Žemaitė in America

ENJulija Beniuševičiūtė, known as Žemaitė, (1845-1921), is one of the classics of the early Lithuanian prose fiction, despite her lack of a formal education. She was taught to read at home and was privately tutored for three years during her adolescence in Lithuania. She began writing at the late age of 49 in dialect form in the days before the Lithuanian language was standardized. Her topics were the socio-economic problems of common people, marital conflicts due to wives being regarded as their husband's legal property, defending of women's rights and opposition of patriarchal, repressive tendencies in society. The works she wrote in Lithuania have been extensively analyzed. However, her literary legacy in America from 1916 to 1921 has remained unexplored, perhaps due to the distance between America and Lithuania and the difficulty of accessing the American-Lithuanian periodicals in which she published. [...] While in America, Žemaitė redefined herself. She began to write in more varied genres, becoming an historical documenter, a subjective hyper-realistic journalist, an emigre-writer in America, a politically active woman, and a radical feminist. She was not afraid to express her opinions publicly against the distortions of truth as she understood them. She voiced her dissatisfaction with both the right and the left wing. Her stories and essays written in America reflect different subjects, themes, and characters from the works she wrote in Lithuania at the beginning of her writing career. She abandoned descriptions of nature and started delving into the psychological labyrinths of the mind, becoming the first Lithuanian female prose writer to portray her protagonists as more complex personalities who left the rural setting in favor of the faster paced city.In her lifetime, she witnessed a turbulent historical period-the 1863 rebellion against Russia, the Tsar's prohibition in 1864 against Lithuanian literature printed in the Roman alphabet, the lifting of this ban in 1904, World War I as it affected Lithuania, and the proclamation of Lithuania's independence in 1918. These events left an indelible impression upon her and strongly influenced the nature of her short stories, essays, letters and published lectures. Her life and works were shaped and influenced by the society in which she lived. She remains a monument to this era which she uniquely and astutely depicted in her works, a literary legacy of her ideals in search of the truth.