We mourn the passing of our beloved Lavina Fielding Anderson. Among her many achievements was to be one of the central founders of the Association for Mormon Letters. She was 79.
We were honored to present Lavina with the Smith-Pettit Foundation Award for Outstanding Contribution to Mormon Letters on March 23, 2018, at the MSH/AML conference held at Brigham Young University. Here is the award citation, which focuses on her literary accomplishments and her service to the AML.
Lavina Fielding Anderson has used her extraordinary intellect and talent as a writer and editor to create and promote Mormon literature and letters throughout her long, distinguished career.
She has worked tirelessly for The Association for Mormon Letters since its creation. She attended the 1976 meeting at which the association was conceived and became a member of the five-person steering committee that created the Articles of Incorporation and organized the first conference. She has served as a board member, president (1982-83), and conference organizer, and worked for the association in many other formal and informal capacities. From 1994 to 2002, she was the editor of each volume of the annual proceedings of the Association, which included most of the papers delivered at both the annual conference and MLA sessions. The history of the Association for Mormon Letters is in some ways a history of the development of Mormon literature, and Lavina’s meticulous and thorough editing has preserved many of the AML scholarly papers for the research and attention of future generations.
Lavina’s work as an editor extended into many other periodicals—the Ensign, the Journal of Mormon History, Mormon Woman’s Forum Quarterly, and Case Reports of the Mormon Alliance. She served as the associate editor of Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought from 1982 to 1987, and in other editorial capacities for eleven additional years. She is also a longtime member of the editorial advisory board of Signature Books, and has helped many authors shape their work before publication. This extraordinary record demonstrates that Lavina has shaped and improved much of Mormon intellectual and literary work of the past forty years.
She has also edited three books of particular literary and cultural importance. With Maureen Ursenbach Beecher, Lavina compiled and edited Sisters in Spirit; Mormon Women in Historical and Cultural Perspective, a collection of essays by important Mormon women scholars. These essays deal with doctrines and practices of the LDS Church that particularly affect Mormon women. Published in 1987 by University of Illinois Press, the volume brought attention to many feminist concerns that continue to be significant to this day.
Tending the Garden: Essays on Mormon Literature, which Lavina edited with Eugene England, is the first collection of essays in Mormon literary criticism, including England’s review of the development of Mormon literature from the early days of the Church to the 1990s. This volume has been of great significance in bringing together major essays that examine the literary merit of early LDS texts, including accounts of Joseph Smith’s first vision and The Autobiography of Parley P. Pratt. Other essays critique literary texts in several genres important to LDS writing, including the essay, folklore, and the novel. This volume has contributed significantly to the development of Mormon literature by spurring Mormon writers and literary scholars to greater effort: Lavina’s Preface to the volume records all the areas of Mormon literature—particularly poetry and drama—that needed additional examination.
Lavina’s third extraordinary volume, published in 2011 by Signature, is Lucy’s Book: A Critical Edition of Lucy Mack Smith’s Family Memoir. As Lavina notes in the Introduction, this memoir is “Mormonism’s first family history and Mormonism’s first female autobiography.” In this critical edition, Lavina sets out to retrieve Lucy’s own voice, given that the text has been cut, appropriated, and revised by so many male editors with so many differing agendas. Lavina presents in parallel columns Lucy’s own manuscript and the first published version of the text, and uses footnotes to present the significant changes in other published versions. Thinking of additional possible scholarship, she suggests a number of critical lenses through which to examine the actual text Lucy Mack Smith authored in 1844-45.
For forty years Lavina Fielding Anderson has been a central figure in the creation and analysis of Mormon literature and history. Like the best editors, she has helped to shape truly remarkable and consciousness-changing texts without recognition or fanfare. It is our great pleasure to present her with the Smith-Pettit Award.
It was a wonderful event honoring Lavina. The panel “Lavina Fielding Anderson and Mormon Literature” was held in the Joseph F. Smith Building at BYU, with a panel including John Bennion, Dennis Clark, Susan Elizabeth Howe, Bruce Jorgensen, and Ross Peterson. Lavina herself spoke on her work on Luce Mack Smith. Tragically, Lavina’s husband Paul Anderson passed away that night, soon after they had returned home.
Her literary accomplishments were just a part of her remarkable life. For more details, please see the obituary at the Salt Lake Tribune, written by Peggy Fletcher Stack.
Lavina was an extraordinary scholar with a wonderful sense of humor. Her deep devotion to her Church was legendary. I counted her as a friend and admired her tremendously.
Thank you AML for this tribute to her life.