Eliza Calvert Hall

Eliza Caroline "Lida" Obenchain (née Calvert) (February 11, 1856 – December 20, 1935) was an American author, women's rights advocate and suffragist from Bowling Green in western Kentucky in the United States. Lida Obenchain, writing with the pen name Eliza Calvert Hall, advocated for the ability of woman to marry and divorce, for a married woman to own property and write a will separate from her husband in her fictional work and her opinion pieces. Her best known work is Aunt Jane of Kentucky which received extra notability when United States President Teddy Roosevelt recommended the book to the American people during a speech.

Sourced

• It is only a plain tale of plain people told in the plain dialect of a plain old woman.
  • Hall, Eliza Calvert (1910). "Introduction". Sally Ann's Experience. Illustrated by G. Patrick Nelson, Theodore Brown Hapgood. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company. pp. v - xii.
  • Lida Obenchain's description of her then famous story Sally Ann's Experience.

Aunt Jane of Kentucky (1907)

Aunt Jane of Kentucky, a collection of nine short stories that are set in rural western Kentucky in the late 19th Century, recounts an elderly spinster Aunt Jane's memories of life in the rural south. The first story in the book Sally Ann's Experience was originally published approximately ten years earlier and was the most famous story that she wrote.

• I've noticed that whenever a woman's willin' to be imposed upon there's always a man standin' 'round ready to do the imposin'.
  • Hall, Eliza Calvert. Aunt Jane of Kentucky. Boston: Little, Brown, and Co, 1907. Sally Ann's Experience p. 27.
  • Hall, Eliza Calvert, and Melody Graulich. Aunt Jane of Kentucky. Masterworks of literature series. Albany, NY: NCUP, 1992. In the reprinted edition, Graulich discusses the quote on page xxxi. The quote appears in the text on page 12 of this edition.

• Patchwork? Ah, no! It was memory, imagination, history, biography, joy, sorrow, philosophy, religion, romance, realism, life, love and death; and over all, like a halo, the love of the artist for his work and the soul's longing for earthly immortality.
  • Hall, Eliza Calvert. Aunt Jane of Kentucky. Boston: Little, Brown, and Co, 1907. Aunt Jane's Album p. 82.
  • Hall, Eliza Calvert, and Melody Graulich. Aunt Jane of Kentucky. Masterworks of literature series. Albany, NY: NCUP, 1992. In the reprinted edition, Graulich discusses the quote on page xxiv.