Anne Moncure Crane

Background

Anne Moncure Crane was born on January 07, 1838 in Baltimore, Maryland, United States. Her father, William Crane, a descendant of Jasper Crane, one of the founders of both New Haven and Newark, came to Richmond, Virginia, in 1812. He was already married, but his wife died in 1830, and in something less than a year he married Jean Niven Daniel, originally from Falmouth, Virginia. In 1834 he removed to Baltimore and organized a business in leather.

Education

Anne’s education was supervised by a Reverend N. A. Morrison. She graduated in the year 1855.

Career

When Anne was about twenty, a group of young women of which she was a member decided that each of them should write a novel. Hers alone seems to have been completed. She wrote under a stimulus perhaps not granted to her companions; she thought herself inspired. “The angel, ” she was fond of quoting, ‘. ‘said unto me, ‘Write’; and I wrote”. The resulting composition was held in manuscript for five years. Then, under the title Emily Chester, it was offered to some publishers in Boston, who put it out anonymously in 1864.

The style is tedious, but the characters, residents of New York and Baltimore, are rich and distinguished, and the plot involves the effort of a married woman to suppress her attraction toward a man not her husband. The book rapidly went through many editions in America and England, it was successfully dramatized, and a translation of it was published in Germany. Indeed it set a literary fashion which for ten or twelve years was widely followed by women writers.

Her next novel, Opportunity, was also concerned with the denial of passion for the sake of respectability. She had not resided long in her New York City home before she learned many things so “fearful” that she felt constrained, she said, to expose them or “the very stones would have cried out against me”. But her response, Reginald Archer (1871), so dutifully intended, brought against her the outcry of the moralists. The dedication was exemplary, “affectionately, to my husband, in token of the happy days when this was written, ” but this could not atone for the all too sure occupation of some of the female characters of the book, or for the failure of the author to award sorrow and painful death to all who sinned, or, in general, for a woman’s writing openly of matters which seemed clearly a problem for men only. She was ill, and while the protests against her were still sounding, she went to Europe and died in Stuttgart.

Achievements

• Anne Moncure Crane was known as a writer of the novels "Emily Chester", "Opportunity" and "Reginald Archer". She was an important voice in early American realism, one that had a decisive influence on Henry James.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Emily Chester: A Novel...

    (This book was originally published prior to 1923, and rep...)

  • Reginald Archer. A Novel

    (This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curat...)

  • Opportunity: A Novel...

    (This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. T...)

Interests

• Crane was intensely fond of music and reading, and her thoughts were always likely to be colored by a sort of mystical piety.

Connections

In 1869, Crane married Augustus Seemuller, a prosperous New York merchant.

Father:

William Crane

Mother:

Jean Niven Daniel

Spouse:

Augustus Seemuller

References

• Henry James and the 'Woman Business' (Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture Book 32)