Languages and a literary career
Born Elizabeth Fries Lummis at Sodus Point, New York, Ellet was the daughter of the physician William Nixon Lummis and Sarah Maxwell. Her birth year is disputed: many literary and library sources give 1818, while some reference works give about 1812. She attended the female seminary at Aurora, New York, and studied French, German and Italian, skills that supported her early translations and literary writing.
Her published work included a translation of Silvio Pellico’s Euphemio of Messina in 1834 and Poems, Translated and Original in 1835. In the mid-1830s she married William Henry Ellet, a chemistry professor. Her career connected the literary worlds of New York and Columbia, South Carolina, where her husband taught. She contributed to periodicals and wrote poetry, stories and works for young readers before expanding into historical biography.
In the 1840s Ellet helped circulate rumours about a relationship between Edgar Allan Poe and Frances Sargent Osgood, contributing to a bitter literary feud. She continued writing in New York after her husband’s death in 1859 and died there in 1877.
Recovering women’s historical experience
The Women of the American Revolution appeared in two volumes in 1848, followed by a third in 1850. To reconstruct lives poorly represented in public records, Ellet sought information from descendants and corresponded with historians and writers. The surviving research collection at the Library of Congress includes replies from more than one hundred individuals, among them women preserving the histories of their own families.
