Caroline Lee Whiting Hentz
Caroline Lee Whiting Hentz was a Massachusetts educator and romance author born in 1800, hailing from a prominent Puritan family with ancestral roots tracing back to Colonial America. She married Nicholas Hentz, a French political refugee, and they lived in various locations including North Carolina, Kentucky, and Ohio. Hentz began her literary career with the theatrical tragedy "De Lara: Or, The Moorish Bride" and later became notable for her rebuttal to Harriet Beecher Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin" with her work "The Planter's Northern Bride." Her writing, while appearing conventional, often incorporated autobiographical elements and reflected the complexities of her life, including her husband's jealousy and their financial struggles.
Throughout her life, Hentz supported her family through teaching and writing, particularly flourishing in Georgia where her works gained popularity, selling over ninety thousand copies in the mid-1850s. Despite the challenges she faced, including the demands of motherhood and her husband's declining health, her literary contributions remained significant, with her works being reprinted for years after her passing in 1856. Hentz's legacy continues to be of interest to those exploring women's literature and the cultural landscape of the antebellum South.
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Subject Terms
Caroline Lee Whiting Hentz
Author
- Born: June 1, 1800
- Birthplace: Lancaster, Massachusetts
- Died: February 11, 1856
- Place of death: Marianna, Florida
Biography
Massachusetts educator and romance author Caroline Lee Whiting Hentz was born in 1800 to prominent puritan stock. The youngest child of a Revolutionary War colonel and his wife, she could trace her ancestry to the 1630’s and the arrival in Colonial America of Reverend Samuel Whiting. In 1824, she married Nicholas Hentz, a French political refugee who would become the only native-speaking French professor at the University of North Carolina during the antebellum period.
During the years following their marriage, the Hentzes lived first in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and then in Covington, Kentucky, and Cincinnati, Ohio. In 1831, while in Kentucky, she wrote a theatrical tragedy called De Lara: Or, The Moorish Bride, commissioned by the Tremont Theater in Boston. After moving to Cincinnati, she was supported by the literary Semi-Colon Club, where she met Harriet Beecher Stowe. Twenty years later, in 1854, Hentz would publish a rebuttal of that author’s most famous work, called The Planter’s Northern Bride, noteworthy in spite of its fairly conventional Southern response to Uncle Tom’s Cabin because it was written by a Northern woman who had come through experience to love the South.
Nicholas Hentz was notoriously jealous, a theme explored in much of his wife’s writing, and he moved his family from Cincinnati to southern Alabama in the mid-1830’s in order to get his wife away from Colonel King, a male friend from the Semi-Colon Club. Although her romantic writing appears conventional on the surface, the autobiographical elements complicate them. While in Florence, Alabama, Hentz was unable to write due to the demands of caring for her children and household. The family did not own slaves and she earned additional income for the family by teaching. She did keep a diary during the period that is gloomy and depressive, perhaps due to the unsatisfying circumstances in which she found herself.
The family moved around the South during the 1840’s, starting schools for girls in Tuscaloosa and Tuskegee and then in Columbus, Georgia. In 1849 her husband’s health failed and she was the sole support for the family. Her literary career blossomed in Georgia, and by 1851 she was supporting her family by writing. Her works were popular because they were well written and trafficked in popular themes and storylines—kidnappings, assaults, shipwrecks, riots, and runaway slaves. In the mid-1850’s, more than ninety thousand copies of her books were sold, and they were consistently reprinted until twenty years after her death of pneumonia in 1856.