Lewis, Estelle Anna (1824–1880)
Lewis, Estelle Anna (1824–1880)
American dramatist and poet. Name variations: Stella. Born Estelle Anna Blanche Robinson near Baltimore, Maryland, in 1824; died in 1880; daughter of J.N. Robinson; attended the Female Seminary at Troy, New York; married S.D. Lewis (a Brooklyn lawyer), in 1841.
Estelle Lewis was born near Baltimore, at the country seat of her wealthy father J.N. Robinson, who died while she was an infant. Her mother was the daughter of an officer in the Revolutionary war. While a schoolgirl at Emma Hart Willard 's Female Seminary in Troy, New York, Lewis composed a verse rendering of the Aeneid into English and also published a series of stories in the Family Magazine. Leaving the seminary in 1841, she was married and lived in Brooklyn until she moved to Europe in 1858.
Her best dramatic work, the tragedy Sappho in Lesbos (1868), ran through seven editions, was translated into modern Greek, and played at Athens. Edgar Allan Poe said she was the rival of Sappho , and Lamartine called her the "female Petrarch." Besides letters on travel, literature, and art published in American journals under the name of "Stella," Lewis wrote two other tragedies, Helémah, or the Fall of Montezuma and The King's Strategem, as well as several books of poems, a collection of which was illustrated in 1866.