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Ella Rhoads Higginson

January 31, 2023

Ella Rhoads Higginson (c. January 28, 1862 – December 27, 1940) was an American author of award-winning fiction, poetry, and essays characteristically set in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States. She was the author of 2 collections of short stories, 6 books of poetry, a novel, a travel book, well over 100 short stories, over 400 poems, and hundreds of newspaper essays. She was influential for the ways her writing drew international attention to the then little-known Pacific Northwest region of the United States.[1] She served as an officer of the Pacific Coast Women's Press Association.

Ella Rhoads Higginson

Life

Ella Rhoads was born in Council Grove, Kansas, to Charles Reeve Rhoads and Mary A. Rhoads. She was the youngest of six children.[2] In 1863, the family traveled by wagon train from Kansas to Oregon and first settled in Eastern Oregon’s Grande Ronde Valley.[3] They later moved to Portland, then to a farm near Milwaukie, then to Oregon City.

Ella was privately tutored and also attended public school.[4] At age 23, she married Russell Carden Higginson, age 33, a druggist from the Northeastern United States. He was a distant cousin of New England writer and abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson.[5] In 1888, Ella and Russell Higginson moved to New Whatcom (later Bellingham), Washington where they would live the rest of their lives. Higginson traveled to Alaska for four summers as part of the research for her travel book. In 1892, the Higginson house, known as Clover Hill, in Bellingham was built. On May 14, 1909, Russell Higginson, age 57, died after a short illness.

Higginson also helped establish the first public reading room and library in Bellingham, Washington, and for a long time was a board member there.[6] During World War I, Ella Higginson ceased writing and volunteered full-time for the American Red Cross. She died on December 27, 1940, at age 78, having been ill most of the year. She left an estate of about $60,000. She is buried in Bayview Cemetery, Bellingham, Washington beneath a self-designed granite monument adorned with four-leaf clovers, a reference to her best-known poem (Koert, 1985: 7).

Writing

Ella Rhoads began writing as a child. Her first published work was the poem, "Dreams of the Past," which appeared in The Oregon City newspaper in 1875 when she was age 14. At this time, she also began sending out her short fiction for publication, much of it anonymously or under various pseudonyms (such as "Ann Lester," "Ethelind Ray," and "Enid"). After her marriage, she began publishing under her own name (Koert, 1985: 22). On March 8, 1890, an article by Higginson appeared in Portland, Oregon’s West Shore, a literary magazine. The article's controversial topic was divorce. In the article, Higginson argued that early marriage was more of a problem for women than divorce. Her recommendation that women would be wise to marry no earlier than age 30 garnered Higginson national notice (Koert, 1985: 52). That same year what would become her best-known poem, "Four-Leaf Clover," was published. In 1893, Higginson’s story "The Mother of ‘Pills’" won McClure’s magazine award for best story. The following year Higginson won McClure’s magazine short fiction contest, with a prize of $500, for "The Takin’ In of Ol’ Mis’ Lane." McClure’s printed 80,000 copies of the issue in anticipation of high demand. In 1897, the Macmillan company became Higginson's main publisher. They published most of her subsequent books and heavily promoted her writing. In 1902, when Higginson’s only novel, Mariella, of Out West, was published, reviewers compared it to novels by Jane Austen, Leo Tolstoy, and Émile Zola. In 1908, Alaska, the Great Country, an account of Higginson's travels in Alaska as well as a history of Alaska, was published and subsequently went through several editions (Murray, 1990: 132). In 1914, Higginson’s story "The Message of Ann Laura Sweet" was named Collier’s magazine prize story and awarded a prize of $500 by a panel consisting of former US President Theodore Roosevelt and investigative journalists Mark Sullivan and Ida Tarbell. With these publications and awards, Higginson became known as the most popular writer of the Pacific Northwest (Baym, 2011: 55-56; Ward and Maveety, 1995: 57-59).

George V rumour

In 1911, Edward Mylius was jailed in England for libel after publishing a report that King George V was a bigamist.

