Katherine Sherwood Bonner Mc Dowell - Early Literary Career

Early Literary Career

Bonner's first months in Boston were lonely and frugal. Her privileged background and pride clashed painfully with her new circumstances, and at first she lived on crackers and ginger snaps and was forced to "trot up and down with coal and things", tasks previously reserved for servants. Capen secured for her a place at a Boston school for young women, and she worked hard to make the most of the prospects offered her, but at twenty-four she was some years older than most of the young ladies that attended and found herself subsequently on the outside of their society. Despite this culture shock Bonner persisted in the face of literary rejection, family pressure and poor living conditions. She thrived on the literary criticisms offered by editors that rejected her early work and was brash enough to prevail upon the renowned poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. It is a credit to Bonner's social grace and personality that within one hour's audience with Longfellow, she secured a lifelong patronage; he provided both financial support and professional encouragement.

The work provided her by Longfellow, such as the role she played as his editorial assistant on Poems of Places, and the contact his society afforded her with editors and publishers gave Bonner many opportunities to advance herself. In 1876 Bonner toured England and Europe for ten months with the well-known novelist Louise Chandler Moulton and wrote "more than a dozen travel articles that were published simultaneously in the Boston Times and the Memphis, Tennessee, Avalanche." Success at writing articles for magazines gained her a contract to write what was to be her only novel, Like unto Like (1878). Bonner's literary career was off the ground at last.