Sara Jane Lippincott

The volumes for older readers are two series of collected prose writings, Greenwood Leaves (1849, 1851); Poems (1850); Haps and Mishaps of a Tour in Europe (1852); A Forest Tragedy (1856); A Record of Five Years (1867); New Life in New Lands (1873); Victoria, Queen of England. This last was published, in 1883, by Anderson & Allen of New York, and Sampson, Low & Marston, London. Lippincott was connected as editor and contributor with various American magazines, as well as weekly and daily papers. Lippincott also wrote much for London journals, especially for All the Year Round. For several years, she lived almost wholly in Europe, for the benefit of her greatly impaired health and for the education of her daughter. When she returned to the United States, she lived in Washington, D.C, and then New York. She was a prominent member of the literary society of New York along with Anne Lynch Botta, Edgar Allan Poe, Margaret Fuller, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Horace Greeley, Richard Henry Stoddard, Andrew Carnegie, Mary Mapes Dodge, Julia Ward Howe, Charles Butler, Fitz-Greene Halleck, Delia Bacon, and Bayard Taylor, among others.

• Name — Sara Jane Lippincott • Pseudonym — Grace Greenwood • Birth Name — Sara Jane Clarke • Born — 23 September 1823 • Birthplace — Pompey, New York, U.S. • Died — 20 April 1904 • Place of death — New Rochelle, New York • Resting Place — Grove Cemetery, New Brighton, Pennsylvania, U.S. • Occupation — * Author • poet • correspondent • lecturer • newspaper founder • Language — English • Alma Mater — Greenwood Institute • Genre — journalism, fiction, poetry, children's literature • Subject — women's rights, abolition • Children — Annie Grace Lippincott • Relatives — Jonathan Edwards

Sara Jane Clarke was born on September 23, 1823, at Pompey, New York to parents Deborah Baker Clarke (c. 1791–1874) and Dr. Thaddeus C. Clarke (1770–1854), a descendant of the family of Jonathan Edwards. • Illustration — Lippincott's house in New Brighton Fearless, at ten years of age, she rode a bare-backed horse, standing on his back. At the age of twelve, she went to school in Rochester, New York living with her older brother. There was nothing remarkable about her education, but she did study Italian, algebra, calculus, English and French history, though literature was her delight, and it became evident that writing was her vocation. At the age of sixteen, she was providing "fresh, piquant, racy" pieces to the Rochester papers. She removed with her family in 1842 to New Brighton, Pennsylvania, where her father practiced as a physician, and which she considered to be her home time for the rest of her life. There, she attended the Greenwood Institute, a ladies' academy, from which she may have taken her pseudonym. She left school at the age of nineteen.

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• Illustration — The Little Pilgrim masthead, 1855 On October 17, 1853, she married Leander K. Lippincott, of Philadelphia, who was a correspondent for several New York papers. That year, Lippincott and her husband started The Little Pilgrim, a monthly American children's magazine devoted to the amusement, instruction, and well-being of children. She was soon producing magazine articles and essays, her contributions conveying historical and biographical information. In this paper, Louisa May Alcott made her debut as a writer of children's stories. Collected from time to time, and published by Ticknor & Fields, they made a juvenile library numbering nearly a dozen volumes, remarkable for the felicitous manner in which they conveyed historical information. On October 3, 1855, they had a daughter, Annie Grace. In the spring of 1856, a volume, entitled A Forest Tragedy, and other Tales, appeared; and in the fall of 1857, Stories and Legends of History and Travel, was the second of her travel series.

Distinguishing herself as a lecturer on literary topics, Lippincott also lectured extensively before and during the Civil War on her abolitionist stance and to other social issues, such as prison and asylum reform, as well as the abolition of capital punishment. During the war, Lippincott was a lecturer to soldiers and at United States Sanitary Commission Sanitary Fairs. President Abraham Lincoln referred to her as "Grace Greenwood the Patriot". However, women's rights became the focus of her speeches, particularly after the war. Her writings from this period were republished in Records of Five Years (1867). By the 1870s, Lippincott wrote primarily for the New York Times. Her articles focused mainly on women's issues, such as advocating for Fanny Kemble's right to wear trousers, Susan B. Anthony's right to vote and all women's right to receive equal pay for equal work.

• Illustration — Lippincott's summer cottage, Manitou, Colorado, 1876 • Illustration — Sara Lippincott (1895) The marriage was not a happy union. After her husband fled the United States in 1876 to escape prosecution for misappropriation of government funds, Lippincott continued her writing and resumed lecturing in order to support herself and her daughter, who trained for a career on the stage. By 1879, Lippincott was residing in London, having moved to Europe with her daughter. For the ten years preceding this, she had done most work and won most distinction in journalism, principally in articles contributed from Washington, to the New York Tribune and the New York Times, on national and political questions, which she has handled in a patriotic way, showing an unusual knowledge of political history and of the construction, principles and tactics of the two opposing parties of the United States and time. She had also contributed to the New York Times, and a leading California journal, several series of letters from Europe—principally from London. She worked for the London Journal, and also wrote a biography, Queen Victoria: Her Girlhood and Womanhood (1883). In 1887, she returned to the United States and continued to work. In 1895, she was living on Capitol Hill with her daughter, and was engaged upon the piece, "Recollections of Washington". But as much as she loved the capital city, her health was better when she was abroad.

There appear in the writings of Lippincott three phases of development, three epochs of a literary career. The first lasted from the days of the boarding-school till marriage, —from the first merry chit-chat and Greenwood Leaves, to the full-rounded, mellow prime, as displayed in the letters from Europe. Then follows a decade, during which story-writing for children principally occupied her pen. With the Civil War commenced the third period, years "vexed with the drums and tramplings," the struggles of middle life.

• Greenwood Leaves (1850) • History of my Pets (1851) • Poems (1851) • Recollections of my Childhood, and other stories (1852) • Haps and Mishaps of a Tour in Europe (1854) • Merrie England (1855) • Forest Tragedy, and other tales (1856) • Stories and Legends of Travel and History (1857) • Stories from Famous Ballads (1860) • Bonnie Scotland (1861) • Records of Five Years (1867) • Stories and Sights of France and Italy (1867) • Stories of Many Lands (1867) • Eminent Women of the Age: being narratives of the lives and deeds of the most prominent women of the present generation (1868) • Summer Etchings in Colorado (1873) • New Life in New Lands (1873) • Heads and Tails: studies and stories of pets (1875) • Emma Abbott, prima donna (1878) • Queen Victoria, her girlhood and womanhood (1883) • Stories for Home-folks, young and old (1884) • Stories and Sketches (1892) (with Rossiter W. Raymond) • Treasures from Fairyland (1879)

* * * * * * • This book has multiple authors. The chapter titled "Grace Greenwood,—Mrs. Lippincott" is by Joseph B. Lyman.