The End of The Road
Tragedy struck in Holly Springs in 1878 when a Yellow fever epidemic struck, carrying away Bonner's father and brother. She returned to the town, risking infection, and removed her daughter to safety before nursing her father and brother before they died. Sadly, tragedy followed close on the heels for Bonner herself when she was diagnosed with advanced breast cancer in 1882 and was told she had only a year to live. Desperate to leave her mark on the literary world and a financial legacy for her daughter and aunt, Bonner hid her illness from all but her closest of friends and threw herself into her work. The work produced at the later stages of her life has been described as revealing "a greater vision and… technical skill; but the pattern of development is obscured by considerable hackwork." This "hackwork" may by sympathetically attributed to the desperate hurry she was in to meet financial needs, and then to complete her work before she died. Bonner was dictating a novel up until four days before she died in Holly Springs on July 22, 1883; her literary legacy was slight, but her legacy to women of the Gilded Age and beyond has been immense. Struggling in a patriarchal, misogynistic era, Bonner exemplified the sacrifices women were to make for a professional life, she was described by her daughter in adulthood as a person "whom I wish to resemble in every way."
Read more about this topic: Katherine Sherwood Bonner Mc Dowell
Famous quotes containing the words the end, the and/or road:
“Cash-payment never was, or could except for a few years be, the union-bond of man to man. Cash never yet paid one man fully his deserts to another; nor could it, nor can it, now or henceforth to the end of the world.”
—Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881)
“Heroism works in contradiction to the voice of mankind, and in contradiction, for a time, to the voice of the great and the good.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“He taught me the mathematics of anatomy, but he couldn’t teach me the poetry of medicine.... I feel that MacFarland had me on the wrong road, a road that led to knowledge, but not to healing.”
—Philip MacDonald, and Robert Wise. Fettes (Russell Wade)