Elizabeth Fries Ellet.
Elizabeth Fries Ellet
Later in her life, Elizabeth Ellet (10.18.1812-8 – 6.3.1877) would produce a three volume history of the daughters of the American Revolution. In this hefty set, Ellet painstakingly accentuated the bravery, integrity, virtue, and patriotism of the women of the Revolution while producing a work that was lauded in its time as a scrupulously researched tribute to her country’s founding matrons. While not a daughter of the Revolution herself, Ellet revealed her unique relationship to the demographic in her dedication of the work:
“To my Mother, Sarah Maxwell Lummis, the Daughter of a Revolutionary Officer, This Work is Respectfully and Affectionately Inscribed.” (Women of the American Revolution, Vol. I, pg. iii)
Ellet, then, as she carefully established, was a daughter of a daughter of the revolution. More specifically, Ellet’s mother, Sarah Maxwell Lummis, was the daughter of Captain John Maxwell and the niece of Brigadier General William Maxwell, both of whom fought in the Revolution and inspired in Sarah—and, subsequently, Elizabeth—a spirit of indomitable perseverance and plucky self-sufficiency. Her father’s line was less martial but equally distinguished, and through his skill as a physician Dr. William Nixon Lummis was enabled to install the small Lummis family comfortably upon the shores of Lake Ontario. Here, Elizabeth took her first breaths in Sodus Point, upstate New York.
Somewhat surprisingly, given that the scene of our study is the nineteenth century, rather than an era of antiquity, there is some confusion surrounding the date of Elizabeth’s birth. While her birthdate traditionally has been held to fall in 1818, the recent discovery of her New York City death certificate casts suspicion on this date, implying that she was born a full six years earlier, in 1812. This discrepancy is significant for, while it can hardly alter our perception of her later life, the later date would earn her the title of child genius—and child bride.
In the interests of preserving historical accuracy, I have attempted to refer to dates on which events occurred rather than noting the year in Elizabeth’s life in which it fell; when an age seemed significant, I have included both possible ages for reference by the reader.
education + early publications.
from Poems (1835), pg. 41
The only daughter of well-to-do parents, Elizabeth received a premier education at Aurora Female Seminary, where she completed a thorough course of study in history, literature, and modern languages. All accounts indicate that she excelled in her studies, and her familiarity with Italian, German, French, and Spanish, far from contenting itself in simple comprehension, extended itself to actual skill in translation. Ellet combined these interests with an early affinity for poetry to produce her first two published volumes: an English translation of the Italian Euphemio of Messina by Silvio Pellico in 1834 (herself aged either 16 or 22) and a collection of her own Poems in 1835 (age 17/ 23). This latter volume included a five act tragedy entitled Teresa Conarini, which Ellet based on an incident she had discovered buried deep in Venice’s history. Although one of Ellet’s earliest experiments with her pen, Teresa Conarini was successfully adapted to the stage shortly after its publication and was performed successfully in multiple cities, including New York City.
During this time, Ellet also initiated her long collaboration with America’s magazines, contributing original poems and translations as well as works of criticism to the pages of American Ladies’ Magazine. Between 1833 and 1835, Ellet extended her list of publications to include works in the Ontario Repository, American Monthly, Lady’s Book, and the extremely popular Knickerbocker, edited by Lewis Gaylord Clark. In reviewing these accomplishments, we must be profoundly curious as to whether she was achieving these feats in her sixteenth or twenty-second year; however, we must also agree that, regardless of the date assigned her birth, those accomplishments prove that the young Ellet was clearly more than ordinarily skilled in her mastery of language and history.
In 1835, Ellet expanded her accomplishments yet again, this time venturing into the realm much celebrated by poetic lore—romantic attachment. The object of her affection was one Dr. William Henry Ellet (1806-1859), a twenty-nine year old chemist who then held a Professorship of Elementary Chemistry at Columbia College in Manhattan, New York. Elizabeth was either sixteen or twenty-two when she formed this attachment, which was reciprocated without reservation. Although the precise date of their marriage is unknown, the couple was certainly married by the next year, when they relocated to the balmy beach city of Charleston, South Carolina; here, Dr. Ellet assumed the role of Professor of Chemistry, Geology, and Minerology at South Carolina College in 1836, and Elizabeth was initiated into social southern culture.
