ABSTRACT
Ann Sophia Stephens’s position as a nineteenth-century woman humorist is complicated since, unlike Frances Whitcher or Marietta Holley, who created female characters, Stephens adopts a male persona, the Down East rustic Jonathan Slick. Born in Humphreysville, Connecticut, in 1810, Ann Sophia Winterbotham had been determined to be a writer since childhood. After marrying Edward Stephens, she edited the Portland Magazine, a periodical her husband published in Maine, from 1834 to 1837; they then relocated to New York so she could pursue her literary career. There, Ann Sophia Stephens became her family’s primary wage earner, writing for and editing several important magazines, including Peterson’s. In Doing Literary Business, a study of women and publishing in mid-nineteenth-century America, Susan Coultrap-McQuin describes exactly Stephens’s agenda. Her struggle with what Coultrap-McQuin characterizes as “the cultural prescriptions and social circumstances” that shaped her literary context can be sensed in the eccentric Yankee persona of Jonathan Slick.
