Ella Rhoads Higginson

Ella Rhoads Higginson (c. January 28, 1862 – December 27, 1940) was an American author of award-winning fiction, poetry, and essays characteristically set in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States.

She was influential for the ways her writing drew international attention to the then little-known Pacific Northwest region of the United States.

Higginson also helped establish the first public reading room and library in Bellingham, Washington, and for a long time was a board member there.

[6] During World War I, Ella Higginson ceased writing and volunteered full-time for the American Red Cross.

She is buried in Bayview Cemetery, Bellingham, Washington beneath a self-designed granite monument adorned with four-leaf clovers, a reference to her best-known poem (Koert, 1985: 7).

Her first published work was the poem, "Dreams of the Past," which appeared in The Oregon City newspaper in 1875 when she was age 14.

At this time, she also began sending out her short fiction for publication, much of it anonymously or under various pseudonyms (such as "Ann Lester," "Ethelind Ray," and "Enid").

On March 8, 1890, an article by Higginson appeared in Portland, Oregon's West Shore, a literary magazine.

Her recommendation that women would be wise to marry no earlier than age 30 garnered Higginson national notice (Koert, 1985: 52).

The following year Higginson won McClure’s magazine short fiction contest, with a prize of $500, for "The Takin’ In of Ol’ Mis’ Lane."

In 1914, Higginson’s story "The Message of Ann Laura Sweet" was named Collier’s magazine prize story and awarded a prize of $500 by a panel consisting of former US President Theodore Roosevelt and investigative journalists Mark Sullivan and Ida Tarbell.

With these publications and awards, Higginson became known as the most popular writer of the Pacific Northwest (Baym, 2011: 55–56; Ward and Maveety, 1995: 57–59).

In 1911, Edward Mylius was jailed in England for libel after publishing a report that King George V was a bigamist.

She applied some poetic licence to the story of royal scandal, writing that when the young prince had to renounce that marriage, his beloved was given the royallest of exiles: near the City of Vancouver "in the western solitude, lived for several years -- the veriest remittance woman -- the girl who should now, by the right of love and honor, be the Princess of Wales, and whose infant daughter should have been the heir to the throne.

The newspaper mischievously opined that Lord Mayor Allen Taylor, as head of the City Council and thus responsible for its library, was as guilty as Mylius in publishing "the same statement with a cheerful disregard for the possibility of things", informing its readers that "the issuing of [a library book] constitutes publication under the law": Higginson started her lifelong editorial work at age 15 when she began work at the newspaper office of The Oregon City Enterprise, learning typesetting and editorial writing.

[9] Higginson wrote a screenplay in 1914 for a silent film entitled Just Like the Men, which follows two women running for office in Washington State facing opposition from male politicians, based upon her time managing Axtell's campaign.

[10] The original draft of the screenplay is among the materials of the Ella Higginson Papers collection housed at the Center for Pacific Northwest Studies at Western Washington University.

"The Pacific Northwest (Re)Writes New England: Civic Myth and Women’s Literary Regionalism in Ella Higginson’s Revision of The Scarlet Letter."