Over the next nine years, Elizabeth continued to develop creative outlets for her writing interests, experimenting in a variety of genres. Building upon her interest in history, literature, and translation, Elizabeth assumed the role of a “popularizer”, translating stories from German and Italian to provide her American audience with access to and an appreciation of the lore of European cultures. She even mingled her translations with literary criticism, as in her 1839 volume The Characters of Schiller, in which she critically analyzed over twenty characters from the writings of German poet, playwright, and philosopher, Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller. Her ability to tackle the subject alone demonstrates her erudition; her analyses further evidenced her scholarly acuity as she mingled her own notions of literary merit, characterization, and aesthetics with those of Schiller.
During these years (1836-1845), Ellet deepened her interest in history and culture, combining and pursuing their implications into niches that would characterize her later writings and which we would describe as belonging to the essentially modern fields of social history and women’s studies. Already fascinated by cultural studies, Ellet’s interest rapidly honed itself upon the role of women in both history and the formation of culture. She found much to absorb both her mind and her pen in this arena, and in 1840 she produced a historical study titled Joanna of Sicily, in which she explored snatches or “scenes” from the history of Joanna, fourteenth century Queen of Naples. At over two hundred fifty pages, this work not only represented a considerable effort of research itself, but also foreshadowed the work to which Ellet would dedicate herself in the successive decade.
husband & history.
nyc + revolution.
“Three quarters of a century have necessarily effaced all recollection of many imposing domestic scenes of the Revolution, and cast over many a veil of obscurity through which it is hard to distinguish their features… Inasmuch as political history says but little—and that vaguely and incidentally—of the Women who bore their part in the Revolution, the materials for a work treating of them and their actions and sufferings, must be derived in great part from private sources… With the view of eliciting information for this purpose, application was made severally to the surviving relatives of women remarkable for position or influence, or whose zeal, personal sacrifices, or heroic acts, had contributed to promote the establishment of American Independence.”
In 1845, after living nine years at her husband’s side hundreds of miles from the nation’s publishing capitals in the north, Ellet relocated to New York City. Already a popular author who was read across the country, Ellet determined to initiate herself more formally into literary society. She achieved this initiation by infiltrating Anne Lynch’s newly formed salon where formed acquaintanceships that would impact both her life’s work and subsequent legacy. One such acquaintance was Rufus Wilmot Griswold, whose later libelous biography of Edgar Allan Poe would incite an uproar amongst their shared scene, and with whom Ellet herself would develop a fierce feud. However, at this time, the acquaintanceship proved generative for Ellet, as Griswold provided Ellet access to the papers of the New York Historical Society, of which he was a member. This archive contained materials dating to the founding of the republic, an era that had become the focus of Ellet’s first true research project—the Women of the American Revolution.
As we have already noted, Ellet was, herself a daughter of a daughter of the Revolution. Perhaps it was this proximity to history that prompted Ellet to perceive the glaring gap in its record of the American Revolution; perhaps it was her interest in women’s history that occasioned the discovery. Whatever her epiphany’s point of origin, Ellet realized that, while history books were replete with the public exploits of America’s “great men,” no space had been afforded to the perspectives of the women who had, just as assuredly as their male counterparts, determined the outcome of the war. Moreover, not only had these stories escaped historians of the era, but the opportunity to accurately record those perspectives was now swiftly deteriorating with each passing day, as those days, in passing, separated the researcher from the original figures of that drama.
Inflamed by a sense of the injustice of allowing the stories of America’s Revolutionary women to pass forever from the reach of historical record, Ellet assumed the mantle of this ignored population’s archivist. For the better part of a decade, Ellet gathered material for her new history, traveling to multiple states to interview the children and grandchildren of the Revolution’s Daughters. She further entered into extensive written correspondence with informants who lay beyond her ability to visit personally and consulted with respected historians, all with the unwavering purpose of assembling as many specific anecdotes and details regarding America’s matrilineal force as possible.
