Dedicated to the recovery of the life and work of Poet, Novelist, Feminist Lecturer, Essayist, Playwright, and Mother
This site serves as a re-introduction, for twenty-first century readers, to one of the most well-recognized literary figures of mid-nineteenth-century literature and culture, and one of the most well-known voices in the debate over the rights and needs of women in the United States.
Elizabeth Oakes Smith
Image: Copy of tintype given to the webmaster by Nona Lockhart, whose family purchased Oakes Smith’s son Appleton’s property in Beaufort NC in the late 19th century. This is the earliest known photographic image of Oakes Smith, likely from the late 1840s or early 50s.
“My friends, do we realize for what purpose we are convened? Do we fully understand that we aim at nothing less than an entire subversion of the present order of society, a dissolution of the whole existing social compact?”
-Elizabeth Oakes Smith--National Women's Rights Convention, 1852
Click here to access the most complete bibliography of critical work on Oakes Smith, including editions of her work, published essays, and conference papers, many of which accessible, full-text.
Here you’ll find the most complete bibliography of works by Elizabeth Oakes Smith, arranged by genre, and further, by date. Hyperlinks for many will send you to original publications via HathiTrust.org and other databases.
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An Invitation to Students and their Professors
One of my students in an American Woman Writers seminar was interested in continuing the work of Jean Fagin Yellin on the now well-known and anthologized Harriet Jacobs and reached out to Yellin herself for advice. She was disappointed to hear from Yellin, frankly and honestly, that there was nothing—or very little—left to recover. Certainly Jacobs’s life and work will continue to inspire new criticism and historical investigations, but what there is to know about Jacobs’s life and her publication of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is now more or less known.
The most exciting thing about the major figure to which this page is dedicated is how much work remains to be done to learn even some of the most basic facts of her life and career. Granted, we have evidence in her diaries that at different times of her life she burned “masses of correspondence,” but she was so prominent and prolific a writer in a host of genres spanning six decades, it will be some years before we fill in even major biographical and professional gaps. With access to a host of new electronic archives and guided by the work of the scholars in our Criticism section, students at any level can contribute meaningfully to the recovery of Elizabeth Oakes Smith.