A woodcut illustration from David and Anna Matson, an epic poem written and published by Abigail Scott Duniway in The New Northwest. (Image: Oregon Historical Quarterly) Abigail Scott. Duniway thought her novels were her legacy By Finn J.D. John — June 17, 2018 Listen to the podcast on Stitcher Abigail Scott Duniway is a name that’s very familiar to most Oregon history buffs. She was a pioneer, a journalist, a newspaper editor, and a tireless advocate for women’s suffrage. All of this she managed to accomplish while also fulfilling all the obligations of an invalid’s wife and the mother of six children. But Duniway, during her life, did not expect any of those things to be what she was most remembered for. She expected — or, rather, hoped — that after her death her novels would be collected and published, and that future readers would “marvel at the facts therein portrayed as much as the student of today is marveling at the progress of the world since the discoveries of Christopher Columbus or the explorations of Lewis and Clark.” That, of course, didn’t happen. Instead, most people don’t even realize that she wrote any novels. In part that’s because none of her novels are very easy for a modern reader to get through — although it’s kind of surprising how well they do hold up, considering how different was the era in which they were written. As English professor Debra Shein of Idaho State University points out, most novels in the 1870s were neither character driven, nor plot driven — they were action-driven, like parables or allegories. That meant most of them were “a song with a message,” intended to manipulate the reader into better or more virtuous patterns of thought or behavior — something modern readers have little tolerance for. It also meant the characters in them had a tendency to be personifications of virtues or vices — the mustache-twirling Dastardly Villains, the placidly faithful Saintly Widows, the relentlessly cheerful Virtuous Youths, and so forth. In other words, these novels are works of advocacy. Or, to put it in Duniway’s own words from the introduction to her first novel, “Skeptics, you who laugh at the Bible, who mock at the mission of the lowly Nazarene ... ye who live merely that you may amass riches, eat, drink and die — this book is not for you. I leave older and wiser heads to parry your studied blows, while I turn, in respect and confidence, to the lenient, intelligent, pious and elevated, for encouragement and assistance.” Of all the novels Duniway wrote, only the first and the last were actually published in book form during her life. The first one, in fact, was the first novel commercially published in Oregon (unless one classifies Margaret Jewett Smith’s 1854 memoir, The Grains; or, Passages in the Life of Ruth Rover, as a novel). Abigail Scott Duniway's first novel was Captain Gray's Company. The full novel, in PDF form, is available here (or here, via Lewis & Clark University Special Collections) Duniway’s first novel was Captain Gray’s Company; or, Crossing the Plains and Living in Oregon (S.J. McCormick, 1859). It was heavily based on the Scott family’s journey to Oregon in 1852 over the Oregon Trail. The last novel, From the West to the West: Across the Plains to Oregon (Chicago: A.C. McClurg, 1905), was basically a rewrite of Captain Gray’s Company. Neither of these novels represents her at her best — although it is probably safe to say that they do represent her at her least controversial. Arguably, Duniway’s best work — and unquestionably her most influential — was represented by the 21 novels she wrote and serialized in her newspaper, The New Northwest, and later her magazine, The Pacific Empire. After she retired from journalism, Duniway spent years revising these novels and submitting them to book publishing houses back East. None were picked up. This most likely is because at the time Duniway was submitting stories to these conservative, male-run publishing concerns, she was just too hot to handle. To be fair, the stories were pretty hot. Judge Dunson’s Secret: An Oregon Story is a black comedy of sorts in which the judge’s “secret” is that he once had a temper tantrum and tore out all his young son’s teeth, leading directly to the boy’s death; the heroine, who for some reason has feelings for him, disguises herself as the dead son’s ghost and rattles a bag of teeth in her eventually successful quest to get him to face what he’s done, repent, and marry her. In Ethel Graeme’s Destiny: A Story of Real Life, the entrepreneurial heroine is tricked into marriage by a drunken sea-captain who treats her like an ATM machine, leaving her penniless at the end of a life in which she’s made her fortune several times over only to have him show up and drink it all away. Abigail Scott Duniway as she appeared in the late 1800s. (Image: Horner/Gazette-Times) Edna and John: A ...
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