Book Description

The profiles and life stories of 160 patriotic women who were committed to the American Revolution and to the settling of the American frontier........ Elizabeth Fries Lummis Ellet (October 18, 1818 - June 3, 1877) was an American writer, historian and poet. She was the first writer to record the lives of women who contributed to the American Revolutionary War. Born Elizabeth Fries Lummis, in New York, she published her first book, Poems, Translated and Original, in 1835. She married the chemist William Henry Ellet and the couple moved to South Carolina. She had published several books and contributed to multiple journals. In 1845 she moved back to New York and took her place in the literary scene there. She was involved with a public scandal involving Edgar Allan Poe and Frances Sargent Osgood and, later, another involving Rufus Wilmot Griswold. Ellet's most important work, The Women of the American Revolution, was published in 1845. The three volume book profiled the lives of patriotic women in the early history of the United States. She continued writing until her death in 1877. Career: In 1835, Elizabeth Lummis published her first book, entitled Poems, Translated and Original, which included her tragedy, Teresa Contarini, based on the history of Venice, that was successfully performed in New York and other cities. Around this time she married William Henry Ellet (1806-1859), a chemist from New York City.He graduated from Columbia College in New York and earned a gold medal for a dissertation on the compounds of cyanogen. The couple moved to Columbia, South Carolina, when he was made professor of chemistry, mineralogy and geology at South Carolina College in 1836. He also discovered a new and inexpensive method of preparing guncotton, for which the state of South Carolina presented him a service of silver plate. During this time Ellet published several books. In 1839 she wrote The Characters of Schiller, a critical essay on the writer Friedrich Schiller including her translation of many of his poems.[9] She wrote Scenes in the Life of Joanna of Sicily, a history of the lifestyles of female nobility, and Rambles about the Country, a lively description of the scenery she had observed in her travels through the United States, in 1840. She continued writing poems, translations and essays on European literature which she contributed to the American Monthly, the North American Review, the Southern Literary Messenger, the Southern Quarterly Review and other periodicals. Ellet wrote abundantly in a wide variety of genres. In 1845, Ellet left her husband in the south, moving back to New York City where she resumed her place as a member of literary society along with such writers as Margaret Fuller, Anne Lynch Botta, Edgar Allan Poe, Rufus Wilmot Griswold, Anna Cora Mowatt and Frances Sargent Osgood............