Eliza Ripley

author

Eliza Ripley

1832–1912

A vivid memoirist of the Old South, she wrote from firsthand experience about plantation life, wartime upheaval, and the social world of nineteenth-century New Orleans. Her books blend personal adventure with sharp memories of a vanished era.

2 Audiobooks

Social life in old New Orleans : Being recollections of my girlhood

Social life in old New Orleans : Being recollections of my girlhood

by Eliza Ripley

From flag to flag : A woman's adventures and experiences in the South during the war, in Mexico, and in Cuba

From flag to flag : A woman's adventures and experiences in the South during the war, in Mexico, and in Cuba

by Eliza Ripley

About the author

Born in Kentucky in 1832 and raised in New Orleans, she became known for writing about Louisiana life as she had lived it. She is generally identified as Eliza McHatton Ripley, and her work drew heavily on her experiences before, during, and after the Civil War.

Her best-known books are From Flag to Flag (1889), a memoir of her wartime travels through the South, Mexico, and Cuba, and Social Life in Old New Orleans (1912), a warm, detailed recollection of girlhood, customs, and society in antebellum New Orleans. Together, those books helped preserve a personal view of a world that had already begun to disappear by the time she wrote.

She died in 1912. Readers still return to her for the immediacy of her storytelling and for the way her memoirs capture both the drama of history and the texture of everyday life.