Early Life
She grew up in Philadelphia. Her mother died when she was very young, and she was sent away to a convent school from the ages of 8 to 17. When she returned to her father's home, he had remarried, and she was bored with the demands and restrictions of being a proper Catholic young lady. She wanted to work, and, with the encouragement of her uncle, the writer and folklorist Charles Godfrey Leland, she took up writing as a career. She started with articles in periodicals such as Atlantic Monthly, and through this work she met a young Quaker artist named Joseph Pennell, who had also had to face down parental disapproval to pursue his creative calling. This began a fruitful collaboration between writer and illustrator.
Read more about this topic: Elizabeth Robins Pennell
Famous quotes related to early life:
“Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians ...”
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)