Sarah Dorsey - Biography

Biography

Sarah Anne Ellis was born to Mary Malvina Routh and Thomas George Percy Ellis, both from wealthy planter families, in Natchez, Mississippi. Her father Thomas, a successful planter, was a member of the famed southern Percy family. In addition to writers and prominent people of the nineteenth century, in the twentieth century, it included notable politicians, lawyers and writers such as Senator LeRoy Percy, William Alexander Percy, Walker Percy, and the historian William Armstrong Percy III.

Sarah Anne Ellis was the niece of Catherine Anne Warfield and Eleanor Percy Lee, the “Two Sisters of the West,” who while young published two volumes of poetry together. Catherine Anne Warfield went on to publish a number of novels, which achieved significant popular acclaim, including The House of Bouverie, a gothic fiction in two volumes, which was a bestseller in 1860. She and Ellis became quite close after her sister Eleanor died in 1849, with Sarah Anne encouraging her to write again.

Sarah Anne’s father died when she was nine. Her widowed mother Mary soon remarried to Charles Gustavus Dahlgren, of Swedish descent. Her stepfather, who saw great potential in Sarah, provided her with a first-rate education, engaging as her tutor Eliza Ann DuPuy, the same woman who had inspired and trained her aunts Catherine and Eleanor. Later, about 1838-1841, he sent her to Madame Deborah Grelaud’s French School in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, founded in the 1790s by a refugee from the French Revolution. Mme Grelaud was a Huguenot, and the school was Episcopal. There Sarah excelled in music, painting, dancing, and languages, quickly gaining fluency in Italian, Spanish and German, as well as French.

At the school, she met the older Varina Banks Howell, whom she would meet later in life again as the wife of Jefferson Davis. During her studies in Philadelphia, Ellis found her most exciting teacher to be Anne Charlotte Lynch. (Later after her marriage, Anne Lynch Botta started the first and most famous salon in Manhattan of the 19th century. She wrote the Handbook of Universal Literature (1860), which remained in print for fifty years. At her salon, the circle of intellectuals included Horace Greeley, William Cullen Bryant, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. She frequently welcomed visitors such as Anthony Trollope, Charles Dickens, and Charles Kingsley.)