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 containing the words early and/or life:
“We are living now, not in the delicious intoxication induced by the early successes of science, but in a rather grisly morning-after, when it has become apparent that what triumphant science has done hitherto is to improve the means for achieving unimproved or actually deteriorated ends.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)
“The earth is not a mere fragment of dead history, stratum upon stratum like the leaves of a book, to be studied by geologists and antiquaries chiefly, but living poetry like the leaves of a tree, which precede flowers and fruit,—not a fossil earth, but a living earth; compared with whose great central life all animal and vegetable life is merely parasitic.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)