Pocahontas

Mrs. Lydia Howard (Huntley) Sigourney was born in 1781, the only child to gardener Ezekiel Huntley and his wife Zeniah in Norwich, Connecticut, where she subsequently began her education, later completed in Hartford in the same state. From 1811 through 1813 Lydia ran a small school with a friend, after which she established her own school in Hartford in 1814. She wrote moral books for her students and had a good albeit brief teaching career until 1816, when it was cut short by her marriage to the widower Charles Sigourney. Although Charles was in business as a hardware merchant in Hartford, he had a background of classical education. The couple experienced monetary problems, and Lydia sought to mitigate them by writing. By 1830 she was a success and had contributed anonymously to more than 20 periodicals. Her earlier and later works were of a varied nature and ranged from “How to be Happy” and “Letters to Young Ladies” in 1833 to a history of Marcus Aurelius, Emperor of Rome (1836). She virtually deluged numerous popular magazines and periodicals for the next twenty years. Edgar Allan Poe criticized her sharply for over-imitation for the styles of others, but as an editor continued to solicit her work. Lydia Sigourney went abroad in 1840 and had numerous works published, including Pocahontas and Other Poems in 1841. Her return to America in 1842 saw the publication of memoirs, nicely titled Pleasant Memories of Pleasant Lands, in which she reproduced passages from the work of the mentally disintegrating poet laureate’s wife, Mrs. Robert Southey. She was harshly criticized for this but never attempted a serious correction or explanation. Lydia Sigourney spent the rest of her years living a charitable, modest, quiet life in Hartford, continuing to produce articles until her death in 1865. When Thanhouser dramatized it for the screen in 1910, the story of Pocahontas was well known, but few people had ever read Mrs. Sigourney’s long and somewhat tedious poem about her.