Memories of a Southern Woman of Letters

by Grace Elizabeth King

"In a word, we are our past. We do not cling to it, it clings to us."

—Grace King, %b%iMemories of a Southern Woman of Letters%r



"Among southern writers of her time she was one of the few who achieved excellence in both history and fiction; in her work the one strongly reinforces the other."

—Robert Bush, editor of %b%iGrace King of New Orleans%r



Originally published in the year of her death, this book brings us the portrait of a woman who lived through war and its aftermath. Unusual for the time, she assumed the role of an independent woman and sole breadwinner. For almost fifty years, she reigned over a literary salon that included local writers M. E. M. Davis, Dorothy Dix, and Pearl Rivers. She was a close friend of national figures Thomas Nelson Page, Charles Dudley White, and Mark Twain, with whom she kept up a lively correspondence.

Pursuing an intellectual career, King was a leader of cultural development in New Orleans. Few, if any, matched her keenness of perception of the life and culture of the Crescent City during her lifetime. She was a voice of progress and wrote about race, class, and women. Known for her strong opinions about the post-Civil War South and its traditions, she was the champion of the people, vehemently defending the heritage, idiosyncrasies, and customs well established in New Orleans at the time. Some may have quipped that she was a living oxymoron in her day, but her widely documented life and work speak of Southern life.

398 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1932

About the author

Grace Elizabeth King was an American author of Louisiana stories, history, and biography, and a leader in historical and literary activities.

Reviews

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Grace King starts her memoir with an account of her Civil War escape from New Orleans and goes on to describe a remarkable life both as a writer, but also as a traveller who met and knew many of the great literary figures of the age in the US and Europe, especially her long friendship with Livy and Samuel Clemens. I've taken the liberty to include the start to a novella I am working on that incorporates her story...


Olana, the historic home of the great landscape painter, Frederick Church, my great great… well to protect the innocent I probably shouldn’t be more specific. All through the winter I’d found jobs here and there gradually earning the funds I needed to travel. But I was still to settle on a destination. A writer called Grace King started that all off for me. King was a Louisiana author and historian, born in 1852 who wrote about privilege and oppression in the American South. She became a good friend of the Hartford literary set -- Charles Dudley Warner and Samuel Clemens (or Mark Twain as most of us know him) and through them of Frederick Church, my aforementioned ancestor.
Grace came from an aristocratic background but her family had become impoverished in the Civil War. Still in her twenties, she’d written her first novel in a state of pique at the popularity of George Washington Cable’s sympathetic portrayal of the oppression of blacks in Louisiana. I came across her work first when I read her autobiography, Memories of Southern Woman of Letters, while researching an English assignment. I thought she was kind of cool, a woman who had challenged the male establishment, in her own way a rebel, an early feminist who knew Stowe and Hooker. The thing that had really caught my eye, however, was her account of a visit to Hartford and the trip that she subsequently made with the Clemens to “Olarna”.