ABSTRACT
As noted in the introduction to this study, the concept of a literary career has tended to be understood in terms of the pursuit of commercial success. The word career generally has had a vexed relationship to women; indeed, the Oxford English Dictionary contains a separate entry for the word as a modifier applied to a woman (“career girl”). Given the varied attitudes toward authorship held by the writers considered in this study, including both women who aggressively sought publication and others who consciously chose to work almost solely in manuscript and coterie literary cultures, a concept of the literary career as defined by the pursuit of commercial gain obviously does not apply in any easily generalizable way. This final chapter considers the idea of a career in a broader way, closer to the term’s etymological roots: in the Renaissance, career designated a road or racecourse; its origin is in the Latin carrus, a wheeled chariot. In this understanding of a career as a path we find a concept large enough to include authors whose approach to authorship varied widely, a concept that will allow us to examine the course writers followed in their pursuit of writing as a vocationtheir progress in a variety of kinds of projects, both in their texts and in their performances as authors. The previous chapters have attempted a synthetic portrait of authorship for American women writers of the Revolutionary era. A sustained look at the careers of individual writers will provide insights about the available models of authorship, social forces affecting those models, and the possibilities for writers to sustain projects over the course of a career. Before turning to three of the writers who have figured frequently in the previous chapters, a brief consideration of two very different writers, both of whom sustained long careers, will suggest how varied the notion of career might be for women writing during the Revolutionary era. Hannah Adams and Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson each wrote prolifically; each developed a significant reputation among a readership of her contemporaries; and each has been marginal in contemporary accounts of literary history, although for different reasons. Between the 1780s and her death in 1813, Hannah Adams wrote books on history and theology that appeared in multiple editions, often under different titles and expanded or condensed for different audiences. Even when writing on religion, Adams cast her work as history, a mode of writing that many social commentators deemed the most suitable for
women to read and, as Nina Baym has argued in American Women Writers and the Work of History (1995), therefore also among the most suitable for women to write. Not surprisingly, the scholarly Adams tended to figure herself in terms of a collaborative, social model of authorship: as a compiler, editor, arranger, and commentator. Adams’s Alphabetical Compendium of the Various Sects Which Have Appeared in the World from the beginning of the Christian Æra to the present Day (1784), however, was by no means a mere chronicle or compilation of others’ scholarship; rather, it was implicitly an argument about theology. Unlike other writers of her day, Adams went to great lengths to maintain neutrality in her portrayal of other, even non-Christian, religious denominations. Her book thus made a strong implicit argument for the equality of world religions-an argument still quite controversial in the United States in 1784. Adams’s popular Compendium, however, presented its author less as writer making a controversial argument and more as a compiler and editor. Later in her life, in seeming contradiction of her collaborative sense of authorship, Adams participated in a variety of debates with male writers, including a copyright battle with ministers who abridged her published work and incorporated it into their own without acknowledgment. She was also prominent among the authors who petitioned Congress for a copyright law. Thus, Adams drew on collaborative and social notions of authorship when it suited her purposes (and clearly the Alphabetical Compendium was engaged in social critique). On the other hand, Adams asserted her property rights as an author when she felt her work had been mishandled.1
