MARY HUNTER AUSTIN

Blackburn College
Carlinville, Illinois

By Karen Dillon and Naomi Crummey

As professors in the English department at Blackburn College, we have always been aware of the legacy of the college’s most famed writer, Mary Hunter Austin, who was born in Carlinville and graduated from Blackburn in 1888. Immediately after graduation she pioneered west with her family, and in the landscapes of California and the Southwest she became celebrated for her understanding of nature and unconventional feminism. In Austin’s canonical work of American nature writing from 1903, The Land of Little Rain, she recounts the story of a Paiute woman, Seyavi, who survived a massacre by hiding in caves with her young son. After describing the landscape in which Seyavi struggles to survive, Austin remarks, “That was the time Seyavi learned the sufficiency of mother wit, and how much more easily one can do without a man than might at first be supposed.” As Seyavi earned the respect of her people by raising her son without a husband, Austin, too, cast off convention to follow her own path. Though Blackburn played only a small and short-lived role in her life, we feel a kinship with Austin and the intellectual and artistic foundation the college laid for her.

Blackburn does not appeal to everyone. It is a tiny, student-managed work college in a small Midwestern town abutted on two sides by farmland; there is plenty of hard work but little glamour. Blackburn can sometimes feel isolating, but as a small, student-centered school, it also, in Austin’s own words from her 1932 autobiography Earth Horizon, provides space for professors and students alike “to walk about in it, making fruitful contacts with [each other], as [we] couldn’t have done in the larger universities.” Austin briefly left Blackburn for a nearby teaching college but despised the “rasping insistence on a regime that violated all the natural motions of her own mind.” Austin’s fiction also emphasizes the desire for natural motions over convention. In the short story “The Walking Woman,” the titular character “had walked off all sense of society-made values, and, knowing the best when the best came to her, was able to take it…. it was the naked thing the Walking Woman grasped, not dressed and tricked out, for instance, by prejudices in favor of certain occupations.”

Austin returned to Blackburn precisely because it welcomes and nurtures the individual mind; it gave her freedom and space to learn as she was inclined, leaving her, as she wrote in Earth Horizon, “so far as her professional proclivities go, without so much as a thumb-print of predilection; and that I count entirely to the good. I am quite sure she could never have escaped from one of the larger, better regimented institutions with so free an intelligence and so unhampered a use of herself.” The campus newspaper The Blackburnian, for which Austin was a writer and editor, may provide evidence of the intellectual freedom Austin was known for at Blackburn. In the March 1887 edition of the “Peculiar Characteristics” section, a 19th century version of a shout-out column to students’ and professors’ unique talents, quirks, and physical characteristics, Mary Hunter is recognized simply for her “ideas.”

As we pass the bust of Austin that presides over the halls of the science building, we continue to draw inspiration from her free-spirited feminism and artistry. In the college archives, there is a copy of the February 1888 edition of The Blackburnian, which notes, “Miss Mary Hunter has not been attending her classes for the past week. Too busy writing, we suppose.” We like to picture Austin, confident and even a bit arrogant (she switched her studies from English to science because for the former she believed she needed only herself and books, but the latter she felt required a proper teacher), walking through the green spaces of campus, writing and imagining alternative ways of inhabiting the world. Like the seemingly arid spaces Austin’s best-known works so meticulously open for readers, the Blackburn campus offers a path for those who seek a space in which to walk about unhampered and forge meaningful connections.

Karen Dillon has been a Professor of English at Blackburn College since 2011, where she teaches U.S. literature and first year writing. She has published two books since being at Blackburn: The Wire in the College Classroom: Pedagogical Approaches in the Humanities (co-edited with Naomi Crummey in 2015) and The Spectacle of Twins in American Literature and Popular Culture (2018). She is originally from Indianapolis, Indiana.

Naomi Crummey has been a Professor of English at Blackburn College since 2005, where she teaches writing and literature. Her personal essays have appeared in Prairie Fire, Kudzu House, and Grain, and she co-edited The Wire in the College Classroom: Pedagogical Approaches in the Humanities, in which she co-authored a chapter entitled “’They’re not learning for our world; they’re learning for theirs’: Changing the First Year Writing Experience” with Karen Dillon. A Canadian citizen, she lives in St. Louis, Missouri.