Elizabeth Fries Ellet (née Lummis; October 18, 1818 – June 3, 1877) was an American writer, historian and poet.

[4] Her father was William Nixon Lummis (1775–1833), a prominent physician who studied medicine in Philadelphia under the famous Dr. Benjamin Rush.

[4] In the early part of 1800, Dr. Lummis left Philadelphia and purchased the Pulteney estate in Sodus Point, Wayne County, New York.

[6] In 1835, Elizabeth Lummis published her first book, entitled Poems, Translated and Original, which included her tragedy, Teresa Contarini, based on the history of Venice, that was successfully performed in New York and other cities.

[9] She wrote Scenes in the Life of Joanna of Sicily, a history of the lifestyles of female nobility, and Rambles about the Country, a lively description of the scenery she had observed in her travels through the United States, in 1840.

[11] In 1845, Ellet left her husband in the south, moving back to New York City where she resumed her place as a member of literary society along with such writers as Margaret Fuller, Anne Lynch Botta, Edgar Allan Poe, Rufus Wilmot Griswold, Anna Cora Mowatt and Frances Sargent Osgood.

[12] During this time, Ellet was a participant in a notorious scandal involving Edgar Allan Poe and Frances Sargent Osgood, both of whom were married to others.

[22] Around 1846, Ellet began a major project in historical writing: to profile the life stories of women who sacrificed for, and were committed to, the American Revolution.

She did this by searching out unpublished letters and diaries, and by interviewing descendants of Revolutionary era and frontier women, becoming the first historian of the Revolution to carry out such an effort.

[7] She noted the "abundance of materials for the [masculine] history of action" and attempted to add balance by telling the feminine side, referring to the founding "mothers" as giving "nurture in the domestic sanctuary of that love of civil liberty which afterwards kindled into a flame and shed light on the world".

[10] Ellet also authored Domestic History of the American Revolution summarizing the same material in narrative form and also published in 1850.

Ellet told the stories of women from every colony and from all ranks of society, with the exception of African Americans, whose role she chose to ignore.

Some of the women she wrote about, such as Martha Washington, Abigail Adams, Mercy Otis Warren and Ann Eliza Bleecker, among others, were famous in their own right.

She also wrote of the women who were more obscure but equally valuable: the wives of heroes who, during the American Revolutionary War, raised children and defended their homes.

"[24] Anthologist and critic Rufus Wilmot Griswold had aided Ellet in the production of the book and granted her access to the records of the New-York Historical Society, of which he was a member.

[25] In a review, Griswold said, "with the assistance of a few gentlemen more familiar than herself with our public and domestic experience, she has made a valuable and interesting work.

The guide, which seemed to target middle to upper class readers, was organized into three parts: cooking, housekeeping and pharmaceutical concerns.

[28][29] She wroteThe Queens of American Society (1867), and Court Circles of the Republic (1869), a look at the social life of eighteen presidents from George Washington to Ulysses S.

[26] In 1850, Ellet and her husband relocated to New York, where he spent his final years as a chemical consultant for the Manhattan Gas Company.

[7] She died of Bright's disease in New York City on June 3, 1877, and was buried beside her husband at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn.