Katherine Sherwood Bonner Mc Dowell - The End of The Road

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 of, the and/or road:

    The elephant sneezed
    And fell on his knees,
    And that was the end of the monk,
    the monk, the monk.
    —Unknown. Animal Fair. . .

    New Treasury of Children’s Poetry, A; Old Favorites and New Discoveries. Joanna Cole, comp. (1984)

    I have given the best of myself and the best work of my life to help obtain political freedom for women, knowing that upon this rests the hope not only of the freedom of men but of the onward civilization of the world.
    Mary S. Anthony (1827–1907)

    By the road to the contagious hospital
    under the surge of the blue
    mottled clouds driven from the
    northwest—a cold wind.
    William Carlos Williams (1883–1963)