Elder, Susan Blanchard

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ELDER, Susan Blanchard

Born 9 April 1835, Fort Jessup, Louisiana; died 3 November 1923, Cincinnati, Ohio

Wrote under: Hermine

Daughter of Albert G. and Susan Thompson Blanchard; married Charles D. Elder, 1855

Daughter of Captain Albert G. Blanchard of the U.S. Army (later a brigadier general in the Confederate Army), Susan Blanchard Elder attended the Girls' High School and St. Michael's Convent of the Sacred Heart in New Orleans. In 1855, at the time of her marriage, Elder converted to Catholicism. Even before then, writing under the name Hermine, she was contributing to Southern newspapers stories and poems such as "Babies" and "First Ride," young outpourings of love and admiration of the beauty of life. During the Civil War, she expressed her sympathy for the Southern cause in vivid and indignant patriotic war lyrics and in the establishment of a hospital in her home in Selma, Alabama, where the Elders had fled after the capture of New Orleans by Union troops.

After the war, they returned to New Orleans. From 1882 through 1890, Elder was on the editorial staff of the Morning Star as well as a literary critic and editorial contributor for other Catholic publications. Her work includes historical and literary criticism, biographies, stories, poems, and plays written especially for Catholic colleges. The primary themes in Elder's work are love for the South, particularly New Orleans and Louisiana, and love for the church. Though acclaimed in her own time, Elder's verse now seems dated because of its melodrama and forced rhymes. For example, in "Cleopatra Dying," once called "her most admired poem," the excess emotion of the persona Cleopatra is expressed mainly through the use of 33 exclamation points. "Chateaux en Espagne," noted as a "pleasantly turned lyric of the times," claims the South will never really be defeated because of its imagination. Southerners all possess castles in the air, "Which they never can lose by tyrannical power, / And where Hope smiles serene through the gloomiest hour!"

A novel, Ellen Fitzgerald (1876), portrays events in the life of Dr. R. D. Williams, Irish patriot and poet, who died at her home at Thibodeaux, Louisiana, before the war. This work was quite popular in the South because it is filled with Southern scenes and sentiments. Probably Elder's most noteworthy contribution, however, is her careful biographical study, The Life of Abbé Adrien Rouquette (1913), which reverently traces the history from childhood to death of the poet-priest and missionary to the Louisiana Choctaw Native Americans. In it she describes the beauty of the natural environment of Louisiana, the political and religious history of the Crescent City, the literary works of Abbé Rouquette, and the customs and history of the Choctaw Native Americans. Elder's scholarship in the biography keeps her for the most part from the excessive emotion of her verse, allowing her to create an inspiring portrait of a man of faith.

Other Works:

James the Second (1874). Savonarola (1875). The Leos of the Papacy (1879). Character Glimpses of the Most Reverend William Henry Elder, D.D. (1911). Elder Flowers (1912). A Mosaic in Blue and Gray (1914).