Mrs. Spring Fragrance

Edith Maude Eaton (1865–1914)
From Becoming Americans: Four Centuries of Immigrant Writing

Interesting links:
An Interview with Ilan Stavans about American Immigrant Writing (PDF)

Buy this book:
Becoming Americans: Four Centuries of Immigrant Writing (Save 20%)

Born in Cheshire to an English father and a Chinese mother, Edith Maude Eaton immigrated with her family to New York in the 1870s before living in Quebec, San Francisco, Seattle, and back east in Boston. Under the pseudonym Sui Sin Far, she wrote articles and stories featuring Chinese immigrants and communities and focusing on themes of assimilation and discrimination. (Her younger sister Winnifred enjoyed even greater success, publishing best-selling novels and stories under the Japanese-sounding pseudonym Onoto Watanna.) The title story from Edith’s 1912 collection, Mrs. Spring Fragrance, portrays an “Americanized” couple who struggle to reconcile their own traditions regarding love and marriage with the view of love illustrated by two lines from a Tennyson poem.

When Mrs. Spring Fragrance first arrived in Seattle, she was unacquainted with even one word of the American language. Five years later her husband, speaking of her, said: “There are no more American words for her learning.” And everyone who knew Mrs. Spring Fragrance agreed with Mr. Spring Fragrance.

Mr. Spring Fragrance, whose business name was Sing Yook, was a young curio merchant. Though conservatively Chinese in many respects, he was at the same time what is called by the Westerners, “Americanized.” Mrs. Spring Fragrance was even more “Americanized.”

Next door to the Spring Fragrances lived the Chin Yuens. Mrs. Chin Yuen was much older than Mrs. Spring Fragance; but she had a daughter of eighteen with whom Mrs. Spring Fragrance was on terms of great friendship. The daughter was a pretty girl whose Chinese name was Mai Gwi Far (a rose) and whose American name was Laura. Nearly everybody called her Laura, even her parents and Chinese friends. Laura had a sweetheart, a youth named Kai Tzu. Kai Tzu, who was American-born, and as ruddy and stalwart as any young Westerner, was noted amongst baseball players as one of the finest pitchers on the Coast. He could also sing, “Drink to me only with thine eyes,” to Laura’s piano accompaniment.

Now the only person who knew that Kai Tzu loved Laura and that Laura loved Kai Tzu, was Mrs. Spring Fragrance. The reason for this was that, although the Chin Yuen parents lived in a house furnished in American style, and wore American clothes, yet they religiously observed many Chinese customs, and their ideals of life were the ideals of their Chinese forefathers. Therefore, they had betrothed their daughter, Laura, at the age of fifteen, to the eldest son of the Chinese Government school-teacher in San Francisco. The time for the consummation of the betrothal was approaching. . . . If you don't see the full story below, click here to download it—free! (PDF)

A Wind-Storm in the Forests

John Muir (1838–1914)
From American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau

Interesting links:
John Muir Exhibit (The Sierra Club)
John Muir and Theodore Roosevelt (photograph)

Buy this book:
American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau (20% off)
Also available:
John Muir: Nature Writings

John Muir—the surprise star of Ken Burns’s recent PBS documentary, The National Parks (which will be rebroadcast Wednesday nights beginning January 27)—is most remembered for founding the Sierra Club in 1911 and for the preservation of Yosemite, but another of his great legacies is his prose, which introduced a new vocabulary to the genre of nature writing. Passionate and witty, his books and essays captured the national imagination and fueled support for the preservation movement. Originally published as a part of The Mountains of California in 1894, “A Wind-Storm in the Forests” exhibits Muir’s awe and love of the wilderness, twin feelings that motivated one of the most remarkable of American lives.

The mountain winds, like the dew and rain, sunshine and snow, are measured and bestowed with love on the forests to develop their strength and beauty. However restricted the scope of other forest influences, that of the winds is universal. The snow bends and trims the upper forests every winter, the lightning strikes a single tree here and there, while avalanches mow down thousands at a swoop as a gardener trims out a bed of flowers. But the winds go to every tree, fingering every leaf and branch and furrowed bole; not one is forgotten; the Mountain Pine towering with outstretched arms on the rugged buttresses of the icy peaks, the lowliest and most retiring tenant of the dells; they seek and find them all, caressing them tenderly, bending them in lusty exercise, stimulating their growth, plucking off a leaf or limb as required, or removing an entire tree or grove, now whispering and cooing through the branches like a sleepy child, now roaring like the ocean; the winds blessing the forests, the forests the winds, with ineffable beauty and harmony as the sure result.

