Sarah Ellen Blackwell (1828
- January 18, 1901) was an American author, biographer, and artist.
Queer Places:
Green-Wood Cemetery
Brooklyn, Kings County (Brooklyn), New York, USA
Sarah Ellen Blackwell (1828
- January 18, 1901) was an American author, biographer, and artist.
Sarah Ellen Blackwell was the youngest daughter of Hannah Lane and Samuel Blackwell, a sugar refiner and lay preacher.[1] She was born in Bristol, England, and her family emigrated to the United States four years later, eventually settling in Cincinnati, Ohio.[1] Her father died when she was a child, and she was educated in part by her older sisters, the physicians Elizabeth Blackwell and Emily Blackwell.[2] Of the sisters, Elizabeth Blackwell was the first woman to receive a medical degree in the United States, while Emily Blackwell was the third. Anna Blackwell was a writer, journalist, and translator. Their sister-in-law, Antoinette Brown Blackwell, was the first woman to be ordained as a mainstream Protestant minister in the United States. Governesses provided her education.[5]
Ellen Blackwell was interested in the arts, and around 1850 she began studying art at the newly opened Philadelphia School of Design for Women; she also took classes in New York.[2][3] In 1855, she went to Europe to continue her training, studying design in Paris before moving on to study painting in London with John Ruskin.[1] She funded her trip in part by writing weekly letters for two Philadelphia newspapers, an opportunity that opened up after one of her stories won a prize in a magazine contest.[2]
On her return to New York after four years in Europe, she opened a studio and began teaching painting and drawing.[2] She eventually closed this studio in order to work with her physician sisters, though she continued to write for magazines and newspapers.[2] She published a series of letters about Anna Ella Carroll, whose role as an adviser to President Lincoln's cabinet during the American Civil War was being much discussed at the time by feminists.[2] In 1891, she published the first full-length biography of Carroll, the well-researched but partisan A Military Genius: Life of Anna Ella Carroll.[2] More recent biographies and analyses generally take a more moderate view of Carroll's accomplishments than Blackwell did.[4] Blackwell was active in the anti-vivisection movement.[1] She died in 1901, and many of her letters are held among the Blackwell family papers at Radcliffe College's Schlesinger Library.[1]
Blackwell raised three adopted children on her own — Cornelia, Paul, and Susie — and often looked after Anna, Emily's adopted daughter.[1]
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