Queer Places:
1221 3rd Ave, New Brighton, PA 15066
Grove Cemetery, 1750 Valley Ave, New Brighton, PA 15066
Sara Jane Lippincott (pseudonym Grace Greenwood, September 23, 1823 – April 20, 1904) was an
American author, poet, correspondent, lecturer, and newspaper founder. One
of the first women to gain access into the
Congressional
press galleries, she used her questions to advocate for social reform and
women's rights. Some of her passionate poems indicate a lesbian relationship at a time (the mid 1800s) where that would have been quite scandalous.
She was part of Charlotte Cushman's
circle. William Wetmore Story, writing to his Boston friend, poet James
Russell Lowell, observed that
Charlotte Cushman,
Harriet Hosmer,
Matilda Hays, and writer Grace
Greenwood formed "a Harem (Scarem) of emancipated females".
Her best known books for children are entitled, History of My Pets
(1850); Recollections of My Childhood (1851); Stories of Many Lands
(1866); Merrie England (1854); Bonnie Scotland (1861);
Stories and Legends of Travel and History; Stories and Sights of France
and Italy (1867). The volumes for older readers are two series of
collected prose writings, Greenwood Leaves (1849, 1851); Poems
(1850); Haps and Mishaps of a Tour in Europe (1852); A Forest
Tragedy (1856); A Record of Five Years (1867); New Life in New
Lands (1873); Victoria, Queen of England. This last was published,
in 1883, by Anderson & Allen of New York, and Sampson, Low & Marston, London.
Lippincott was connected as editor and contributor with various American
magazines, as well as weekly and daily papers.
Lippincott also wrote much for London journals, especially for All the Year
Round. For several years, she lived almost wholly in Europe, for the
benefit of her greatly impaired health and for the education of her daughter.
When she returned to the United States, she lived in Washington D.C. and then
New York.
She was a prominent member of the literary society of New York along with
Anne Lynch Botta, Edgar Allan Poe,
Margaret
Fuller,
Ralph Waldo Emerson and Horace Greeley, Richard Henry Stoddard, Andrew
Carnegie, Mary Mapes Dodge, Julia Ward Howe, Charles Butler,
Fitz-Greene Halleck, Delia Bacon, and
Bayard Taylor,
among others.
Sara Jane Clarke was born on September 23, 1823, at Pompey, New York to
parents Deborah Baker Clarke (c. 1791–1874) and Dr. Thaddeus C. Clarke
(1770–1854),[3]
a grandson of Princeton President Rev. Jonathan Edwards' sister Elizabeth, and
the second cousin of Aaron Burr.
At the age of twelve, she went to school in Rochester, New York living with
her older brother.
There was nothing remarkable about her education, but she did study Italian,
algebra, calculus, English and French history, though literature was her
delight, and it became evident that writing was her vocation. At the age of
sixteen, she was providing "fresh, piquant, racy" pieces to the Rochester
papers.
She removed with her family in 1842[a]
to New Brighton, Pennsylvania, where her father practiced as a physician,
and which she considered to be her home time for the rest of her life. There,
she attended the Greenwood Institute, a ladies' academy,
from which she may have taken her pseudonym. She left school at the age of
nineteen.
Not long after she returned home, in 1845 and 1846, she started writing
using the pen name, Grace Greenwood.
The earliest writing of Lippincott was in the form of poetry and children's
stories, which she published in local papers. In 1844, she drew national
attention, at age 21, with a poem published in the New York Mirror,
then under the editorship of George Pope Morris and Nathaniel Parker Willis.[7]
Soon after, she was writing for the Home Journal and other literary
magazines of the day,
under both her given name and her pseudonym. In the February 14, 1846 issue of
the Home Journal, The Wife's Appeal, a poem by Sara J. Clarke, is
published just above Tit-for-Tat, a story by Grace Greenwood. By
October 1849, Godey's Lady's Book listed her as an assistant editor and
she was also editor of Godey's Dollar Newspaper.
