Royal Street in the French Quarter at the time Elizabeth Bisland lived there (Illustration Credit 3.2)
Looking back years later, Elizabeth Bisland would laugh at the attitude that she, “a wretched little provincial,” initially assumed on her arrival in New Orleans, “imagining it would appreciate the condescension with which I stepped down from a poor but proud estate.” Whatever hauteur she might have brought with her from Mount Repose dissipated very quickly in the French Quarter. She was alone for the first time in her life, in a strange city where a sense of danger seemed to swirl in the air like the fog that drifted in at night from the marshes. She was not used to such a casual mingling of blacks and whites on the street, to the jumble of European and Caribbean cultures, as though the city were a colonial outpost transplanted onto the American mainland. She had learned French to read Rousseau; now she was hearing it spoken all around her, though often in a patois she did not understand. A few blocks toward the river, the stalls of the French Market had tables heaped high with dates and bananas and leathery pomegranates cut open to reveal glistening red seeds packed into pale membranes like rubies in a bed of cotton; from all around came the singsong cries of street vendors wearing dresses the colors of a tropical garden. The city was like a traveling carnival that never moved on, noisy and surprising and disorderly, and, to a young woman newly arrived from a ruined plantation, overwhelming: in the mornings she would linger behind the weather-stained front door that opened onto the Rue Royale, gathering her courage to plunge into the indifferent crowd.
The offices of the Times-Democrat were on lower Camp Street, the section of the city known as “Newspaper Row,” as thirteen papers—from the Picayune and the Ledger to the Jewish South and the Southwestern Christian Advocate—made their offices there. It was not a long walk from her boardinghouse, just past Canal Street, the city’s busiest thoroughfare and its cultural dividing line. (Canal Street, a German visitor to the city once remarked, divided New Orleans as the Straits of Dover divided England from France.) Walking to work Elizabeth Bisland would have passed from the Rue Royale to Royal Street, addressed first as “Mademoiselle” and then, a few blocks along, as “Miss.” Across Canal, on Camp Street, the store awnings and ground floor windows advertised the services of print shops and lithographers and paper warehouses and binderies, the businesses that attend a great newspaper district as camp followers accompany an army. The street, alive with carriages and streetcars, was lined on both sides with antebellum row buildings, four and five stories high, in the Greek Revival style; on spring mornings, when the windows were open, Bisland would have heard the satisfying metallic clicks of type being set by hand. In the narrow alley by the Newsboys’ Home, clusters of boys, most of them orphans, rolled dice or tossed a ball, waiting to pick up their copies of the latest edition. All around reporters, editors, typesetters, office boys hurried to make a deadline or, having already made it, paused for a moment to chat about the latest news; as in any business district of the time, there were very few women.
Not surprisingly, Elizabeth Bisland was assigned to the women’s page of the Times-Democrat, for which she wrote about the doings of high society. The New Orleans on which she was now reporting was a far different city from the one she had found in the French Quarter. It was a city of white-pillared mansions on broad, tree-lined avenues, of teas and garden clubs and flower shows, sun-filled afternoons at the Fair Grounds racetrack and glittering evenings at the French Opera: a city ruled by customs and manners, where a young lady could accompany a gentleman for a ride in his carriage but had to be chaperoned to concerts or the theater, where women read the latest books and attended the ballet but professed to be shocked by the use of the word “leg” in conversation.
Her hours, she found, were increasingly filled. There were, for instance, the regular meetings of the literary club that had been organized by the Tulane professor John Rose Ficklen, of which she was an original member (another was Julia Ward Howe, author of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”), and on Friday afternoons between three and six o’clock there was the salon at the Royal Street home of the poet and novelist Mollie Moore Davis. No invitations to the Royal Street salon were ever sent out, and none needed to be—the right people knew to attend, among them Kate Chopin and Grace King (both of whom would become famous authors), as well as New Orleans’s most celebrated writer, George Washington Cable. This salon, as Davis herself characterized it, was “a place of resort for men and women of brains and wit, where fashion is subservient to mind, and where the twaddlers cease to twaddle”—a place that provided exactly the type of intelligent, stimulating talk that Elizabeth Bisland had longed for since those long-ago dinner table conversations about English poetry. Now she could have those conversations again, week after week; in this house on Royal Street she was not the shy country girl cowering behind the door of the cheap boardinghouse but was instead a talkative, self-assured, radiant young woman. One of the salon’s participants would later recall how on those afternoons Bisland smiled spontaneously and with delight, seeming to create around her “a little circle of magnetic sunshine.”
She was tall and slender and had large, soft brown eyes with long lashes, and a graceful neck, and full lips that turned up slightly at the ends as if she was privately amused about something; her long wavy hair, pinned up in the back, was chestnut-colored, a dark frame for her pale skin. Her voice was soft, her gaze languid, and she had about her the aristocratic manner that other girls paid extravagant sums to be taught in Southern finishing schools. “She is a refined, elegant and accomplished lady,” the New Orleans Daily Picayune observed, “and one of the most beautiful women of her day.”
