Eliza Calvert Hall

Biography

Eliza Caroline Calvert, daughter of Thomas Chalmers Calvert and Margaret (Younglove) Calvert, was born in Bowling Green, Kentucky on February 11, 1856. She was known as "Lida" throughout her life. Lida's father Thomas Chalmers Calvert was born in Giles County, Tennessee to Samuel Wilson Calvert, a Presbyterian minister, and his wife Eliza Caroline (Hall) Calvert. Lida's mother, Margaret Younglove, was from Johnstown, New York.

Lida attended a local private school, and then Western Female Seminary in Oxford, Ohio. She pursued two of the careers acceptable for a single woman in her era, teaching school and writing sentimental poetry. She began her professional writing career in order to help support her mother and siblings. Scribner's Monthly magazine accepted two of her poems for publication in 1879 and paid her the equivalent of $600 USD. She continued writing and had at least six more poems published before age thirty.

On July 8, 1885, Lida married 44-year-old Major William Alexander Obenchain. Obenchain was a Virginia native and American Civil War veteran who in 1883 became president of Ogden College, a small men's school in Bowling Green. Lida and William had four children: Margery, William Alexander Jr. (Alex), Thomas Hall and Cecilia (Cecil). Her family responsibilities left her with limited time to write. Her frustration as an unpaid housewife motivated her to support the cause of women's suffrage and to work with the Kentucky Equal Rights Association.

Women's Rights and Woman Suffrage Activism

Lida was a passionate advocate of suffrage and women's rights. She envisioned a time when "woman's growing self-respect made her rise in revolt, and out of her conflict and her victory came a higher civilization for the whole world." See also her 1892 article, Why Democratic Women Want the Ballot published under the pseudonym, "A Kentucky Woman" for The National Bulletin in 1892.

Lida used her talent as a writer to draft original articles to advocate for women's rights in general. In 1898 Cosmopolitan published "Sally Ann's Experience." The story was reprinted in the Woman's Journal, the Ladies' Home Journal, and in international magazines and newspapers, making the story familiar to people around the world. "Sally Ann's Experience" became the first story of Aunt Jane of Kentucky, a collection of short stories published in 1907. She followed up with The Land of Long Ago in 1909 and Clover and Blue Grass in 1916. Lida published a short novel, To Love and to Cherish, in 1911. In 1912, Lida wrote a book about the mountain weavers of Tennessee, Virginia, North Carolina, and Kentucky called "A Book of Hand-Woven Coverlets". The book, one of the first of its kind, detailed the designs and colors of the coverlets which aided in elevating the coverlets to be an art form.

Aunt Jane

"Aunt Jane", an elderly widow, was a reoccurring character in Lida Obenchain's short stories who told the experiences of the people in a rural southern town, named Goshen, to a younger woman visitor who relayed them to the reader. This type of rhetorical device, called a "double narrative," was a common form of storytelling in this era. A collection of short stories, Obenchain's first published book, featuring Aunt Jane, was released in 1907 under the title Aunt Jane of Kentucky.

Rural southern dialect

In the era after the Civil War, magazines featured writers that told stories with regional dialects in local setting. Lida frequently utilized this style of storytelling in her writing. She was successful using this technique: The New York Times stated in their review of Aunt Jane of Kentucky that "Aunt Jane is not false, nor cheap, nor shallow, and the stories that are put in her mouth exhale the very breath of old gardens and county roads and fields."

Interests and themes

Melody Graulich in the Prologue to the 1990 reprint of Aunt Jane of Kentucky notes that Lida Obenchain has women's relationships as a major theme of her writing. The significance of female relationship is further reflected in her choice of her grandmother's maiden name and her own maiden name as her pen name.

Through Aunt Jane and the other characters in her stories, Lida tells of the problems facing women of her time with imagery and symbolism taken from the domestic arts of sewing, cooking, and gardening.

Lida portrays the social fabric of her rural southern region by using quilting metaphors in her stories. At the end of Aunt Jane's Album, the unnamed narrator concludes:

I looked again at the heap of quilts. An hour ago they had been patchwork, and nothing more. But now! The old woman's words had wrought a transformation in the homely mass of calico and silk and worsted. Patchwork? Ah, no! It was memory, imagination, history, biography, joy, sorrow, philosophy, religion, romance, realism, life, love, and death; and over all, like a halo, the love of the artist for his work and the soul's longing for earthly immortality.

Life as a Widow and Death

William Obenchain died on August 17, 1916, after an extended illness. Family responsibilities caused her to move to Dallas, Texas to care for her daughter Margery, who had contracted tuberculosis. She continued to write, but her most productive years as a writer were past. After the death of her daughter in 1923, she stayed in Texas, where she died on December 20, 1935.