Grace Elizabeth King (November 29, 1852 - January 12, 1932) was an American author of Louisiana stories, history, and biography, and a leader in historical and literary activities. New Orleans novelist and historian Grace King made the city and state of her birth an abiding theme in her work. She was prolific in several genres: short fiction, the novel, memoir, biography, social and cultural history.
Background
Grace Elizabeth King was born in New Orleans on November 29, 1852, the third of seven children of lawyer William Woodson King, a New Orleans attorney, and Sarah Ann Miller King. The family had an aristocratic background had been impoverished by the American Civil War. The outbreak of the Civil War and the subsequent occupation of New Orleans by Federal troops interrupted King’s childhood and formal education. Like so many families of their stature, the King family lost nearly everything in the course of the war and was forced to rent a house in a less-than-fashionable district of New Orleans. Despite this disruption, the King children received a solid education, and by the mid-1880s Grace King had turned to writing for both financial and intellectual reasons.
King never married; she lived with her (also unmarried) sisters and traveled widely and independently after gaining fame as a writer. Her brand of "local color" struck the right note for late-nineteenth century American readers.
She is buried in Metairie Cemetery in New Orleans.
Career
During a period of nearly fifty years, she wrote three novels, two novellas, four histories, three collections of stories, two biographies, an autobiography, a drama, and countless articles. Like many southern white women of her generation, Grace King became an apologist for the antebellum South in the aftermath of the Civil War. Maternal themes as well as the defining events of women’s lives—education, marriage or the single life, work, motherhood — permeate her stories. She credits her mother’s storytelling on New Orleans balconies as the inspiration for her writing.
Her works closely echoes the King family’s experiences fleeing New Orleans during the war. King offers a perspective on issues that touched every woman of her station, such as her lamentations on the death of her mother and brother and details about family conflicts. Overall, her journals reveal the rich texture of southern life, especially that of the region's white and black women. Her reflections on the centrality of white and black women to "civilizing" the nation, for example, offer historians and literary critics alike ample material for evaluating the postwar South's racial ideologies.
She was a very prolific historian.While King’s fiction took place in the Louisiana of her day, her historical studies explored colonial Louisiana. In all her histories, she essentially feminized the process of historical research. As she states in Creole Families of New Orleans, history lay just as much in “bits of old furniture, jewelry, glass, old miniatures, portraits, scraps of silk and brocade” as in the dusty volumes of historical archives. As chronicler of New Orleans and Louisiana, she became a cultural ambassador for, and defender of, the region she called home.
Her fiction and history were complementary aspects of a complex vision documenting a society in transition and a formative period in the lives of southern and American women. For many late nineteenth-century readers, particularly in the South, Grace King became the voice of post–Civil War New Orleans.