LETTER: ALS to her publisher.
First American Woman Science Fiction Writer
Letter to Her Publisher
Griffith, Mary. Autograph Letter Signed, to Daniel Appleton. New York; May 11, 1842; one leaf; one page; ca. 7.5” x 9.5”; creased; remnant of backing sheet pasted to verso.
Griffith writes to her publisher to remind him that he promised to publish her manuscript before April, explaining that she needed money badly. She asks Appleton to send her a hundred dollars for the manuscript, and also requests that he return “a book of mine called Camperdown and a large folio thin volume called the ‘Omnibus,’ it contains a series of letters on the faculties.” Griffith also asks that if Appleton publishes her latest manuscript, that he send her a “certain number of copies” of the finished product. The “Omnibus” that Griffith refers to here is her Discoveries in Light and Vision (1836).
Griffith (1772-1846) was the first American woman science fiction writer, a horticulturalist and a scientist. She lived in New York until the death of her wealthy merchant husband in 1815, when she bought an estate in Franklin Township, New Jersey. There she performed experiments in horticulture, natural history, economic entomology, earth science, epidemiology, and optics and vision, publishing her results in scientific and literary journals and newspapers. She published four books in her lifetime: Our Neighborhood, or Letters on Horticulture and Natural Phenomena (1831), Camperdown, or News from Our Neighborhood (1836), Discoveries in Light and Vision (1836) and The Two Defaulters (1842). Little else is known about her life.
Camperdown contains a section titled “Three Hundred Years Hence” – Griffith’s projection of what life in the United States would be like three hundred years in the future – and which scholars and science fiction aficionados consider to be the first fantasy fiction written by an American woman. Camperdown caught the attention of Edgar Allen Poe, who reviewed it in the Southern Literary Messenger, describing it as containing “originality in thought and manner” as well as being “sufficiently outré.”
Griffith refers to her third and final novel, The Two Defaulters, in her letter to Appleton. This book was a moralistic tale of intrigue in the business world. The plot is apparently in keeping with Griffith’s philosophy that women can achieve independence through equal educational and economic opportunities.
Institutional holdings of Griffith’s books and letters are rare. Only Yale and three other rare book libraries in the United States hold copies of the original edition of Camperdown, and only Yale, UCLA and the University of Minnesota hold copies of the original 1842 printing of The Two Defaulters. Even more scarce are letters written by Griffith. The only archival collection of her letters is at Rutgers University, found in the papers of her son-in-law Thomas Isaac Wharton, the Philadelphia lawyer. All of those are dated in the mid-1820s - eight years before the publication of her first book, and therefore without literary content. Griffith is also not listed in the finding aids of Columbia and Indiana University’s collections of correspondence from the D. Appleton publishing files.
(#12173)
Print Inquire