Having assembled these previously undocumented records, Ellet then culled multiple archives—including that made available to her by Griswold—intently searching for independent sources to corroborate the anecdotes provided to her by her primary sources. From this sprawling web of journals, letters, public records, and oral accounts, Ellet spun a rich multilayered account of no fewer than 120 Revolutionary Era women, an account that stretched over 700 pages in two volumes, which she published in 1848. By the time she released a third volume containing additional tales from her research in 1850, the first two volumes had already run to multiple editions and received commendation from historical and literary authorities alike.
These three volumes, collectively known as The Women of the Revolution Vol. I-III (1848-1850), form the backbone of Ellet’s literary reputation and are notable for several reasons. While Ellet included profiles of “celebrities” from the era, such as Martha Washington, Abigail Adams, and Catharine Schuyler, she was intentional in incorporating sketches of women from all corners of the colonies, as well as from across a broad range of classes. By grounding her history in the perspectives of this broad range of women, Ellet achieved a social depth in her study that was rarely achieved in histories of the War at that time.
Even more interestingly for students of women’s equality and archival research, Ellet proved an unintentional trailblazer in both realms. In producing The Women of the Revolution, Ellet accomplished two “firsts” in the field, acting as the first woman to write a history of the Revolution and the first historian to consider the role of women in the Revolution. In a sense, Ellet was, herself, acting out the implications of her grandparents’ revolution by staging her own. More astonishingly still, Ellet was the first historian of the Revolution to draw upon oral histories and private documents in her research methods.
Conscious of the (at that time) eccentricity of her methods, Ellet was careful to incorporate the “masculine” research-language of her fellow historians as she wrote of the more “feminine”—i.e., personalized—experiences of the women who strove to maintain their war-ravaged domiciles while their male relatives were at war. This attentiveness is particularly reflected in the preface to her first volume, in which she masterfully outlined her methods and sources and reflected soberly on the use to which she had put them:
“In offering this work to the public, it is due to the reader no less than the writer, to say something of the extreme difficulty which has been found in obtaining materials sufficiently reliable for a record designed to be strictly authentic. Three quarters of a century have necessarily effaced all recollection of many imposing domestic scenes of the Revolution, and cast over many a veil of obscurity through which it is hard to distinguish their features. Whatever has not been preserved by contemporaneous written testimony, or derived at an early period from immediate actors in the scenes, is liable to the suspicion of being distorted or discolored by the imperfect knowledge, the prejudices, or the fancy of its narrators. It is necessary always to distrust, and very often to reject traditionary information. Much of this character has been received from various sources, but I have refrained from using it in all cases where it was not supported by responsible personal testimony, or where it was found to conflict in any of its details with established historical facts.” (Preface, WAR, Vol. I., pg. ix)
Here we see Ellet grappling with many of the same questions that continue to haunt researchers—and particularly archival researchers—in the twenty-first century. Indeed, she anticipates the twenty-first century’s concern with positionality with a precision approaching the prophetic as she frankly discusses her research methods and addresses questions of bias and representation throughout the work’s premise. In retelling the history of her culture, Ellet joined the future of her field, establishing practices that would be referenced for the remainder of her century.
oral historian + archival assembler
Image of Godey’s Magazine and Lady’s Book, Vol. 38, no. 3 (March 1849), page 224.
“Ellet is especially important for validating private letters, diaries, and personal remembrances in reconstructing the lives and contributions of women and for confirming generally the roles women have played in building society. ”
poe & the starry sisterhood.
Excerpt from a letter by Ellet to Osgood dated July 8, 1846. A digitized copy of the letter may be viewed here.
“This moment – on my arrival in the city – received your letter dated June 19th and deeply has it wrung my heart in convincing me how poorly you have been misrepresented and traduced. I cannot now in the least blame you for the impressions you received against me; and I only regret deeply that my explanation has not been made, in full [illegible word]. It was written months ago, but I feared you would not receive it in a candid [illegible word] and therefore destroyed it.
The letter shown me by Mrs. Poe must have been a forgery, and any man capable of offering to show notes he never possessed, would not, I think, hesitate at such a crime. Had you seen the fearful paragraphs which Mrs. Poe first repeated and afterwards pointed out – which haunted me night and day like a terrifying spectre – you would not wonder I regarded you as I did. But her husband will not dare to work further mischief with the latter;— nor have either of us any thing to apprehend from the verbal calumnies of a wretch so steeped in infamy as he is now.
