Jeanette Hadermann Walworth

Jeanette Ritchie Hadermann Walworth was a prolific and widely read author in the latter half of the nineteenth century. She lived in the South for most of her life, including many years in Mississippi, and drew inspiration from its people and places for her novels and stories.

Walworth was most likely born in 1837 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania—though at least one source claims she was born in 1835 and another claims Charleston, South Carolina, as her birthplace. She was the sixth child of Mary Matilda Norman and Charles Julius Hadermann. Her father was a German baron and political exile who came to America to avoid political persecution.

After Jeanette was born, her father acquired a position at Jefferson College as modern languages faculty and president of the institution, and the family moved to Washington, near Natchez in Adams County. Her father is credited with her education and her initial interest in writing.

When she came of age, her father died and Walworth began working as a governess for the family of a Louisiana planter, a position she held until the end of the Civil War. After the war was over, Walworth moved to New Orleans to begin a career in journalism. While she did publish a few popular articles in the New Orleans Sunday Times using the name “Ann Atom,” the pay was not sufficient to support her life in the city. Around 1870, she moved in with her sister who lived on a plantation in Lake Bruen, Louisiana, and began the first of many novels she would come to write. She published her first novel, Forgiven at Last, in 1870 with Philadelphia publisher J. B. Lippincott & Co. While living with her sister, she completed and published another two books before she married and moved away.

Walworth often used her experience as governess and her time in Mississippi as inspiration for her characters and settings. While her characters were staunch southerners, they often regretted the unnecessary bloodshed of the war. Some “Lost Cause” rhetoric can be found in her characters’ reflections on the war, but Walworth herself seemed to advocate for creating a South for the modern era, and she supported industrialization to stabilize the economy. On racial issues, she advocated for educating “freemen” and incorporating Black Americans into southern society without segregation, but she also continued to hold paternalistic views of the necessity of white control over Black lives.

In 1873, Jeannette Hadermann became Jeannette Hadermann Walworth, marrying ex-Confederate officer Major Douglas Walworth from Natchez. The couple and the major’s two children from a previous marriage moved to southern Arkansas to the Walworth family plantation. While there, Jeannette published an additional three novels before they moved to Memphis in the late 1870s. There, she became a contributor to the Memphis Appeal, writing under the pseudonym “Mother Goose.”

In the early 1880s, the Walworths moved to New York where Jeannette began publishing at record speed, with at least ten novels, two short-story collections, and one compilation of character sketches titled Southern Silhouettes written within the decade. In the late 1880s, the pair returned to live in Natchez until Major Walworth died in 1914. Jeanette moved to New Orleans and died only four years later in 1918.

Though her writing has largely been considered pedestrian, Walworth was able to publish a staggering twenty-eight books in her lifetime. Her first three novels are set on southern plantations and are melodramatic, moralistic, and romantically driven, characteristics that haunt her literary reputation. However, the volume of her work suggests that her contemporary readers held fewer qualms with its quality than more present-day examinations of her work might indicate. Interested readers can find many of her surviving works online with open access.