Elia W. Peattie:

Frontier Newswoman, Writer, and Poet

1862-1935

Elia Wilkinson Peattie was born and reared in southwestern Michigan in near poverty, discovered books and her future husband, Robert Burns Peattie, in Chicago, and then worked as the first "girl reporter" on the Chicago Tribune. When her husband came to Omaha as managing editor of the Omaha Daily Herald, and later the merged Omaha World-Herald, Peattie became a reporter and editorial writer for the Omaha World-Herald during his editorship -- the first "girl reporter" in Omaha. During the eight years Peattie lived in Omaha, she travelled the region on news stories, some of the people and incidents she encountered finding their way into her short stories. As an Omaha citizen, she worked tirelessly for philanthrophic causes, was a founding member of the Omaha Woman's Club, and was active with the Rev. W. J. Harsha, who began the practice of collecting and delivering Christmas donations to the homes of poor families. Peattie also wrote numerous poems, short stories, essays, and books, ranging from the romance of the frontier and its unique characters to stories of old New England and even ghost stories for children, as even a partial bibliography reveals. While writing these stories and occasional poems, she continued to write daily columns for the Omaha World Herald .

In addition, she wrote one of the first accolades lauding the quality of Nebraska author Willa Cather's writing. In an essay on "Newspaper Women of Nebraska" written in 1895, Peattie referred to Cather as "a young woman with a genius for literary expression," calling her "criticisms, both literary and dramatic . . . clever, original and generally just." Referring to Cather's style as "elegant," Peattie predicts that "If there is a woman in Nebraska newspaper work who is destined to win a reputation for herself, that woman is Willa Cather."

After Peattie and her husband left Omaha in 1896, they returned to Chicago, where Peattie served as the literary critic on the Chicago Tribune until 1917, served actively in the Woman's Club, the Little Room literary club, and wrote and acted in plays performed at the settlement houses. Her work appeared in such prestigious journals as Atlantic, Century, and Harper's, as well as in journals such as the Woman's Home Companion and The Youth's Companion. Some of her stories were collected in anthologies, such as The Mountain Woman , The Shape of Fear and The Edge of Things. Many others also appeared in newspapers and in unindexed journals. When Peattie went with an ailing son to South Carolina for his health, the result was a series of children's books starring Azalea. Because Peattie's husband was often ill, she wrote commissioned works or rapidly produced stories in order to maintain the family income. At one point she wrote one hundred short stories for the Chicago Tribune in as many days to finance home remodeling. Her work became uneven in quality, though prolific, and she felt that her reviews, constantly reading someone else's creative work, also diminished her creativity. The Peatties had four children, Roderick, Donald Culross, Barbara, and Edward. Their daughter Barbara, a poet and mother, died in 1915, but their eldest son Roderick became a professor of geology, Donald Culross Peattie became a world-renowned naturalist, and Edward a successful New York businessman.

Robert and Elia retired and moved with Elia's mother to "Dunwandrin'," their home in Tryon, North Carolina. Peattie died of heart failure in 1935 at the home of the eldest of her three sons, Roderick, at Wallingford, Vermont.

Peattie Home

Peattie Bibliography

Dr. Susanne George Bloomfield