Fame and Reviews

It's easy to imagine due to Ella Higginson's current lack of fame that those who study her would be liable to overstating her popularity at the turn into the 20th century, but it only takes a few minutes of digging through old newspapers to realize that her fame was indeed widespread.

An October 1896 clipping from The Harrisburg Telegraph of Pennsylvania claims that Ella Higginson's poems "show that the art of poetry is not yet dead in America" as well being certain that she will make "an impression that will last in the world of literature."

This 1894 article from the Oregon newspaper the Statseman Journal boasts of her Oregon roots as she is "on the road to literary fame."

In 1897, The Tennessean gives a glowing review of The Land of the Snow Pearls, complimenting her work which "not only charms the mind but also the heart. . ."

This 1901 clipping from the Evening Report in Pennsylvania makes perfectly clear Ella Higginson's reputation.

This review of Mariella, of Out West in The Chicago Tribune in January of 1903 praises the story's accessibility despite its Pacific Northwest roots: "The characters are each one destined to long remembrance; their sorrows, joys, mistakes, and varied experiences all go to prove the truth that life on the Puget sound is made up of the same component parts as elsewhere, and that, at heart, all human beings are strangely alike."

This poem by Charles Edward Cone (also born in Kansas in 1862, later moved to La Push, Washington) reprinted here in The Brooklyn Daily Eagle in 1924, praises the work of Ella Higginson in the last stanza.

This 1905 clipping from New York paper The Buffalo Inquirer informs us that Ella Higginson's work was in demand in Australia.

In 1909, the Buffalo Courier of New York, referring to Bellingham, Washington, reports that Ella Higginson is "the proudest possession, in a literary way, of this city and this State. . ."