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Show 211 True, the men were well represented in these periodicals. Women first disguised their work through using such nom de plumes as Amethyst, Cactus, Hyacinth, Minerva, and Monda. But even in the first (October 1879) issue of The Contributor, a Young Men/s publication, we find items authored by Maria H. Miller, Augusta F. Crocheron, E. R. Snow, and Emmeline B. Wells. Ellis, too, was an occasional contributor to some of these publications, and her material was not exclusively poetry. There is a rather nice bit of work in a story for children, three pages, an example of Ellis' delicate, indirect, motivational teaching philosophy. The writings of Ellis Reynolds Shipp are never better, though, than in her diary where some of her prose entries are more convincingly poetic than are her poems. Her later writing style seems to have undergone a metamorphosis from the leaner, cleaner mode of her earlier work (which finds consonance in today's literary tastes) to a more florid, more ornamented expression with a tendency to be repetitious--a fault which can be easily overlooked in a woman approaching ninety. It is Ellis, the older woman, who describes her condition when, in the early part of her marriage, she returns with her family from Fillmore: ...with a mind enriched with more study, a soul o'erflooded with experience, a spirit uplifted, strengthened by a more beautiful faith, a heart divinely englorified by maternal love-fast becoming my ruling passion!3 It is also the older Ellis, reflecting upon the period when she first established her early-morning study regimen, who says: |