SOURCE: “The Literary Legacy of Caroline Kirkland: Emigrants' Guide to a Failed Eden” in The Land Before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers, 1630-1860, University of North Carolina Press, 1984, pp. 131-58.

In the following essay, Kolodny argues that even though Kirkland's success was in large part due to the element of realism in her depiction of the West, her most immediate impact on literature was the fact that her work made the West “available for literary treatment by women.”

Among those whom Margaret Fuller read in order to prepare herself for her summer in Illinois and Wisconsin was Caroline Kirkland. Like Fuller, Caroline Kirkland was the daughter of old and well-connected eastern families, and, also like Fuller, she ventured onto a rapidly expanding western frontier. Unlike Fuller, when Kirkland resigned her teaching post at a girls' school in Geneva, New York, in order to head out...