Mary Austin Holley was one of the most eloquent apostles of American
expansion in the 1830s. As the author of the first English-language book
about Texas and a land-holder in the colony run by her cousin, Stephen
Austin, Holley unabashedly promoted a vision of American expansion westward
and mapped out the practical benefits of American and European emigration
to "the west."
But Holley's frontier visions and her eloquence as a travel writer had deeper roots in her life during the Early Republic. When her husband, Horace Holley, became president of Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky in 1818, Mary Austin Holley established herself as a prominent social and literary figure in the "Athens of the West." Her time in Lexington shaped in Holley a sense of the tension between "culture" and the thrill of the "natural" west that she would carry through the remainder of her public and private career as a traveler, land speculator, and writer. After Horace Holley died, Mary Austin Holley (a native New Englander) moved freely between Lexington, New Orleans, and Texas for twenty years-recording her impressions and ideas both in print and in an extraordinary series of letters to her daughter.
This paper examines some of Mary Austin Holley's most interesting travel writings to uncover how her Romantic imagination, shaped by her devotion to de Staël and particularly evident in her descriptions of the natural world, informed her advocacy of western settlement. For Holley, the "frontier" was simultaneously wild and thrilling, the perfect expression of the sublime, and in need of civilization. Her eloquent expression of this basic tension in early republican and ante-bellum public attitudes takes on particular importance in light of her popularization of Texas settlement and her active support of Texas independence. Holley emerges as a major transitional figure in the history of "intercultural frontiers" between the 1810s and 1840s.
The paper relies on evidence from Holley's extensive correspondence, her published poems and articles, her Texas Diary, and her two books: Texas: Observations Historical, Geographical, and Descriptive (1833) and Texas (1836).