Susan Petigru King

At Talvande’s in particular she focused on French, the required language for both instructional and social dialogues, but she also studied chemistry, botany, astronomy, literature, rhetoric, German, art, dancing and music.

Sue, expecting the urban North to contain a world of excitement and adventure, was frequently discouraged by the social restrictions created by her father’s unwillingness to produce appropriate financing.

Her aunt Louise Porcher, on the other hand, considered it “safer & wise to refuse than accept,” for she could not “bear that so young a girl should be urged on that subject, as it is a step one cannot retrieve when once taken, & all the trials it may entail must be borne alone & in silence, as it is one of the few trial[s] that the sympathy of friends cannot alleviate but rather enhances.” Sue thought Henry “very short very broad & very round shouldered, & withal a little lame,” and Aunt Louise echoed that his looks presented a potential wife “substantial objection.”[8] Aged 19, Sue did accept his second request, and a month later they married.

[10] When Sue looked back fondly on her unmarried life, a time when “the hours did dance away right joyously", Henry responded that she was "'a great goose for talking so' with a side glance at little [Adele] to point his remark.

"[11] Six years into their marriage, what little warmth existed between Henry and Sue had declined precipitously, and she began a series of long, extended visits to the North with her sister Caroline.

I dare say that if you were to take to study, you might, in time, attain to the delineation of the passions and rise to the walk in which Miss Austen is admired… [Busy Moments] will be remembered longer than anything that any of the rest of us have done.

[18] King published her work anonymously, as encouraged by her father, who believed that "the interest would be better kept up by standing in the reserve and making the authorship a sort of secret … it can’t be more, considering how many are in the plot.

Sue was already mocking her daughter’s “affected & very absurd” behavior at age six, and the constant fighting between mother and father left the only child with little understanding of healthy social discourse.

The war prevented her from finding suitable publishing for her next novel, Gerald Gray’s Wife, and its eventual release by Southern Field and Fireside provided no subsequent royalties.

Jane Amelia’s addiction had progressed to the point where she was begging Confederate officer George Alfred Trenholm to procure and smuggle morphine across enemy lines.

At this point Sue was particularly depressed about her social affairs, writing that:I am obliged to shut my eyes and ears to the most glaring things, or else live in total solitude – for between the supercilious neglect of one half and the covert slander of t’other, my couch of life has many crumpled rose leaves – and I really have to be grateful to those who only abuse me behind my back, and are not impertinent to my helpless face.

[23]Sue left her mother in December 1863 to return to Columbia, where according to one cousin, she was determined "to make herself notorious during the sitting of the Legislature", a prospect at which she wholly succeeded.

"[25] Yet it was not until 1870, while working as a foreign-language clerk in Washington’s Post Office Department, that Sue participated in her most scandalous and damning public affair – her marriage to Radical Republican and carpetbagger Christopher Columbus Bowen.

Born in Rhode Island, Bowen had worked a series of odd jobs until eventually making his way to Georgia, where he volunteered (after being threatened with conscription) in the Confederate cavalry.

"[26] Afterward, he began acting as a pro-bono lawyer for newly freed slaves, and the connections he developed allowed him to become first a Republican delegate to South Carolina’s 1868 constitutional convention, and later the elected representative of its first congressional district.

[citation needed] In 1871, after marrying Sue, Bowen was arrested and tried on charges of bigamy brought by two former wives, one of which owned several brothels and was later convicted as a serial killer.

Sue deftly and adamantly defended her husband both in court and in public, writing to one Washington newspaper that she knew “that he had been an orphan boy, without relations or friends; had drifted into the company of gamblers and prostitutes, and had lived their life until it had pleased the good god to lift him from the mire.”[27] Bowen received a two-year prison sentence and a $250 fine, but Sue appealed to President Ulysses S. Grant, who eventually offered Bowen a full pardon.

Her marriage to Bowen, a man considered a thief, murderer, bigamist and traitor, was too much for even her few remaining supporters – aunt Adèle and sister Caroline – to bear.

James wrote:[Sue] led the way upstairs to her bedroom, and directing me to help her we pulled off the coverings of a bed that was dainty enough to be the resting-place of a fairy.

From which I would infer that ‘necking parties’ in Charleston were not unknown in the good old days – ‘when Plaucus was consul.’”[37] Sue bore no marks of the religious devotion that other Petigru women, including sister Caroline, ascribed to.

Finally, shortly before her death at age 51 from typhoid pneumonia, Sue flirted with Roman Catholicism (as she was being cared for by Catholic nuns), but died before any actual religious conversion occurred.

[citation needed] For most of her life, Sue was characteristically dismissive of heated political debates although, like the rest of the slave-holding Petigru family, she was adamantly against any form of abolition.

In 1850, amid constant talk of South Carolina’s possible secession, Sue wrote to her aunt Adèle of her decision to "laugh at the whole business – have not the slightest respect for the whole body of legislators."

She also helped to publish a political journal in support of her second husband’s campaign efforts, and their Charleston home was frequently visited by both white Republicans and black Freedmen.

Yet the kind of fiction written by Susan Petigru King, psychological realism in comedies of manners, has been totally ignored, and, I suppose, assumed to be non-existent in this period.

King as a psychological realist very clearly belongs to the group of writers that includes William Dean Howells and Henry James, yet today she enjoys no recognition as such in literature.

The feminine voice of Caroline Gilman that so surely touched women’s feelings and aspirations in the 1830s had become less audible, less convincing in its story of the smooth road Home.

Whereas Sue King saw humbug in "a time of overblown artifice and argument over basic matters of social and cultural authority", as well as “the sentimental constructs and hypocrisies that constrained individual expression and representation, especially of women, in her genteel society,” McCord took a different tack.

One woman was a scandalous fiction writer, and the other a highly conservative essayist, yet Moore writes that “both women expressed dismay about the general exaggeration that defined the fashions in antebellum life and letters.

Mace analyzes Sue King collective work for the ways in which it subverts the major themes of the Cult of True Womanhood, specifically piety, purity, submissiveness and domesticity.