Beatrice Ravenel

Beatrice Ravenel (1870-1956). Courtesy elle est belle la seine la seine elle est belle.

Beatrice Witte Ravenel (August 24, 1870 - March 15, 1956) was an American poet.

Life

Ravenel was born Beatrice Witte in Charleston, South Carolina, the daughter of Charlotte Sophia (Reeves) and Charles Otto Witte. She was educated at the Charleston Female Seminary.

In 1889 she enrolled in the women's division of Harvard University, where she associated with a literary circle that included Trumbull Stickney and William Vaughn Moody, wrote for the Harvard Monthly and Advocate, and also published poems in Scribner's Magazine, The Chap-Book, and the The Literary Digest.

She married Francis Gualdo Ravenel, the son of writer and biographer Harriott Horry Ravenel, in 1900. They had a daughter, Beatrice St. Julien Ravenel, in 1904. The family lived on a plantation near Charleston. By the late 1910s, most of the money her family had left her was gone, and she began writing again to help support the family. Besides writing poetry, she published fiction in Ainslee's Magazine, Harper's Magazine, and the Saturday Evening Post, and (beginning in 1919) wrote editorials for the Columbia (South Carolina) State.

Francis Ravenel died in 1920. In 1926, Beatrice married Samuel Prioleau Ravenel. No longer having to support herself and her daughter through writing, she wrote little from then on. The Ravenels travelled extensively. She died at the age of 85.

Writing

According to Southern Writers: A biographical dictionary, Ravenel's early poetry consisted of "sentimental abstractions of the waning genteel tradition." In the early 1920's, however, her writing underwent an "abrupt change," and she "began producing free verse of notable economy of diction, precision of language, and vivid imagery."

Publications

Poetry

• The Arrow of Lightning. New York: H. Vinal, 1926.
• The Yemasee Lands: Poems of Beatrice Ravenel. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1969.

Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy WorldCat.

See also

• List of U.S. poets

References

Fonds

• Beatrice Witte Ravenel Papers, 1892-1948 in the Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina.

External links

Poems

• Ravenel in Poetry: A magazine of verse, 1912-1922: "The Gypsy," "Harbor Water," "White Azaleas in Magnolia Gardens," "Dew," "The Only Child," "Lill' Angels"

Books

• Beatrice Ravenal at Amazon.com