Relationship with Herman Melville
In August 1850 Herman Melville vacationed in the Berkshires, intending to stay only a short time.[7] He was then thirty-one, and owed much of his literary fame to the success of his first book, Typee (1846). After getting to know Sarah Morewood and Nathaniel Hawthorne during August, he abruptly decided to move his family to Pittsfield, Massachusetts, uprooting his young wife (Elizabeth Shaw Melville) from their home in Manhattan. In his haste to move, Melville "acted impulsively, and extravagantly, even recklessly," observed biographer Hershel Parker.[8] In September 1850 Mrs. Morewood and her husband had bought the 250 acre farm in Pittsfield owned by Melville's uncle (the site of Melville's childhood fondness for the area), and in the same month Melville borrowed more money than he would ever be able to repay to buy the farm adjoining hers--Arrowhead (Herman Melville House).[9]
Reviewing Michael Shelden's Melville in Love in The Kenyon Review, Mark Dunbar noted, "When Melville arrived in the rural, sequestered community in the summer of 1850, he immediately gained Sarah's affections. Combining her innate female warmth with a slightly affected appreciation for his novels (Omoo and Typee were at this point already critical successes, if not financial ones), she was irresistible to a man with a history of insecurities and anxieties."[10]
As evidence of a romantic relationship between Melville and Morewood, Shelden's book cites passages in Melville's surviving letters to her (available at the Berkshire Athenaeum), including his descriptions of Sarah as "Thou Lady of All Delight"; "the ever-excellent & beautiful Lady of Paradise"; "Mrs. Morewood the goddess"; and "most considerate of all the delicate roses that diffuse their blessed perfume among men is Mrs. Morewood."[11] Also cited are examples of their intimacy at parties, the gifts of books and bottles of Eau de Cologne that Morewood gave Melville, and their frequent outings in the countryside, including a summer night spent together in 1851 at the summit of Mount Greylock, the highest point in Massachusetts, where they were accompanied by a few friends, but not by their respective spouses."[11] After this overnight adventure Sarah wrote that, as a woman openly violating the social norms of the times, she left the mountain feeling as defiant as "Lot's wife, casting many a lingering look behind."[12] In the following weeks she and Melville grew closer as they explored the Berkshires together, strengthening the bond established by their shared experience on Greylock. In October 1851 she wrote, "Greylock is not forgotten here but often recalled in an amusing way—by Mr. Herman or myself—In some of our long walks we have taken a spyglass with us so as to bring nearer to us the Tower [where they had stayed overnight at the summit] and its associations."[13]
The traditional reason given for Melville's sudden move to Pittsfield is that he wanted to be near his new friend Nathaniel Hawthorne, who lived six miles away in Lenox, Massachusetts.[14] In Shelden's book, the claim is made that there was a more compelling reason—Melville's attraction to Sarah Morewood. Melville in Love points out that, whereas Hawthorne left the Berkshires in 1851, Melville continued to call the area home for thirteen years, not leaving until near the time of Sarah Morewood's death in 1863.[15]
According to Shelden, the romance between Melville and Morewood was not entirely a secret in Pittsfield, especially in the case of their mutual friend, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., whose novel Elsie Venner (1861) was associated in Berkshire legend with Sarah Morewood. In Pittsfield, Sarah Morewood said, Elsie Venner "created a storm in many quarters."[17]
The idea at the heart of Melville in Love is that Moby-Dick, which was largely written in the months following the novelist's move to the Berkshires, was inspired in part by Melville's passion for Sarah, an obsession that drove him to manic extremes in a manner similar to Ahab's pursuit of the whale. "How strong is Shelden's case? asked Michael Lindgren in The Washington Post. "Plausible, but not definitive."[18]
Some critics see Sarah Morewood her as a figure unjustly overlooked by literary history. In the New York Journal of Books, Laura Schultz concluded, "Throughout his trials and tribulations, Melville was both inspired and sustained by the magnetic effervescence of Sarah Morewood."[19] In the Library Journal Stefanie Hollmichel wrote, "Shelden carefully and convincingly presents his evidence regarding Morewood's influence and how she inspired Melville to a greatness recognized by few of his peers."[20] In Booklist Donna Seaman observed, "Shelden presents the evidence gleaned through his assiduous research and performs a delving and convincing analysis of the sexual wellspring of Moby-Dick's violent energy and tragic majesty. Riveting in its incandescent sense of discovery, intimacy, and velocity, Shelden's bound-to-be-controversial anatomy of a clandestine love transforms our perception of Melville and introduces one of the great unsung figures in literary history."[21]
