Sarah Dorsey

Sarah Dorsey (February 16, 1829 – July 4, 1879) was an American novelist and historian.

Biography

Born Sarah Anne Ellis to Thomas George Percy Ellis and Mary Malvina Routh in Natchez, Mississippi, she became a novelist and historian. She was known as the "companion" of Jefferson Davis, to whom she proved a great boon in his post-Civil War life. Her father Thomas, a successful planter, was a member of the famed southern Percy family. It produced notable politicians, lawyers and writers, such as Senator LeRoy Percy, William Alexander Percy, Walker Percy, and the historian William Armstrong Percy III.

Sarah AnneEllis was the niece of Catherine Anne Warfield and Eleanor Percy Lee, the “Two Sisters of the West,” who while young published two volumes of poetry together. Catherine Anne Warfield went on to publish a number of novels, which achieved significant popular acclaim, including The House of Bouverie, a gothic fiction in two volumes which was a bestseller in 1860.

Sarah Anne’s father died when she was nine, and her mother soon remarried to Charles Gustavus Dahlgren. Her stepfather, who saw great potential in Sarah, provided her with a first-rate education, engaging as her tutor Eliza Ann DuPuy, the same woman who had inspired and trained her aunts Catherine and Eleanor. Later he sent her to Madame Deborah Grelaud’s French School in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where she excelled in music, painting, dancing, and languages, quickly gaining fluency in Italian, Spanish and German, as well as French.

During her stay in Philadelphia, Sarah Anne became very close with her teacher Anne Charlotte Lynch. (Later as Anne Botta, she started the first and most famous salon in Manhattan of the 19th century. She also wrote the Handbook of Universal Literature (1860), which remained in print for fifty years. At her salon the circle of intellectuals included Horace Greeley, William Cullen Bryant, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. She frequently welcomed visitors such as Anthony Trollope, Charles Dickens, and Charles Kingsley.) (Wyatt-Brown, pg. 125)

Marriage and family

In 1852, Ellis married Samuel Worthington Dorsey, a member of a prominent Maryland family. His father Thomas Dorsey, a failed lawyer, had accumulated large plantations in the Tensas Parish region, which Samuel inherited. Between the Dahlgren-Routh-Ellis plantations on Sarah's side and Samuel's family’s plantations, the rich newlyweds settled first in Maryland. Soon, however, they were living on a Routh family plantation near Newellton in Tensas Parish.

Literary career

Dorsey wrote articles for the New York Churchman in the 1850s.^[1]

She published her first work in 1863–1864 in the Southern Literary Messenger, which serialized her novel Agnes Graham. It was a sentimental tale about a young woman who falls in love with her cousin, whom she plans to marry until she learns about their common blood line. The success of the serials prompted her aunt Catherine’s publisher to republish it in complete volume. Other fictional works of Dorsey include Lucia Dare (1867), Athalie (1872), and Panola (1877).^{[citation needed]}

In 1866, Dorsey published a biography of the wartime Governor Henry Watkins Allen, whom she had first met in 1859, while wandering through the Rhine River Valley in Europe with her husband. "As a leader of wartime relief for the poor, an advocate of emancipation for slaves as reward for Confederate service, and other bold if not always welcomed innovations, Allen much deserved her praise." (Wyatt-Brown, pg. 134) The highly regarded work is considered to be an important contribution to the Lost Cause legend of southern memory. It is in print through Sarah Hudson-Pierce's Ritz Publications in Shreveport, Louisiana.

In 1873, the Dorseys moved to Beauvoir near Mississippi City, now Biloxi, overlooking the Gulf of Mexico. Soon after her husband died in 1875, Dorsey invited the former President of the Confederacy Jefferson Davis to visit her on the plantation in December 1876. Davis was married to his second wife, Varina Howell Davis, who had been a classmate of Dorsey’s at Madame Grelaud's French school.^{[citation needed]}

Impoverished after his imprisonment and living with his wife and numerous progeny in Memphis, Davis moved into Beauvoir on a permanent basis. There he composed his memoirs, The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government. Some claim that Dorsey ghost wrote the Davis memoir, but the style is too tedious to have been hers. Dorsey was instrumental in his success, organizing his day, motivating him to work, taking dictation, transcribing notes, editing and offering advice. Rumors quickly began to fly that the two were having an illicit affair, so much so that Varina Davis became greatly enraged and refused for a long time to set foot on Dorsey’s property. Eventually she too moved into one of the guest cottages at Beauvoir.^{[citation needed]}

When the Davises' last surviving son, Jefferson Davis, Jr., died in 1878, the loss devastated both his parents. That summer, Sarah Dorsey nursed Varina through a long debilitating illness, probably a combination of physical and emotional causes. Soon afterward, Sarah Dorsey learned that she had inoperable tumors in her breast. As her health declined, Varina Davis became her primary nurse.^{[citation needed]}

Death

Recognizing that she was dying, Dorsey rewrote her will in 1878, from which she cut out all her family, bequeathing all her capital and, more importantly, Beauvoir to Jefferson Davis. Dorsey died in the St. Charles Hotel in New Orleans on July 4, 1879, at the age of 50, following an unsuccessful operation for cancer performed by Dr. T. G. Richardson, assisted by Dr. Rudolph Matas.^[1]

The Percy family sued, but failed to break the will. After Jefferson Davis' death, Beauvoir became a home for Confederate veterans, many of whom are buried in the cemetery behind the house. After the last veteran died, it was adapted as a house museum.^[1]

Percy Writers

• Kate Ferguson
• Eleanor Percy Lee
• Walker Percy
• William Alexander Percy
• William Armstrong Percy, III
• Catherine Anne Warfield

Other Percys

• LeRoy Percy
• Thomas George Percy

References

1. ^ ^{a b c} "Dorsey, Sarah Anne Ellis". A Dictionary of Louisiana Biography (lahist.org). http://www.lahistory.org/site21.php. Retrieved December 16, 2010. 

Sources

• "Dorsey, Sarah Anne Ellis" Notable American Women, Vol. 1, 4th ed., The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1975

Persondata
Name	Dorsey, Sarah
Alternative names	Ellis, Sarahanne
Short description	American novelist
Date of birth	February 16, 1829
Place of birth	Natchez, Mississippi, U.S.
Date of death	July 4, 1879
Place of death	New Orleans, Louisiana, U.S.