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| | | | | The Heath Anthology of
American Literature, Fifth Edition
Paul Lauter, General Editor
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Jane Colman Turell
(1708-1735)
The daughter of Jane Clark and Benjamin Colman, the liberal minister
of Boston’s Brattle Street Church and president of Harvard College, Jane was a
precocious child, lovingly instructed by her father. Ill health and her
father’s large library allowed her to read widely in divinity, history, and
literature. To improve her writing skills, she began a regular correspondence
and exchange of verses with her father and composed her first hymn before she
was ten. In 1726, she married one of her father’s theology students, Ebenezer
Turell. She had four children, only one of whom survived her early death at age
twenty-seven.
Although Jane Coleman
Turell was a prolific poet, correspondent, and diarist, the only works that
survive are those her husband included in Some Memoirs of the Life and Death
of Mrs. Jane Turell. He admitted, “I might add to these some Pieces of Wit
and Humor, which if published would give a brighter Idea of her to some sort of
Readers; but as her Heart was set on graver and better Subjects, and her Pen
much oftener employ’d about them, so I chuse to omit them, tho’ innocent
enough.” Turell’s father noted that “she was sometimes fir’d with a laudable
Ambition of raising the honour of her Sex, who are therefore under Obligations
to her....” Her best poetry was written before her marriage—that is, before she
was eighteen. Despite masculine censorship, Turell represents a new generation
of women who had a consciousness of gender and looked to women as poetic models
and whose interests went beyond religious and natural subjects dictated by
Puritan culture.
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Texts
In the Heath Anthology
Psalm CXXXVII. Paraphras'd August 5th, 1725
(c.1725)
[Lines on Childbirth]
(1741)
On Reading the Warning by Mrs. Singer
(c.1741)
[n.b., First published posthumously]
To My Muse
(1741)
[n.b., First published posthumously]
Other Works
[The Fifth Chapter of Canticles paraphras'd from the 8th Verse]
(c.1740)
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Links
Coming into Communion: Pastoral Dialogues in Colonial New England
http://www.sunypress.edu/sunyp/backads/html/c4337x.html
A summary of Laura Henigman's book that references poetry of Jane Colman Turell as evidence of popular women's contributions to religious culture in Colonial New England.
The Integrity of Memory: Creating a New Literary History of the United States
http://xroads.virginia.edu/~DRBR/kolodny.html
An article by Annette Kolodny on the exclusive practice of literary history construction.
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Secondary Sources
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