Goodale Sisters
Elaine Goodale Eastman (1863–1953) and Dora Read Goodale (1866–1953) were American poets and sisters from Massachusetts. They published their first poetry as children still living at home, and were included in Edmund Clarence Stedman's classic An American Anthology (1900).
Elaine Goodale taught at the Indian Department of
Dora Read Goodale published a book of poetry at age 21 and continued to write. She became a teacher of art and English in Connecticut. Later she was a teacher and director of the Uplands Sanatorium in Pleasant Hill, Tennessee.[1] She attracted positive reviews when she published her last book of poetry at age 75 in 1941, in which she combined modernist free verse with the use of Appalachian dialect to express her neighbors' traditional lives.[2]
Early life and education
Elaine and Dora were born in the 1860s to Dora Hill Read and Henry Sterling Goodale, a farmer and writer in Mount Washington, Massachusetts. Dora Read Goodale was the daughter of a notable colonial family, and Henry Goodale could trace his family tree all the way back to 1632, to an ancestor who settled in Salem, Massachusetts. Elaine, born October 9, 1863, was the couple's first child. Elaine's sister Dora was born four years later.
From 1876 to 1879 Elaine and Dora's father served as a delegate to the Massachusetts State Board of Agriculture.
The Goodale sisters grew up on their parents' farm, known as Sky Farm. They had a brother Robert, and a sister, Rose Sterling Goodale, who married James A. Dayton and preserved much of the family's history and manuscripts.[5] The entire family absorbed the New England Transcendental culture.
Elaine and Dora were precocious writers, starting poetry while young. Elaine self-published her poems at age eight in her Sky Farm Life, a monthly. Her first pastoral poem appeared in the Springfield Republican when she was twelve.[6] Friends helped collect the two girls' early writings; Elaine was fifteen and Dora twelve when their first book was published:
- Apple Blossoms: Verses of Two Children (1878)
- In Berkshire with the Wildflowers (1879)
- All Round the Year: Verses from Sky Farm (1880)
Beginning in 1881, the Goodale sisters contributed to such periodicals as
Elaine Goodale Eastman
In 1881 Elaine published The Journal of a Farmer's Daughter. Two years later she became a teacher at the
Having become interested in the cause of Indian reform, in 1886 Elaine Goodale received a government appointment to teach Indians at the
In the aftermath of the
The couple had six children:
- Dora Winona Eastman, d. August 22, 1964, Northampton, MA
- Keene, NH
- Virginia Eastman, d. April 2, 1991, Amherst, MA(married Mr. Sterling Whitbeck)
- Eleanor Eastman, d. May 2, 1999, Pittsford, NY(married Mr. Ernst Mensel)
- Florence Eastman, d. December 30, 1930, Holyoke, MA(married Mr. Robert Prentiss)
- Charles Eastman Jr. (Ohiyesa), d. January 15, 1940, Detroit, MI(married Miss Marion Nutting)
The couple remained together for three decades, returning to Massachusetts in 1903. They had struggled financially after Eastman was forced out of two physician positions with the
After Goodale Eastman started helping Eastman write his stories of childhood and Indian culture, he became well known and sought after for lectures. The family was based in Amherst, near Goodale's family, as Eastman increasingly traveled for public lectures and other activities. Goodale managed his lecture tours and associated publicity, as he had about 25 lectures annually.[8] They also collaborated on writing, and he published eight books while they lived in Amherst; Goodale Eastman published three during the time they were married;[5] after they separated she published four additional books. The extent to which Goodale Eastman edited or influenced Charles Eastman’s writing is a source of much debate.[9]
In 1915 the family founded their own summer camp, Camp Oáhe, at
Goodale Eastman continued to write, publishing four books after her separation from Charles: The Luck of Old Acres (1928), a novel about a summer camp; and her last book of poems, The Voice at Eve (1930), which included a biographical essay entitled "All the Days of My Life". In 1935, when she was more than 70 years old, she published both her best novel, One Hundred Maples, and a biography of
After her death of natural causes on December 22, 1953, her ashes were scattered in the Spring Grove Cemetery in Florence, Massachusetts, near where her daughter Dora and her family lived.[5] Goodale Eastman had written a memoir about her experiences as a school teacher of the Sioux called Sister to the Sioux. The manuscript was published posthumously in 1978 by the University of Nebraska Press.
Dora Read Goodale
After graduating from Smith College in 1890, Dora published her first independent book of poetry in 1887, Heralds of Easter. She became a teacher of art and English in
Later in life Dora worked as a teacher and director of Uplands Sanatorium in Pleasant Hill, Tennessee. In 1941 she published Mountain Dooryards, her last book of poetry, a work that was written in modernist free verse and used the dialect of the people of the Appalachians and expressed their traditional but changing world.[2]
Legacy
- In 1950 Goodale Eastman donated her papers to Smith College, where she had earned her undergraduate degree. (She had removed most of the references to Charles Eastman.)[5] Her sister, Rose Sterling Goodale Dayton, subsequently donated many papers to the collection.