What is past, I truly hope and trust – can be productive of no lasting injury to you. Nothing definite can be known – and vague rumors will soon be forgotten. Be assured I shall preserve utter silence in future on the subject – and so will my friends; only saying – should others mention your name in connection with it – that you have been traduced wrongfully.”
“On one point let me caution you, dear Helen. No sooner will Mrs E. hear of my proposals to yourself, than she will set in operation every conceivable chicanery to frustrate me: —and, if you are not prepared for her arts, she will infallibly succeed — for her whole study, throughout life, has been the gratification of her malignity by such means as any other human would rather die rather than adopt.”
The portrait we have sketched thus far yields the visage of a vivacious yet meticulous scholar whose commitment to cultivating accurate narratives wedded her to meticulous research and documentary exactitude in all her proceedings. This portrait clashes violently with the perception of Ellet held by the Poe scholars among us, who possess a rather different and not altogether inaccurate memory of her in the role of persecutor of both Edgar Allan Poe and, ironically, her erstwhile benefactor Rufus Griswold. Indeed, these three figures, taken together with that of Frances Sargent Osgood, formed a chaotic quartet that featured in several scandals from the mid-1840s to early 1850s, scandals that evince a complicating, alternative aspect to Elizabeth Ellet’s history.
As we have already noted, upon her arrival in New York City Ellet became a member of Anne Lynch’s salon, where she was enabled to interact regularly with Griswold, Osgood, and Poe. By this juncture, Poe and Griswold’s rivalry, which seems to have sourced itself equally from the men’s conflicting views on American poetry and mutual admiration for Frances Osgood, had begun to broil. For her part, Osgood—then separated geographically and emotionally from her husband—was enamored of Poe, and over the summer of 1845 she submitted several poems hinting at her affection for him to his magazine. Poe published these poems and responded to them with similarly flirtatious overtures, but the exact nature of their relationship was never satisfactorily established. During this time, Ellet, also separated from her husband by distance if nothing else, joined the ranks of Poe’s admirers, sending a few overtures of her own in an attempt to capture his attention.
However, Ellet’s tune altered dramatically in early 1846, when she claimed to have been shown the indiscreet contents of Osgood’s correspondence with Poe by none other than the Poes themselves while visiting at their house. In the wake of this “incident”, Ellet leapt immediately into action, urging Osgood to demand the return of her letters from Poe and emphasizing the certain ruin that their exposure to the public would incur. Thus urged by Ellet, Osgood sent their mutual hostess, Anne Lynch, and Margaret Fuller to demand the return of her letters from Poe, who, annoyed, retorted that “Mrs. Ellet had better come look after her own letters” (qtd. Quinn 498). The situation quickly deteriorated into disaster and although, according to his version, Poe returned Ellet’s letters to her doorstep later that evening, she nevertheless sent her brother to Poe’s home to retrieve them. The incident turned violent and ended in a fistfight.
It was on the basis of this incident, incited primarily by Ellet, that Poe was silently ejected from his dearly prized position in Lynch’s salon that spring, and it is unsurprising that he nursed a deep animosity for Ellet thereafter. Poe was not the only man to be enraged by her conduct that spring; in the wake of the scandal, Ellet spoke freely enough regarding Poe’s supposed “affair” with Frances that Samuel Osgood, Frances’ husband, threatened to sue Ellet if she did not apologize and cease her rumor-spreading. Ellet acquiesced responding that the entire affair must have been a concoction on the Poes’ part designed to humiliate Frances and herself. However, Virginia Poe, Poe’s wife, continued to receive anonymous letters regarding the “affair” nearly to the day of her death, and she ascribed the cause of much of her torture leading up to that death as having devolved upon her from the pen and tongue of none other than Elizabeth Ellet. As for Frances Osgood, her reputation had been severely damaged as a result of these exaggerated reports of the situation and she repaired to Philadelphia in an attempt to recover her health and dignity.