Higginson had also written about the king's rumoured earlier marriage, in Alaska: The Great Country. She applied some poetic licence to the story of royal scandal, writing that when the young prince had to renounce that marriage, his beloved was given the royallest of exiles: near the City of Vancouver "in the western solitude, lived for several years -- the veriest remittance woman -- the girl who should now, by the right of love and honor, be the Princess of Wales, and whose infant daughter should have been the heir to the throne."[7]

The International Socialist newspaper of Sydney, Australia, offered a new twist on this. Higginson's book in which this story of pathos appears had been acquired by the city's library in 1910. The newspaper mischievously opined that Lord Mayor Allen Taylor, as head of the City Council and thus responsible for its library, was as guilty as Mylius in publishing "the same statement with a cheerful disregard for the possibility of things", informing its readers that "the issuing of [a library book] constitutes publication under the law":

Mylius's libel wasn't any stronger, and this paper declares that what is sauce for the Mylius goose should also be sauce for the Lord Mayor gander, and it is hereby demanded that the Lord Mayor and the City Librarian and various other persons be prosecuted for 'libelling the king,' and that they each be given one year's hard labor, and taken to Goulburn Jail in leg-irons.
It is needless to say that 'Alaska' will be withdrawn from the Free Library immediately after this article appears; therefore, those who wish to get the book and verify the libel for themselves will have to call early to avoid the crush.[8]

Editorial work

Higginson started her lifelong editorial work at age 15 when she began work at the newspaper office of The Oregon City Enterprise, learning typesetting and editorial writing. In later years, she served as editor of the "Fact and Fancy for Women" department for Portland, Oregon’s West Shore, a literary magazine; as associate editor of The Pacific magazine in Seattle; and as associate editor for the Seattle magazine, The Westerner (Koert, 1985: 89).

Politics

In 1912, Higginson served as campaign manager for Washington State Republican candidate Frances C. Axtell, cousin of United States President Grover Cleveland. Axtell became the first female member of the Washington State Legislature (Koert, 1985: 118-119).

Honors

Higginson was the recipient of several national awards for her short fiction. In 1931, Higginson was named first Poet Laureate of Washington State (Bennett, 1998: 490; Blair, 1997: 34).

List of books

This list is compiled from Blain, 1990: 520; and Koert, 1985: 150-151.

  • A Bunch of Western Clover (Bellingham, Washington: Edson & Irish, 1894).
  • The Flower That Grew in the Sand and Other Stories (Seattle: The Calvert Company, 1896); reprinted as From the Land of the Snow Pearls (NY: Macmillan, 1897).
  • A Forest Orchid and Other Stories (NY: Macmillan, 1897).
  • When the Birds Go North Again (NY: Macmillan, 1898).
  • The Snow-Pearls (Seattle: Lowman and Hanford, 1897); reprinted Macmillan, 1902.
  • Four-Leaf Clover: A Little Book of Verse (Bellingham, Washington: Edson & Irish, 1901).
  • Mariella of Out-West (NY: Macmillan, 1902).
  • The Voice of April-Land and Other Poems (NY: Macmillan, 1903).
  • Alaska, the Great Country (NY: Macmillan 1908).
  • The Vanishing Race (Bellingham, Washington: C.M. Sherman, 1911).

References

  1. ^ (Baym, 2011: 284; Blair, 1997: 52)
  2. ^ (Koert, 1985: 4)
  3. ^ (Koert, 1985: 5, 7)
  4. ^ (Gray, 1997: 274)
  5. ^ (Koert, 1985: 27, 24)
  6. ^ "Guide to the Ella Higginson Papers 1870-1940". Retrieved November 27, 2014.
  7. ^ Higginson, Ella (1909). Alaska: The Great Country.
  8. ^ "The King Again Libelled". The International Socialist. Sydney, NSW, Australia. 18 Mar 1911.

