Organising relief from Newport
Born in England in 1830, Wormeley settled with her family in Newport, Rhode Island. When the American Civil War began, she and her mother helped organise relief. Her clothing operation employed women from soldiers’ families to sew shirts, supplying troops while providing paid work at home.
In 1862 she worked aboard hospital transports carrying sick and wounded soldiers during the Peninsula Campaign. She later served at the military hospital at Portsmouth Grove. Her letters from the transports record the work of finding food, bedding and room for patients arriving in large numbers. She published them in The Other Side of War in 1889.
An American readership for Balzac
In the years after the war Wormeley undertook a sustained translation of Balzac’s fiction. A reader meeting the same family, fortune or title in successive novels depended in part on her consistency. In the Centenary Edition containing Séraphîta, Wormeley translates the French narrative, George Frederic Parsons signs the introduction and Jules Girardet supplies the pictures. The library text preserves Séraphîta from a bound volume that also named The Alkahest.
