Constance Cary
| Constance Cary Harrison | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born | Constance Fairfax Cary April 25, 1843 Port Gibson, Mississippi, U.S. |
| Died | November 21, 1920 (aged 77) Washington, D.C., U.S. |
| Resting place | Ivy Hill Cemetery, Alexandria, Virginia |
| Pen name | Refugitta |
| Occupation | writer |
| Language | English |
| Spouse | Burton Harrison (m. 1867) |
Constance Cary Harrison (April 25, 1843 – November 21, 1920) was an American writer. She was also known as Constance Cary, Constance C. Harrison, and Mrs. Burton Harrison, as well as by her nom de plume, Refugitta. She and two of her cousins were known as the "Cary Invincibles"; the three sewed the first examples of the Confederate Battle Flag.
Harrison belonged to an old Virginia family related to the Fairfaxes and Jeffersons. Her home was destroyed during the American Civil War and consequently she witnessed much of the horrors of that struggle. After its close, she accompanied her mother to Europe and while in France. Upon her return to the United States, She married Burton Harrison, a lawyer and American democratic politician, who was at one time the Secretary of President Jefferson Davis. They moved to New York in 1876, and there she began her literary life. Harrison's first magazine article was A Little Centennial Lady, which attracted much attention, and thereafter, she wrote a great deal.
Few literary women in New York were better known at the time, her home a social and literary center. She produced several plays, chiefly adaptations from the French. The work that probably gained her more reputation abroad was The Anglomaniacs. This appeared in "The Century" without her name. It ranked her at once among the best novelists. Some of her other works included, Golden Rod, The Story of Helen Troy, Woman's Handiwork in Modern Houses, Old-Fashioned Fairy Book, Bric-a-Brac Stories, Flower de Hundred, Miy Lord Fairfax of Greenway Court, The Homes and Haunts of Washington, The Russian Honeymoon, Sweet Bells Out of Tune, A Daughter of the South and Other Tales, Bar Harbor Days, An edelweiss of the Sierras, Golden-rod, and other tales.
Constance Fairfax Cary was born at Port Gibson, Mississippi, into a planter aristocrat family, to Archibald Cary and Monimia Fairfax. Archibald Cary was the son of Wilson Jefferson Cary and Virginia Randolph. Monimia Fairfax was the daughter of Thomas Fairfax, 9th Lord Fairfax of Cameron, and Margaret Herbert who was the granddaughter of John Carlyle and Sarah Fairfax. Archibald Cary was a subscriber to the Monticello Graveyard (1837). They lived at Cumberland, Maryland, where he was editor of its leading newspaper, The Cumberland Civilian. When he died in 1854, her mother, Monimia, moved the family, in with her grandmother at Vaucluse Plantation in Fairfax County, Virginia, until the outbreak of the Civil War.
...
Wikipedia