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EDITH MAY (DOWE) MINITER (1867-1934) was an American author, newspaper woman and amateur journalist. The critic William Lyon Phelps wrote of her in As I Like It in 1924 (Phelps 19):

Many novels have been written in our country to illustrate the process of Americanization, but the best one I have seen is Our Natupski Neighbors, by Edith Miniter, published in 1916. This is the real thing, and came from direct observation. Mrs. Miniter is a New England journalist, and for a time was the only woman city editor of a daily paper in New England. The history of this Polish family ought to be read by every American. When I say that I regard it as superior even to My Antonia, you will see how much I admire it.

Early Life: Amateur Journalist and Newspaper Woman

Edith was the daughter of William Hilton Dowe (1840-1875) and Jane Elizabeth (“Jennie”) (Tupper) Dowe (1840-1919). She was born on May 19, 1867, in the home of her maternal grandparents Edwin Lombard Tupper (1815-1901) and Catharine Orpha (Moore) Tupper (1812-1896) at 307 Mountain Road in Wilbraham, Massachusetts. Her father, a builder, removed from his native Charlton, Massachusetts to Worcester, Massachusetts by 1869 to conduct his business. Edith was mostly privately educated by her parents. Her mother was a noted poetess who published mostly in The Century. Edith joined the amateur journalism hobby in 1883 and attended her first convention in Gardner, Massachusetts in July of that year. Among the amateur journals she published over the years were The Worcester Amateur (1884-86), The Webster Amateur (1887), Quartette (1890-1902), Aftermath (1894-1921), Ours (1902), The Varied Year (1902-10), True Blue (1907-10), and The Muffin Man (1921). Most of her amateur activity was in the New England Amateur Press Association (1883-1904) and the National Amateur Press Association (NAPA). She was among the first women to attend a NAPA convention in Boston in 1885. She served as official editor of the short-lived Young Women’s Amateur Press Association in 1885-86. She served as official editor of NAPA in 1895-96 and was the first woman president of NAPA in 1909-10. She was one of the founders of the Interstate Amateur Press Association in 1903 and served as official editor in 1905-06 and as president in 1906-07. She was an active participant in Boston’s Hub Club from 1893 until 1924 and attended her final NAPA convention in Boston in 1924. Edith married John T. Miniter (1864?-1900), a fellow amateur journalist, in 1887, and they conducted The Worcester County News, a weekly, from Webster, Massachusetts in 1887-89 and from Worcester in 1889-91. Edith and her husband separated because of her husband’s alcoholism by 1891. They had no children. Edith’s closest maternal relatives are cousins descending from her mother’s brother Charles Tupper (1838-1916). Edith did newspaper work in New Hampshire in 1891-93. Probably her most notable newspaper article was “On $40 a Year” (VG 354-361) which concerned how a woman might dress on that sum annually. It appeared in The Boston Sunday Globe on Jan. 4, 1891 and generated comments for weeks afterward. In 1894, she began working at The Boston Home Journal, a society weekly, and continued in this position until 1906, when she became a freelance author.

