Lillie Buffum Chace Wyman
Lillie Buffum Chace Wyman was an influential writer and activist born in 1847 in Valley Falls, Rhode Island, into a prosperous Quaker family deeply engaged in social justice issues. Her upbringing in a politically active household, with a mother who was a prominent abolitionist, set the stage for Wyman’s lifelong commitment to social reform. After the Civil War, she faced a personal crisis, leading to a diagnosis of neurasthenia, yet she eventually found her purpose in writing. Wyman gained recognition with her story "The Child of the State," published in 1877, which highlighted gender inequality and the struggles of women in domestic roles.
Throughout the late 19th century, she published numerous stories in The Atlantic Monthly that addressed the challenges faced by female factory workers, garnering praise for her realistic portrayals. In addition to her fiction, Wyman wrote essays on various social issues, including racial equality and the conditions of peasants in Russia. Notably, she produced works celebrating abolitionist figures and authored a feminist reinterpretation of Gertrude from Shakespeare's Hamlet in her later years. Despite being relatively unknown during her lifetime and largely forgotten today, Wyman's contributions to literature and activism are seeing a resurgence of interest among scholars studying 19th-century realism and social movements. She passed away in 1929 in Newtonville, Massachusetts.
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Lillie Buffum Chace Wyman
Writer
- Born: December 10, 1847
- Birthplace: Valley Falls, Rhode Island
- Died: January 10, 1929
- Place of death: Newtonville, Massachusetts
Biography
Lillie Buffum Chace Wyman was born into a prosperous Quaker family in Valley Falls, Rhode Island, in 1847. One of ten children, Wyman’s household was full of the political activism that marked many affluent antebellum New England households: Her mother was a well-known abolitionist and women’s rights advocate, and her grandfather founded the New England Antislavery Society in 1832. Wyman’s house was a stop on the Underground Railroad, providing protection to slaves running to the North away from slavery. She grew up reading the abolitionist newspaper The Liberator, attending antislavery meetings, and assisting with her mother’s political correspondences and appointments.
With the end of the Civil War necessarily came the end of the abolitionist movement to which Wyman’s family had dedicated itself for over thirty years, the movement which the young Wyman assumed would be the focal point of her life. Thus, Wyman had an identity crisis and was diagnosed with neurasthenia—an illness exclusively diagnosed in middle- and upper-class women of the period, consisting of nervousness and fatigue. Feeling she had no purpose in life, Wyman was moved to a sanatorium.
By 1872, with the sanatorium, several years spent engaged with hobbies, and an eighteen- month trip to Europe with her mother behind her, Wyman gained a focus in her life through her writing. Her breakthrough came in 1877 with the publication of the story “The Child of the State” in The Atlantic Monthly. A detailed account of a female orphan’s descent into a life of crime, turpitude, and eventually prison, the story is a strong statement against gender inequality, specifically the “domestic sphere” women were forced to inhabit. Between 1877 and 1882, Wyman frequently published stories in The Atlantic Monthly that dealt primarily with the plight of female factory workers. The period’s most influential and prominent literary critic, William Dean Howells, praised Wyman for the realism and social awareness of her fiction. These short stories were collected in the book Poverty Grass (1886).
In 1878, Lillie married John Crawford Wyman, a former abolitionist twenty-five years her senior, with whom she had one child. She continued to write vigorously, publishing essays on the plight of the female factory workers, racial inequality, and the peasants in Russia. In 1913, Wyman published American Chivalry, a set of previously published biographical articles celebrating her abolitionist heroes, such as Wendell Phillips, Sojourner Truth, and her mother. Continuing her identification with the long-ago abolitionist movement, Wyman published two volumes of poetry concerning the people and events of the movement, a two-volume biography of her mother, and a memoir about the Civil War surgeon Augustine Mann. Her most compelling later writing is Gertrude of Denmark: An Interpretive Romance (1924), which reinterprets the character of Gertrude from Hamlet from a decidedly feminist and sympathetic light.
Wyman died in Newtonville, Massachusetts, in 1929. She was little known in her own time and largely forgotten in ours; however, scholars investigating literary realism and nineteenth century activism have revived some appreciation for her work.