Review
Title: JOSEPHINE SPENCER: Her Collected Works Volume One: 1887-1899
Editors: Ardis E. Parshall and Michael Austin
Publisher: BCC Press
Genre: Documentary History/Collected Literature
Year Published: 2020
Number of Pages: 504
Binding: Paper
ISBN: 978-1948218375
Price: 15.95
Reviewed by Conor Hilton for the Association of Mormon Letters
In the “Introduction” to Josephine Spencer: Her Collected Works Volume One: 1887-1899 Parshall and Austin boldly state that “Josephine Spencer (1861-1928) may be the most significant figure in Mormon letters that most people today have never heard of” (2). This collection makes a strong case for this bold assertion! Josephine Spencer and A Craving for Beauty: The Collected Writings of Maurine Whipple (which I reviewed for AML here) are the first two installments in the BCC Press’ Classics in Mormon Literature series.
As I flipped through the stories and poems contained in this collection, I continually found myself shocked and surprised at the nature of them. I had no idea that Mormon literature contained such fantastically political and radical fiction as the stories Spencer wrote. I probably should not have been surprised by this, but I was, and some of the important work that this volume does is challenge many of the ideas and norms surrounding fairly early Mormon literature.
Josephine Spencer contains four sections, 1) an introduction, 2) the stories contained in Spencer’s collection The Senator from Utah, 3) other stories published or written from 1891-1899, and 4) poetry. Spencer’s writing is wide-ranging and often surprising, with the poems feeling quite different from her generally more political stories.
I am excited to be able to return to and revisit many of the stories and poems here, as I read a few deeply and more quickly ploughed through others. I found the first two The Senator from Utah stories quite interesting for their proto-Grisham-esque legal/political thriller vibes and some pulp-adjacent elements (which are particularly fun to see given the ways that authors outside of Mormonism were using Mormons as villains in their own pulpy works).
Spencer’s stories illuminate elements of the Mormon past that, in my experience, are not brought into the core narratives that we tell about our history or our literature. For that alone, this collection of work would be valuable. And yet, these stories do more than just that, also showing a variety of ways to reimagine the intersections of religion and politics, as well as what political and religious possibilities are embedded in the Mormon (literary) tradition. I hope to continue to be surprised by Spencer’s work as I dig back into the vast amount of literary material in this collection and that you may find yourself pleasantly surprised by something here as well.