An Autoethnography of the Artist as a Young Woman? Susanna Paine's Roses and Thorns (1854)

Roses and Thorns, or Recollections of an Artist (1854), the autobiography of American painter Susanna Paine (1792-1862) has been overlooked despite its historical value, due to its alleged affinity to fiction. In this article I argue that Paine’s narrative should be read instead as an early attempt to write in the autoethnographical mode; I demonstrate my argument by focusing on one such “fictional” element, her use of composite vignettes. I find that exploring Paine’s narrative style and the dynamics between the personal and the social offers a new path to trace the impact of early nineteenth-century socio-economic changes had on American women artists; second, it highlights the difficulties in rendering that life into a narrative, and last it calls attention to the intertwining of “truth,” memory and imagination in autobiographical writing.