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slaves. Several authors hold her work to be superior to that of her better-known peers. Literary scholar Louis D. Rubin, Jr., who edited a 1969 volume of her works, wrote that her work was "better than any other poetry being written in the South during the 1920s outside of
Nashville." Her obscurity may be due in part to her own withdrawal from writing and in part due to a general neglect of southern women writers by literary scholars. Recent scholarship places her as a key literary figure in the Charleston Renaissance, along with fellow writers
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Ravenel took up writing poetry again in the late 1910s, but she only returned to writing full-time out of necessity after Frank's death, by which time little of her inheritance was left due to his bad investments. Ravenel supported herself and her daughter by writing fiction for publications like
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Indians. One critic notices that although she evokes history like many of the
Charleston Renaissance writers, it is not in the typical nostalgizing vein for a lost antebellum world; instead, she insistently gives voice to those forgotten by history: Native Americans, soldiers, mothers, pirates,
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Beatrice Witte was born in
Charleston, South Carolina, on Aug. 24, 1870, the third of six daughters of Charlotte Sophia (Reeves) Witte, who was of French Huguenot descent, and Charles Otto Witte, a German-born banker and businessman. In her teens, her family lived in a house that is now the
251:—poets in the early 1920s through her founding membership in the South Carolina Poetry Society, she began writing a dramatically different kind of free verse notable for its vivid imagery and precise language. She became a friend of such modernist poets as
200:, who would go on to become a writer on architecture and Charleston history. The couple lived south of Charleston, initially supported mainly by the fortune left to Ravenel by her father, and during this period Ravenel wrote little.
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Ravenel's second marriage (in 1926) brought her renewed financial stability. She traveled widely and wrote little, though she did produce one sequence on the West Indies that was only published long after her death.
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Ravenel died on March 15, 1956, sixteen years after Samuel. Her papers—including manuscripts, letters, scrapbooks, and sketchbooks—are held by the
University of North Carolina.
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Ravenel's husband died in 1920, and in 1926 she remarried. Her second husband was Samuel
Prioleau Ravenel, a second cousin of her first husband.
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Worthingon, Curtis. "Beatrice
Ravenel: Avant-Garde Poet of the Charleston Renaissance." In James M. Hutchisson and Harlan Greene, eds.
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Donaldson, Susan V. "Songs with a
Differenc: Beatrice Ravenel and the Detritus of Southern History". In Carol S. Manning, ed.,
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story. She also wrote editorials for newspapers edited by her brother-in-law
William Watts Ball, including
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509:. University of North Carolina University Libraries website. (Finding aid). Retrieved Feb. 17, 2016.
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Rubin, Louis D., Jr. "Beatrice
Ravenel (1870–1956)". In Joseph M. Flora and Amber Vogel, eds.,
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Ravenel originally wrote poems in a late
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459:. William L. Clements Library Manuscripts Division Finding Aids. Retrieved Feb. 17, 2016.
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She showed early intellectual promise and was educated at the
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Robert Bain, Joseph M. Flora, and Louis D. Rubin, Jr., eds.
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