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Harriet L. Smith: A “Conspicuous Woman Writer”

Image via The Baltimore Sun.
Image courtesy of The Baltimore Sun’s article on “WHEN GIRLS OF TODAY TAKE UP READING,” published 09.19.1915.

Over the weekend, I did some extended research on one of my favorite assigned authors – Mrs. Harriet Lummis Smith. According to a 1909 issue of The Sun, Mrs. Smith (also recognized as Mrs. William Mulligan Smith) was born in Auburndale, Massachusetts and was the daughter of Jennie Brewster Lummis and Dr. (and Reverend) Henry Lummis who had been the head of the Greek department at Lawrence College in Appleton, Wisconsin. She was also the sister of Harry Brewster Lummis and a half-sister of Charles Fletcher Lummis (who had been an author, adventurer and early advocate of multiculturalism). Charles F. Lummis’s mother had passed away at an early age, and his father (Reverend Henry Lummis at the time) remarried to Jennie Brewester (who also happened to be his teacher at the time of his father’s re-marriage who he had not established a warm rapport with. I found this to be a very interesting discovery… family drama!

Harriet Lummis Smith went on to study graduate at the University of Wisconsin after her mother and father had moved to Sheboygan, Wisconsin, where she went on to become a teacher of mathematics and Latin. After receiving a letter one day from a publisher who accepted a story of hers said that she was ‘wasting [her] time teaching,’ Mrs. Smith was given a final push to officially end her teaching career and pick up writing as a full-time profession. When she departed from teaching, she took up writing “merely for amusement” (The Sun, 1915).

Some time between the catalyst that sparked her career into writing and her time living on Calvert Street in Baltimore, Mrs. Smith received her A.B. (Bachelor of Arts) degree in 1886, and went on to accept a position at David Cook Publishing Company in 1894. Her sister Katherine went on to receive her A.M. degree (Master of Arts) at Stanford University in 1890 and then went on to study at the American School of Classical Studies in Rome (now known as the American Academy in Rome). Katherine later moved to Calvert Street also and lived close to her sister Harriet. Thank goodness for the Lawrence College Alumni Records! It is difficult to place when exactly Harriet had decided to go to move to Chicago. According to the February 14th, 1909 Baltimore Sun article, she had moved from Wisconsin to Chicago for some time where she then gained more of a reputation for her short stories to McClure’s Magazine, the Youth’s Companion, the Independent, Lippincott’s, and many more. I can only assume that she joined the WLCB by 1909 and ended her time at the WLCB soon after 1915 (according to club records), which means she must have moved to Calvert Street in Baltimore by 1909 since the Baltimore Sun biographical article had been published in 1909. Filling in the puzzle pieces is quite exciting!

While browsing the Minutes, I noticed that because she was referenced by her husband’s name, she would have gone by Mrs. William Mulligan Smith (she married her husband in Wisconsin in 1905) – but the Minutes label her as Mrs. William Milligan Smith in the 1909-1910 minutes! She had sat as Chairman and Judge of an election in 1909, and her name had been labeled properly as Mulligan at this time within the Minutes. During some instances, Mrs. Smith had been a substitute as the recording secretary in the 1910-1911 Minutes, and within the 1911-1912 Minutes, she continued to be a substitute Secretary for the Minutes. At the 779th Meeting on November 13th of 1913, as active Chairman, she had stated that, “while an autobiography is a man’s picture of himself as he likes to imagine he looks, his letters really reveal himself. The simple, almost stupid, letters of certain great men sometimes give us a feeling of affection for them not called out by their profundities” (“Other People’s Letters,” 779th Meeting); I found this comment by her to be particularly amusing as she opens up the Meeting with this comment. 1915 seemed to be the liveliest time for Mrs. Smith, as she went on to review many works within the club meetings, culminating with her election as President of the WLCB at the end of the season. After 1915, references to Mrs. Harriet Lummis Smith begin to taper off. With the 832nd Meeting’s text missing, it is difficult to try to understand what happened to Mrs. Smith from 1915-1916. Because these specific minutes are currently being transcribed, I will have to halt my research on the elusive and “Conspicuous” Harriet Lummis Smith!

..To be continued?!

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Posted on by Jean Lee Cole

Contemporary Critics

Guest blogger Cynthia Requardt is a volunteer transcriber and researcher for this project. In addition to transcribing several entire seasons of the Club meeting minutes, she also has contributed a Club history to the WLCB Archive. She is currently transcribing the 1913-1914 season, which spurred her to share:

Reading through the Woman’s Literary Club minutes has reminded me how easy it is to misjudge the members if I look at them with a 21st century perspective.

There is consistency in the Club meetings and it lulled me into complacency. Often members read their own compositions, poems, stories, novel chapters or plays. Or they delve into analysis, usually praise, of well-known authors; Browning and Shakespeare being popular topics. Other times members wrote reviews of music, art, or historical events. When I would read that the Committee on Fiction or the Committee on Art and Artists of Maryland was presenting the program, I thought I knew what to expect. But the program presented by the Committee on Current Literature, December 2, 1913, came as a surprise.

Mary Johnston
Mary Johnston c. 1909. Full image available at Wikipedia.org.

Harriet Lummis Smith wrote short stories, and by 1913 had some success with her standard formula of a young woman overcoming obstacles in her search for a happy marriage. At the December meeting, Smith chose to review the new novel Hagar by Mary Johnston. Johnston had been successful writing historical romances. This novel was a departure for her, and many of her readers, like Smith, found it unsatisfactory. Today, Hagar is considered one of the first feminist novels, with a heroine struggling to lead an independent life as an author. Smith alluded to the feminist tone of the work but seemed most concerned with poor character development noting that “the reader resents the marriage of the heroine to a lover with whom they hardly feel acquainted.”

Tagore
Rabindranath Tagore, 1913 Nobel Prize winner. nobelprize.org.

The following paper on the program was by poet Virginia Woodward Cloud. She also was disappointed in what she saw as new trends in poetry. The 1913 Nobel Prize in Literature had been awarded to Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore which Cloud thought undeserved. He may be revered by his countrymen, stated Cloud, but he would never appeal to the “Anglo-Saxon mind” and his lack of concrete ideas meant his poetry would never be universal.

I was disappointed that both Smith and Cloud seemed to dismiss new ideas in their craft. They seemed to want to hold on to traditional forms and measures of success. It then occurred to me that I needed to remember who these women were and judge them for what they achieved, not what I would like them to have done.