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Sally Wood of Maine: America’s First Female Gothic Novelist
Above: A daguerreotype image of Sally Wood, made c. 1840, when she was around eighty years old. This is the only known photographic image of Wood. Maine Women Writers Collection, University of New England.
by TOM HILLARD
Tom J. Hillard is a professor in the English Literature Department at Boise State University and he has published widely on early American and Gothic literature. He is currently working on several textual editing and book history projects related to Gothic literature in early US history – including Sally Wood – with the aim of making many such “lost” texts once again available to readers.
On the banks of the York River in Maine, overlooking the wharves where the river spills into York Harbor, stands stately Sayward-Wheeler House, one of the most remarkably preserved New England homes of the Revolutionary War era. Built c. 1718, it is best known as the residence of Judge Jonathan Sayward—among the wealthiest merchants of eighteenth-century Maine and an influential and sometimes polarizing political figure during the Revolution. Like his house, Sayward’s life and legacy loom large in Maine lore. What is less known amid this storied building’s three-century history, however, is that Sayward-Wheeler House was also the birthplace of an extraordinary figure in early American literary history: Sally Sayward Wood.
Sally Wood - or “Madam Wood,” as she is sometimes known to locals - was among the most prolific novelists in the first decades of the nineteenth century, yet she remains unknown to most modern readers because her fiction has languished, largely out of print, for more than 200 years. In her own day Wood was a pioneering author, publishing four novels in quick succession between 1800 and 1804: Julia and the Illuminated Baron (1800), Dorval; or the Speculator (1801), Amelia; or, the Influence of Virtue (1802), and Ferdinand and Elmira: A Russian Story (1804). Such a feat of literary production was exceeded at the time by only one other American-born author, Wood's Philadelphia contemporary Charles Brockden Brown (the so-called “father” of the American Gothic novel), and it was a feat that wouldn’t be replicated by any American author until the 1820s, when in the aftermath of the War of 1812 American literature soared to new heights. The other superstar of the period was Susanna Rowson, an English author who transplanted to America, and whose 1791 Charlotte Temple was the best-selling novel in the US well into the nineteenth century.
Both Brown and Rowson have far eclipsed Sally Wood in twentieth- and twenty-first-century reputation and readership, yet Wood’s story is a singular one that needs to be told. When her first novel, Julia, was published in June 1800, Wood became Maine’s first novelist (when Maine was still a district of Massachusetts). Moreover, because her novels—especially Julia and Dorval—draw heavily on the Gothic fiction that was then wildly in vogue in England (and eagerly imported by American readers), Sally Wood is the United States’ first woman Gothic novelist.
Wood’s novels follow the narrative patterns developed by her 1790s British Gothic predecessor Ann Radcliffe: frightening stories of danger and moral transgression faced by a virtuous young heroine, wherein the threats are ultimately overcome, and complications brought to safe closure. Along the way, readers experience vicariously the terror and violence of the stories’ villains, as well as hints of the supernatural amid foreboding, isolated settings. Historians of Gothic fiction often separate its lineage into two major strands: the “horror” Gothic on one hand, as exemplified by Matthew Lewis’s scandalous, no-holds-barred The Monk (1796), and the “terror” Gothic on the other, made famous by Radcliffe in such works as The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and The Italian (1797). Sally Wood’s Julia, set mainly in France, showcases the fear and paranoia produced by the recent French Revolution, and it is arguably the best and most faithful adaptation of the Radcliffean style of “terror” Gothic in early American literary history.
Wood’s path to becoming an author was an improbable one. Born Sarah Sayward Barrell on October 1, 1759, Sally (as she went by all her life) was the first grandchild of Jonathan Sayward, and the daughter of Nathaniel and Sarah (Sayward) Barrell. Sally grew up mainly in York, splitting time between her parents’ home, known as Barrell Grove, and her grandfather's mansion. Despite the tumult of the American Revolution, whose disruptions to the international shipping industry upended many aspects of her family’s daily lives, teenage Sally found love, and in 1778 she married Richard Keating, a young maritime clerk who worked for her grandfather. Five years later, as the long, worrisome war was finally coming to a close, tragedy struck when Richard unexpectedly died from a fever. Thus, in the summer of 1783, Sally suddenly found herself a twenty-three-year-old widowed mother of two, with a third child on the way.
