Life
Swisshelm was born Jane Grey Cannon in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA, one of several children of Mary (Scott) and Thomas Cannon, both of Scots-Irish descent; her father was a merchant and real estate speculator.
In 1823, when Jane was eight years of age, both her sister Mary and her father died of consumption, leaving the family in straitened circumstances. Jane worked at manual labor, doing lace making and painting on velvet, and her mother colored leghorn and straw hats. At twelve she was sent to boarding school for several weeks, as there were no public schools at the time. When she returned home, she learned the doctor thought she was in the first stage of consumption. Her mother had already lost four of her children to illnesses. She moved with her children to Wilkinsburg, a village outside Pittsburgh, and started a store. After some more formal study, in 1830, Jane started teaching classes for village children. That year her family learned that her older brother William, much loved by all, had died of yellow fever in New Orleans, where he had gone for work.
Read more about this topic: Jane Swisshelm
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“One idea is enough to organize a life and project it
Into unusual but viable forms, but many ideas merely
Lead one thither into a morass of their own good intentions.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“Capital punishment kills immediately, whereas lifetime imprisonment does so slowly. Which executioner is more humane? The one who kills you in a few minutes, or the one who wrests your life from you in the course of many years?”
—Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904)
“In ‘70 he married again, and I having, voluntarily, assumed the legal guilt of breaking my marriage contract, do cheerfully accept the legal penalty—a life of celibacy—bringing no charge against him who was my husband, save that he was not much better than the average man.”
—Jane Grey Swisshelm (1815–1884)