While this incident cooled Ellet’s relationship with Lynch’s coterie, it in no way infringed upon her relationship with Griswold, and it was at this juncture that he provided her with access to his organization’s archive to conduct research for The Women of the American Revolution. Their relationship cracked, however, after Ellet released her book, as Griswold felt that she did not give him or the New York Historical Society a sufficient amount of credit for their role in assisting her. At about this time, Griswold also claimed that he had caught Ellet reading his private letters in his study at the society while she was completing her research there.
Griswold and Ellet’s true rivalry did not break forth, however, until two years later, when Ellet interjected herself into the divorce proceedings between Griswold and his second wife (his first wife having died ten years earlier). While these proceedings were taking place, Ellet discovered that, though not yet divorced, Griswold had begun courting another woman. Although Griswold’s wife had agreed to the divorce, Ellet threw herself into convincing her to retract that agreement and urged her instead to appeal the proceedings. Ellet further contacted the woman whom Griswold had begun to pursue, revealing his duplicity and instructing them to cease all contact with him. So persuasive were her arguments that both women complied with her advice, and Ellet herself testified at great length against his character in court during his divorce proceedings. In the wake of this stand-off, Griswold—much like Virginia Poe before him—came to regard Ellet as one of the chief causes of his troubles in the declining years that led to his death in 1857.
griswold.
In 1856, Griswold released a lengthy statement regarding his divorce, mainly attempting to shake the (justly) negative perspective many held towards his behavior. After detailing many complaints against the involvement of both Ellet and the editor Ann S. Stephens in his divorce case, Griswold concluded his remarks with a statement that fairly represents his (and other nineteenth-century male editor’s) attitude towards women:
“I hope in what I have said of these women I have not gone beyond the reserve both of fact and of language which restrains gentlemen in speaking of the other sex. Indeed, averse from controversy with any one, I cannot bring myself to enter the lists at all where women are presented as my antagonists. Honor paralyzes and ought to paralyze the arm of a man who attacks those whom it should ever be the highest pride and pleasure only to defend. And when woman, leaving the domestic sphere, comes before the public, the challenger of public judgment; when, laying down the distaff, she takes up the pen,--not for the illustration of those sentiments which are her proper world, but, as a newspaper reporter or correspondent, to enter into the exciting and rude discussions of the forum and the club-room; to judge for others of public and private characters; or, stepping in advance of attorneys general, grand-jurors, and others, its sworn and responsible administrators, pushes herself through crowds into the heated air of city courts, and without writs or subpoenas calling her there, claims attention as the vindicator of public justice, I shall for myself suffer chiefly in silence whatever she may do or say concerning me. The lists of such combats can be arranged by no court of honor or chivalry with whose laws I am acquainted.” (Griswold 24-25)
last of life.
However else these scandals may have affected Ellet, they did not dampen her creative outpouring, and she continued writing short articles for journals and publishing gargantuan volumes through the 1870s, long after Poe, Osgood, and Griswold died. In 1859 her husband, who had joined her in New York in 1850, joined her foes in death at the age of fifty-three. The couple had produced no children and had lived in a curiously symmetrical pattern—nine years together, five years apart, nine years together again. Ellet’s productive output slowed in the wake of his death, partly due to her own advancing age, but also due to her assumption of the literary editorship of the New York Evening Express, a daily newspaper that ran between 1839-1881.
While Daughters of the American Revolution was perhaps the most academically rigorous of her productions—and the one that has enjoyed the most longevity—her acumen for research did not cease with its completion. Ellet’s interest in historical research naturally dovetailed into social research, and she continued her examination of the role of women in society with several subsequent works. The most noticeable of these was undoubtedly Women Artists in All Ages and Countries (1859), which surveyed the history of women in all mediums of art from the foundation of civilization to the “present” (1850s), the first project ever to do so. Also of note was her lengthy effort The Queens of American Society (1867), which analyzed the role of women in the social climate of mid-nineteenth century America.