Few documentary details exist regarding Sally’s life in the decade following Richard’s death, so we can only speculate about her interior, imaginative world. We do know she remained in York, living near her grandfather, and it is during this time that Sally turned her eye toward literary ambitions. Extant correspondence shows Sally and her parents having a deep interest in reading and novels in the 1790s, and for her to be able to produce her novels at the pace that she did, she almost certainly had to have been fine-tuning her writing for some time. While only one manuscript poem from the period survives, about the death of a friend’s son, it is possible Sally may have published essays, tales, or poems anonymously in regional newspapers or periodicals. If true, no concrete evidence has yet been found.
Whatever her path to authorship, when Wood published Julia in 1800 she was entering uncharted territory. By then only a few dozen novels by American authors had appeared, almost all in the publishing centers of Boston, New York, and Philadelphia; and for Wood, in the comparatively isolated York, there was no literary infrastructure to speak of. In fact, to publish Julia, Wood sought out nearby Portsmouth, New Hampshire, printer Charles Peirce, who ran the United States Oracle newspaper and operated a bookshop out of his Daniel Street office. Julia was Peirce’s first foray into producing a full-length novel, and it was only the second American novel published in New Hampshire (the first was Royall Tyler’s The Algerine Captive, printed in Walpole in 1797). At the time, publishing a novel was no small task and it was a risky venture for a printer to take on an unknown American author.
In bringing her fiction to the public, Wood herself also faced real social danger. While novels were widely consumed on either side of the Atlantic—and the Gothic novel particularly popular—both English and American society at large were still unsure what to make of this literary form. For the novel was still a relatively recent invention and, as is often the case with new things, it faced a strong, conservative backlash. The tenor of this backlash is perhaps best seen in a hyperbolic, oft-reprinted magazine piece of the era titled “Novel Reading, A Cause of Female Depravity.” Wood published her four novels despite an enormous social pressure that questioned, and even outright condemned, novel reading itself.
Sally was keenly aware of such critiques, and in the preface to Julia we see her masterfully navigate this rhetorical minefield. She writes about “a duty to apologize, with her very humble talents, for thus appearing in public,” and an awareness “that writers of Romance are not highly estimated.” And because “custom and nature . . . have affixed the duties of woman to very confined and very limited bounds,” she continues, “she does not hesitate to declare, that not one social, or one domestic duty, have ever been sacrificed or postponed by her pen.” There is a striking modesty (whether real or feigned) in this apology for putting herself before the public, as well as a memorable assertion that in taking up the pen, she hasn’t neglected any of her womanly or motherly duties. Wood clearly anticipated the criticism she might face in sending her fiction out in the world—yet she was prepared to take it on anyway.
Julia was a resounding success. It circulated widely in bookstores and libraries in the northern states, was marketed alongside the most famous novels of its day, and went through two editions in England. There was even a French translation in 1804. Sally rode this success with three subsequent books. Just after the final one, Ferdinand and Elmira, was published, however, her novel-writing career effectively came to an end when she married her second husband, Abiel Wood, and the couple moved to his home in Wiscasset, Maine. Wood (as her married name was now) stopped publishing fiction, but her considerable energies found other outlets. Most notably, in 1805 she helped found the Female Charitable Society of Wiscasset, one of the earliest women’s organizations of its type. Thus, in life, Wood embodied the same generosity and virtuous spirit that characterizes so many of her stories’ heroines.
After Wood was widowed a second time in 1811, she relocated to live near or with her children and grandchildren, moving between Portland, Maine, New York City, and ultimately Kennebunk, Maine, where she died in 1855 at age ninety-five. In the final third of her long life, Wood tried her hand at publishing fiction only one more time, with two novellas collected as Tales of the Night (1827). The literary scene in America had changed considerably in the two decades since her previous books and for whatever reasons, Wood never published any more fiction (though a fair copy manuscript of an unpublished novella, War, the Parent of Domestic Calamity, is held by the Maine Historical Society). Even so, for all her life she remained a storyteller: over sixty extant manuscript letters to family and friends attest to Wood’s penchant and talent for telling tales and recounting family lore.
Such a legacy of storytelling as Wood’s is indicative of the larger history of New England, whose very fabric is woven with innumerable stories and legends. And in the region’s literary history, writers of Gothic tales seem always to have occupied a special place— whether it’s Stephen King of Bangor, Maine, Shirley Jackson of Bennington, Vermont, H.P. Lovecraft of Providence, Rhode Island, or Nathaniel Hawthorne of Salem, Massachusetts. When reflecting on this rich legacy today, we would do well not to forget that long before there were any of those now-famous others, there was Maine’s pioneering Gothic novelist, Sally Sayward Wood.
