“I am filled with horror at the idea of you not having any reading.”

Lavinia Goodell to Maria Frost, March 10, 1867

The Goodell family was very well read, and their letters frequently mentioned their current literary selections. When Lavinia’s sister Maria Frost and her family moved from New York state to Janesville, Wisconsin in the late 1860s, Maria found herself missing many of the amenities of life in the east, especially the lack of a public library. Lavinia was horrified that Janesville had no library and offered her sister some suggestions:

“If I have any model in fiction, it is Mrs. Stowe.”

Lavinia Goodell, April 21, 1860

Lavinia Goodell’s acquaintance with Congregationalist preacher Henry Ward Beecher has already been chronicled, but she was also an avid reader of the prose produced by two of Henry’s sisters, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Catharine Beecher.

Harriet Beecher was born in 1811. After teaching for several years, in 1832 she accompanied her father, Congregational minister Lyman Beecher,  to Cincinnati, Ohio when he became the president of Lane Seminary. In Cincinnati, Harriet met reformers and abolitionists and in 1833 published her first book, Primary Geography. In 1836 she married Calvin Stowe, a professor at Lane Seminary. Calvin encouraged Harriet’s writing. Harriet wrote many articles and thirty books.

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“We would have every path laid open to woman as freely as to man.”

Margaret Fuller, 1845

Although Margaret Fuller may not widely known today, in the mid-nineteenth century she was a well known teacher, editor, and essayist whose best known book, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, published in 1845, examined the place of women within society. Lavinia Goodell admired Margaret Fuller’s works and spent countless hours reading them in order to prepare a paper that she delivered at a December 1877 meeting of Janesville, Wisconsin’s literary society, the Mutual Improvement Club.

Margaret Fuller was born in Massachusetts in 1810. A precocious child, her father, a lawyer, oversaw her education, providing his daughter with tutors in Latin, philosophy, history, science,  literature, and German. After her father’s death in 1835, the family found itself quite poor, and Margaret went to Boston as a teacher. She taught in Bronson Alcott’s school and offered classes for young ladies. She became a friend of Ralph Waldo Emerson and other Transcendentalists. Few would accuse her of being overly modest. It was while dining at Emerson’s home that Margaret uttered what is probably her best remembered remark: “I now know all the people worth knowing in America, and I find no intellect comparable with my own.”