Jane Colman Turell

Jane Colman Turell (born on 25. February 1708 in Boston as Jane Colman , died on 26. March 1735 in Medford, Massachusetts ) was a New England poet.

Life

She was the daughter of Benjamin Colman , longtime pastor of Brattle Street Church in Boston, and his first wife, Jane Clark Colman. Throughout her life she had an exceptionally close relationship with her father. From childhood she read extensively in his extensive library, also because she was often unable to leave the house because of a chronically weak constitution. She began early on with her own literary experiments. By the age of four she is said to have read fluently and recited the Psalter by heart, and by the age of nine she is said to have written her first hymn . She also entertained Governor Joseph Dudley as a child with vivid retelling of Biblical stories . She was encouraged in her literary ambitions by her father, with whom she exchanged letters for years in order to polish her linguistic expression.

In 1726 she married Ebenezer Turell, who had studied theology with her father and held the parish of Medford in inland Massachusetts. Although the marriage is described as happy, Jane Colman Turell's mood after the wedding was overshadowed by religious doubts. The envisaged entry into the congregationalist community of her husband and the related question about her own state of grace and the question addressed to herself as to whether she was worthy to partake of the Lord's Supper drove her into contemplation that bordered on neuroticism. She confessed to her father that she had “black and numerous” sins on herself, including and above all reading “useless books” - a statement that describes the Puritans' difficult relationship with all forms of literary fiction. The severe earthquake that shook New England in 1727 and was interpreted in many places as a sign of divine anger also contributed to this deep uncertainty. She was finally accepted into the ward in October of that year. In addition to the dark disposition, it was again health problems that troubled her. His marriage to Ebenezer Turell had four children, two of whom were stillborn and one of whom died in infancy. Until the end of her life, she was repeatedly weakened by phases of morbid introspection and religious doubts. She died weakened with her family at the age of only 27. Only one son, Samuel, survived but died soon after his mother's death at the age of six.

plant

Her father published the funeral address he held at his daughter's grave in 1735 under the title Lachrymae Paternae ("Fatherly Tears") in book form. This was followed by a biographical essay by her husband Ebenezer, which also contained numerous excerpts from her letters, diaries and poems. They are of some interest to literary scholars, since this publication makes Turell the only poet of Puritan New England besides Anne Bradstreet who has survived a larger corpus of lyrical works.

Her poems are mostly only assessed as epigonal and thus also include not very original exercises in the conventional lyrical forms of the time (hymns, elegies, lyrical paraphrases). Only a few poems manage without didactic-moral impetus and clichéd metaphors, only their Lines on Childbirth about their miscarriages convey an impression of their emotional pain. In recent years, however, feminist literary scholarship has drawn attention to the fact that in one of her poems Turell invokes exclusively female poets as role models - Sappho , Katherine Philips, and especially "Philomela," Elizabeth Singer Rowe , who was rumored to be her In her youth in England she was said to have had a more than permissible relationship with Benjamin Colman - and so she at least longed for a female line of tradition in the male-dominated culture and literature of New England. Indeed, Turell's poetic ambitions may have spurred later eighteenth-century American poets like Sarah Moorhead , Martha Brewster, and Mercy Warren .

literature

• Benjamin Colman: Reliquiae Turellae et Lachrymae Paternae ...: Two Sermons Preach'd at Medford, April 6, 1735 .... To Which Are Added, Some Large Memoirs of Her Life and Death, by Her Consort, the Reverend Ebenezer Turell .... Boston, 1735.
  • Facsimile in: The Poems of Jane Turell and Martha Brewster. Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints, Delmar, NY 1978.
• Clayton Harding Chapman: Benjamin Coleman's Daughters . In: New England Quarterly 26: 1, 1953.
• Pattie Cowell: Puritan Women Poets in America . In: Peter White (ed.): Puritan Poets and Poetics: Seventeenth-Century American Poetry in Theory and Practice , Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park 1985.