Caroline Lee Hentz

https://www.ncpedia.org/biography/hentz-caroline

Caroline Lee Whiting Hentz, novelist, was born in Lancaster, Mass. Her father, John Whiting, who served as a colonel in the Revolutionary War, was descended from Samuel Whiting who came to the colonies in 1636 and became the first minister in Lynn, Mass.; her mother was Orpah Danforth Whiting. Little is known about her childhood except that she supposedly wrote fiction, drama, and poetry as an adolescent.

On 30 Sept. 1824 she married Nicholas Marcellus Hentz, an emigré who had fled his native France with his family in 1816. The following year she, her husband, and their first child, Marcellus, began their residence in Chapel Hill. She devoted herself to the care of the five children who were born in the first decade of their marriage: Marcellus died before his second birthday, but Charles, Julia, Thaddeus, and Caroline survived their parents. Her husband accepted an appointment as professor of modern language and belle lettres at The University of North Carolina, taught French, and spent his spare time in entomological studies. She found the years in North Carolina satisfying and nostalgically recalled the "kindness, warm feeling, hospitality, and union of Chapel Hill."

In the fall of 1830 Nicholas Hentz, who was described by his son Charles as "a rolling stone; never abiding long in one place," moved the family to Covington, Ky., where he found employment as the head of a female academy. From that point on, Caroline Hentz divided her energies between teaching in various female academies and writing short stories and novels. Beginning with the academy in Covington, she and her husband supervised and taught in girls' schools in Cincinnati, Ohio; Florence, Tuscaloosa, and Tuskegee, Ala.; and Columbus, Ga. Her ambivalent reaction to the teaching profession was reflected in her relatively negative attitude towards her duties along with a recognition that her efforts were necessary in the support of the family: "School again—Alternate coaxing and scolding, counsel and reproof—frowns and smiles—oh! what a life it is—oh woe is me—this weary world! I am often tempted to say—Yet man is doomed to earn his subsistence by the sweat of the brow and the fire of his brain and why not woman also?"

Simultaneously, she was constantly writing fiction and issued dozens of short stories and twelve novels before the end of an extremely successful career during which she gained a popular and national audience. Her first novel, Lovell's Folly , appeared in 1833; her last, Ernest Linwood , was published in 1856. Mrs. Hentz's literary endeavors were motivated partially by the need to supplement the family's income, and her correspondence with publishers indicates that she sought to profit from the increasing demand for sentimental-domestic fiction, a genre that addressed itself to women and their concerns.

Aside from the financial motivation, she sought in her fiction to fulfill a dual purpose. The first was rooted in a transplanted but undeviating loyalty to the antebellum South. Setting nearly half of her fiction in the South, she attempted to defend that section's commitment to slavery. She claimed that the institution of slavery was misunderstood by Northerners and in fact benefited Southerners, both white and black. Convinced that the misunderstanding stemmed at least in part from the antislavery writings emanating from the North, she responded directly to Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin by defending slavery in The Planter's Northern Bride . She noted in a letter to her publisher that Stowe's characterization was completely inaccurate: "Slavery, as she [Stowe] describes it, is an entirely new institution to us." In her preface to the novel, she described relations between whites and blacks in positive terms, writing that "we have been touched and gratified by the exhibition of affectionate kindness and care on the one side, and loyal and devoted attachment on the other."

Her second and more important literary purpose expressed concerns regarding women and their status in society that went beyond sectional boundaries. Along with other women writers of the nineteenth century who focused on women and the home in their fiction, she sought to promote and legitimate the role of women in society. Arguing that women were different from—and morally superior to—their male counter-parts, she emphasized that women were the primary inculcators of a virtue and morality necessary for the maintenance of the social fabric and that women performed this function most effectively by remaining in the home and providing models for their husbands and children. Women, she felt, should provide a peaceful haven for their husbands and serve as their spiritual guides. They should also mold their children's character and prepare them for the tasks assigned by society. In short, woman in her fiction was seen as the controlling force in the family, and the family in turn was portrayed as the institution upon which society depended for its continuance and survival.

During the 1840s, Mrs. Hentz's familial responsibilities increased in proportion to the decline of her husband's health. She maintained their last girls' school in Columbus by herself but soon decided that her pen was the surest path to security. She had already produced some short stories and two novels during the years in which she had combined teaching and writing, and the reaction to them determined her decision to concentrate on writing alone to support herself and her family. As she commented, "I am compelled to turn my brains to gold and sell them to the highest bidder." Increasing her production to a startling degree, she achieved her aim, writing eight novels and five collections of short stories all of which were published in the first half of the 1850s.

While visiting her son Charles during the winter of 1855–56 she contracted pneumonia in Marianna, Fla., died, and was buried there. Her husband died nine months later and was buried beside her. Both had joined the Presbyterian church in 1835.

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http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=26384913&ref=wvr

Well known in her day, she is best known for her 1854 novel "The Planter's Northern Bride", in which she defended the South and the institution of slavery. Her intention was to refute much of what Harriet Breecher Stowe wrote in "Uncle Tom's Cabin".

Born Caroline Whiting in Massachussetts, she married Nicolaus Marcellus Hentz in 1824. The couple moved to Alabama to operate an all-girls school, and Hentz wrote of her love for the region in her poem "La Fayette". She also lived for a time in North Carolina before spending her last years in Marianna, Florida, where she died.

Married in1825 to Professor Hentz

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Caroline Lee Hentz (1800-1856) was Alabama's first best-selling writer and one of the most popular American women writers of the early nineteenth century. Along with other southern novelists, such as Caroline Gilman and Augusta Jane Evans Wilson, Hentz wrote and helped to popularize women's domestic fiction. Although she was born in the North and lived in seven different states, Hentz spent 14 years in Alabama (1834-1848) with her husband and four children. Most of her fiction is set in the South, the region she adopted as home and fiercely defended from northern criticism.

