Charmian Kittredge London, Blazing the Trail, Leading Jack London on the Adventure of their Lives and Helping Write His Books
A weekly email that brings back the voices of those who have been forgotten or misremembered.
I am so excited to announce that my biography on Charmian Kittredge London has just been released in audiobook format. You can download your copy here. For this week’s post, we’ll be celebrating Charmian Kittredge London (born November 27, 1871, died on January 14, 1955).
Charmian (pronounced charm-me-in) Kittredge London married the best-selling American author Jack London on a cold Chicago night, November 19, 1905, and immediately stepped into the critical public eye. For the rest of Jack’s and Charmian’s lives, until Jack’s untimely death at the age of forty, reporters followed their every move. Charmian and Jack would travel the world, exploring and writing together, but although the world remembers Jack London and his exploits, few people know or understand the woman who was by his side, often driving him toward these adventures. During her lifetime Charmian was a celebrity and an author in her own right. What happened to change the way we remember her?
I first discovered Jack and Charmian when I was in the sixth grade on a field trip at the Jack London State Historic Park in Glen Ellen, California. It was the first time I had encountered a “real” writer, one whose life I could see and touch through artifacts, and in some ways that encounter gave me license to become a writer myself. It was, of course, Jack London I fell in love with: his mind like a jar full of bees, the perfect lines of his muscled body. But what I didn’t realize at the time was that on that day I also encountered another writer, one who few people know much about, who would haunt me until I could tell her full story, re-created from the artifacts of her life. In later years, after studying literature and becoming a professor and a writer, I returned to the park as a volunteer, running a book discussion group with another Jack London scholar. One of the books we chose to read and discuss was The Book of Jack London, the biography Charmian wrote about her husband shortly after his death. By this time I had read all the biographies written about Jack London, but none in my opinion re-created the man I saw emerge from the second volume of Charmian’s book.
Sitting under the oaks at the park I realized that Charmian was quite different from who I thought she was. She wasn’t the stereotype I’d come to know her as, the airhead, bossy, needy wife. She was an ambitious and adventurous woman who did not fit into the gender norms that regulated the time when she lived. Aside from a few exceptions, including the important work of Clarice Stasz in her books American Dreamers (1988) and Jack London’s Women (2001), Earle Labor’s biography, Jack London: An American Life (2013), and the 2017 Women’s Studies volume (edited by Amy Tucker), dedicated to scholarly articles on Charmian, up to this point the story of Jack London’s life (and subsequently Charmian’s) has always been researched and told with Jack London at its center. My realization at the park set me on a quest to find out who Charmian really was.
What happened when I dug into the archives—read her extensive diaries, letters, and travel logs and saw her photo albums, maps, and artifacts, when I looked at city and county records, census data, and old newspapers—was that a different story began to emerge, one quite different from the one I had previously known. How different a story can be when we look at it from the perspective of a woman. What happens when we switch the perspective through which we perceive history? When we let go of a set historical narrative and begin to dig up the forgotten letters and diaries and photographs and artifacts?
A different story emerges, one much closer to the truth.
Women’s stories emerge stories where women challenge the stereotypes we’ve set for them. Stories where women persevere, are independent, and hold power.
When you walk into Charmian’s former home, the House of Happy Walls in Glen Ellen, California (made into a museum in 1963, as she wished it to become after her death), you immediately encounter Charmian’s strong presence. She was clearly no lightweight who held back her husband’s writing career. She was a modern woman. She didn’t abide by the conventions that governed feminine behavior in the early 1900s. She was an intelligent woman who lived a creative life. She was “warm,” as Joy Shaffer (the granddaughter of Jack’s stepsister Eliza Shepard) attests, and she valued and fostered relationships with her friends and relatives during her life. She worked hard every day during the productive years of her life. However, she was also a fiercely private woman. She valued having a room of her own, a place to be creative. Creativity was at the core of her self-identity. She was a woman who found joy in every day, in the fog that rolled down from Sonoma Mountain at the ranch, in the sunsets that illuminated the sea. She loved adventure. From her early days, she rode horses and preferred to spend months at sea. She was a serious writer who wrote four books and thrived as a travel writer.
Charmian was the kind of woman you would love to have known. She was brave. She was free-spirited and she didn’t give up. My aim in my biography, Charmian Kittredge London: Trailblazer, Author, Adventurer is to take you on the adventure of her life—to show you how this modern woman did not succumb to the social pressures that formed the idea of femininity for her day. Instead, Charmian lived an independent life and fought to become a writer.
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So happy to see this!