{"value"=>"<p>This 599 page manuscript autobiography was largely written during the early 1880s and completed ca. 1885, though some portions may be earlier. Some chapters and other text portions are composed of mounted clippings of previously published essays, poems, letters, some of which have been revised by Smith in manuscript. Included are previously published sections of at least two autobiographical accounts and several profiles of people Smith had known. Also tipped in are two manuscripts letters (1867-1868) to Smith from Father Adrian Rouquette, and a silhouette of Smith's son Rolvin Oaksmith, age 6 [ca. 1834].</p> <p>Portions of the original autobiography were originally published serially in the <em render=\"underline\">Lewiston (Me.) Journal</em> and then collected in <em render=\"underline\">Selections from the Autobiography of Elizabeth Oakes Smith</em>, ed. Mary Alice Wyman (Lewiston, Me.: Lewiston Journal Co., 1924). The published version, however, is heavily condensed, rearranged, and substantially rewritten, with most passages silently altered in significant ways. The editor also inserted material from Smith's other autobiographical writings which Smith did not incorporate into this manuscript.</p> <p>Smith's autobiography consists of a series of 142 short sketches arranged in rough chronological order. [A table of contents has been prepared and placed with the manuscript.] After a prologue on her ancestry and especially her grandfather Blanchard, Smith provides an extended recounting of her childhood in and around Portland, Maine, the family's way of life, her inner feelings, her education, and her ambitions of becoming a schoolteacher, which were thwarted by her mother and an early marriage. Smith's account of her life in Portland after marriage focuses on raising her children, her religious beliefs, psychic experiences, social activities, enthusiastic participation in Portland's intellectual life, and exposure to antislavery, temperance, and other reform movements. Smith had little to say about her husband Seba Smith, and his literary career, though she discusses his financial speculations and business failures in the late 1830s at some length. Smith's account of life in New York City is primarily an intellectual autobiography: profiles of famous figures she had known, such as Horace Greeley and Edgar Allan Poe, are interspersed with accounts of women authors and women's rights advocates, the condition of women in New York, and how Smith's own advocacy of women's rights cost her many friends among the literati. Very little is said about Smith's career as a lyceum lecturer or her attendance at women's rights conventions. Similarly, Smith largely ignores her own literary career, save for a chapter on her poem \"The Sinless Child\". The autobiography essentially ends in the mid-1850s, though the final sections discuss Smith's increasing preoccupation with religion and interest in Roman Catholicism during the 1860s.</p> <p>location: clamshell box.</p>"}