Eliza Ann Dupuy was the prolific and popular author of some two dozen novels published for the mass market in the mid nineteenth century. Often compared with fellow Southerner E. D. E. N. Southworth, although she never quite attained the same degree of success, Dupuy wrote stories that are generally more sensational and lurid than Southworth's. Readers have found that Dupuy's style has little in common with the quiet domestic novels that are most often associated with nineteenth-century women writers. As an April 1855 Harper's review of Dupuy's The Country Neighborhood (1855) noted, her scenes are generally "set forth in high-wrought language," often inclining toward "an excessive intensity of expression," and her plots are sure to include "situations of exciting interest, portraying the lurid exhibitions of unbridled passion."

Born in Petersburg, Virginia, in 1814, Eliza Ann Dupuy was one of the younger of Jesse Dupuy and Mary Ann Thompson Sturdevant Dupuy's...