of aesthetic and thematic importance.

In general, the Illinois fiction is tightly structured and often formulaic, usually with plausible plots. It depicts concrete realities of daily life, shows continuities between past and present social conditions, and stresses the development of society. Authors show that people's lives are inextricably conditioned, if not determined, by physical surroundings, relationships, social class, and the past. The writers rarely offer works of cosmic moral concern that ponder dark and complex mysteries and truths. Instead, their writings acknowledge that women must function within the context of society in general and of family in particular. Authors recognize the sometimes trying and troubling aspects of social relationships, but most do not advise escape. When they emphasize the brighter side of life, they are usually prudential and circumspect, at the same time reconfirming the value of experience. Robert Bray argues that a sense of place in literature relies on an author's heightened consciousness of the environment, on "transactions" of this consciousness with nature and with humanity's "natural" institutions of home and garden: the Illinois women writers possess an almost obsessive interest in the individual's relationship with her environment. (1)

Although the Illinois authors have a special sense of their distinctive culture and locale, many times they are uneasy with an uncritical position. They often express mixed views, taking into account both the positive and negative aspects of their surroundings, including topography, flora, fauna, and climate as well as speech, dress, mannerisms, habits of thought, and social customs. Many want to get the facts straight, to capture local color, but they also want to unfold, through dramatization, the complex implications of reality and the difficulties that characterize everyday life without entirely letting go of the romantic idealism of the female myth.

The female myth was centered on domesticity, the idealization of a middle-class vision of marriage and motherhood. (2) Many authors and their heroines maintained that "beyond the obstacles and darkness of reality [they] could still see their ideal, shining clear and distinct, in the pure, undimmed light of their imagination." (3) In The Romance of Dollard (1889) Mary Hartwell Catherwood insists that "all localities have their romance, their unseen or possible life, which is hinted to the maker of stories alone." (4) The romantic idealism of the female myth suggested that authors should provide happy endings, and many writers were critical of works that "do not appear to have brought the problem of life to a happy or hopeful solution. They fail to recognize the hope-illuminated principles accepted or comprehended by the world's greatest philosophers, poets, seers, and prophets, that evil is negative, while love is positive." (5)

Some of the writers, however, express their uneasiness with the female myth and question its truth. They warn that romantic idealism can be an aesthetic evasion that deters women from admitting that they might be disenchanted with domestic life. They caution their readers to avoid the trap that snared Clarisse Arditti in Mary French Sheldon's Herbert Severance (1889): "Her artistic soul was becoming so wedded to her art, that she yearned to live the intensely passionate stories she was constantly acting and phrasing.... Her true identity was coalescing in an invidious way with her artistic presentation." (6) Some characters admit that they have to be "actresses" and are forced to deception in an effort to conceal their unhappiness in life or their distaste for the men in their society. (7)

Many Illinois women writers explain that they have tried to write a romance while still promising to tell the truth and never attempting "to color anything to make it appear better than it was in reality." (8) Sarah E. Farro, the author of True Love; A Story of English Domestic Life (1891), insists, "I have tried to make the plot exciting without being sensational or common, although within the bounds of proper romance, and create a set of characters most of whom are like real people." (9) In the preface to The Lady of Fort St. John (1891) Mary Hartwell Catherwood notes that "reality is stranger than fiction," and the reality is that many of the female characters that Catherwood and other writers create participate actively in their society and assert their independence as they try to believe in the romantic ideal basic to the female myth. (10) Increasingly, many female characters experience a new and different kind of romance. When the passionate and independent Lucile Layton is finally united with her old friend Frank Dana in Lucile and Her Friends (1890), she tells him with amazement, in an apparent rejection of conventional romance, "'I have loved you all the time, but did not know it. I thought that love must mean something new, and strange, and wonderful.'" (11)

Many of the authors wrote romances that reflected the conflicting forces that pulled at women in American society during the second half of the nineteenth century. Like Fanny West, the unmarried schoolteacher of Tried in the Fire (1871), (12) a significant number of heroines vacillate between self-reliance and dependence, willfulness and compliance, intellect and feeling. If female characters speak the truth about their condition, they are sometimes considered unbalanced. (13) As Norma Southstone, the heroine of For Her Daily Bread (1887), says, women are faced with "'a terrible choice, moral or physical death.'" (14) Women could achieve a moral triumph if they told the truth about their paradoxical condition and the difficulties they had in living the female myth. At the same time, they could suffer a kind of physical death if they questioned the traditional female myth and risked the condemnation of many men.

Still other writers were convinced,…