Elliott, Sarah Barnwell

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ELLIOTT, Sarah Barnwell

Born 29 November 1848, Beaufort, South Carolina; died 30 August 1928, Sewanee, Tennessee

Daughter of Stephen and Charlotte Barnwell Elliott

The youngest of five children, Sarah Barnwell Elliott was born at her grandparents' plantation on the South Carolina coastal plains while her father, an Episcopal bishop, toured with his Georgia diocese. Leading a liberal, aristocratic family, Elliott's father resisted hostile antebellum politics and helped to found the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, where Elliott lived most of her life. In 1866 she enrolled at Johns Hopkins, and by 1895 was supporting herself by writing in New York, where she became a suffragist. In 1902 she returned to Sewanee to rear orphaned nephews in the family home.

A polite duty to Episcopal dogmatism restrains Elliott's first novel, The Felmeres (1879). Virtually isolated in a mansion on the desolate coastal marshes, beautiful Helen Felmere swears to her father's agnostic creed, studies logic instead of sewing, and lovelessly marries her cousin instead of supporting herself as an artist. A visiting painter stirs her repressed spirit with instruction and respect for her art, and a black servant urges charity work, but Helen joins her husband in New York society. Helen attacks conventional piety in the Gilded Age until a long-lost brother baptizes her baby, and she casts herself beneath carriage wheels. Dialogues on doctrinal controversy intrude on gloomy, gothic settings.

A Simple Heart (1887), which portrays a self-sacrificing frontier ministry, is Elliott's tribute to her brother, the Episcopal missionary bishop of west Texas. In a dialect study, she shows an itinerant carpenter fulfilling his dream of building a church, only to be rejected as his congregation grows more sophisticated. The carpenter's wife teaches him to read the Book of Common Prayer and invites a passing Episcopal bishop to ordain him deacon before she dies gazing at a man-sized cross. A quiet, "naytral" grasp of scripture contrasts the preacher with both wild prayer meetings and fashionable church raffles, but her pious pathos diminishes her local color.

No longer restrained by denominationalism, Elliott returns to the frontier setting for her longest, most successful novel, Jerry (1891). Young Jerry escapes a brutal home in the Tennessee mountains to be reared by an isolated Western miner and educated by a guilt-driven doctor, who inspires him to be a gentleman. Founding a school, holding off railroad speculators, and organizing a mining collective, Jerry is a folk hero until an unexpected inheritance corrupts his ambition. Serializing Jerry for Scribner's magazine, Elliott shifts her attitude repeatedly. Frontiersmen are innocent yet disgusting; wealth is corruptive yet the entrance to gracious society; leadership is self-serving yet self-sacrificing. Jerry's closing shootout does not decide Elliott's romantic dilemma in favor of either heroic force or social compassion.

Elliott compares two smug, isolated societies of Sewanee in The Durket Sperret (1898). In their ancient pride of family spirit, Cumberland mountaineers scorn the fastidious new university people, but young Hannah rejects her drunken mountain suitor to become a lady's maid in town. Defying the Durket matriarch leaves Hannah vulnerable to her employer's patronizing improvement projects and to her vengeful suitor's gossip until she escapes both through a farming career. The elaborate rituals of a mountain death, "buryin'," and will-reading show Elliott as anthropologist, and Hannah's silent attention to a professor's discourse on the Sewanee caste system displays Elliott's psychological acumen. In Hannah and the Durket matriarch, Elliott builds her two strongest character studies.

Elliott's strongest novel, The Making of Jane (1901), challenges the womanly self-sacrifice that defines heroism in her early books. Fighting her childhood homesickness in New York, young Jane lets her aunt's strict tutelage repress all personality until she rebels into maturity by returning to the South for a business career. Investments supplant a lost love, and Jane's millionaire proposes well after she has discarded her dependence on him. Though she exaggerates Jane's stoicism and success, Elliott naturalistically exposes facets of a lady discovering her power of self-reliance. By traveling, working, and investing earned income with her own authority, Jane makes herself into a satisfied, independent person.

Retired in Sewanee, Elliott championed the South and woman suffrage while writing criticism for the Sewanee Review and Forensic Quarterly Review. In 1907 she praised Ibsen's stress on individual will restricted in a Norway mirroring the South.

In a sentimental literary period, Elliott's measured transition from romanticism to naturalism portrays the local color of Texas frontiersmen and Tennessee mountaineers before it confidently realizes a self-sufficient womanly ideal. Disciplining her insights to make a significant statement, Elliott turns from family doctrines and regional viewpoints to her own experience as a sensitive woman in turbulent times. Through all the expansive plots and symbolic settings, Elliott's distinctive character is a lonely outsider earnestly working to build a new home in a puzzling, hostile world.

Other Works:

John Paget (1893). An Incident and Other Happenings (1899). Sam Houston (1900).

Bibliography:

Mackenzie, C. C., Sarah Barnwell Elliott (Dissertation, 1971). Maness, D. G., The Novels of Sarah Barnwell Elliott.: A Critical Study (Dissertation, 1974). Wiggins, B. L., Library of Southern Literature (1909).