At the 1991 centennial meeting in Pittsfield Donald Yannella alluded to Sarah Morewood's improper fascination with George L. Duyckinck. We all shouted him down, I crying, "She was a religious woman!"
Well, Yannella had read Sarah's letters in the Duyckinck Collection and none of the rest of us had.
I thought I knew her through the letters in the Augusta Papers and in the Log, but I knew only part of the story, and in fact had not known what to make of one fragment of a letter about a servant sent with a midnight message across the hill from Broadhall to Arrowhead. Later, Lion Gardiner Miles, a Berkshire researcher, went to Yale for me to look in the Gardiner papers (his family's papers) where he found a dumbfounding letter about Sarah's notorious pursuit of the young brother-in-law of President Tyler two summers before Melville's Idyl in the Berkshires.
I was still naive in 1991, slow to learn that minor members of my cast of characters might be much more complex than I was giving them credit for being. I thank Lion Miles and apologize here to Yannella for simplifying a very complicated woman and wrongly challenging him in public. I was right about Helen Melville when I challenged Yannella that day in 1991, but embarrassingly wrong about Sarah Morewood--much more wrong than even Yannella or anyone else knew at that time.
No comments:
Post a Comment