Background
Eliza Ann Dupuy was born in 1814 in Petersburg, Virginia, United States. She was the daughter of a merchant and ship-owner of that place and Norfolk. She was, on her father’s side, of French ancestry, and was proud of being a descendant of the Colonel Dupuy who received a land grant on the James River from James II for the little band of Huguenot exiles whom Dupuy led to America. Her maternal grandfather was Capt. Joel Sturdevant, commander of a company in the American Revolution, but she was, as contemporary biographers are careful to state, only “distantly connected with that old pirate known as Commodore Sturdevant. ”
Education
Dupuy's education had been extremely sketchy, and while in Kentucky she deliberately set about to educate herself in order to take up teaching.
Career
Dupuy's early childhood was spent in Norfolk, but while still in her teens she removed with her father to Kentucky. Heavy financial losses at this time made it necessary for her to contribute to the family income, and for this reason she turned to writing.
Her first novel, “Merton, a Tale of the Revolution, ” was at once accepted for publication. On the death of her father she accepted the post of governess with the family of Thomas G. Ellis in Natchez, and it was here that her first popular novel was written, “The Conspirator, ” based upon the character and career of Aaron Burr. This appeared in the New World when she was only twenty-two years old.
Some ten years later Appletons published the novel in book form, when it sold to the extent of 24, 000 copies. Her entire life was spent in the South, where she continued to teach and to write voluminously — novels and articles and short stories. Many of the latter were published in the New York Ledger under the pen name of Annie Young.
Ardent, almost fiery in her Southern sympathies, she was yet able to place her writings in Northern journals even during the Civil War.
All her novels are extremely melodramatic, the sensational promise of the titles being more than fulfilled both in plot and in style. She was a systematic worker, doing her writing in the morning and devoting the afternoon to revision.
The critics of her own day varied widely in their estimate of her ability. At the one extreme her work was considered “full of scenes of most absorbing interest, while it exhibits the purity of diction which are among Miss Dupuy’s characteristics”. At the other extreme she was dismissed as lurid and “Miss Braddonish. ” Her historical novels are the best: The Conspirator (1850), The Huguenot Exiles (1856), and All for Love (1873), al~ though none of them escapes the blight of overemotionalism.
