At Miss Larcom’s particular request I have refrained from saying more than is necessary of her as a writer for The Offering. On her last visit to me, in 1892, while speaking of the material to be used in this book, she asked me not to say too much about her, because, as she said, she was “tired of being always cited as the representative of The Offering writers, when there were others who wrote and did quite as much, or more, for the magazine than I did.”
Miss Larcom is correct here. Her fame was achieved long after she ceased to be a mill-girl; and there were several others, as the sketches will show, who were as good writers, and much better known than herself, when she left the factory. And it is very thoughtful of her to speak a good word for those hitherto forgotten authors, by declining to be made a sort of composite portrait, as representing the best and brightest among them.
In one of her letters she says,—
“Don’t you think it is getting a little tiresome, this posing as factory-girls of the olden time? It is very much like politicians boasting of carrying their dinners in a tin pail in their youth. What if they did?... I am proud to be a working-woman, as I always have been; but that special occupation was temporary, and not the business of our lives, we all knew, girls as we were.”...
“I sent you a copy of my ‘New England Girlhood,’ for old time’s sake. Did you receive it? You could write a more entertaining one. Why don’t you write a novel? I wish you would write up The Offering time, and sketch Harriot Curtis in it. She was unique.”
Miss Larcom’s writings, all told, never yielded her income enough to live on, even in her modest way. In speaking of this matter in a letter written in February 1891, she says,—
“‘A New England Girlhood’ has as yet brought me only about two hundred dollars. How can writers live by writing?”
She was therefore obliged to supplement her literary labors by teaching. She was very prudent in her manner of living, and never, from childhood, really had a home of her own. Towards the last of her life she found herself much cramped for means to secure that rest her tired brain so much needed; and this made the gifts received from her publisher and from her dearly loved Wheaton Seminary pupils, most welcome, and enabled her, during her last illness, to feel a relief from pecuniary anxiety.
If Miss Larcom had not been exceptionally fortunate, not only in her temperament but in her surroundings,—hampered as she was all through her life by want of pecuniary means,—she could not have developed her writing talent so well. She had the rare gift of finding and keeping the right kind of friends, in her own family as well as outside, and these supplied to her life that practical (though not pecuniary) help she so much needed. So her days were free from household and other cares, and when relieved from her duties as teacher, or as editor, her time was free to use in her own chosen way.
In this, her life differed from that of many women writers, who, whether married or not, often have exacting cares which interrupt and hinder the expression of their written thoughts. Miss Larcom did not have that hindrance; and she had the chance through most of her life to carry out her idea, as she expressed it, of “developing the utmost that is in me.” She had no family or domestic cares, and her children were all “dream children.”