Ella Rhoads Higginson


Ella Rhoads Higginson was an American author of award-winning fiction, poetry, and essays characteristically set in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States. She was the author of 2 collections of short stories, 6 books of poetry, a novel, a travel book, well over 100 short stories, over 400 poems, and hundreds of newspaper essays. She was influential for the ways her writing drew international attention to the then little-known Pacific Northwest region of the United States.

Life

Ella Rhoads was born in Council Grove, Kansas, to Charles Reeve Rhoads and Mary A. Rhoads. She was the youngest of six children. In 1863, the family traveled by wagon train from Kansas to Oregon and first settled in Eastern Oregon’s Grande Ronde Valley. They later moved to Portland, then to a farm near Milwaukie, then to Oregon City.
Ella was privately tutored and also attended public school. At age 23, she married Russell Carden Higginson, age 33, a druggist from the Northeastern United States. He was a distant cousin of New England writer and abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson. In 1888, Ella and Russell Higginson moved to New Whatcom, Washington where they would live the rest of their lives. Higginson traveled to Alaska for four summers as part of the research for her travel book. In 1892, the Higginson house, known as Clover Hill, in Bellingham was built. On May 14, 1909, Russell Higginson, age 57, died after a short illness.
During World War I, Ella Higginson ceased writing and volunteered full-time for the American Red Cross. She died on December 27, 1940, at age 78, having been ill most of the year. She left an estate of about $60,000. She is buried in Bayview Cemetery, Bellingham, Washington beneath a self-designed granite monument adorned with four-leaf clovers, a reference to her best-known poem.

Writing

Ella Rhoads began writing as a child. Her first published work was the poem, "Dreams of the Past," which appeared in The Oregon City newspaper in 1875 when she was age 14. At this time, she also began sending out her short fiction for publication, much of it anonymously or under various pseudonyms. After her marriage, she began publishing under her own name. On March 8, 1890, an article by Higginson appeared in Portland, Oregon’s West Shore, a literary magazine. The article's controversial topic was divorce. In the article, Higginson argued that early marriage was more of a problem for women than divorce. Her recommendation that women would be wise to marry no earlier than age 30 garnered Higginson national notice. That same year what would become her best-known poem, "Four-Leaf Clover," was published. In 1893, Higginson’s story "The Mother of ‘Pills’" won McClure’s magazine award for best story. The following year Higginson won McClure’s magazine short fiction contest, with a prize of $500, for "The Takin’ In of Ol’ Mis’ Lane." McClure’s printed 80,000 copies of the issue in anticipation of high demand. In 1897, the Macmillan company became Higginson's main publisher. They published most of her subsequent books and heavily promoted her writing. In 1902, when Higginson’s only novel, Mariella, of Out West, was published, reviewers compared it to novels by Jane Austen, Leo Tolstoy, and Émile Zola. In 1908, Alaska, the Great Country, an account of Higginson's travels in Alaska as well as a history of Alaska, was published and subsequently went through several editions. In 1914, Higginson’s story "The Message of Ann Laura Sweet" was named Collier’s magazine prize story and awarded a prize of $500 by a panel consisting of former US President Theodore Roosevelt and investigative journalists Mark Sullivan and Ida Tarbell. With these publications and awards, Higginson became known as the most popular writer of the Pacific Northwest.

Editorial work

Higginson started her lifelong editorial work at age 15 when she began work at the newspaper office of The Oregon City Enterprise, learning typesetting and editorial writing. In later years, she served as editor of the "Fact and Fancy for Women" department for Portland, Oregon’s West Shore, a literary magazine; as associate editor of The Pacific magazine in Seattle; and as associate editor for the Seattle magazine, The Westerner.

Politics

In 1912, Higginson served as campaign manager for Washington State Republican candidate Frances C. Axtell, cousin of United States President Grover Cleveland. Axtell became the first female member of the Washington State Legislature.

Honors

Higginson was the recipient of several national awards for her short fiction. In 1931, Higginson was named first Poet Laureate of Washington State.

List of books

This list is compiled from Blain, 1990: 520; and Koert, 1985: 150-151.
Baym, Nina. Women Writers of the American West, 1833-1927. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011.
Bennett, Paula Bernat, ed. Nineteenth-Century American Women Poets. New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 1998.
Blain, Virginia, Patricia Clements, and Isobel Grundy, eds. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers From the Middle Ages to the Present. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990.
Blair, Karen J. Northwest Women: An Annotated Bibliography of Sources on the History of Oregon and Washington Women, 1787-1970. Pullman, Washington: Washington State University Press, 1997.
Gray, Janet, ed. She Wields a Pen: American Women Poets of the Nineteenth Century. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1997.
Koert, Dorothy. The Lyric Singer: A Biography of Ella Higginson. Bellingham, Washington: Center for Pacific Northwest Studies and Fourth Corner Registry. 1985.
Laffrado, Laura. "The Pacific Northwest Writes New England: Civic Myth and Women’s Literary
Regionalism in Ella Higginson’s Revision of The Scarlet Letter." Nathaniel Hawthorne Review 40, 1 18-40.
Laffrado, Laura. "Ella Rhoads Higginson, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, and Pacific Northwest Women's Literary Regionalism" Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers 31, 2 281-288.
Laffrado, Laura, ed. Selected Writings of Ella Higginson: Inventing Pacific Northwest Literature. Bellingham, Washington: Whatcom County Historical Society Press. 2015.
Murray, John A., ed. A Republic of Rivers: Three Centuries of Nature Writing From Alaska and the Yukon. New York: Oxford, 1990.
Ward, Jean M. and Elaine A. Maveety, eds. Pacific Northwest Women, 1815-1925: Lives, Memories, and Writings. Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 1995.