This week on the AML email list Kent Larsen was musing on the connection between Mormon home literature and romantic literature. These were my thoughts.

The home literature period for Mormon literature (1880-1930) was all about creating literature by and for Latter-day Saints so that (as with other home industries of the late 19th century) Mormons would not have to depend upon the world’s products–especially given the taint of so much of the low-grade fiction of that day. Orson Whitney’s 1888 speech to the Young Men organization, titled “Home Literature,” is the eloquent call to arms for this movement and contains the prophecy of Mormons having Miltons and Shakespeares of our own. He took himself literally, imitating Milton’s Paradise Lost in a minor epic poem about the plan of salvation, “Elias: An Epic of the Ages” (an excerpt is online here). However, epic literature didn’t really take off as a genre. The more successful home literature circulated in the church periodicals (such as the Contributor, named precisely to encourage young men and women to develop their literary talents by submitting manuscripts), and through a popular series published from 1875-1915 by the Juvenile Instructor Office, the “Faith Promoting Series.” As the titles in that series demonstrate, there was an effort for home literature to replace the romance fiction of contemporary America with missionary narratives, biographical excerpts, and other  nonfiction.

However, and somewhat ironically, some of the greatest proponents of the home literature movement wrote fiction that imitated contemporary romances. For example, Susa Young Gates’ 1909 novel, John Stevens’ Courtship: A Story of the Echo Canyon War, or Josephine Spencer’s highly romantic 1891 short story from the Contributor, “The Descendant of an Ancestor.” These contain sentimental love stories, and like other fiction of the day depended upon a certain melodrama and exoticism to draw interest. It is ironic that Spencer would use eastern polygamy and the mystique of an oriental harem in her Contributor story, but not if we see early home literature as continuous with, rather than distinct from, “gentile” romances of the day.

That continuity is still there today when one examines LDS romance fiction. Though I would love to be proven wrong, it appears to me (as one admittedly not well read in the genre), that Mormon romance fiction succeeds not to the degree that it departs from contemporary mainstream romance (by avoiding explicit sexual content), but to the extent that it is continuous with the style, themes, and intended effects of mainstream romance fiction. We aren’t alone as a people in wanting to have an untainted or less tainted version of a popular genre of fiction. The Evangelical Christian book market has entire publishers or imprints devoted to romance fiction (such as Bethany House).

There is another branch of home literature that descends to us today in the form of nonfiction and biography. Consider some of Neal Maxwell’s slim and eloquent theological volumes (such as All These Things Shall Give Thee Experience, 1979), or the many biographies put out by LDS publishers (more on the order of Francis Gibbons‘ brief and popularizing biographies and less in the comprehensive and scholarly style of Richard Bushman’s Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling).

For more on home literature see the period description by Eugene England in his “Mormon Literature: Progress and Prospects” and Richard Cracroft, “Seeking ‘the Good, the Pure, the Elevating’: A Short History of Mormon Fiction” (Parts I and II), Ensign 11 (June 1981): 57–62; (July 1981): 56–61 (online). Most recently, see Michael Austin’s “Mormon Home Literature” Sunstone 21.4 (December 1998): 12-13.