Poetess as Paratext: The Contextualizing Influence of Lydia H. Sigourney and Alice Cary in the New York Ledger

This chapter sets the stage for a poetics of paratextuality via a study of Lydia Huntly Sigourney and Alice Cary in Robert E. Bonner’s (1824-1899) New York Ledger. It argues that Bonner’s regular publication of Sigourney and Cary was a strategy to manage the Ledger’s image as a “family paper.” The chapter begins by describing the Ledger as a periodical bridging the gap between broadsheets and literary monthlies, occupying an interstitial place in the print market world between popular culture and high culture. The chapter then examines Sigourney’s “hermeneutic poems,” which provided biblical teachings on usury, hubris, death, and munificence. These poems thematically complemented and conflicted with the Ledger’s sensationalist paratext, which included serials about love, hate, crime, and murder. In the third section, the chapter explores Cary’s cross-genre writing in the Ledger. Cary’s work was marked by cross-genre experimentation, introducing a pastoral element absent from the Ledger’s otherwise sensational content. This chapter leads to several preliminary conclusions about how a poetics of paratextuality shaped the production and assembly of Sigourney’s and Cary’s Ledger contributions, and how these contributions informed the image of the poetess persona as a major figure in Bonner’s paper. Often viewed as poetesses during and after their lifetimes, mostly for being women and less for finessing cultural stereotypes about women writers, Sigourney and Cary evince how pervasive and complex the poetess persona was in mid-century story papers.