Ellet further indulged her interest in women’s domestic sphere by penning a massive six hundred page manual she entitled The Practical Housekeeper; a Cyclopedia of Domestic Economy (1857), which she filled with instruction, recipes, managerial tips, quotes from philosophers, and other miscellania. Towards the end of her career she returned once more to historical records to pen a social history of each of the eighteen presidents’ time in office entitled. This work, entitled Court Circles of the Republic (1869), represents the full maturation of Ellet’s unique skill in blending hard “facts” with narrative histories and is still recommended as a useful source of social commentary by scholars of the era.
After her husband’s death, Ellet’s interest in the historical relationship between women and the societies in which they lived, which she had explored so effectively in her writing, assumed a practical bent. In addition to continuing to write women back into history during these two decades, Ellet also gave public speeches, the proceeds of which supported charities for women and children. Active in this and other work until her last moments, Ellet succumbed to Bright’s disease in her New York City home on June 3, 1877. By the time of her death, Ellet had penned over fifteen lengthy volumes in genres spanning from poetry to social history, German folklore, literary criticism, practical home management, Biblical retellings, and travelogues.
legacy.
As we have already noted, Ellet’s legacy is a complex one. A simple examination of the records of her life reveals that she appears to have operated according to diverging standards of integrity within her personal and professional roles and, indeed, to have blurred the lines between those roles occasionally. As students of history, it is easy to resent the records for thus presenting us with two highly discrepant views of the same woman. We want history to tip the scales of judgment for us—to tell us how to integrate the form of the meticulous, reclamation-minded historian devoted to reinstating women’s lost voices to history with that of the inveigling, malice-spreading, grave-hounding Fury intent upon wreaking havoc in her ill-fated colleagues’ lives.
However, as any interpreter of literature or human psychology will admit, this later characterization—and, indeed, any attempts to integrate these two incarnations of the woman—must rest upon an evaluation or imputation of motive to Ellet. In attempting to unravel Ellet’s motives in the Poe-Osgood-Griswold case, many authors have suggested that she acted out of jealousy—that she was enraged to discover that Poe preferred Osgood to herself and that she determined to wreck their happiness and reputations as punishment. Other authors have suggested that she acted out of embarrassment upon realizing that she was but one of many from whom Poe gleaned worship—or that she acted out of fear when she realized that Poe’s discretion regarding his correspondence was not to be trusted and that her own position and marriage were on precarious grounds in his fitful hands.
Equally plausible, however, is the possibility that Ellet had more positive motivations for her behavior. Perhaps Ellet resented the flippancy with which Poe treated the affection of artistic women—felt he exploited them to swell his own ego while belittling the women whom he used to that end. Perhaps Ellet further perceived Poe and Griswold as representative examples of the arrogant presumptiveness that characterized men’s attitude towards women and women’s art in that decade. Both Poe and Griswold were known to wax combative towards women who trespassed too far into the masculine sphere. Perhaps the real reason the two men demonized her in their writings was less because she was truly shrewish in her dealings with them and more because she refused to cower before them and instead thwarted them in their dishonorable dealings with women. Whatever we may think of Poe’s conduct in the Poe-Osgood scandal, we must acknowledge that Griswold’s behavior in courting and promising marriage to another woman while yet married hardly smacks of honor.
Indeed, the reports of Ellet from this time are suspect if for no other reason than the fact that both Poe and Griswold proved through their own writings that truth was not always their primary concern when writing of their fellow writers. Neither man was averse to introducing the occasional falsehood as a means of exonerating themselves and incriminating those with whom they became involved in ego spats—perhaps a good deal of the negativity that surrounds Ellet’s conduct with these men may be imputed to just such a tendency to falsification on their part. Perhaps Ellet felt that, as these men did whatever they liked with women’s feelings and reputations, she was fully entitled to do as she liked while punishing them for that high-handed treatment.
As the extensive usage of the modifier “perhaps” in the previous paragraphs should indicate, we do not here attempt to argue for Ellet’s innocence or even to exonerate her entirely for her role in this affair. We merely wish to complicate our understanding of that role and to recognize that the sources through which we have traditionally received information regarding Ellet’s behavior were not themselves unbiased or above the very machinations which they imputed to Ellet herself. Indeed, the majority of the records we have received of these events were penned by men whose own reputations were at stake and who were the sort to punish women for displaying too independent or non-submissive a streak. While even the most positive interpretation of the situation cannot erase the seeming malice with which Ellet spread rumors regarding the Poe-Osgood affair after its termination, we must equally recognize that to accept uncritically the version of the events offered by Ellet’s detractors is to engage in a sloppy and shallow analysis of Ellet’s character. The historian need not be intent upon absolving a figure of all guilt to note that, perhaps, much of the “guilt” imputed to that figure has more to do with gender inequality than with actual wrongdoing.
