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This is an exceptional antebellum biography, chronicling Elleanor Eldridge's life from her birth through the first publication of almost yearly editions of the text between 1838 and 1847. Because of Eldridge's exceptional life as a freeborn woman of colour entrepreneur, it constitutes a counter-narrative to slave narratives of early 19th-century New England.
About the author
Elleanor Eldridge (1794-1862) was born free in Rhode Island. She and her siblings acquired considerable property and local prestige, despite rampant racism against people of color in the state. As a successful proprietor and entrepreneur in Warwick and Providence, Elleanor Eldridge cultivated and maintained harmonious relationships with the white women she served such that they backed her during a series of lawsuits in which she was involved, and eventually won. Frances Harriet Whipple Green McDougall (1805-1878) was a minor US woman writer committed to developing a career for herself as a publishing social activist as well as to creating opportunities for other women and for people of color. Her first publication, The Original, was a magazine for New England women short-lived in the early 1820s. Her biographies of Elleanor Eldridge followed. She went on to publish in multiple genres ranging from abolitionist magazines, prolabor tracts, botany textbooks, and temperance and Spiritualist tracts. Joycelyn K. Moody is the Sue E. Denman Distinguished Chair in American Literature and Professor of English at the University of Texas at San Antonio, where she teaches and publishes on black print culture studies, US narratives of slavery, African American autobiography, and women's self-representation. She is also founding Director of UTSA's African American Literatures and Cultures Institute. With John Ernest, she co-edits the West Virginia University Press series Regenerations: African American Literature and Culture.
