author
Louise Clarke Pyrnelle
1850–1907
Best known for a once-popular children's novel about plantation life, this Alabama writer drew heavily on her own early memories of the antebellum South. Her work is now read with interest not only as fiction, but also as a window into the Lost Cause nostalgia of its time.
2 Audiobooks
Diddie, Dumps, and Tot; Or, Plantation Child-Life
by Louise Clarke Pyrnelle
Diddie, Dumps & Tot; or, Plantation child-life
by Louise Clarke Pyrnelle
About the author
Born in Alabama in 1850 as Elizabeth Louise Clarke, she grew up on Itta-Bena Plantation in Perry County and later lived in Dallas County after the Civil War. She studied in Alabama and New York, worked as a governess, teacher, and public speaker, and married John Parnell in 1880, adopting the pen name Louise Clarke Pyrnelle.
She is best known for Diddie, Dumps, and Tot; or, Plantation Child-Life (1882), a book based in part on her childhood memories. Modern reference sources note that her writing presented slavery and plantation life in a romanticized, paternalistic way, which makes her work historically revealing as well as deeply shaped by the attitudes of her era.
Pyrnelle died in 1907. Another book associated with her name, Miss Li'l' Tweetty, appeared after her death, and her work remains most notable today for what it shows about Southern memory, children's literature, and the cultural legacy of the post-Civil War South.