American author, born on the 25th of April 1845, near Alexandria, VA. She was descended from Archibald Cary of Ampthill, VA, who presided over the senate of his native state from its organization and through the Revolutionary War, while on her mother’s side she belonged to the Fairfax family. Educated in private schools in Virginia, she was noted in her girlhood for her piquant beauty. Her mother’s home was devastated in the Civil War, and the family resided in Richmond, where, in 1867, she was married to Burton Harrison, who had been private secretary to Jefferson Davis. He became a member of the New York bar, and early established a summer residence at Bar Harbor, ME. Mrs. Harrison’s first book concerned this summer resort, and was entitled Goldenrod: An Idyll of Mount Desert (1879). Eight years later she published Bar-Harbor Days.
The literary work of Mrs. Harrison has been concerned with the scenes of her life and with society. In magazines and collections of tales she has depicted with sympathetic art life in Virginia. Flower de Hundred (1891) is concerned with the plantations of her native state, where kinship, hospitality and inherited culture gave rise to sunny manners. Crow’s Nest and Belhaven Stories (1892) disclose life in quaint old Alexandria, one of the most historic cities of the South, and the pathos of the old families living through the war. In 1887 Mrs. Harrison appeared as a satirist of society manners, in Anglomaniacs. The commingling of aspiring and newly opulent people with those of hereditary fortune and culture in the resorts of fashion furnished her with themes that she handled with a genial but unsparing pen, and with keen appreciation of incongruities. Of this character are A Daughter of the South (1892); Sweet Bells Out of Tune (1893); A Bachelor Maid (1894); An Errant Wooing, a romance of foreign travel (1895); A Virginia Cousin (1896); and A Triple Entanglement (1898). She also wrote The Well-Bred Girl in Society (1898).