Film portrayal
In the HBO film Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (2007), Elaine Goodale was portrayed by the actor Anna Paquin.
Works
Poetry:
- Elaine Goodale and Dora Read Goodale. Apple-blossoms: verses of two children, G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1878.
- ______________________. (and illustrated by William Hamilton Gibson). In Berkshire with the wild flowers, G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1879.
- _____________________. All Round the Year: Verses from Sky Farm, G.P. Putnam's Sons, (1880).
- Goodale, Dora Read. Heralds of Easter (1887).
- Goodale, Dora Read.Test of the Sky, 1926[5]
- Goodale, Dora Read.Mountain Dooryards, 1941; 1945, revised and enlarged[2]
- Eastman, Elaine Goodale. The Voice at Eve, collected poems (Unknown Binding - 1930).
Non-fiction:
- Eastman, Elaine Goodale. Journal of a Farmer's Daughter, (Unknown Binding - 1881).
- ________________. The Senator and the School-house ([Indian Rights Association. Publications. 1st ser.]), (Unknown Binding - 1886).
- ________________. Indian Wars and Warriors, (Unknown Binding - 1894)
- ________________ & Charles A. Eastman. Smoky Day's Wigwam Evenings: Indian Stories Retold, Little, Brown and Company, 1910.
- _________________. Pratt The Red Man's Moses, 1935. (biography of Carlisle Indian School
- ________________. Western Sentiment on the Indian Question, (Unknown Binding - 1946)
- ________________. Sister to the Sioux: The Memoirs of Elaine Goodale Eastman: 1885-1891, Kay Graber, editor, University of Nebraska Press, 1978.
Fiction:
- Eastman, Elaine Goodale. Little Brother O' Dreams, Houghton Mifflin Company, February 1910.
- ______________. Yellow Star: A Story of East and West, Little, Brown and Company, 1911. (Goodale Eastman described these first two novels as "potboilers".[8])
- ______________. The Eagle and the Star,: American Indian Pageant Play in Three Acts, (Unknown Binding - 1916)
- ______________. The Luck of Oldacres (1928), New York: Century Company[5]
- ______________. Hundred Maples, Stephen Daye Press, 1935.
- This article incorporates text from a publication now in the New International Encyclopedia (1st ed.). New York: Dodd, Mead.)
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References
- ^ a b "Eastman-Goodale-Dayton Family", Sophia Smith Collection: Women's History Archives, Smith College, Northampton, MA, accessed 3 February 2011
- ^ a b c d Paula Bennett, Nineteenth-century American Women Poets: An Anthology, Wiley-Blackwell, 1998, pp. 351-352, accessed 3 February 2011
- ^ History of Berkshire County, Vol. 1, accessed 3 February 2011
- ^ "Fresh Magazines. Harper's Magazine", The New York Times, 18 September 1880, accessed 3 February 2011
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j Theodore D. Sargent, The Life of Elaine Goodale Eastman (Women in the West), University of Nebraska Press (2006), accessed 3 February 2011
- ^ "The Bride of an Indian: Miss Elaine Goodale Married to Dr. Eastman", The New York Times, 19 September 1891, accessed 3 February 2011
- ^ "Elaine Goodale Eastman", Only a Teacher: Schoolhouse Pioneers, Public Broadcasting Company (PBS), accessed 3 February 2011
- ^ a b c d e f g Ruth Ann Alexander, "Elaine Goodale Eastman and the Failure of the Feminist Protestant Ethic", Great Plains Quarterly, Spring 1988, accessed 3 February 2011
- ^ a b Dobrow, Julie (January 20, 2022). ""Poetry Wedded to Science." On the Love and Legacy of Elaine Goodale and Charles Eastman".
Further reading
- Clark, Carol Lea. Charles A. Eastman (Ohiyesa) and Elaine Goodale Eastman: A Cross-Cultural Collaboration, University of Tulsa, 1994.
- Dobrow, J., and Wilson, R. (Spring 2022). "'Good Night Irene': The Pandemic of 1918 and the Death of Irene Taluta Eastman" (subscription required). South Dakota History. 52(1).
External links
- Works by Elaine Goodale Eastman at Project Gutenberg
- Works by or about Elaine Goodale Eastman at Internet Archive
- Works by or about Dora Read Goodale at Internet Archive
- Works by Goodale Sisters at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
- Elaine Goodale Eastman at Library of Congress, with 26 library catalog records, and at WorldCat
- Dora Read Goodale at LC Authorities, with 8 records, and at WorldCat
- Eastman-Goodale-Dayton Family Papers, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College Special Collections.