Bibliographic references

Baym, Nina. Women Writers of the American West, 1833-1927. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011. ISBN 9780252035975

Bennett, Paula Bernat, ed. Nineteenth-Century American Women Poets. New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 1998. ISBN 9780631203995

Blain, Virginia, Patricia Clements, and Isobel Grundy, eds. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers From the Middle Ages to the Present. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990. ISBN 9780300048544

Blair, Karen J. Northwest Women: An Annotated Bibliography of Sources on the History of Oregon and Washington Women, 1787-1970. Pullman, Washington: Washington State University Press, 1997. ISBN 0874221455

Gray, Janet, ed. She Wields a Pen: American Women Poets of the Nineteenth Century. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1997. ISBN 9780877455752

Koert, Dorothy. The Lyric Singer: A Biography of Ella Higginson. Bellingham, Washington: Center for Pacific Northwest Studies and Fourth Corner Registry. 1985. ISBN 9996605302

Laffrado, Laura. "The Pacific Northwest (Re)Writes New England: Civic Myth and Women’s Literary Regionalism in Ella Higginson’s Revision of The Scarlet Letter." Nathaniel Hawthorne Review 40, 1 (2014) 18-40. ISSN 0890-4197

Laffrado, Laura. "Ella Rhoads Higginson, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, and Pacific Northwest Women's Literary Regionalism" Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers 31, 2 (2014) 281-288. ISSN 0748-4321

Laffrado, Laura, ed. Selected Writings of Ella Higginson: Inventing Pacific Northwest Literature. Bellingham, Washington: Whatcom County Historical Society Press. 2015. ISBN 978-0-939576-27-2

Murray, John A., ed. A Republic of Rivers: Three Centuries of Nature Writing From Alaska and the Yukon. New York: Oxford, 1990. ISBN 9780195076059

Ward, Jean M. and Elaine A. Maveety, eds. Pacific Northwest Women, 1815-1925: Lives, Memories, and Writings. Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 1995. ISBN 9780870713934

External links

 
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Ella Higginson.
 