After one has seen pines six feet in diameter bending like grasses before a mountain gale . . . If you don't see the full story below, click here to download it—free! (PDF)

The Bouquet

Charles W. Chesnutt (1858–1932)
From Charles W. Chesnutt: Stories, Novels, and Essays

Interesting links:
Charles W. Chesnutt: Historical Contents, Biography, Literary Career, Commentary (The Library of America)

Buy this book:
Charles W. Chesnutt: Stories, Novels, and Essays
(SALE: 50% off)

Through his novels and stories, Charles Chesnutt spoke out against disfranchisement, lynching, and the legal underpinnings of segregation, and he often tackled the twin issues of miscegenation and "passing” by featuring characters who, in fact or deed, blurred the irregular boundaries between white and black. He also depicted the hopes and dreams of those freed after the Civil War: “The chattel aspired to own property; the slave, forbidden learning, to educate his children,” as he wrote in his story “The Doll.” This esteem for education is at the center of “The Bouquet” (1899), in which a young girl struggles against the obstacles imposed by a racially divided society to fulfill the wish of a venerated white schoolteacher.

Mary Myrover’s friends were somewhat surprised when she began to teach a colored school. Miss Myrover’s friends are mentioned here, because nowhere more than in a Southern town is public opinion a force which cannot be lightly contravened. Public opinion, however, did not oppose Miss Myrover’s teaching colored children; in fact, all the colored public schools in town—and there were several—were taught by white teachers, and had been so taught since the State had undertaken to provide free public instruction for all children within its boundaries. Previous to that time, there had been a Freedman’s Bureau school and a Presbyterian missionary school, but these had been withdrawn when the need for them became less pressing. The colored people of the town had been for some time agitating their right to teach their own schools, but as yet the claim had not been conceded.

The reason Miss Myrover’s course created some surprise was not, therefore, the fact that a Southern white woman should teach a colored school; it lay in the fact that up to this time no woman of just her quality had taken up such work. . . . If you don't see the full story below, click here to download it—free! (PDF)

Luella Miller

Mary Wilkins Freeman (1852–1930)
From American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from Poe to the Pulps

Interesting links:
Brief biography of Mary Wilkins Freeman (Perspectives in American Literature)
Peter Newell's illustration (1903) for “Luella Miller”

Buy this book:
American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from Poe to the Pulps

By the end of the 1880s, her first decade as a published writer, Mary Eleanor Wilkins had become one of America’s most popular short story writers, publishing nearly fifty stories for Harper’s several periodicals and collecting many of them in two book publications. During the following decades, she expanded her repertoire from the realism that pervaded her earlier work to other genres, including ghost stories. In 1902, the year she married Charles Manning Freeman, she wrote “Luella Miller,” one of her most enduringly popular stories, describing a local woman who saps the life out of everyone who cares for her and featuring the narrator Lydia Anderson, whose “thoughts were clothed in the rude vernacular of her native village.”

Close to the village street stood the one-story house in which Luella Miller, who had an evil name in the village, had dwelt. She had been dead for years, yet there were those in the village who, in spite of the clearer light which comes on a vantage-point from a long-past danger, half believed in the tale which they had heard from their childhood. In their hearts, although they scarcely would have owned it, was a survival of the wild horror and frenzied fear of their ancestors who had dwelt in the same age with Luella Miller. Young people even would stare with a shudder at the old house as they passed, and children never played around it as was their wont around an untenanted building. Not a window in the old Miller house was broken: the panes reflected the morning sunlight in patches of emerald and blue, and the latch of the sagging front door was never lifted, although no bolt secured it. Since Luella Miller had been carried out of it, the house had had no tenant except one friendless old soul who had no choice between that and the far-off shelter of the open sky. This old woman, who had survived her kindred and friends, lived in the house one week, then one morning no smoke came out of the chimney, and a body of neighbours, a score strong, entered and found her dead in her bed. . . . If you don't see the full story below, click here to download it—free! (PDF)