E-text prepared by sp1nd, Charlie Howard,
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
()
from page images generously made available by
Internet Archive
(https://archive.org)
| Note: | Images of the original pages are available through Internet Archive. See https://archive.org/details/famousamericanbe00peac |
Famous American Belles
of the
Nineteenth Century
Emily Marshall
(Mrs. William Foster Otis)
From portrait by Chester Harding
Famous American
Belles of the
Nineteenth Century
By
Virginia Tatnall Peacock
ILLUSTRATED
Philadelphia & London
J. B. Lippincott Company
1901
Copyright, 1900
by
J. B. Lippincott Company
ELECTROTYPED AND PRINTED BY J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY, PHILADELPHIA, U.S.A.
To
My Dear Mother
from whom I derived my first
conception of all that is
most beautiful in
woman
PREFACE
During the century now drawing to its closethere have appeared in America from time totime women of so pre-eminent a beauty, sodazzling a wit, so powerful a magnetism, that theirnames belong no less to the history of their countrythan those of the men whose genius has raised it to therank it holds to-day among the nations of the earth.Among them have been women of the highest type ofmental and moral development, women of great politicaland of great social genius, all of whom have left theimpress of their remarkable personalities upon theirtime. When they have manifested these qualities intheir girlhood they have risen frequently to an eminencesuch as it is scarcely possible for the women ofany other country to attain at a correspondingly earlyage.
From among the latter class the subjects of thesesketches have been taken, those having been selectedwho seemed most adequately to represent their periodand locality and whose fame was beyond question, ithaving been frequently of national and sometimes ofinternational extent.
Rising to wield the magic of their influence in everyviiidecade o