Harriott Horry Ravenel

At the outbreak of the Civil War, Ravenel accompanied her husband to Columbia, SC, where he was to take charge of a laboratory to produce medicines for the Confederate States Army.

[7] Ravenel started writing short stories in the 1870s and published a novella about antebellum South Carolina, Ashurst; or, The Days That Are Not, in 1879.

Ravenel was a good writer and an able historian,[3] and Charleston: The Place and the People—which devoted nine-tenths of its 500 pages to the years before 1830—was influential in establishing a strain of backward-looking literature in South Carolina.

[10] Documents (including diaries) concerning Ravenel and various relatives are held by the South Carolina Historical Society.

[10] The Charleston Library Society holds a portrait of Ravenel painted by Charles Van Dyke shortly before her death.