Caroline M. Kirkland (1801–1864)

Caroline M. Kirkland, née Stansbury, was born in New York City to an educated family. Her mother Eliza Alexander Stansbury was a writer, and her father Samuel Stansbury was a bookseller. Her paternal aunt Lydia Mott ran a Quaker school, which Caroline attended for 10 years. After her father died in 1822, the rest of the family followed her to upstate New York, where she taught at a school in Clinton. In 1828, she married William Kirkland, a classics scholar at Hamilton College and founded a girls' school with him in Geneva, New York. When the school failed, they moved in 1835 to Detroit, Michigan, then on the edge of the frontier, where they bought 800 acres during the land boom. Caroline's experiences inspired her career as a writer. In 1839, she published A New Home—Who'll Follow?, a slightly fictionalized account of life on the frontier, under the pseudonym "Mrs. Mary Clavers, an Actual Settler." It was followed by Forest Life (1842) and Western Clearings (1845). In 1843, the family returned to New York City. where William Kirkland became editor of his own newspaper, The Christian Inquirer. After his death in 1846, Mrs. Kirkland supported herself and her four children with her literary and educational activities. She ran the newspaper, opened a school for girls, and was editor of the Union Magazine of Literature and Art from 1847 to 1849. She also contributed essays and sketches to a variety of magazines. She established a salon that attracted the literary elite of the day, hosting notables such as Edgar Allan Poe, Lydia Maria Child, Catharine Sedgwick, William Cullen Bryant, and Elizabeth Drew Stoddard. She also became a close friend and correspondent of Harriet Martineau, whom she met on a trip to England in 1850. In the early 1850s, her short stories and essays were published in three collections of gift books.