Wikisource has original works by or about:
Ella Higginson

January 31, 2023
ella, rhoads, higginson, january, 1862, december, 1940, american, author, award, winning, fiction, poetry, essays, characteristically, pacific, northwest, region, united, states, author, collections, short, stories, books, poetry, novel, travel, book, well, ov. Ella Rhoads Higginson c January 28 1862 December 27 1940 was an American author of award winning fiction poetry and essays characteristically set in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States She was the author of 2 collections of short stories 6 books of poetry a novel a travel book well over 100 short stories over 400 poems and hundreds of newspaper essays She was influential for the ways her writing drew international attention to the then little known Pacific Northwest region of the United States 1 She served as an officer of the Pacific Coast Women s Press Association Ella Rhoads Higginson Contents 1 Life 2 Writing 2 1 George V rumour 3 Editorial work 4 Politics 5 Honors 6 List of books 7 References 8 Bibliographic references 9 External linksLife EditElla Rhoads was born in Council Grove Kansas to Charles Reeve Rhoads and Mary A Rhoads She was the youngest of six children 2 In 1863 the family traveled by wagon train from Kansas to Oregon and first settled in Eastern Oregon s Grande Ronde Valley 3 They later moved to Portland then to a farm near Milwaukie then to Oregon City Ella was privately tutored and also attended public school 4 At age 23 she married Russell Carden Higginson age 33 a druggist from the Northeastern United States He was a distant cousin of New England writer and abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson 5 In 1888 Ella and Russell Higginson moved to New Whatcom later Bellingham Washington where they would live the rest of their lives Higginson traveled to Alaska for four summers as part of the research for her travel book In 1892 the Higginson house known as Clover Hill in Bellingham was built On May 14 1909 Russell Higginson age 57 died after a short illness Higginson also helped establish the first public reading room and library in Bellingham Washington and for a long time was a board member there 6 During World War I Ella Higginson ceased writing and volunteered full time for the American Red Cross She died on December 27 1940 at age 78 having been ill most of the year She left an estate of about 60 000 She is buried in Bayview Cemetery Bellingham Washington beneath a self designed granite monument adorned with four leaf clovers a reference to her best known poem Koert 1985 7 Writing EditElla Rhoads began writing as a child Her first published work was the poem Dreams of the Past which appeared in The Oregon City newspaper in 1875 when she was age 14 At this time she also began sending out her short fiction for publication much of it anonymously or under various pseudonyms such as Ann Lester Ethelind Ray and Enid After her marriage she began publishing under her own name Koert 1985 22 On March 8 1890 an article by Higginson appeared in Portland Oregon s West Shore a literary magazine The article s controversial topic was divorce In the article Higginson argued that early marriage was more of a problem for women than divorce Her recommendation that women would be wise to marry no earlier than age 30 garnered Higginson national notice Koert 1985 52 That same year what would become her best known poem Four Leaf Clover was published In 1893 Higginson s story The Mother of Pills won McClure s magazine award for best story The following year Higginson won McClure s magazine short fiction contest with a prize of 500 for The Takin In of Ol Mis Lane McClure s printed 80 000 copies of the issue in anticipation of high demand In 1897 the Macmillan company became Higginson s main publisher They published most of her subsequent books and heavily promoted her writing In 1902 when Higginson s only novel Mariella of Out West was published reviewers compared it to novels by Jane Austen Leo Tolstoy and Emile Zola In 1908 Alaska the Great Country an account of Higginson s travels in Alaska as well as a history of Alaska was published and subsequently went through several editions Murray 1990 132 In 1914 Higginson s story The Message of Ann Laura Sweet was named Collier s magazine prize story and awarded a prize of 500 by a panel consisting of former US President Theodore Roosevelt and investigative journalists Mark Sullivan and Ida Tarbell With these publications and awards Higginson became known as the most popular writer of the Pacific Northwest Baym 2011 55 56 Ward and Maveety 1995 57 59 George V rumour Edit In 1911 Edward Mylius was jailed in England for libel after publishing a report that King George V was a bigamist Higginson had also written about the king s rumoured earlier marriage in Alaska The Great Country She applied some poetic licence to the story of royal scandal writing that when the young prince had to renounce that marriage his beloved was given the royallest of exiles near the City of Vancouver in the western solitude lived for several years the veriest remittance woman the girl who should now by the right of love and honor be the Princess of Wales and whose infant daughter should have been the heir to the throne 7 The International Socialist newspaper of Sydney Australia offered a new twist on this Higginson s book in which this story of pathos appears had been acquired by the city s library in 1910 The newspaper mischievously opined that Lord Mayor Allen Taylor as head of the City Council and thus responsible for its library was as guilty as Mylius in publishing the same statement with a cheerful disregard for the possibility