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
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