author
Caroline E. (Caroline Elizabeth) Merrick
b. 1825
A vivid memoirist of the antebellum and postwar South, she also became a leading voice for temperance and women’s rights in Louisiana. Her best-known book, Old Times in Dixie Land, blends personal memory with social history.
1 Audiobook
Old Times in Dixie Land: A Southern Matron's Memories
by Caroline E. (Caroline Elizabeth) Merrick
About the author
Born on November 24, 1825, in East Feliciana Parish, Louisiana, she was an American writer, reformer, and public advocate whose life stretched from the plantation South into the modernizing world of the early 20th century. She is best known for Old Times in Dixie Land: A Southern Matron's Memories (1901), a memoir that looks back on Southern life before, during, and after the Civil War.
Beyond her writing, she was active in temperance work and in the movement for women's rights. Historical summaries of her life also describe her as an early Louisiana suffrage advocate, making her notable not only for what she wrote, but for the public causes she supported.
She died on March 29, 1908. Today, she is remembered as a writer whose work preserves a personal view of 19th-century Louisiana and as a reform-minded figure who connected literature with civic life.