America's Joan of Arc
The Life of Anna Elizabeth Dickinson
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- $23.99
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- $23.99
Publisher Description
One of the most celebrated women of her time, a spellbinding speaker dubbed the Queen of the Lyceum and America's Joan of Arc, Anna Elizabeth Dickinson was a charismatic orator, writer, and actress, who rose to fame during the Civil War and remained in the public eye for the next three decades.
J. Matthew Gallman offers the first full-length biography of Dickinson to appear in over half a century. Gallman describes how Dickinson's passionate patriotism and fiery style, coupled with her unabashed abolitionism and biting critiques of antiwar Democrats--known as Copperheads--struck a nerve with her audiences. In barely two years, she rose from an unknown young Philadelphia radical, to a successful New England stump speaker, to a true national celebrity. At the height of her fame, Dickinson counted many of the nation's leading reformers, authors, politicians, and actors among her friends. Among the dozens of famous figures who populate the narrative are Susan B. Anthony, Whitelaw Reid, William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. Gallman shows how Dickinson's life illuminates the possibilities and barriers faced by nineteenth-century women, revealing how their behavior could at once be seen as worthy, highly valued, shocking, and deviant.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Born into a fiercely abolitionist Philadelphia Quaker family in 1842, feisty Anna Dickinson discovered her love of the limelight at 17 when her spontaneous invective drove a male speaker from a women's rights meeting. Soon, the gifted orator was delivering dozens of public lectures critiquing the progress of the Civil War and Lincoln's refusal to renounce slavery. Taken under the wing of leading abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison, Dickinson was both a celebrity and an oddity, with a lecture attended by Lincoln and Congress and a rash of newspaper coverage, including one story that dubbed her "a Joan of Arc that God sent into the field" to help a nation in crisis. After the war, the iconoclastic orator had a complicated relationship with the suffrage movement and with Susan B. Anthony, and added novelist, playwright and actress to her already bulging r sum . Middle age brought poverty, illness, alcoholism and a lawsuit against the Republican Party for withheld lecture fees. Her lowest point came in 1891 with a brief but humiliating commitment to an insane asylum by the sister Dickinson had supported financially for years. Illuminating the life and times of an extraordinary 19th-century woman, historian Gallman's (Mastering Wartime) well-researched volume will mainly interest scholars of American and women's history. Photos.
