By Judith A. Ranta

Reviewed by Sara Niesobecki, Senior Reference Librarian, MPMRC.

Betsey Guppy Chamberlain was many different things: a wife, a mother, a humorist, a feminist and one of the first Native women writers. She was born about 1797 in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire on the shore of Lake Winnipesaukee. Chamberlain was of English and Algonkian (most likely Narragansett or Abenaki) descent. Ranta says that assembling Chamberlain’s biography required much detective work because her writings obscured her identity. She used four pen names, married four times and used five surnames, and relocated from New England to the Midwest. At one point in her life Ms. Chamberlain lived in Lowell, Massachusetts and worked in the textile mills. There she wrote stories and sketches for two workers’ magazines—The Lowell Offering and The New England Offering. Thirty-four of these short pieces are collected in this book, along with an extensive biography and historic and literary analysis of the writings.

The first half of the book is a biographical and critical introduction to Chamberlain and her writings. Ranta collected information on her life, family and genealogy and showed how intricately connected these were to the author’s writings. Chamberlain used her own town as the basis of the fictional towns in her stories and she also used many of the people she encountered in her life as characters in her stories. The second half of the book consist of Ms. Chamberlain’s writings, which are divided into three categories: Native Tales & Dream Visions, “The Unprivileged Sex”: Women’s Concerns and “Our Town”: Village Sketches. 

While the author never explicitly identifies herself as Native she does suggest it, along with making references to Native Peoples and Native issues in the writings which are collected in the first section, Native Tales & Dream Visions. In these writings she veers from angry protest against the mistreatment of Native Peoples to conventional, and often stereotypical, representations. Ranta believes that this ambivalent treatment of Native Americans reflects her bicultural heritage and the fact that she was being published in a periodical which was mostly written by and for Euro-Americans.

The second section, “The Unprivileged Sex”, is where Chamberlain makes a strong feminist statement. At the time of these writings she was a single mother working to support herself and her children. Some of the themes of these writings are men’s restriction of women’s free speech, political participation, education and culture.  The author also addresses problems in courtship and marriage and, ironically as she was married four times, writes much about “old maids.”  She also frequently uses humor in these writings, almost all of it is focused on the male characters.

The last section, Village Sketches, are reminiscences of life in Chamberlain’s hometown of Wolfeboro. Like those in “The Unprivileged Sex,” many pieces focus on the quality of women’s lives and advocate changes in society’s treatment of them. The characters are often poor or elderly women, old maids and bachelors, Native people and servants. Some of the events are drawn from local histories of Wolfeboro and the surrounding area.

Overall, this is an interesting and well written book. The biographical section is a bit too long and repetitive but Chamberlain did lead an interesting life and this does show through. Ranta really documents how difficult life could be at that time, especially for a Native American woman, and why it was necessary for the author to downplay her Native heritage. The sections where Ranta discusses other writers of the time and how they relate to Ms. Chamberlain’s writings would be informative for the literary analyst, but for most readers the jewels of this book are Chamberlain’s writings. They are both humorous and sad, providing wonderful images of New England village life, of women and the lives of Native Americans in the mid-1800s.