Elizabeth C. Wright (1826–1882)

Elizabeth C. Wright (1826–1882) Emily E. VanDette When your soul is utterly weary with shaking hands with pretence, and conversing with make-believes, you too will be ready for such a plunge into the wilderness. (13) Elizabeth C. Wright, “Into the Woods,” Lichen Tufts, from the Alleghanies, 1860 Of all the forgotten and neglected early American nature writers, none is less well known or more worthy of recovery, republication, and scholarly attention than Elizabeth C. Wright. (400) Daniel Patterson, Early American Nature Writers: A Biographical Encyclopedia, 2008 The identity of the woman who wrote the 1860 book Lichen Tufts, from the Alleghanies, discovered by Lawrence Buell in 1995 and thought to be the first book-length treatise on nature written by a US woman, has mostly eluded scholars. Beyond her name and the autobiographical allusions throughout the essays and poems of her book, information about Elizabeth C. Wright has been scarce and speculative, the most likely candidate thought to be a married woman living in Dunkirk, New York, with her husband and children. In fact, the author of Lichen Tufts was not a wife and mother but an unmarried, educated woman who grew up in the Allegheny region near the New York–Pennsylvania border and graduated from Alfred Academy; she was a botanist, teacher, abolitionist, temperance lecturer, and women’s rights activist. The details about Wright’s life add crucial context for appreciating the radical politics and philosophical significance of Lichen Tufts, and they [End Page 112] provide a compelling glimpse into the life of a woman who was ahead of her time as a scientist, author, and activist. Between her upbringing in an abolitionist family, which housed and supported fugitives from slavery along a crucial part of the Underground Railroad path to Canada, and the progressive, coeducational environment at her school in close proximity to the western New York region known as the burned-over district, Wright’s life and writing provide an important record of the impact of those influences on a woman in the nineteenth century. Wright’s legacy demands attention in its own right, especially given how impressively Lichen Tufts predates and anticipates later female nature writers. As Daniel Patterson observes, “One would probably have to look ahead a hundred years to the work of Rachel Carson to find the next female naturalist and writer who attempted so comprehensively to represent the whole of nature as a system” (“Elizabeth C. Wright” 400). Lawrence Buell recognized Lichen Tufts as an important early response to Thoreau: “The first book, to my knowledge, published by an outsider to the transcendentalist circle that celebrates nature as a refuge from hypercivilization with explicit invocation of Thoreau as model and precursor was written by a woman” (45). Wright’s book is composed of four essays and forty poems, opening with Wright’s description of her experience on a coed camping trip in the region that is now Allegany State Park in western New York. In that opening essay, titled “Into the Woods,” Wright models the “nature cure” she will theorize more fully in the second essay—an unfettered, rugged immersion into the wilderness, combined with a studious appreciation for local natural history. Wright celebrates the liberating prospects of such an encounter with nature: “It was utterly delightful to let ourselves loose, and live freely; to have no rules for coming in or going out, for rising up or sitting down; to be emancipated from the bondage of the ceremonial law, and do what pleased us best, was paradisiacal enough” (17). Taken together, the four essays of Lichen Tufts articulate a theory of nature, the first of its kind by an American woman author, in which the natural world offers a crucial antidote to society’s corruption, flaws, and constraints, especially the patriarchal codes restricting women’s lives. The liberatory themes of Lichen Tufts are bold and subversive, aptly reflecting the life and politics of its author. Buell perceives the book as a “sustained exercise in pushing limits whereby nature authorizes mid-Victorian woman to level the social distinctions that gall her” (47). Patterson situates Wright—along with Susan Fenimore Cooper, author of Rural Hours (1850), and Henry David Thoreau, author...

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