Novelist, short-story writer, playwright, essayist, and suffragist Sarah Bull Barnwell Elliott enjoyed a fair measure of personal and professional success in her day. She is important as a precursor of the Southern literary renaissance and as an early feminist. Elliott's varied body of writing reveals a woman of keenness and wit, a risk-taker and perceptive observer who held to strong opinions and was not afraid to state them. Her biography reveals a wealthy and prestigious family background, an enlightened education, and an unmarried freedom that opened doors to her that were closed to the majority of nineteenth-century American women, especially Southern women. Sharing traits with the turn-of-the-century "New Woman" that she delineated in her fiction, Elliott wrote to her brother in 1871, "When a woman gives up all idea of matrimony, she either turns saint or woman's rights." Though she threatened the former, by 1895 she was supporting herself by...