of things informing its readers that the issuing of a library book constitutes publication under the law Mylius s libel wasn t any stronger and this paper declares that what is sauce for the Mylius goose should also be sauce for the Lord Mayor gander and it is hereby demanded that the Lord Mayor and the City Librarian and various other persons be prosecuted for libelling the king and that they each be given one year s hard labor and taken to Goulburn Jail in leg irons It is needless to say that Alaska will be withdrawn from the Free Library immediately after this article appears therefore those who wish to get the book and verify the libel for themselves will have to call early to avoid the crush 8 Editorial work EditHigginson started her lifelong editorial work at age 15 when she began work at the newspaper office of The Oregon City Enterprise learning typesetting and editorial writing In later years she served as editor of the Fact and Fancy for Women department for Portland Oregon s West Shore a literary magazine as associate editor of The Pacific magazine in Seattle and as associate editor for the Seattle magazine The Westerner Koert 1985 89 Politics EditIn 1912 Higginson served as campaign manager for Washington State Republican candidate Frances C Axtell cousin of United States President Grover Cleveland Axtell became the first female member of the Washington State Legislature Koert 1985 118 119 Honors EditHigginson was the recipient of several national awards for her short fiction In 1931 Higginson was named first Poet Laureate of Washington State Bennett 1998 490 Blair 1997 34 List of books EditThis list is compiled from Blain 1990 520 and Koert 1985 150 151 A Bunch of Western Clover Bellingham Washington Edson amp Irish 1894 The Flower That Grew in the Sand and Other Stories Seattle The Calvert Company 1896 reprinted as From the Land of the Snow Pearls NY Macmillan 1897 A Forest Orchid and Other Stories NY Macmillan 1897 When the Birds Go North Again NY Macmillan 1898 The Snow Pearls Seattle Lowman and Hanford 1897 reprinted Macmillan 1902 Four Leaf Clover A Little Book of Verse Bellingham Washington Edson amp Irish 1901 Mariella of Out West NY Macmillan 1902 The Voice of April Land and Other Poems NY Macmillan 1903 Alaska the Great Country NY Macmillan 1908 The Vanishing Race Bellingham Washington C M Sherman 1911 References Edit Baym 2011 284 Blair 1997 52 Koert 1985 4 Koert 1985 5 7 Gray 1997 274 Koert 1985 27 24 Guide to the Ella Higginson Papers 1870 1940 Retrieved November 27 2014 Higginson Ella 1909 Alaska The Great Country The King Again Libelled The International Socialist Sydney NSW Australia 18 Mar 1911 Bibliographic references EditBaym Nina Women Writers of the American West 1833 1927 Urbana University of Illinois Press 2011 ISBN 9780252035975Bennett Paula Bernat ed Nineteenth Century American Women Poets New York Wiley Blackwell 1998 ISBN 9780631203995Blain Virginia Patricia Clements and Isobel Grundy eds The Feminist Companion to Literature in English Women Writers From the Middle Ages to the Present New Haven Yale University Press 1990 ISBN 9780300048544Blair Karen J Northwest Women An Annotated Bibliography of Sources on the History of Oregon and Washington Women 1787 1970 Pullman Washington Washington State University Press 1997 ISBN 0874221455Gray Janet ed She Wields a Pen American Women Poets of the Nineteenth Century Iowa City University of Iowa Press 1997 ISBN 9780877455752Koert Dorothy The Lyric Singer A Biography of Ella Higginson Bellingham Washington Center for Pacific Northwest Studies and Fourth Corner Registry 1985 ISBN 9996605302Laffrado Laura The Pacific Northwest Re Writes New England Civic Myth and Women s Literary Regionalism in Ella Higginson s Revision of The Scarlet Letter Nathaniel Hawthorne Review 40 1 2014 18 40 ISSN 0890 4197Laffrado Laura Ella Rhoads Higginson Mary E Wilkins Freeman and Pacific Northwest Women s Literary Regionalism Legacy A Journal of American Women Writers 31 2 2014 281 288 ISSN 0748 4321Laffrado Laura ed Selected Writings of Ella Higginson Inventing Pacific Northwest Literature Bellingham Washington Whatcom County Historical Society Press 2015 ISBN 978 0 939576 27 2Murray John A ed A Republic of Rivers Three Centuries of Nature Writing From Alaska and the Yukon New York Oxford 1990 ISBN 9780195076059Ward Jean M and Elaine A Maveety eds Pacific Northwest Women 1815 1925 Lives Memories and Writings Corvallis Oregon State University Press 1995 ISBN 9780870713934External links Edit Wikimedia Commons has media related to Ella Higginson Wikisource has original works by or about Ella Higginson Ella Higginson A Woman of the Century 1893 Center for Pacific Northwest Studies Western Washington University http library wwu edu cpnws Archive permanent dead link of Higginson s papers in Bellingham Washington The collection includes short stories poems plays a novel correspondence clippings photographs and ephemera Northwest Digital Archives Guide to the Ella Higginson Papers http nwda orbiscascade org ark 80444 xv19502NWDA provides access to descriptions of primary sources in the Northwestern United States C SPAN interview with Dr Laura Laffrado regarding The Ella Higginson Recovery Project http www c spanvideo org program 316868 1 The Ella Higginson Blog featuring many of Higginson s poems Works by Ella Higginson at Project Gutenberg Works by or about Ella Rhoads Higginson at Internet Archive Works by Ella Rhoads Higginson at LibriVox public domain audiobooks Retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title Ella Rhoads Higginson amp oldid 1123525337, wikipedia, wiki, book, books, library,

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