Author

Edith was most noted in the amateur journalism hobby as an author of short stories. Her first-published story, “Bert Gifford’s Masterpiece,” appeared in The Cincinnati Amateur in 1884. Edith typically wrote of New England life, in the vein of authors such as Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman. Following her marriage, she wrote a series of “real life” stories, of which the most notorious was undoubtedly “Cindy’s Child” (VG 304-324) in 1891. A more nuanced story of tragedy was “A Tragedy of the Hills” (DH 192-199), which appeared in the same year. Her story-telling ability perhaps reached its peak with “The Emancipation of Elvira” (DH 257-279), published in 1906. Elvira Garvice endured abuse and neglect from her husband Henry for years, but her patience finally snapped when he insisted that their deceased baby be buried on a weekend so that Elvira could work on the succeeding weekday. She was only saved from being a murderess when her husband detected the foul taste of poison in his coffee. After Elvira admitted her deed, he finally relented and agreed to allow their baby to be buried on Monday. Some critics regard the later “Dead Houses” (ca. 1920) (DH 343-368) as Edith’s best short fiction. Like many of her stories, it is set in “West Holly,” her fictional equivalent of Wilbraham’s agricultural eastern suburb Glendale. W. Paul Cook regarded it as Mrs. Miniter’s finest work, and he was outraged when R. H. Barlow published it for the first time in his mimeographed amateur magazine Leaves in 1937. Cook had a printer’s contempt for mimeography. Edith’s only known professionally published short story during her lifetime was “Worthless Neighbors” (CB 280-284) in Collier’s for Aug. 1, 1914. World War I was about to intrude upon the world, and the change in tastes and reading habits it engendered probably limited the commercial success of Edith’s work. She and her mother and their friend John Leary Peltret (1874-1938) spent many summers camping on Edith’s property “Meadowbeck” in her ancestral Wilbraham, but by about 1911 the Polish immigrant family of Kasmierz and Marya (Mals) Nietupski had become their neighbors. Edith’s keen observation of her immigrant neighbors and the reaction of the old-timers to their presence engendered her novel Our Natupski Neighbors (Holt, 1916). Despite a plethora of generally favorable reviews and mentions, including one by William Lyon Phelps (Phelps 19, quoted supra], Edith’s novel did not do well enough to justify publication of a proposed sequel, of which only a few drafts and outlines survive. During the 1920s, Edith worked on a novel The Village Green (VG 77-208) featuring a local amateur journalists’ club much like the Hub Club. She also continued to work on her novel Lydia ‘n’ Gerald (VG 1-76) about the struggles of an impoverished mother with an unfaithful husband to bring up their son. Like Our Natupski Neighbors, Lydia ‘n’ Gerald was episodic in structure, and Edith evidently made efforts to market some of the chapters as short stories; none have been detected in published form. She serialized her novel Love Without Wings (VG 209-247) in The Varied Year in 1902-10, but it was left incomplete and the full text is not known to survive. Love Without Wings was a heavily fictionalized account of her marriage to John T. Miniter. All three of these novel fragments were eventually published in The Village Green in 2013. Edith began writing about the cultural and domestic antiquities of New England as early as the first decade of the twentieth century. Two of these articles landed in The New York Times in 1925-26 and one in The Boston Evening Transcript in 1927. Many more doubtlessly remain undetected in the newspaper press. She also did not abandon the writing of blank verse, and her poetry appeared in Poetry in 1923 and The New York Times in 1924. It is not known whether she employed an agent at any time during her career as a freelance writer. With more expert guidance, she might have attained greater success for her fiction, her poetry and her nonfiction articles. She was an authority on the New England of yesteryear, and lectured in the antiques-filled home of her remote relation Evanore Olds Beebe (1858-1935) on the occasion of the Wilbraham sesquicentennial on June 20, 1913 (Peck 354-358).

Retirement and Death

Edith and her mother entertained both the members of the Hub Club and visiting amateur journalists in their homes at 77 [East] Berkeley Street (ca. 1897-1906) and 17 Akron Street (1906-1918) in Boston. In 1918, Edith sold both her Wilbraham property “Meadowbeck” and 17 Akron Street. Afterward, she and her mother made their home with fellow amateur journalists Charles and Laura Sawyer in Alston. Jennie Dowe died in March 1919, and Edith subsequently lived with Charles A. A. and Augusta Parker in Malden until she finally joined Evanore Olds Beebe (1858-1935) in her home “Maplehurst” in Wilbraham in 1925. Miss Beebe and Mrs. Miniter entertained H. P. Lovecraft in their home in July 1928 (DH 51-64, Bradofsky 47-55). Their guest marveled over the evening swarms of fireflies in the meadows (DH 60) and soaked up the local legendry during his eight day-week visit. The legendry provided part of the source material for his story “The Dunwich Horror.” Mrs. Miniter felt well enough to attend the local Memorial Day celebration in Glendale on May 31, 1934. She died suddenly at “Maplehurst” late on the afternoon of June 4, 1934. Her funeral was held in the Glendale Church on June 6, 1934, and she was buried the same day in an unmarked grave in the Tupper family lot in Woodland Dell Cemetery in Wilbraham.

