Beatrice Ravenel

Beatrice Ravenel (August 24, 1870 – March 15, 1956) was an American poet associated with the Charleston Renaissance in South Carolina.

Beatrice Witte was born in Charleston, SC, on Aug. 24, 1870, the third of six daughters of Charlotte Sophia (Reeves) Witte, who was of French Huguenot descent, and Charles Otto Witte, a German-born banker and businessman. In her teens, her family lived in a house that is now the Ashley Hall school.

She showed early intellectual promise and was educated at the Charleston Female Seminary. In 1889, she went on to study at the women's annex of Harvard University, the Society for Collegiate Instruction of Women (shortly to be renamed Radcliffe College). She remained there for five years and was active in literary circles, publishing poetry in The Harvard Advocate (a literary magazine), and stories in the The Harvard Monthly, of which she subsequently became an editor. She also published her poems and stories in Scribner's Magazine, the Chap-Book Magazine, the Literary Digest, and other magazines of the day.

In 1900 she married Francis '(Frank') Gualdo Ravenel, whose mother was the writer Harriott Horry Ravenel. They had a daughter, Beatrice St. Julien Ravenel, who would go on to become a writer on architecture and Charleston history. The couple lived south of Charleston, initially supported mainly by the fortune left to Ravenel by her father, and during this period Ravenel wrote little.

Ravenel's husband died in 1920, and in 1926 she remarried. Her second husband was Samuel Prioleau Ravenel, who may have been a distant cousin of her first husband.

Ravenel took up writing poetry again in the late 1910s, but she only returned to writing full-time out of necessity after Frank's death, by which time little of her inheritance was left. Ravenel supported herself and her daughter by writing fiction for publications like Harper's Magazine, the Saturday Evening Post, and Ainslee's Magazine. One of the stories she wrote in this period was republished as an O. Henry Memorial Prize story. She also wrote editorials for newspapers edited by her brother-in-law William Watts Ball, including The State and the Post and Courier.

...
Wikipedia