The morning after one of my book talks in Maine last summer (2024), I received a call from Scott Vile at Ascensius Press. He hadn’t been able to attend the previous night but wanted to have coffee, and we met at a place across the street from the Portland Public Library. There I learned who he was—

Plans for archeological excavation at Lakeview Cemetery in Patchogue, Long Island are underway. Specifically, experts will be examining the site of “The Willows,” home of Elizabeth Oakes Smith and Seba Smith from 1859 to 1870. The lives and work of both these writers are significant parts of literary and social history in the area…

Even into my fourth decade recovering the work of Elizabeth Oakes Smith, her paradox continues to assert itself: how could such a ubiquitous and popular and to some notorious writer of the nineteenth century have been so firmly forgotten in our cultural history? 

The first volume of Elizabeth Oakes Smith: Selected Writings (2023) considers Oakes Smith’s emergence as a public figure and her rise to fame, first in New York, and soon as a name widely recognized in the national media. The volume ends, however, with a countertext…

Oakes Smith began her lecture career in June of 1851 at Hope Chapel, where she spoke on “Dress: Its Social and Aesthetic Relations.” 

Only six months later, she had written four new lectures and delivered them in Brooklyn, in Worcester MA, in Portland ME, and on Nantucket Island.  Through Wendell Phillips, or else by writing directly to the Lyceum at Concord, she booked a lecture among the Transcendentalists for December 31.  Her subject was “Womanhood.”

At a union service during “Old Home Week,” in an address entitled “Castine, Sixty Years Ago,” George Adams predicted a growing interest in the history of this tiny town on the Maine coast:

As time rolls on, more and more poetic interest will gather around the names of D’Aulnay, and La Tour, and Friar Leo, and Baron Castin; other pens will be enlisted to add to what has already been so well done, in rescuing from oblivion the incidents and legends of the past, and in immortalizing in fiction and romance the events of our early history… 

Elizabeth Oakes Smith is my longest-running research interest and my most recent foray into her work is a study of her first piece of fiction, a short story titled “The Black Fortune-Teller” (1831). I first encountered this story back in 2013 when I was working my way through the Maine Historical Society’s archives of 1820-30s newspapers…

I recently presented a paper at the recently renovated Yarmouth History Center at the invitation of its (then) Interim Director Amy Aldredge.   I had come, I told the audience, to ask their help, for my thesis was that too much of what we know about her--really the whole orientation of our understanding of Oakes Smith's work--is probably weighted much too far toward her late reflections on her career available in her autobiography…

This past October I dropped everything and took another trip to Charlottesville, where five feet of Elizabeth Oakes Smith's MSS are held in the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library. My first priority was to have a closer look at the early letters between Oakes Smith and her husband, written between 1833 and 1837, which will form a section of my projected edition of her writings…