| Book Reviews | The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 131.3

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| Book Reviews | The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 131.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Reviews

America's Joan of Arc: The Life of Anna Elizabeth Dickinson. By J. Matthew Gallman. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. vii, 262 pp. Illustrations, bibliographic essay, notes, index. $30.)
Contemporaries likened Philadelphia's Anna Dickinson to Joan of Arc when she rocketed to fame as a spellbinding orator during the Civil War. Dickinson peaked early, perhaps as early as 1864, the year she addressed Congress and President Lincoln in the Capitol, at age twenty-one. She rode her fame into the postwar years as a well-paid campaigner for the Republican Party and popular lecturer. For fifteen years, Dickinson was arguably the best-known woman in the country—a voice against slavery, champion of black suffrage, successful public woman, and world-class flirt. When her popularity waned in the 1870s, Dickinson turned to the stage as playwright and actress with minimal success. She lingered on at the fringes of celebrity for five more decades.	1
Matthew Gallman provides the first biography of this curious, troubled woman since Giraud Chester's Embattled Maiden in 1951. Mining the rich lode of Dickinson's papers at the Library of Congress, he traces her career and the tangled relationships with accomplished women and powerful men who fell in love with her. With fondness for his subject, Gallman delivers a compact, enjoyable book.	. . .

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