Ever heard of Ellen Brown Anderson? You’re about to. She’s the author of what may be the first novella about Florida, written by a woman.
It’s set in Key West. That’s where she moved after a major hurricane in 1846 leveled the town. She was close to her sister, Corinna Brown Aldrich, who was also a writer.
“The sisters went there because Edward, Corinna’s husband, was applying for a job at the Marine Hospital in Key West, he was a physician. And by that time, Ellen's husband had been killed in the Mexican War, and so she and her three children went everywhere that Corinna and Edward went, and that's how they ended up in Key West,” said Keith Huneycutt, a professor of English at Florida Southern College in Lakeland.
He said long before Miami came to be and while Tampa was still Fort Brooke, Key West was the place to be to make your fortune.
And shipwreckers did a brisk business.
"You know, the shipwreckers go out, they rescue anybody, any survivors, and then they come, they auction off the goods on the shipwrecks. I'm not sure if you're familiar with that industry in Key West. It was a big thing in the old days, and there are a lot of reports, like from court proceedings and descriptions of the shipwrecks. But she talks about how the families in Key West distributed those goods, what use they made out of out of them," Huneycutt said.
Recalling the 'Havana Hurricane'
What’s known as the “Havana Hurricane” — a Category 5 storm by today’s measure — killed 60 people and became the subject of an unpublished manuscript by Anderson, who was a widow with three children.
It’s called “The Storm” and Huneycutt is the editor of the newly published book.
Through contact with Anderson’s descendants, her letters and a tip-off, he and colleague Mike Denham found the manuscript in the University of Florida’s Special Collections.
Determining the author was a bit of a puzzle, but Huneycutt said it became clear it was Ellen.
“Ellen is a is a very clear and correct kind of writer. I think she fits into maybe a 19th century realism," Huneycutt said. "She doesn't indulge in fantasy or anything that is not sort of day-to-day realism and even domestic concerns. But she's also a very deliberate in her description and account of events.”
Huneycutt said this is a book people need to see. Such as lovers of Florida, Key West people, and literary people in Key West. He said it should also be interesting to people who have never heard of Ellen Brown Anderson.
“I've seen just a stack of unpublished manuscripts for stories and essays that some of them not finished, and it just is kind of sad that they (Ellen and Corinna) had bad luck with publishing," Huneycutt said. "Corinna seems to have given up, but Ellen never gave up. Even later, after they left Key West and she went to New York, she tried to pursue a writing career.
"She always wanted to support herself after her husband died. She got a little military pension, and she got help from her brothers, but her letters are always talking about how she wants to support herself. And she thinks that her best skill is writing, and so she wanted to support herself with writing, and she just never could get a break," Huneycutt said.
A 16-year-old's story
The story in “The Storm” is centered around 16-year-old Jenny Greenough.
“The story tells how she went from being a young married bride to the storm and how that changes her life, and she ends up as a person with kind of a second chance to have a more fulfilling life than she had with Peter, her husband, who turns out to be a scoundrel, basically, and someone who doesn't respect her as a person," Huneycutt said. "And she talks a lot about being married too early in life, 16, she decides was too early and she regrets being poorly educated.”
He said while some of the novella is clearly autobiographical, the part about her husband being a scoundrel doesn’t seem to apply.
But Ellen Brown Anderson did lament her own lack of formal education and the challenges of being woman in the 19th century.
The book has three charming illustrations, one with a woman under a mosquito net in what looks like a parlor.
Huneycutt thinks these were done by Ellen’s brother, Mannevillette Brown, or one of her daughters, who were both taught by him.
It’s easy to think about the difficulties faced by Anderson’s English peers, such as George Eliot and the Bronte sisters, but Huneycutt says there’s a clear distinction.
And that is that those women authors did not have children.
Huneycutt mentioned the Virginia Woolf essay “A Room of One's Own,” which says for a woman to be able to write, she must have time and space and no other things to focus on.
“I always think about that essay when I'm thinking about Ellen down in Key West, under the under the mosquito net, trying to even to write letters and get them to the boat before it's gone," Huneycutt said. "It's a challenge because the kids are doing this and that, and she is educating them at the same time. So, she made her way a different way.”
Huneycutt will speak about "The Storm" as part of the 2024-25 Florida Lecture Series at Florida Southern College on Jan. 30th of next year.