Born Caroline Lee Whiting on June 1, 1800, in Lancaster, Massachusetts, Hentz was the youngest of John and Orpah Whiting's eight children. At age 17, she began teaching at the Lancaster Common School. On September 30, 1824, Caroline married Nicholas Marcellus Hentz, a native of Metz, France, who had immigrated to America in 1816. An entomologist, novelist, and artist, Hentz was intellectually gifted but prone to depression and uncontrollable fits of jealousy. Not surprisingly, male jealousy would one day become a recurring theme in Hentz's fiction.

At the time of their marriage, Nicholas was teaching French at George Bancroft's Round Hill School in Northampton, Massachusetts. After the family's initial move to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, in 1826, Caroline began writing a verse drama, De Lara, or The Moorish Bride, and edited the narrative of enslaved George Moses Horton. In 1830, the Hentzes moved to Covington, Kentucky, where Nicholas served as headmaster at a female academy and where Caroline completed De Lara, which won a prize offered by Boston actor and manager William Pelby. De Lara was produced, to favorable reviews, at the Tremont Theater in Boston and the Arch Street Theater in Philadelphia. The following year, two more of her plays were produced, Constance of Werdenberg, or The Forest League, at the Park Theater in New York, and Lamorah, or the Western Wild, in Cincinnati, where the couple had moved in 1832 to oversee another school for girls.

In Cincinnati, Caroline joined a literary and social group to which the future author Harriet Beecher Stowe also belonged. Twenty years later, Stowe's enormously popular antislavery novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), would inspire Hentz to defend slavery and the South by writing a pro-slavery novel, The Planter's Northern Bride (1854). While in Ohio, Hentz published her first novel, Lovell's Folly (1833), which included unfavorable portraits of recognizable northern citizens. Fearing libel charges, the publisher quickly withdrew the book from circulation.

In 1834, the Hentzes left Cincinnati following an incident in which Nicholas slapped a man who had sent Caroline a note after a party. Their often stormy marriage near collapse, the Hentzes moved to the frontier town of Florence, Lauderdale County, where they established the Locust Dell Academy. During the next 14 years, the Hentzes operated girls' schools in Florence (1834-43), Tuscaloosa (1843-45), and Tuskegee (1845-48). Caroline continued to publish, but most of her time was spent assisting her husband at school, cooking meals for the students, and tending to her own children.

In 1848, the Hentzes moved to Columbus, Georgia, to open yet another school, but Nicholas's rapidly deteriorating mental state prompted them to close the school in 1849. Two years later, the Hentzes moved to Marianna, Florida, where Caroline spent her remaining years caring for her husband and writing stories and novels at a feverish pace to support her family. She rapidly became one of America's most popular writers. Between 1850 and 1853, Hentz's books sold more than 93,000 copies, and as late as 1872, the Boston Public Library listed her as one of the three most popular authors of the day.

The popularity of Hentz's books can be attributed to her mastery in writing sentimental novels. The successful formula for these works centered on an innocent young woman, usually an orphan, who is pursued by an evil suitor through a variety of dangerous episodes until some handsome young man rescues her and joins her in a happy marriage. Other popular ingredients in the genre include narrow escapes, mistaken identity, romantic love and jealousy, religious sentiment and/or conversion, and an inspiring climb from rags to riches.

Although much of the fiction of this genre has been criticized as overly sentimental, newer generations of feminist scholars have reevaluated the challenges it poses, however subtly, to male domination. In Hentz's Eoline, for example, the heroine rebels against her father by refusing to marry his choice of suitor, even though the penalty is the loss of her inheritance. In the end, Eoline marries the chosen suitor of her own free will. Hentz's work has also been examined for its promotion of Lost Cause ideology. The Planter's Northern Bride, for example, is a chilling rebuttal of Uncle Tom's Cabin. On its surface, the novel offers readers a sentimental marriage plot that covers a deeper theme defending the institution of slavery through the eloquent rhetoric of the main male character, planter Russell Moreland, and in many idyllic scenes of slave life.

The Hentzes did not live long to enjoy Caroline's success, however. When Nicholas's health grew worse, he moved to St. Andrews, Florida, to live with their daughter Julia. Caroline stayed in Marianna, traveling to St. Andrews occasionally to tend to her husband. She contracted pneumonia and died on February 11, 1856. Her husband died nine months later. Both are buried in Marianna, Florida. Her sons Thaddeus and Charles would later serve in the Confederate army during the Civil War, and after the war daughter Julia joined other southerners, known as Confederados, who moved to Brazil to reestablish slave-based plantation agriculture in South America.

Selected Works by Caroline Lee Hentz

Lamorah; or, the Western Wild (play, 1832)

Constance of Werdenberg., or, The Forest League (1832)

Lovell's Folly (1833)

De Lara; or, The Moorish Bride (1843)

Human and Divine Philosophy: A Poem Written for the Erosophic Society of the University of Alabama (1844)

Linda; or, The Young Pilot of the Belle Creole (1850)

Rena; or, The Snow Bird (1851)

Eoline; or, Magnolia Vale; or, The Heiress of Glenmore (1852)

Marcus Warland; or, The Long Moss Spring (1852)

The Banished Son and Other Stories of the Heart (1852)

The Victim of Excitement, The Bosom Serpent, etc. (1853)

Wild Jack; or, The Stolen Child, and Other Stories (1853)

The Planter's Northern Bride (1854)

Courtship and Marriage; or, The Joys and Sorrows of American Life (1856)

The Lost Daughter and Other Stories of the Heart (1857)