For six or eight years, her summer home was New Brighton. In winter, she
was in Philadelphia, Washington D.C., New York City, writing for Whittier, or
for Willis and Morris, or for Neal's Gazette, or for Godey. Lippincott was the first "lady
correspondent" in Washington, D.C., beginning her work in that line with
letters to a Philadelphia paper in 1850.
That year, many of her early sketches and letters were collected and
republished by Ticknor & Fields under the name of Greenwood Leaves.
She would go on to become a correspondent for the Saturday Evening Post.
She was a highly respected journalist and consistently argued for the reform
of women's roles and rights.[11]
She joined the National Era, a weekly abolitionist newspaper, and
copyedited the serialized original version of
Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin as well as writing
columns, travel letters, and articles. Her staunch abolitionist views
contributed to the ongoing national controversy.
Lippincott's poetry received significant critical attention. A published
collection, Poems (1851), included passionate poetry and references to
her intimate friendship to Anna Phillips, indicating an acceptance of intimate
same sex friendships.[12]
Also that year, she published History of My Pets.. Sophia Hawthorne
wrote that her husband, the author
Nathaniel Hawthorne, considered it "the best children's book he has ever
seen".[13]
On November 12, 1852, Harriet Hosmer arrived in
Rome, accompanied by her father, Dr. Hiram Hosmer;
Sarah Jane Clarke Lippincott,
the journalist known professionally as Grace Greenwood;
Virginia Vaughn, a
girlhood friend from Lenox;
Charlotte
Cushman; Sallie Mercer, Cushman’s
African-American maid and “right-hand woman”; and
Matilda Hays, Cushman’s
partner, a feminist reformer and translator of
George Sand’s novels. The
socially well-connected Vaughn had introduced Hosmer to Cushman in 1850 after
a performance in Boston. Hosmer was immediately taken with this strikingly
independent woman and developed a lifelong attachment to her. In a letter to
her childhood friend Cornelia Crow Carr, she wrote: “Miss Cushman and
Miss Hays (her friend and companion) have left Boston, and I can’t tell you
how lonely I feel. I saw a great deal of them during the three weeks that they
were in the city.... Isn’t it strange how we meet people in this world and
become attached to them in so short a time?” Cushman and Hays represented
models of creative freedom for Hosmer, who shared their residence at via del
Corso 28 in Rome.
Cushman was fiercely protective of her young female charges in Rome and
quickly made enemies with the influential American sculptor William Wetmore
Story. Writing to his friend the poet James Russell Lowell shortly after the
women’s arrival in Rome in 1853, Story described the “furore at 28 Corso,”
with its “harem (scarem) as I call it... [of] emancipated females who dwell
there in heavenly unity; namely, the Cushman, Grace Greenwood, Hosmer,” and
others.
In 1852, Lippincott made her first visit to Europe,
on an assignment for The New York Times, having the distinction of
being the first woman reporter on the Times payroll.[14]
She spent a little over a year abroad, which, in the dedication to her
daughter of one of her juvenile books, she calls "the golden year of her
life".
Her accounts of her travels were well-received contributions to literature of
the day. The correspondence was collected immediately after her return, and
published under the title of Haps and Mishaps of a Tour in Europe.
Upon her return, she also made frequent excursions into California, writing
vivid descriptions of the land.
In the fall of 1855, she published Merrie England, the first of a
series of books of foreign travel for children.[7]
Nathaniel Hawthorne criticized her travel letters, calling her an "ink-stained
woman" and claiming he could do as well. Despite this, Lippincott seems to
have gotten along amiably with Hawthorne's family. She dedicated her
children's book Recollections of My Childhood, and Other Stories to his
children Julian and Una Hawthorne.
On October 17, 1853, she married Leander K. Lippincott, of Philadelphia,[7]
who was a correspondent for several New York papers.
