Corra Mae Harris - (1869-1935)

Elberton

By Wendy Thomas

I.  Biography

Corra believed that woman's first duty was her marriage; she also was a realist who thought that women were men's equals and were capable of thinking for themselves. Everyone read her books and really liked her work. Mostly everyone had heard of her work in the nineteenth century. Many stories took place in the mountains; they were serialized before they were published.

Corra wrote a lot of her work on the farm she and her husband owned near Elberton. She wrote one of her novels in 1869. One of her books is called The Circuit Rider's Wife; it was first published in a serial in the Saturday Evening Post.

Lundy Harris was a Methodist Circuit rider and twenty-eight years old and made $245 every year. He left Corra in 1888 and was found later in Texas, suffering from aphasia. Corra helped him through his breakdown, but he ended up taking his own life in 1910.

Corra's writing changed.  The new attitudes could not survive the changes in popular taste of the 1920's and even the Post began to not accept her stories after 1930.

II.  Sources

"Corra Harris." Georgia Women of Achievement.  Atlanta:March 21,1996.

Fifth Introduction Ceremony http://www.gawomen.org/honorees/harrisc.htm.

This essay was submitted by a student of Debbie Wooten, a teacher at Bacon County High School in Alma, Georgia.