Samantha in Europe: written by Josiah and similar items

This is one of the 10 titles the author, Holley, wrote in the satirical travels of "Samantha, Josiah Allen's wife." The youngest of seven children, Marietta Holley was born on the family farm where she lived her entire life. Financial difficulties ended her formal education at fourteen, but she maintained a lifelong fondness for reading. In the 1870s she augmented her family's modest income by teaching piano lessons. Always inordinately shy, she was fifty years old before she left Jefferson County for the first time. Her shyness eventually prevented her from accepting invitations to read her work in public or to address the leading feminist reformers of the day. After the death of her parents, she lived alone with her unmarried sister, Sylphina, who died in 1915. Nothing about her private life reflects the fact that she was a celebrated humorist whose popularity rivaled Mark Twain's. Although she initially wrote and published poetry under the pseudonym Jemyma, her contributions to the American vernacular humor tradition began with My Opinions and Betsey Bobbet's (1873). Holley created in Samantha Allen, her commonsensical persona, an ideal spokesperson for her primary theme: women's rights. Holley made relatively unpopular feminist ideas more acceptable by grounding them in the domestic perspective of a farm wife and stepmother. Even Samantha's nom de plume, Josiah Allen's Wife, served as an ironic comment on women's subordinate social, political, and economic status. Two antagonists to Samantha's feminism appear in the novel: Josiah Allen and Betsey Bobbet. Josiah's views are suffused with sentimentality and male egoism, while Betsey, an aging spinster, holds that woman's only sphere is marriage. Although Betsey soon disappeared from Holley's work, Josiah continued as a comic foil to Samantha's feminism and common sense, appearing in her second novel Josiah Allen's Wife as a P.A. [Public Advisor]