That year, Lippincott and her husband started The Little Pilgrim,[18]
a monthly American children's magazine devoted to the amusement, instruction,
and well-being of children.
She was soon producing magazine articles and essays, her contributions
conveying historical and biographical information.
In this paper,
Louisa
May Alcott made her debut as a writer of children's stories.
Collected from time to time, and published by Ticknor & Fields, they made a
juvenile library numbering nearly a dozen volumes, remarkable for the
felicitous manner in which they conveyed historical information.
On October 3, 1855, they had a daughter, Annie Grace. In the spring of
1856, a volume, entitled A Forest Tragedy, and other Tales, appeared;
and in the fall of 1857, Stories and Legends of History and Travel, was
the second of her travel series.[7]
Distinguishing herself as a lecturer on literary topics,
Lippincott also lectured extensively before and during the Civil War on her
abolitionist stance and to other social issues, such as prison and asylum
reform, as well as the abolition of capital punishment. During the war,
Lippincott was a lecturer to soldiers and at sanitary fairs.
President
Abraham Lincoln referred to her as "Grace Greenwood the Patriot".[21]
However, women's rights became the focus of her speeches, particularly after
the war. Her writings from this period were republished in Records of Five
Years (1867). By the 1870s, Lippincott wrote primarily for the New York
Times. Her articles focused mainly on women's issues, such as advocating
for Fanny Kemble's
right to wear trousers,
Susan B. Anthony's
right to vote and all women's right to receive equal pay for equal work.[12]
The marriage was not a happy union. After her husband fled the United
States in 1876 to escape prosecution for misappropriation of government funds,
Lippincott continued her writing and resumed lecturing in order to support
herself and her daughter,[12]
who trained for a career on the stage.
By 1879, Lippincott was residing in London, having moved to Europe with her
daughter. For the ten years preceding this, she had done most work and won
most distinction in journalism, principally in articles contributed from
Washington, to the New York Tribune and the
New York Times, on national and political questions, which she has
handled in a patriotic way, showing an unusual knowledge of political history
and of the construction, principles and tactics of the two opposing parties of
the United States and time. She had also contributed to the New York Times,
and a leading California journal, several series of letters from
Europe—principally from London.
She worked for the London Journal, and also wrote a biography, Queen
Victoria: Her Girlhood and Womanhood (1883). In 1887, she returned to the United States
and continued to work.
In 1895, she was living on Capitol Hill with her daughter, and was engaged
upon the piece, "Recollections of Washington". But as much as she loved the
capitol city, her health was better when she was abroad.
Lippincott later lived with her daughter in New Rochelle, New York, where
she died of bronchitis[21]
on April 20, 1904. Lippincott is buried in the Civil War section of Grove
Cemetery in New Brighton.[12]
Her obituary was on the front page of the New York Times, "proving her importance as
a literary figure in the nineteenth century".[12]
Lippincott's style was something quite new, characterized as "brilliant,
picturesque, piquante, every line sparkled; the words seemed to bound rather
than flow from her pen". Her writings displayed a charm of style which was
evident in the best American works of the mid 19th-century but was so seldom
seen thirty years later. The language was redundant, but not over-laden;
picturesque, without any effort to be so.
A letter-writer, she charmed a million readers by the piquant dash and spicy
flavor of her style.
There appear in the writings of Lippincott three phases of development,
three epochs of a literary career. The first lasted from the days of the
boarding-school till marriage, —from the first merry chit-chat and
Greenwood Leaves, to the full-rounded, mellow prime, as displayed in the
letters from Europe. Then follows a decade, during which story-writing for
children principally occupied her pen. With the Civil War commenced the third
period, years "vexed with the drums and tramplings," the struggles of middle
life.
My published books:
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- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sara_Jane_Lippincott
- Dabakis, Melissa. A Sisterhood of Sculptors .
Penn State University Press. Edizione del Kindle.
- Improper Bostonians
Lesbian and Gay History from the Puritans to Playland
By History Project Staff · 1998