Smith, Elizabeth Oakes (Prince)

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SMITH, Elizabeth Oakes (Prince)

Born 12 August 1806, North Yarmouth, Maine; died 15 November 1893, Hollywood, North Carolina

Also wrote under: E., Ernest Helfenstein, Oakes Smith, Mrs. Seba Smith

Daughter of David and Sophia Blanchard Prince; married Seba Smith, 1823

As a child, Elizabeth Oakes Smith lived in the country near the south coast of Maine, where she spent much time even after her family moved to Portland when she was eight. At the age of sixteen, Smith married Seba Smith, an editor and publisher and the author of the popular Major Jack Downing stories. Smith's first poems and sketches appeared anonymously in his newspapers. In Portland, Smith had five sons; one died as a young child.

After a series of financial reverses, the Smiths moved to New York in 1837 and took their places in the city's literary circles. Smith contributed to the support of her family through her writing. Her stories, sketches, and poems appeared in the Ladies' Companion, Godey's Lady's Book, Graham's Magazine, and other popular monthlies of the day, in addition to her husband's various periodical publications. She contributed to 36 gift books (senti-mental annual publications) between 1836 and 1856, editing some of them with her husband and some of them on her own.

From about the midpoint of her life, the "busy devil" with which Smith professed to be afflicted directed her into intense reform activity. She was an active participant in the women's rights conventions of 1848, 1851, 1852, and 1878. In 1851, as an advocate of the working woman, Smith, with Lucretia Mott, sponsored a tailoring cooperative that employed women in Philadelphia. Under the auspices of the YMCA, she was a social worker in New York City. In 1868, she became a charter member of New York's first women's club; she served as its vice-president in 1869. In 1877, after a lifetime of religious searching and questioning, Smith became the minister of an independent congregation in Canastota, New York.

Smith's early writings draw heavily on her immediate environment and include Native American myths and legends, Down East characters, and stories of Maine. These early writings also include sketches of women whose lives were far outside her experience, such as Charlotte Corday and Mme. de Staël, which reappear in later writings and in her lectures on the Lyceum circuit.

Smith won popular and critical acclaim for "The Sinless Child," a long narrative poem which first appeared in the Southern Literary Messenger, to which she was a frequent contributor. In the poem, the unworldly heroine is released from a corrupt world through death. Its publication as the title piece in a collection of her poems in 1843 established Smith's reputation.

Smith's first novel, Riches Without Wings, was published in 1838. Its themes and values are conventional: the superiority of natural beauty, temperance in all things, modesty, cleanliness. Worldly riches are not to be pursued at the expense of spiritual purity, but wealth and recognition do reward hard work and honesty. Her dialogues and asides to her readers are intended to instruct, and in these, along with the dominant themes, Smith occasionally disparages convention, as when the leading female character asserts the value of passion in women as well as in men, and again when she refuses to wear the prescribed mourning dress on the death of a relative.

In her later work, Smith continued to use the conventional themes of her first novel. A strong strain of mysticism, present in most of her writing, becomes more marked in the later writing. Patriotism and progress are typical themes. The evils of cities, the romantic theme of the superiority of the natural, or country life, is the major theme in The Newsboy (1854), a novel credited with influencing social reform in New York.

Smith believed women had the right to develop fully as individuals, and that the current constraints of the marriage relation inhibited their development, were articulated in a series of essays in the New York Tribune, published as a monograph in 1851, under the title Woman and Her Needs (reprinted in 1974).

As a writer, Smith was spurred always by financial necessity. Her work is remarkable for variety, volume, and inventiveness; it ranges from sonnets to very informal travel sketches and reminiscences, from children's stories to tragic drama. Though in general her characters have the conventional virtues and vices and her intensely romantic themes were chosen to appeal to a wide audience, Smith's fiction, poetry, and essays expose the occasional "burr under the saddle" that placed her among contemporary reformers and made her a significant contributor to the popular literature of the middle third of the 19th century.

Other Works:

The Western Captive (1842). The Sinless Child, and Other Poems (1843). The Dandelion, The Rosebud and The Moss Cup (1845). The Lover's Gift (1848). The Salamander (1848). The Roman Tribute (1850). The Good Child's Book (1851). Hints on Dress and Beauty (1852). Shadowland (1853). Old New York (1853). The Sanctity of Marriage (1853). Bertha and Lily (1854). Black Hollow (1864). Bald Eagle (1867). The Sagamore of Saco (1868). Selections from the Autobiography of Elizabeth Oakes Smith (edited by M. A. Wyman, 1924).