Caroline Gilman

Caroline Gilman was the best-known Southern woman writer in the period from 1833 to the Civil War. She was born in Boston in 1794, and in 1819 she married the Rev. Samuel Gilman and moved to Charleston. Her husband was a Unitarian minister there for 40 years, and she was an active participant in the city's literary and social life. She was the editor of a popular magazine, the Southern Rose Bud, which published the work of several of her contemporaries, among them Nathaniel Hawthorne and William Gilmore Simms. The magazine also included critiques of abolitionist literature and advice for young enslavers. Among her own books were Recollections of a Housekeeper, Recollections of a Southern Matron, and Poetry of Travelling in the United States. She died in 1888 after spending most of her life in Charleston.