This section contains 3,308 words (approx. 12 pages at 300 words per page) |
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Dictionary of Literary Biography on Sarah Barnwell Elliott
Novelist, short-story writer, playwright, essayist, and suffragist Sarah Bull Barnwell Elliott enjoyed a fair measure of personal and professional success in her day. She is important as a precursor of the Southern literary renaissance and as an early feminist. Elliott's varied body of writing reveals a woman of keenness and wit, a risk-taker and perceptive observer who held to strong opinions and was not afraid to state them. Her biography reveals a wealthy and prestigious family background, an enlightened education, and an unmarried freedom that opened doors to her that were closed to the majority of nineteenth-century American women, especially Southern women. Sharing traits with the turn-of-the-century "New Woman" that she delineated in her fiction, Elliott wrote to her brother in 1871, "When a woman gives up all idea of matrimony, she either turns saint or woman's rights." Though she threatened the former, by 1895 she was supporting herself by...
This section contains 3,308 words (approx. 12 pages at 300 words per page) |
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