Blake Family

First page of "The Fables of Lillie Devereux Blake," 1879

Lillie Devereux Blake (1833-1913) was a suffragist, a noted fiction writer, journalist, essayist, lecturer, and women's rights advocate. The daughter of planter George Pollock Devereux and Sarah Elizabeth Johnson, she was born in Raleigh, North Carolina. When her father died in 1837, her mother decided to leave his plantation in Roanoke, Virginia and return with her daughters to her relatives in New Haven, Connecticut. Lillie attended Miss Apthorp's School for Girls in New Haven until age fifteen, after which she studied with a private tutor in the Yale undergraduate curriculum. She married Frank Umsted, a lawyer from Philadelphia, in 1855. The birth of their first daughter, Elizabeth, in 1857 coincided with the publication of her first story in Harper's Weekly. The years 1858-59 were marked by the birth of her second daughter, Katherine, the publication of her first novel, Southwald, and the alleged suicide of her husband. She resisted remarriage. Instead, to support her family she wrote, using pseudonyms, for mass market magazines and was a Washington-based Civil War correspondent for one magazine and two papers. In 1866, she married Grinfill Blake, an employee at a manufacturing firm in New York. She continued to support herself by writing. Among her works are a collection of short stories, a collection of essays, hundreds of uncollected short stories and essays, and five novels.

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