Page:The part taken by women in American history.djvu/416

Rh Atlanta, who has been on the editorial staff of several journals and magazines of the North and South, is a prolific writer for the leading magazines and the author of many novels, and is a member of several clubs in New York and in the South.

In Marion Harland's "Autobiography," published in 1910, occurred these words, "The idea of reviewing my life upon paper first came to me with the consciousness—which was almost a shock—that of all the authors still on active professional duty in our country I am the only one whose memory runs back to the stage of our national history which preceded the Civil War by a quarter century. I alone am left to tell of my own knowledge and experience when the old South was in debt and in trouble."

But Mrs. Terhune, who was born in Virginia in 1831, must have had a slight lapse of memory when she was penning these words, for Mrs. Pryor, who was born in Virginia in 1830, as already cited in this article, is a living writer, and Mrs. Ruth McEnery Stuart, novelist and clubwoman, who was born in Louisiana long before the Civil War, and who, as the widow of a cotton planter, remembers the old South, and though she has resided in New York in recent years, has been a factor of some influence in the building of the new South. Mrs. Virginia Carolina Clay Clopton, born in North Carolina in 1825, widow of Clement Claiborne Clay, of Alabama, and author of "Memories of Mrs. Clay, of Alabama," or "A Belle of the Fifties," is also still living. Mrs. Myrta Lockett Avary, who resided in Atlanta and who has been actively identified with settlement and charity work for many years, and has been contributor to many magazines and newspapers, and who knows a little of the old South from recollections, is the author of "A Virginia Girl in the Civil War" and "Dixie After the War," and has edited "A Diary from Dixie" and "Letters and Recollections of Alexander H. Stevens." The daughter. of Louis T. Wigfall, of