Illuminating Sara Haardt-Mencken

I had no idea what to expect coming into this research project. Sara Haardt and her husband were utter unknowns to me. The most exposure I had gotten of them was from a small poster hung up inside the classroom next to the Goucher Special Collections and Archives advertising a past exhibition on their love letters. When my professor suggested looking up Haardt and her husband to get an idea of who they were, I was less than enthused, but I did so anyway.

For many, Henry L. Mencken is the attention grabber, and with all of his writing exploits, I wasn’t surprised that he kept the attention. What of his wife, though? The woman who stands next to him in so many pictures, dark eyes glinting, the smallest of smiles playing at her lips? Who was she? 

That question: Who was she? I couldn’t get it out of my mind. As I found out more about her from a shallow internet search, the more I was hooked. I felt as if I was, in some ways, looking at a mirror. Sara Haardt was a native of Alabama who wanted more than what the South, at the time, could give her. She came to Goucher College so that she could grow personally and professionally away from the South, with it’s somewhat stifling social structures. She was a writer, a good student, and confident in her abilities. Perhaps the thing that was most striking, though, is how the South haunted her, a feeling that I could deeply relate to.

Haardt’s struggle with her opinion of the South is prevalent in her writings. She perfectly captures the hot, humid days, the magnolias, the honeysuckle sweet air. In this picturesque view, however, she addresses the darker underbelly dealing with racism, the romanticism of the Confederacy, and the dichotomy between rich and poor. She was at once loving and condescending towards her home, and in the end, her perception of the South seemed to take on a sort of ambivalence. The Old South was too romantic, the New South too vulgar – what was she to do when both versions of the South weren’t the right South for her?

She died long before she was finished parsing out her feelings and opinions about the South. Despite her novel, The Making of a Lady, her countless short stories and essays, and her half-finished novel manuscript, she still had a long way to go before her thoughts would be wholly untangled, if they ever could be. 

The fact remains, though, that she was a force to be reckoned with. She was courageous, stubborn, and charming, her sharp wit and keen intellect often hidden behind a mask of aloofness. Without her, there’s no doubt in my mind that Mencken would have been lesser off – after all, she was the one who helped him on several occasions with gathering research for various writings, and it was she that often kept his spirits up when they were flagging. Despite all of this, though, many newspapers merely referred to her as ‘Mencken’s wife,’ if they referred to her at all.

Sara Haardt-Mencken was a brilliant writer, and without a doubt helped shape the early Southern Literary Renaissance along with her husband. Moreover, though, she was a complex, private woman whose contributions to the literary world were at once charming and haunting.