What is perhaps most profound in this entire discussion is the fact that these two incidents, although the most difficult of her life to interpret, have become the basis of Ellet’s reputation in the present day. Discussions of Ellet’s behavior during these two years of her life have overshadowed the colossal work she accomplished in her career, and she lives on primarily within the footnotes of Poe’s biography, where her work is tainted with the imputation of vindictiveness and scandal-mongering. This phenomena itself—of the “personal” Ellet overwhelming the “professional” Ellet—invites dismantling, and perhaps the most effective way that dismantling may be achieved is through acknowledging that both the personal and the professional Ellets are equally valid and that an attempt to integrate the two is not more important than acknowledging the strides their combined power achieved in pioneering progressive archival research methods and women’s studies. Whatever means we find to reconcile the two halves of the woman cannot and should not rest in erasing or disincluding either half of the narrative. History has seen enough of erasure—we cannot erase one Ellet in favor of the other, but must instead regard both as co-existent if not entirely consistent aspects of her being.
Having thus discussed the “personal” Ellet at such great length, we turn now to the more significant accomplishments of the “professional” Ellet—the long term effects of her work as a historian. We have already discussed Ellet’s position as the first female historian of the American Revolution and first historian of the women of the American Revolution, accomplishments which, though they seem rudimentary from our twenty-first century perspective, were truly ground-breaking in her day. Equally as revolutionary, however, were Ellet’s innovations within the realm of archival research. Indeed both the nature of Ellet’s research methodologies and the focus of her projects find their nearest associates, not in her own century, but in ours. By travelling across the country gathering the personal stories of participants in the era of history she wished to canvas (rather than relying upon the testimony of “experts”), Ellet anticipated archival research’s call for alternative histories by over a century. In addition to championing the oral narrative, Ellet also contributed to the development of a more inclusive archive, accepting both previously excluded sources and modes of documentation. Her methodology’s emphasis on process might be called feminist; her quest to reclaim the voices of the women who, no less than men, had determined the stage and outcome of the American Revolution was positively modern; and her insistence that the stories of these women were worthy of preservation radiates the same energy as that channeled in modern “reclamation” projects.
However, much as integrations of the “personal” and “professional” Ellet produce internal tensions, so also comparisons of Ellet’s progressive methodologies and intentions with her eventual products yields the sensation of mismanaged potential. This is because, despite the promise of her progressive perspective towards the inclusion of women’s voices in the archive, Ellet’s usage of that material is wholly tinged by her century’s patriarchal distinction between the public and private spheres. Thus, in the opening pages of the work designed to reinsert women into the discourse of the American Revolution, Ellet asserted women’s influence by proclaiming that, “Patriotic mothers nursed the infancy of freedom” (Ellet, WAR, Vol. I., pg 14). This phrase, while perhaps a clever metaphor, reflects the role that Ellet then ascribed to the women in her history. She offered them a degree of agency, but the power afforded them was tightly bound to the maternal—and domestic—sphere.
For modern readers, this result can only be termed disappointing. And yet, Ellet’s work was progressive enough in its era to stand at the head of women’s inclusion in American history. Furthermore, while her prose was not as bombastically feministic as we might wish, Ellet herself seemed to exist without regard for her society’s expectations of women, living separately from her husband for half a decade and writing massive works of history—a realm traditionally reserved for men. Likewise, her careful documentation of the women of her own era bespoke her belief that an understanding of woman’s experience would greatly clarify the task of future historians who sought to understand the era—a belief that could only be supported by an elevation of the role of women in determining the development of that society.
