cover image America's Joan of Arc: The Life of Anna Elizabeth Dickinson

America's Joan of Arc: The Life of Anna Elizabeth Dickinson

J. Matthew Gallman, . . Oxford Univ., $30 (262pp) ISBN 978-0-19-516145-8

Born into a fiercely abolitionist Philadelphia Quaker family in 1842, feisty Anna Dickinson discovered her love of the limelight at 17 when her spontaneous invective drove a male speaker from a women's rights meeting. Soon, the gifted orator was delivering dozens of public lectures critiquing the progress of the Civil War and Lincoln's refusal to renounce slavery. Taken under the wing of leading abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison, Dickinson was both a celebrity and an oddity, with a lecture attended by Lincoln and Congress and a rash of newspaper coverage, including one story that dubbed her "a Joan of Arc that God sent into the field" to help a nation in crisis. After the war, the iconoclastic orator had a complicated relationship with the suffrage movement and with Susan B. Anthony, and added novelist, playwright and actress to her already bulging résumé. Middle age brought poverty, illness, alcoholism and a lawsuit against the Republican Party for withheld lecture fees. Her lowest point came in 1891 with a brief but humiliating commitment to an insane asylum by the sister Dickinson had supported financially for years. Illuminating the life and times of an extraordinary 19th-century woman, historian Gallman's (Mastering Wartime ) well-researched volume will mainly interest scholars of American and women's history. Photos. (Apr.)