Title: Embattled maiden
Description: "Mr. Chester's brilliant and fully documented biography is the first full-length study of Anna Dickinson's long, colorful, and tragic life--a life in which she touched the heights of crusading fervor and sank to depths of recrimination and near-madness. She was hailed during the Civil War as the Joan of Arc and at this stage of her career the 21-year-old Quakeress addressed Congress, with President Lincoln and his cabinet in attendance, to tell them how to end the Civil War and attain a lasting peace. Later Anna Dickinson became the Queen of the Lyceums, earning as much as $23,000 a year by her lecture tours throughout the country. When financial reverses forced her to go on the stage, she starred in her own plays and even appeared as Hamlet with some success. Always she was courageous and ready to battle for the principles of freedom and equality for women to which she devoted her life. As she grew older, penury and illness caused her at one point to be adjudged insane. Her suit against her sister and the doctors was a cause célèbre of the nineties, and Mr. Chester's account of the trial is engrossing. Finally Anna, who had appeared like a meteor on the political horizon, as if born for the eventful times in which she lives, was abruptly eclipsed. Forgotten, she lived in Goshen, New York, for many years and died in 1932 at the age of 90. It is a curious and fascinating story, and not one without its parallels with the present. Here is a rich and, surprisingly, an undisturbed field for the biographer--for among the prominent persons who were devoted to her were William Lloyd Garrison, Whitelaw Reid, Horace Greeley, Susan B. Anthony, and various political figures whose fame has since dimmed like Anna's own. Embattled Maiden is full of revealing anecdotes and quotations from letters and newspapers of the period." -- Publisher's description
Subjects: Abolitionists, Biography, Suffragists
People: Anna E. Dickinson (1842-1932)