Memoirs of Elleanor Eldridge.

Intro -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- Memoirs of Elleanor Eldridge and Nineteenth-Century Interracial Coauthorship -- Memoirs of Elleanor Eldridge, Sentimentalism, and (Black) Print Culture as (White) Women's Political Activism -- Memoirs of Elleanor Eldridge and Productions of Maria W. Stewart -- A Free Woman of Property -- Memoirs of Elleanor Eldridge and the Rhode Island Court of Common Pleas -- Conclusion: Memoirs of Elleanor Eldridge as African American Literature -- A Final Note on Recovering Memoirs of Elleanor Eldridge -- Memoirs of Elleanor Eldridge -- Preface. -- Chapter I. -- Chapter II. -- Chapter III. -- Chapter IV. -- Chapter V. -- Chapter VI. -- Chapter VII. -- Chapter VIII. -- Chapter IX. -- Chapter X. -- Chapter XII. -- Chapter XIII. -- APPENDIX. -- Appendices to 2014 Edition -- About the Authors.

Elleanor Eldridge, born of African and US indigenous descent in 1794, operated a lucrative domestic services business in nineteenth century Providence, Rhode Island. In defiance of her gender and racial background, she purchased land and built rental property from the wealth she gained as a business owner. In the 1830s, Eldridge was defrauded of her property by a white lender. In a series of common court cases as alternately defendant and plaintiff, she managed to recover it through the Rhode Island judicial system. In order to raise funds to carry out this litigation, her memoir, which includes statements from employers endorsing her respectable character, was published in 1838. Frances Harriet Whipple, an aspiring white writer in Rhode Island, narrated and co-authored Eldridge's story, expressing a proto-feminist outrage at the male "extortioners" who caused Eldridge's loss and distress. With the rarity of Eldridge's material achievements aside, Memoirs of Elleanor Eldridge forms an exceptional antebellum biography, chronicling 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 color entrepreneur, it constitutes a counter-narrative to slave narratives of early 19th-century New England, changing the literary landscape of conventional American Renaissance studies and interpretations of American Transcendentalism. With an introduction by Joycelyn K. Moody, this new edition contextualizes the extraordinary life of Elleanor Eldridge--from her acquisition of wealth and property to the publication of her biography and her legal struggles to regain stolen property. Because of her mixed-race identity, relative wealth, local and regional renown, and her efficacy in establishing a collective of white women patrons, this

biography challenges typical African and indigenous women's literary production of the early national period and resituates Elleanor Eldridge as an important cultural and historical figure of the nineteenth century.

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Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, Michigan : ProQuest Ebook Central, 2024. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ProQuest Ebook Central affiliated libraries.