Elizabeth Fries Ellet.
Elizabeth Fries Ellet
Elizabeth Fries Ellet [10. 18. 1818 – 6. 3. 1877] was an American translator, poetess, and historian whose consistent publications in both periodical and bound form ensured her lasting popularity amongst audiences of the mid-nineteenth century. An attendee of Lynch’s salon in the late 1840s, Ellet demonstrated inexhaustible commitment to her art, popularizing the genre of travel writing and generating awareness of European culture through her writings before ultimately assuming editorship of the New York Evening Express in the last decade of her life.
Ellet’s most lasting contribution to scholarship is undoubtedly her multi-volume series, The Women of the American Revolution, which proved groundbreaking as the first work of Revolutionary history penned by a woman and the first work by any author to focus on Revolutionary era women. Ellet’s methods in assembling her portraits of these women prefigured the turn of modern feminist archival practices and served to carve out a space for women in the then-male-dominated realm of historical study.
