SOURCE: “Reinventing Lydia Sigourney,” in American Literature, Vol. 62, No. 3, September, 1990, pp. 385-404.

In the following essay, Baym claims that critics have failed to appreciate the extent to which Sigourney's writings express a very public (as opposed to domestic) program, which required Sigourney to assume particular social roles as a strategy to achieve a mass audience.

If Lydia Howard Huntley Sigourney had not existed, it would have been necessary to invent her. In fact, she was invented. As American women writers began to publish in numbers before the Civil War, one of their number would inevitably be construed as an epitome of the phenomenon of female authorship in its range of allowed achievements and required inadequacies. Now, here was a poor, virtuous, essentially self-educated woman whose writing was sponsored by one of the leading families in Hartford, Connecticut, with additional patronage from many other New England aristocrats.¹ She published...