Woman Rice-Planter, A.
Pringle, Elizabeth W.A. [Patience Pennington, pseudonym]. A Woman Rice-Planter. Introduction by Owen Wister. Illustrations by Alice R. H. Smith. New York: Macmillan, 1913.
8vo.; illustrated; small mailing label on front pastedown; green cloth, pictorially stamped; light wear to extremities.
First edition of Pringle’s autobiography, a widely read and favorably reviewed “collection of humorous, whimsical accounts of the people and simple events at Chicora and in the summer community of Plantersville. Its lasting value, well expressed by its most recent editor, lies in ‘the story not only of her trials, vexations, and triumphs, but also the death of an old an significant industry, and the end of an era in our social and economic history’” (NAW III, p. 101). After the Civil War left her family with just one of their seven rice plantations, in 1870 Elizabeth Waties Allston married John Julius Pringle, a well-educated, aristocratic planter who died suddenly six years later. Still only partially recovered from her grief, in 1880 she bought his plantation from his heirs, and in 1885 took over its management herself, supervising the labor and occasionally working in the fields beside them. “In addition to raising rice she kept livestock and poultry, planted for fodder, and cultivated local fruits…She herself could perform almost any farm task from making mattresses of the wool of her flock to improvising a method for the delivery of a stillborn calf. She had a scientific approach to agriculture and applied new techniques such as the use of an incubator and the inoculation of alfalfa seed” (NAW III, p. 100).
Despite her aptitude for the work, Pringle could not overcome the lack of reliable labor, foul weather, and the industrial revolution which modernized the Southwest before rescuing the Deep South. During the first decade of the 20th century, she reduced the plantation’s output drastically, but was still able to remain a driving force behind cultural and historical efforts in her community. She began to achieve some degree of success with her writing, which until then she had pursued seemingly in vain, enduring countless rejections of her stories and plays. Many of the diary entries which became A Woman Rice-Planter first appeared as a series in the New York Sun (1904-07) under the name Patience Pennington. After the success of the book publication—which added a considerable amount of additional material, an introduction by Owen Wister, and illustrations—she wrote her recollections of plantation life in her father’s day, published as Chronicles of Chicora Wood; it was published posthumously in 1922.
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