Posthumous Reputation

Charles W. “Tryout” Smith published a slim memorial booklet (Sawyer) in honor of Mrs. Miniter in 1934. Hyman Bradofsky followed with a “Miniter Memorial” section of his journal The Californian in 1938 (Bradofsky). The latter contained a fairly comprehensive memoir by Mrs. Miniter’s friend H. P. Lovecraft. Kenneth Faig followed with two collections Going Home (1995) and The Coast of Bohemia (2000) from Moshassuck Press. The latter contained Faig’s article on Mrs. Miniter’s life and literary works (Faig). Faig and Sean Donnelly published Dead Houses (2008) and The Village Green (2013) from Hippocampus Press. PODcaster Mark Griffin devoted one of his half-hour segments to Mrs. Miniter on Sept. 28, 2022. Mrs. Miniter wrote a burlesque of H. P. Lovecraft and his supernatural fiction in her “Falco Ossifracus” (DH 117-119) and included Lovecraft as a character (Mr. Theobald, the “man with the long chin”) in The Village Green (VG 77-208). She herself had no abiding interest in the supernatural, considering everyday life grim enough in its own right without adding imagined horrors. She did write at least three stories with supernatural themes, “Who Brought the Children Home?” (VG 248-252), “The Other Elizabeth” (VG 264-272) and “Wonted Fires” (DH 242-249) of which the last Is the most powerful. Her own best stories are grounded in the grimness of everyday life in contemporary New England. She always strove to be a faithful recorder of everyday life and of human actions and feelings. If she has any lasting place in literature, it is probably in the school of New England domestic fiction. Lovecraft saw fit to compare her work with that of Jane Austen, and if that is an exaggerated estimate, nevertheless it is in the faithful portrayal of the human heart set against everyday surroundings that any claim for the work of Mrs. Miniter must reside. While the novel Our Natupski Neighbors will undoubtedly remain her best-known work, an omnibus edition of all her short fiction and poetry would contribute notably to the growth of her reputation. Our Natupski Neighbors might be combined with the surviving novel fragments to form another omnibus edition. Most of her nonfiction was devoted to the amateur journalism hobby although she also wrote on cultural and domestic antiquities. An omnibus edition of her nonfiction would undoubtedly have to be selectively edited to appeal to general readers.

References

Primary

The Coast of Bohemia and Other Writings, Moshassuck Press, 2000. Kenneth Faig, ed. [CB}. Dead Houses and Other Woks, Hippocampus Press, 2008. Kenneth Faig and Sean Donnelly, eds. [DH]. Going Home and Other Amateur Writings, Moshassuck Press, 1995. Kenneth Faig, ed. [GH]. Our Natupski Neighbors, Henry Holt, 1916. [NN]. Available from reprint publishers and on Google Books: https://www.google.com/books/edition/Our_Natupski_Neighbors/6ouS53StBEcC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=edith+miniter&printsec=frontcover. The Village Green and Other Pieces, Hippocampus Press, 2013. Kenneth Faig and Sean Donnelly, eds. [VG].

Secondary

Bradofsky, Hyman, ed., “Edith Dowe Miniter Memorial,” in The Californian, Spring 1938, pp. 47-78. Portrait of Mrs. Miniter facing p. 47. [Bradofsky]. “Edith Miniter”, The Writer (24:6), June 1912, pp. 6-7. Faig, Kenneth, “Edith Miniter: Her Life and Work,” CB 848-903, DH 3-50 (abridged). [Faig]. Goudsward, David, “The Other Miniter: In Search of John T. Miniter,” The Fossil (117:2, whole no. 386), January 2021, 3-4. See: https://thefossils.org/fossil/fos386.pdf. [Goudsward]. Lovecraft, H. P. Collected Fiction: 1926-1930, Hippocampus Press, 2015. S. T. Joshi, ed. [CF2]. Merrick, Charles L., ed., History of Wilbraham USA: Bicentennial Edition 1763-1963, [town of Wilbraham], 1963. Philip B. Foster was assistant editor. The table of “Houses and Streets in Peck’s 1913 History” (164-168) is useful in converting addresses in Peck to 1963 addresses. [Merrick]. Peck, Chauncey E., The History of Wilbraham, Massachusetts, [published by the author], 1913. [Peck]. Phelps, William Lyon, As I Like It, Scribner, 1924. [Phelps]. Sawyer, Laurie A., and Charles W. Smith, In Memory: Edith May Miniter: A Coworker in Amateur Journalism: 1884-1934, C. W. Smith, [1934]. [Sawyer]. White, Michael, ed., In Memoriam: Jennie E. T. Dowe, W. Paul Cook, 1921. [White].

Notes