Frances Sargent Osgood.

legacy of an angel.

“Angel.”

The word dominated her legacy. Like Poe before her, Frances entrusted the care of her literary estate to Rufus Griswold, the man who had supported her in the last two, beleaguered years of her life and with whom she had developed a close relationship. In both instances, Griswold acquitted himself of the estate left to his care by publishing critical sketches of the poet and interpretations of their work that were wholly colored by his own perception of them, but which proceeded to form the keystone of the poet’s enduring reputation. The stories he told of Poe and Frances were inverted negatives of one another; Poe took the stage an unmitigated rascal, Frances graced her portrait an unassailable angel. Griswold partially reinforced the latter claim by depicting Frances as a ministrant of grace to the tormented person of Poe in his biography of the latter, highlighting Frances’ generosity and spotless charity towards Poe as he wallowed in his dark creativity.  

Clearly, Griswold hoped that his biography of Poe would consign Poe to history’s shades and that his treatment of Frances would install her as an object of permanent reverence among literary circles. Ironically, his sketches achieved the opposite result, and as the nineteenth-century progressed, readers found much that was magnetic in his portrait of the rascallish Poe and little that was compelling in his portrait of the saintly Osgood. After all, what is one to do with an angel? Is not the devilish genius to which an earthly angel ministers of more interest than the angel itself? Thus, while attempting to elevate Frances, Griswold succeeded only in transforming her into a secondary character in another poet’s narrative.

As we have noted, however, Griswold seems not to have acted with any malicious intent towards Frances in depicting her this way, an observation that is reinforced by the fact that her friends raised no objection to this depiction and instead supported it. Indeed, while his sketch of Frances first appeared in the International Monthly Magazine, a publication he edited, it was repurposed as the introduction to a volume produced by her friends in honor of her memory: The Memorial: Written by Friends of the Late Mrs. Osgood and Edited by Mary E. Hewitt (1851). Nearly sixty of Frances’ acquaintances, including Griswold, Anne Lynch, Sarah Helen Whitman, Nathaniel Hawthorne, N. P. Willis, and others, contributed pieces to this volume, which was produced with the intent of employing the profit from its sales to purchase a headstone for Frances’ grave. In 1854 the collection was re-issued as a gift book entitled Laurel Leaves: A Chaplet Woven by the Friends of the Late Mrs. Osgood, Edited by Mary E. Hewitt. Between themselves the two editions raised the necessary money, and in 1854 Samuel Osgood designed a headstone inspired by “The Hand that Swept the Sounding Lyre,” the last poem in her 1850 volume Poems. Thus physically and critically, Frances Sargent Osgood was laid to rest.  

Twentieth century criticism, however, has taken issue with this pat categorization of Frances’ career, deriving its primary dissatisfaction from the manner in which the straightforward record of Frances’ actions so thoroughly contradicts the interpretation placed upon her by her contemporaries. Despite Frances’ public flirtations with several men, her friends described her alternatively as an angel and a saint; despite her continuous pursuit of publication, her critics insisted she had no taste for the celebration of time; despite her obvious artistic skill, her observers described her in childlike terms. This depiction is made the more curious by recent scholarship, which reveals that, as voluminous as Osgood’s collected published works are, a significant portion of her work went unpublished. One researcher, after immersing herself in Osgood’s archives, revealed that Osgood wrote a host of “skilled verses of sexual teasing and heterosocial satire” (Dobson 632), which she shared with her personal friends and fellow salon-attendees, but never sought to publish. In these sparkling verses, Osgood engages in double entendre and professes an individualism unseen in her more sentimental published works, an individualism that is, indeed, somewhat disjointed from those works.

This discovery proves that any attempt to simplify Frances’ reputation to that of a mere “angel” is unwarranted by the record she herself left of her life and leaves us wondering—who then, was Frances Sargent Osgood, really? The answer is simple—she was a female artist of the nineteenth century, tasked with constructing and maintaining a persona that would ingratiate her work with the literary establishment in which she operated. That artists of all time have engaged in extensive reconstructing of their reputation is an unimpeachable fact; one need look no further than Osgood’s ill-fated paramour, Edgar Allan Poe for confirmation. But for women of this century, for Osgood, a carefully sculpted personae was no luxury idly entered into—it was a necessity. The woman who strayed too near masculine pursuits was in danger of being deemed “hermaphroditish” by her male critics, and she who revealed no intellect at all might suffer either their excoriations or, worse, their patronizing pity. This persona-construction was no light-hearted sport; it was a weighty game on which their careers depended.

As we attempt to integrate these newly discovered poems with Frances’ historical reputation, perhaps we should conclude that Osgood was as childish and naive as her contemporaries asserted—perhaps we might believe that her success was accidental and her emotional entanglement with the most tempestuous figure of her decade the clumsy doings of an unenlightened infant. However, an honest evaluation of the narrative—particularly one which acknowledges its historical context—yields the conclusion that Osgood, a shrewdly perceptive woman, evaluated her market, noted its preference for “angelic” women writing in a sentimental vein, and accordingly constructed her canon and her persona to achieve the best success in this climate. She allowed her more natural vivacity to sparkle at times in private company, but she preserved her carefully crafted aesthetic of the innocent nightingale. She walked the tight rope of sexual politics, integrating her feminine and fay natures in a desperate balancing act that established her as one of the most popularly enjoyed female poets of her generation. She was, as her critics so often claimed, a songbird—but she was a strategic songbird who expertly tuned her trills to the tenor of her era, thus securing her own century’s adoration and our century’s respect.