Mary Austin, born in Illinois (Mary Hunter), after completing college in 1888 (at the age of 19), moved West to California to homestead with her family. This was, essentially, a bust, and a few years later, Mary, unable to keep a position as a teacher, in 1891 married Stafford Wallace Austin, whom she would separate from in 1906; they were divorced in 1914.
She published her first story, “The Mother of Felipe” in The Overland Monthly in 1892. Her “first significant publication,” though, appeared a little over ten years later (Fetterley and Pryse 565), The Land of Little Rain (1903), from which we draw our selections for Wednesday and Friday of this week. In that time in between her Overland Monthly piece and Little Rain, Austin moved with her husband to the vicinity of Death Valley, from which she drew inspiration. In general terms, she is best known for her writing depicting the Southwest. I put the selections from Little Rain in the unit with Jack London’s Northland stories, Zitkala-Sa’s short Sioux fiction, and Gary Totten’s piece on the problems of reading Indigenous writing as regional writing in order to develop discussion about regionalism’s complicated engagement with Native America.
I’m sure your noticing (it would puzzling if you did not notice it) the naturalist (in the sense of nature writer) tone (I’m also noticing too many parentheticals in this sentence but am unwilling to revise). Certainly, the regionalist form, as we’ve seen, calls attention to the topography and other features of the natural environment. Mary Austin, too, was especially attuned to nature, both as a child and as a young adult in California: she reports feeling the “warm pervasive sweetness of ultimate reality” at peak moments spent in nature (qtd. in Fettereley and Pryse 565). On top of that, she studied science in college, alongside art, interestingly. That’s a compelling context, but I think there’s something worth thinking about, too, in the nexus she builds between nature and Native Americans. Perhaps we’ll talk about that.
REFERENCE
Fetterley, Judith and Marjorie Pryse. “Mary Austin.” American Women Regionalists, 1850-1910. New York: Norton, 1993. 564-67.
“Mary (Hunter) Austin.” Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale, 2003. Literature Resource Center. Web. 19 Mar. 2013.