Lizzie Petit Cutler

Background

Lizzie Petit Cutler was born in 1831, in Milton, Virginia, United States. Her father’s people were “respectable farmers, ” and her mother was descended from distinguished Anglo-French Virginia landowners.

Education

The child’s education had been irregular, and in her new residence it was made more so by the constant necessity of meeting the social obligations of life in a university environment.

Career

In 1855 she published, with half-hearted anonymity, Light and Darkness, a Story of Fashionable Life. She chose as her scene places which she had not had the fortune to visit—New York, New Haven, and the expanse of Europe, and she professed “to veil a moral in every scene, ” but in one essential regard she defied the canons of romance. “I have endeavored, ” she, said, “to portray the bad not as wholly bad nor the good as immaculate, since of human nature either is rarely or never true. ” The heresy of this view-point was widely and vigorously denounced, and the Southern Literary Messenger of October 1855, while admitting the interest of the book, calls it “a story of guilty love, ” and judges that “it had far better never been published. ”

The author fled to New York. Society there did not blench at receiving her, but the late furore proved so disciplinary that in her next book, Household Mysteries, a Romance of Southern Life (1856), she maintained a more seemly attitude. In 1858, she published The Stars of the Crowd, or Men and Women of the Day. Soon afterward, a misunderstanding with her publishers made it necessary for her to earn money.

She undertook a series of public readings and so won the popular favor that she determined to become an actress. This resolution was defeated by her marriage to Peter G. Cutler, a prominent New York lawyer. During her married life, social activities absorbed most of the energy which she had formerly devoted to writing. When her husband died in 1870 he left her an ample livelihood, but it soon disappeared and she was forced to return to Charlottesville to ask help of friends whom she had long before estranged by the “latitude” of her writings. She sincerely attempted atonement by returning to the stricter ideals of her very young womanhood, and by writing industriously, though not with great success, for any publication that would accept her work. She spoke tenderly of the Confederacy, and people remembered that “during the war, though she was in New York, powerless to aid her people, she had given them her sympathy and tears. ”

But from 1865 to 1902 is a long while, and the Richmond newspapers, when occasion came, gave brief notice of her sudden, solitary death as that of “an aged, dependent old woman, in a cheap boarding house. ” She had friends, the reporter added, in South Carolina and in Tennessee.

Achievements

• Cutler's first novel, "Light and Darkness, " was republished in London and translated into French.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Light and Darkness: Or the Shadow of Fate, a Story of Fashionable Life (Classic Reprint)

    (Excerpt from Light and Darkness: Or the Shadow of Fate, a...)

  • Household Mysteries: A Romance Of Southern Life

    (This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. T...)

Connections

Cutler married Peter G. Cutler, a prominent New York lawyer.

husband:

Peter G. Cutler

lawyer