KING, Grace Elizabeth

Born 29 November 1851, New Orleans, Louisiana; died 14 January 1932, New Orleans, Louisiana

Daughter of William W. and Sarah Miller King

The eldest of four girls in a family of eight children, Grace Elizabeth King was raised in the French-speaking Creole society of New Orleans by her Protestant mother and staunchly Confederate lawyer father. A member of the state legislature prior to the Civil War, he was barred for a time from practicing law for refusing to take the oath of allegiance to the Union. King's memories of antebellum life and view of Southern defeat and Reconstruction were shaped by her youthful experiences of flight from New Orleans, loss of the family home, and years of relative privation. Only gradually did her father reestablish a thriving law practice. Like other cultivated upper-class whites who had lost most in the war, King became a conservative.

Upon the family's return to the city at the end of Union occupation, King attended the Institut St. Louis and graduated with a prize in French at age sixteen, after which she continued her studies at the school of Heloise Cenas, where she developed an interest in writing. Her skill in French led her to Maupassant and other French authors from whom she learned techniques of realism influential in her treatment of regional subjects. In 1904, with a brother and two unmarried sisters, King purchased a permanent home in New Orleans, their residence for the remainder of their lives. She made three trips to Europe, finding Paris most congenial to her writing, interest in theater, and friendships with women.

Her criticism of what she considered George Washington Cable's negative portrayals of Creole society in a conversation with the Century magazine editor in 1885 led to his challenge that some local author might try producing better work. From this stimulus grew her first story, "Monsieur Motte," published in 1886 through the efforts of a family friend and respected advisor, Charles Dudley Warner, editor of Harper's. At Warner's invitation she visited Connecticut in 1887 and met, among others of the Nook Farm group, Samuel Clemens and his wife Olivia, who became her longtime confidant. On the whole she detested the North, finding affection for only a few admirable "exceptions."

Minor praise in the northern press led to the acceptance of other stories in monthlies such as Century. To "Monsieur Motte" she added three stories and published them as a first collection in 1888. Her stories centered on women's experiences. Later, she wrote articles for Harper's Bazaar, introducing the French intellectuals she met in Paris to American readers, and contributed a number of short pieces about such figures as Baudelaire, Mérimée, and Paul Desjardins to Warner's Library of the World's Best Literature (1896-97).

From 1893 to 1898, King turned her attention to writing historical works about the territory and state of Louisiana, following the example of Charles Gayarré, a distinguished conservative Southern historian and beloved family friend. Jean Baptiste le Moyne (1892) is a biography of the Canadian founder of Mobile and New Orleans. With H. R. Ficklen, a Tulane University professor, she wrote A History of Louisiana (1893), primarily a school text. New Orleans: The Place and the People (1895), a model municipal history, is her best historical work.

King wrote few stories and articles and only two novels in the last 20 years of her life. The Pleasant Ways of St. Médard (1916) is an autobiographical work dealing with the economic struggle and humiliation of the Reconstruction period; and La Dame de Sainte Hermine (1924), a historical romance set in 18th-century New Orleans. Creole Families of New Orleans (1921), an interesting interpretive history, is based on the lives of French and Spanish families who contributed to the development of the city's culture in the 18th and 19th centuries.

"The past is our only real possession in life" begins King's Memories of a Southern Woman of Letters, published posthumously in 1932. More a study of King's friendships than a detailed picture of her life, it recalls in an overly refined manner the genteel society King sought to reestablish after her family's misfortunes.

King was a competent realist at her best. Her fiction offers instructive contrast with that of Cable and Kate Chopin; her most notable efforts can be found in Balcony Stories (1893), several uncollected stories, New Orleans, and in sections of her Memories.

Other Works:

Tales of a Time and Place (1892). DeSoto and His Men in the Land of Florida (1898). Stories from Louisiana History (with J. R. Ficklen, 1905). A Splendid Offer: A Comedy for Women (1926). Mount Vernon on the Potomac (1929).

Bibliography:

Bush, R., Grace King: A Southern Destiny (1983). Bush, R., Grace King of New Orleans: A Selection of Her Writings (1973). Civil War Women: The Civil War Seen Through Women's Eyes in Stories by Louisa May Alcott, Kate Chopin, Eudora Welty, and Other Great Women Writers (1990). Elfenbein, A. S., Women on the Color Line: Evolving Stereotypes and the Writings of George Washington Cable, Grace King, Kate Chopin (1989). Gehman, M. E., "The Creole Controversy Between George Washington Cable and Grace King: A Thesis" (thesis, 1987). Heidari, M. W., "Grace King in Her Journals, 1886-1910" (thesis, 1991). Kirby, D. K., Grace King (1980). Lyles, E. R., "A Transitional Generation: Grace King's World, 1852-1932" (thesis, 1991). Ripples of Dissent: Women's Stories of Marriage in the 1890s (1996). Shannon, A. W., "Women on the Color Line: Subversion of Female Stereotypes in the Fiction of Cable, King, and Chopin" (thesis, 1984). Signet Classic Book of American Short Stories (1985). Slayton, G. C., "Grace E. King: Her Life and Works" (dissertation, 1974). Sneller, J. E., "Man-Figs and Magnolias, Ladies and Lariats Humor and Irony in the Writings of Three New Orleans Women, 1865-1916" (thesis, 1993). Williams, C. A., "A Southern Writer's Retrospective: Betrayal, Rage and Survival in the Reconstruction Fiction of Grace King" (thesis, 1986).

Reference works:

DAB. NAW (1971). NCAB, 2. Other references: AL (March 1972). Louisiana Historical Quarterly (Oct. 1934). SLJ (Fall 1974). Southern Review (April 1977).

—THEODORA R. GRAHAM