Another participant in the Royal Street salon, the Times-Democrat’s literary editor, Lafcadio Hearn, had already become one of Elizabeth Bisland’s closest friends; it was a friendship that would last a lifetime. Bisland had long admired Hearn’s lush, poetic, sometimes macabre sketches of New Orleans life, and soon after her arrival in New Orleans she paid a call on him at his home in the Vieux Carré, a little green-shuttered house covered in vines. He proved to be as strange and startling as the city itself. Hearn stood only five foot three, with small feet and delicate hands, but it was his eyes that most compelled attention. As a schoolboy he had injured his left eye, which became infected and then blind; the sightless eye had since turned a milky white, while his right eye, as if in compensation for the other, bulged behind his thick glasses. Dignified, gentle, and extraordinarily sensitive, Hearn would wander about the room during their conversations, softly touching the furnishings, sometimes picking up an object to study with his pocket glass, all the while keeping up a steady stream of talk about voodoo rituals, Creole cookery, Chinese ghost stories, Japanese folk tales. Bisland could scarcely have imagined a wittier or more delightful conversationalist than Lafcadio Hearn, though she quickly realized that “to remain on good terms with him it was necessary to be as patient and wary as one who stalks the hermit thrush to his nest.”
As for Hearn, he was simultaneously entranced and repelled by Bisland. She was young and beautiful and knew a great deal about poetry, but she also represented to him the new type of American woman, whom he thought of as cunning, overly ambitious, and, in his characterization, “diamond-hard.” To look at her she was a perfect Southern belle, but unlike most of the belles about whom she reported for the Times-Democrat, who married young and were proud never to have held a job, Bisland was determined to create a full intellectual and professional life for herself: to read and write as she wished, to earn her own living, to make her opinions known, in public and private alike. In one of his letters Hearn referred to her as “une jeune fille un peu farouche”—no other word, he felt, so conveyed her particular combination of shyness and force.
Though she now often found herself in upper-class company, Elizabeth Bisland had years of deprivation in her past, and she well understood that whatever money she made would come by way of her own pen—that she was, in a real sense, li
ving by her wits. Her most valuable lesson had been taught by her mother, after all: her mother, who at the age of eighteen had tied her fortunes to a man from a wealthy family and then, when history turned and the money ran out, was left with few resources of her own, with little to do but write the occasional anodyne poem and complain about the fecklessness of her husband and dream of how things used to be. Bisland was not about to repeat her mother’s mistakes. She was a professional woman trying to make her way in a world run almost exclusively by men, and in New Orleans, as her newspaper work took her around the city, she began to notice that other young women, working in a variety of fields, were facing similar challenges. Together, she thought, they might be able to assist one another, and in 1884, at the age of twenty-three, she inserted a notice into the Times-Democrat calling for the creation of a new women’s organization in the city.
In her notice Bisland reminded the paper’s readers that the men of New Orleans had the Young Men’s Christian Association and various other benevolent organizations through which they were “elevated financially, socially, and morally”—all of these benefits, she took care to point out, due at least in part to the “gratuitous labor” provided by the women’s auxiliaries of these groups. Surely, she wrote, the women of the city deserved such an organization of their own, one that would have as its goals “equal salaries with men whenever women rendered equal services, and assistance when a member was out of work or ill.” No comparable organization had ever existed before in New Orleans; the city had numerous women’s clubs, of course, but they were devoted to social activities or charitable work, not professional advancement. Hers was an exceedingly daring proposition—it was difficult enough to convince conservative Southerners that women should work outside the home, much less that they should earn as much as men—but on the following Monday evening twelve women showed up in the parlor of the local YMCA, and by the time the meeting was over the New Orleans Woman’s Club had been established and Elizabeth Bisland voted in as its first president.
The club’s constitution declared that it would be devoted to “breaking down and removing barriers of social prejudice” through both intellectual improvement and practical instruction. As time went on it offered members regular concerts, plays, and lectures on topics ranging from English and Russian literature to Louisiana history and the role of the press in shaping public opinion, as well as classes that taught skills such as typewriting, stenography, telegraphy, needlework, and elocution. A Daily Picayune article remarked that, as late as ten o’clock at night, it was not unusual “to see two or more score of husbands amiably cooling their heels in the club halls while their wives in the pretty parlors beyond were listening to literature lectures, to good music, or to practical talk, calculated to make them better homemakers or more sensible women.” The club established its own Bureau of Employment, and members took on projects to place matrons in police station houses, provide supplies to the local Woman’s and Children’s Hospital, and distribute food and clothing to flood victims. A reporter of the time, describing the successes of the New Orleans Woman’s Club to the readers of the New York weekly The Epoch, declared, “This Louisiana sisterhood … owes its existence to one woman—in this case to a journalist, Miss Elizabeth Bisland.”