It is true that her depictions of women in this society was not entirely unbiased; as Sarah Helen Whitman biographer Caroline Ticknor comments, Ellet’s depiction of contemporary social affairs “did not include those rivals in the literary world who had aroused her enmity” (Ticknor 104). Such behavior may exhibit bias, but it was not peculiar to Ellet, who received similar treatment at the hands of Poe when he dropped her completely from his Literati sketches despite including nearly every other member of their shared set. Many of Ellet’s shortcomings, while real, also seem to be habits she acquired from her contemporaries.
As we say, Ellet’s legacy is complex. In many ways, her life seems to have evolved to reflect the archives in which she spent so much time—to have become a mass of contradiction that is ultimately unsortable, but which yields gems to the careful enquirer. Her relationships with her contemporaries, both male and female was troubled, and yet she told the stories of women previously untold and, by doing so, paved the way for women of the future to more avidly claim their gender’s presence in the past. In the final analysis, then, we must view Ellet as some combination of all of her many conflicting portraits: as a purveyor of intrigue, inclusivity, innovation, and—as she herself hoped to be known—as an inspiration for women to strive towards artistic independence.
“Should the perusal of my book inspire with courage and resolution any woman who aspires to overcome difficulties in the achievement of honourable independence, or should it lead to a higher general respect for the powers of women and their destined position in the realm of Art, my object will be accomplished.” (Ellet, Women Artists, V)
bibliography.
Casper, Scott E. “An Uneasy Marriage of Sentiment and Scholarship: Elizabeth F. Ellet and the Domestic Origins of American Women’s History.” Journal of Women’s History 4, no. 2 (Fall 1992): 10-35.
“Elizabeth F. Ellet.” Baltimore Monument 1 (November 1838): 79-80.
Griswold, Rufus Wilmot. Statement of the Relations of Rufus W. Griswold with Charlotte Myers (Called Charlotte Griswold,) Elizabeth F. Ellet, Ann S. Stephens, Samuel J. Waring, Hamilton R. Searles, and Charles D. Lewis, with Particular Reference to Their Late Unsuccessful Attempt to Have Set Aside the Decree Granted in 1852 by the Court of Common Pleas of Philadelphia County, in the Case of Griswold vs. Griswold. Philadelphia: Henry B. Ashmead, 1856.
Griswold, Rufus Wilmot. “Elizabeth F. Ellet.” In The Female Poets of America, 199-205. Philadelphia: Carey and Hart, 1849.
Mattingly, Carol. “Elizabeth Fries Lummis Ellet (1818 – 1877).” Legacy 18, no. 1 (2001): 101-7.
“Mrs. Ellet’s Women of the American Revolution.” Godey’s Lady’s Book 38, no. 3 (March 1849): 224.
Phillips, Elizabeth. “Ellet, Elizabeth (Fries Lummis).” In American Women Writers: A Critical Reference Guide from Colonial Times to the Present Vol. II, edited by Taryn Benbow-Pfalzgraf, 17-18. Detroit, MI: Gale, 2000.
Poe, Edgar Allan. “Critical Notices. Mrs. Sigourney – Miss Gould – Mrs. Ellet.” Southern Literary Messenger 2, no. 2 (January 1836): 112-17.
Poe, Edgar Allan. “Elizabeth Frieze Ellet.” The Works of the Late Edgar Allan Poe – Vol III: The Literati, edited by Rufus W. Griswold, 202-203. New York: Redfield, 1850.
Poe, Edgar Allan. Letter to Sarah Helen Whitman. 24 Nov. 1848. The Letters of Edgar Allan Poe, vol. 2, edited by John Ostrom, 406-409. New York: Gordian Press, Inc., 1966
Quinn, Arthur Hobson. Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography. New York: D. Appleton-Century, 1941.
Reece, James B. “A Reexamination of a Poe Date: Mrs. Ellet’s Letters. American Literature 42, no. 2 (May 1970): 157-64.
Silverman, Kenneth. Edgar A. Poe: A Biography. New York: Harper Perennial, 2009.
Wilson, Clyde N. “Elizabeth F. Ellet.” In Dictionary of Literary Biography Vol. 30: American Historians, 1607-1865, edited by Clyde N Wilson, 84-88. Detroit, MI: Thomson Gale, 1984.