Elleanor Eldridge, born of African and US indigenous descent in
1794, operated a lucrative domestic services business in nineteenth
century Providence, Rhode Island. In defiance of her gender and
racial background, she purchased land and built rental property
from the wealth she gained as a business owner. In the 1830s,
Eldridge was defrauded of her property by a white lender. In a
series of common court cases as alternately defendant and
plaintiff, she managed to recover it through the Rhode Island
judicial system. In order to raise funds to carry out this
litigation, her memoir, which includes statements from employers
endorsing her respectable character, was published in 1838. Frances
Harriet Whipple, an aspiring white writer in Rhode Island, narrated
and co-authored Eldridge's story, expressing a proto-feminist
outrage at the male ""extortioners"" who caused Eldridge's loss and
distress. With the rarity of Eldridge's material achievements
aside, Memoirs of Elleanor Eldridge forms an exceptional antebellum
biography, chronicling Eldridge's life from her birth through the
first publication of almost yearly editions of the text between
1838 and 1847. Because of Eldridge's exceptional life as a freeborn
woman of color entrepreneur, it constitutes a counter-narrative to
slave narratives of early 19th-century New England, changing the
literary landscape of conventional American Renaissance studies and
interpretations of American Transcendentalism. With an introduction
by Joycelyn K. Moody, this new edition contextualizes the
extraordinary life of Elleanor Eldridge - from her acquisition of
wealth and property to the publication of her biography and her
legal struggles to regain stolen property. Because of her
mixed-race identity, relative wealth, local and regional renown,
and her efficacy in establishing a collective of white women
patrons, this biography challenges typical African and indigenous
women's literary production of the early national period and
resituates Elleanor Eldridge as an important cultural and
historical figure of the nineteenth century.
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