Bisland had provided the club with a solid foundation, but she would not serve out the year as its first president. After three years in New Orleans, she was ready to leave. The world in which she was moving had begun to feel uncomfortably small; the more interesting people, she sensed, the more challenging writing, the more important publications, lay elsewhere. She was increasingly frustrated with what she considered to be the parochialism of the South, its chivalrous men and idealized women, its aggressive religiosity, its insistent focus on the lost glories of the past. As a girl she had imagined herself as a nymph out of Bulfinch’s Mythology, dancing in the moonlight that silvered the white irises in the garden. Even then literature had been her means of escape. Now she saw herself as the songbird she had dreamed up in a poem years before, beating its wings against the bars of its cage, longing to be part of the wider world.
ELIZABETH BISLAND ARRIVED IN NEW YORK AT NIGHT, ENTERING HER new home as she had returned to her first one, by water, breathing in the salt air and gazing up at the lights of the skyscrapers that twinkled in the darkness, as bright and distant as stars. She had fifty dollars in her purse.
The first room she found was in a modest five-story stone building on Madison Avenue at the northwest corner of Thirty-first Street. In time she would come to see herself as a kind of naturalized citizen of New York, but first she had to adjust to its strange ways. There was, she was surprised to discover, a reserve among New Yorkers that she had never experienced in the South and that made her uncomfortable. Nor had she quite anticipated how everyone there lived so piled on top of one another. Increasingly the city’s residents were taking to a European style of building called an apartment house; in 1869 New York had only a single rental apartment building, but by 1885, the year she arrived, there were three hundred. Some of these buildings had been built to resemble Moorish castles and German châteaus and were as much as fourteen stories tall. “Why not go as high as the strength of materials will permit,” suggested an article in the Real Estate Record and Buildings Guide, “or until the tenants of the upper stories begin to suffer, like Humboldt in the Andes, from nose-bleed and ringing in the ears.” In the upper stories, the tenants reached their apartments by means of a passenger elevator, with a separate elevator reserved for coal, wood, ashes, and freight. Some of the houses offered a kitchen in each apartment; others consisted simply of suites of rooms, and provided, after the fashion of hotels, a restaurant on the ground floor. Her own building had a concierge by the front door, a “large and determined” man who greeted visitors and received packages. Just down the block was a new apartment house called the Hubert Home Club, a massive brick building with gabled roofs; it rose eleven stories high and in the mornings cast the street into shadow. She had never lived in a city this cold, nor one as dark. But gas for the lights turned out to be dreadfully expensive, and coal cost twice as much by the scuttleful as by the half ton: as the saying went, it took money to economize.
Fifty dollars, Bisland knew, would not last long in a city such as this, and so she needed to find work at once. She went first to the offices of the Sun, where, thanks to letters of introduction from newspaper friends back in New Orleans, she managed to get an interview with Chester Lord, the paper’s longtime managing editor. She told him who she was and what her experience had been, and then asked about the possibility of obtaining writing work. Lord was an exceedingly courteous, mild-mannered man—both unusual qualities in the New York newspaper business—and he listened patiently to Bisland’s story; when she was finished he said to her, “My dear little girl, pack your trunk and go back home. This is no place for you.”
Bisland, however, was undeterred—she had not come more than a thousand miles only to turn around at the first rebuff—and when she persisted, Chester Lord consented to give her a trial run; she went off and soon returned with a feature article in hand, which she later recalled as being “a little sketch of a negro funeral.” Lord was impressed with the quality of writing shown in the article, its appealing mixture of humor and pathos. He published the piece in the Sun and then gave her many more assignments, which in turn helped her to place work at other publications. Before long Bisland was regularly writing feature articles for the Sun and magazines such as Harper’s Bazaar, Illustrated American, and Puck, and book reviews for a number of newspapers, including The World, where Nellie Bly would soon begin work. She also contributed the “New York Letter” to both the Brooklyn Daily Eagle and the Chicago Tribune, in which she saucily commented on some of the goings-on of metropolitan society life, from Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt’s innovation of freezing Roman punch in tulip hearts to the use of spirit guides by certain members of the stock exchange. In addition to all this, she wrote the “Literary Bric
-a-Brac” column for the Times-Democrat of New Orleans. Lafcadio Hearn reported to a friend, “She works for four papers at the same time—a very brave girl: works often eighteen and twenty hours at a stretch, and still keeps fresh and rosy and gracious as a jessamine.”
In 1887, Bisland’s older sister Molly joined her in New York; the two moved in to an apartment exactly one block west of her previous one, above a candy store on Fourth Avenue between Thirty-first and Thirty-second Streets. As time went on, Bisland became well known among New York’s creative set, and by 1889 she was hosting a Sunday afternoon salon in her apartment in which she sought to re-create the intellectually stimulating atmosphere of Mollie Moore Davis’s salon on Royal Street. Among those who attended the gatherings were the Shakespearean actor Henry Irving, the actress and elocutionist Sarah Cowell, the war correspondent Archibald Forbes, the poet Clinton Scollard, and the portrait painter William Henry Lippincott; when Coquelin, the leading man of the Comédie Française, was in New York, Bisland’s was one of the few salons the actor visited, and the only one in which he gave an impromptu performance. Her knowledge of French must have been an inducement for him to perform, as well as what The Cosmopolitan termed “her charm of manner” and, of course, her “considerable personal beauty.”
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