Writing between New England and Charleston
Gilman was born in Boston in 1794. After losing both parents while young, she moved between relatives and schools. In her own recollections she describes an irregular education, an early attempt at a novel in letters and the importance of music and religious reading. Her poem Jephthah’s Rash Vow brought her attention as a teenager; Jairus’s Daughter later appeared in the North American Review. In 1819 she married Samuel Gilman and moved to Charleston, where he became minister of the Unitarian church.
In 1832 she began the Rose-Bud, one of the early American periodicals for children. As the Southern Rose-Bud and then the Southern Rose, it expanded to include adult readers before ending in 1839. It provided an outlet for stories, poems and the fiction that became her Recollections of a Housekeeper and Recollections of a Southern Matron. Her interest in domestic life reached beyond advice about managing a household: she hoped to make readers in different parts of the country recognise shared affections and concerns.
That wish for sympathy coexisted with her defence of slavery. Gilman and her husband enslaved people, and her writing presented an idealised view of Southern domestic order. During the Civil War she supported the Confederacy and participated in relief work in Greenville. Her surviving correspondence, described by the South Carolina Historical Society, records wartime displacement, emancipation and subsequent poverty. She continued publishing collections and books after her most active magazine years. Widowed in 1858, she died in Washington, D.C., on 15 September 1888.
