LKirkland, Caroline Matilda Stansbury1801╨1864writer and editorBorn in New York City on January 11, 1801, Caroline Stansbury was educated in schools operated by a Quaker aunt, and for several years from 1820 she assisted the aunt in a succession of schools in New York towns. In January 1828, after an engagement of nearly seven years, she married William Kirkland, a teacher. During the next seven years Caroline Kirkland operated a girls╒ school in Geneva, New York. After their move to Michigan in 1835 she taught for a time in the Detroit Female Seminary, of which her husband was principal. From 1836 to 1843 they lived amid the most primitive and isolated frontier conditions in the tiny Michigan village of Pinckney. Kirkland╒s descriptive letters on her life there grew into A New Home╤Who╒ll Follow? or, Glimpses of Western Life, 1839, a sharply realistic picture of frontier life thinly disguised as a novel and published under the pseudonym of ╥Mrs. Mary Clavers.╙ In depicting the coarse vulgarities, the hardships, the rare pleasures, the crude democracy, and the courage of ╥Montacute╙ (Pinckney) in bold strokes and in avoiding conventional sentimentalities and romantic notions, she established a new standard for frontier fiction. Forest Life, 1842, was in a similar vein, although cast in the form of a series of essays, as were the stories collected in Western Clearings, 1845, which appeared after the Kirklands╒ return to New York City. On her husband╒s death in October 1846 Kirkland succeeded him as editor of the Unitarian weekly Christian Inquirer, and in May 1847 she became editor of the Union Magazine of Literature and Art (later Sartain╒s Union Magazine) a post she held until late in 1849. Her later literary work was largely conventional. She published Holidays Abroad, on a European journey, 1849, The Evening Book; or, Fireside Talks on Morals and Manners, 1851, Garden Walks with the Poets, 1852, A Book for the Home Circle; or, Familiar Thoughts on Various Topics, Literary, Moral and Social, 1853, The Helping Hand, written for the Home for Discharged Female Convicts, 1853, Memoirs of Washington, a school biography, 1857, and The School-Girl╒s Garland, 1864. She was a central figure in New York literary circles. After three months of exhausting labor on behalf of the New York Metropolitan Fair in aid of the U.S. Sanitary Commission╒s Civil War work, she died in New York City on April 6, 1864. Her son, Joseph Kirkland (1830╨1894), wrote a number of novels in the vein of frontier realism inaugurated by A New Home; he in turn exerted a strong influence on Hamlin Garland. ▐styl ` $ ! ¬ % 5¬ / 5¬ B !I \ 5¬ ] !I !I O !I ∞ !I ≈ !I h !I y !I └ 5¬ ┴ !I ! !I 3 !I ^ !I é !I è !I ó !I
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