Hall, Louisa (Jane) Park

views updated

HALL, Louisa (Jane) Park

Born 2 February 1802, Newburyport, Massachusetts; died 8 September 1892, Cambridge, Massachusetts

Daughter of John Park; married Edward B. Hall, 1840

Louisa Park Hall began to compose verse at an early age, publishing it anonymously in newspapers around 1820. The first part of her verse drama Miriam (1837) was read at a literary gathering in Boston in 1825 and highly praised. Shortly after she and her family moved to Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1831, she developed an eye condition that almost completely blinded her for several years. Her disability, however, did not prevent her from enjoying literature; her father read aloud to her several hours a day and helped to record her own work.

When she recovered her vision, Hall married a Unitarian minister and moved to Providence, Rhode Island. The Cross and the Anchor (1844), a collection of religious verse, was written to benefit a mission for sailors there. Hall also wrote three pieces of prose fiction: Alfred (1836) and The Better Part (1836), both didactic moral tales, and The Sheaves of Love (1861), a sentimental romance tracing the friendships and courtships of schoolgirls.

Hall's two verse plays, Miriam and Hannah, the Mother of Samuel the Prophet and Judge of Israel (1839), show that religion is the chief motivating force in life, and both illustrate the importance of women as teachers and examples of faith. Miriam depicts the doomed love between the son of a proud Roman governor and a devout young Christian girl ready to die for her faith, while Hannah shows the influence of the mother of a biblical prophet upon her son. Hall's blank verse reflects her reading in 18th-century tragedy.

The Memoir of Miss Elizabeth Carter (1844) is a carefully documented and lucidly written biographical tribute to Samuel Johnson's scholarly friend. It was actually composed before Hall regained her sight, at about the same time as the historical drama Joanna of Naples (1838). The latter, based on Jameson's Lives of the Female Sovereigns, is a florid romance with lavish passages of description.

Several of Hall's works were reprinted in her lifetime. Her short lyric poems were perhaps the most widely circulated of all her writings, since they were regularly printed in newspapers throughout the country. Her favorite themes in these poems are children, scenes in nature, and settings and situations dramatizing religious faith. Hall's last works, My Body to My Soul (1891) and Verses (1892), express her love of nature, her full life, and her religious faith, as well as her calm acceptance of death.

Hall's large and varied body of work reflects her lifelong pleasure in reading and writing and her ability to discuss religion, the heart, and the home, all favorite subjects of domestic literature, in a variety of different ways.