The Ella Higginson Recovery Project

Mission Statement

As director of The Ella Higginson Recovery Project, Dr. Laura Laffrado of Western Washington University has several goals: "First, I wish to reintroduce Higginson's engaging writings to a new audience of appreciative readers. Second, I seek to draw attention to the forgotten position of the Pacific Northwest region in American literature from the late nineteenth- and early twentieth centuries. Other regions of the United States are very well-known in earlier American literature while the Pacific Northwest remains overlooked. Finally, I hope to begin to reestablish Higginson's once celebrated literary reputation by restoring both her name and her works to their justly merited places in the history of American literature."

Quoted from the introductory essay of Selected Writings of Ella Higginson: Inventing Pacific Northwest Literature by Laura Laffrado (2015).

The Perfect Storm: Obscurity

Several factors contributed to the great Ella Higginson being forgotten:

• During WWI, the majority of books went out of print as war-time demands changed what goods were manufactured. When the war was over, Higginson's books didn't come back into print save for another edition of her novel Mariella of Out West and nonfiction book Alaska the Great Country.
• Ella Higginson and her husband Russell Carden Higginson, who died in 1909, never had any children.
• When Higginson died on December 27, 1940, the heir of her substantial estate was her niece Ivy Morgan, who shortly thereafter died of cancer March 3, 1941. The estate was contested in court for two years and ultimately went to the family of Russell Carden Higginson who were (and for the most part still are) based on the East coast.
• Her grand and beautiful hill-top house (built in 1890 named "Clover Hill") that used to sit on what is now Western Washington University's north campus, was torn down to make room for a dining hall and dorms in the early 1960's.
• There were very few writers in the Pacific Northwest to begin with, even fewer women writers, and none with her level of success. Due to Higginson's unusual position as a prolific author in a sparsely-populated corner of the country, there was no one who could compare and therefore no way to find her through the recovery of other female turn-of the-century writers. Had Ella Higginson died in 2018, she wouldn't have been forgotten nearly as easily thanks to the internet, but that was something her lifetime couldn't give her.

Why It Matters: A Note from the Editor

Ella Higginson's story, until a few years ago, ran very roughly like this: birth, life, literary success, being forgotten, and death. Now, however, her narrative is slowly changing. One day, the books will record her story with the basic framework of: birth, life, literary success, being forgotten, death, and literary recovery. The story of Ella Higginson matters because she both confirms and destroys one of most tragic facts of life: You can be the first, you can be the best, you can be the only, you can be rich, famous, successful, you can do everything right – and still lose. And yet. . . here we are, nearly eight decades after her death, and she’s being found. With every work of hers that’s read, every telling of her story, every single time someone utters her name she’s losing a little less. Maybe obscurity was just a setback; maybe she’s not as forgotten as she herself believed she was; maybe she can win after all. Ella Higginson gives me hope.

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Works by Ella Higginson:

• A Bunch of Western Clover (Bellingham, Washington: Edson & Irish, 1894)
• The Flower That Grew in the Sand and Other Stories (Seattle: The Calvert Company, 1896); reprinted as From the Land of the Snow Pearls (NY: Macmillan, 1897)
• A Forest Orchid and Other Stories (NY: Macmillan, 1897); reprinted 1902
• When the Birds Go North Again (NY: Macmillan, 1898)
• The Snow-Pearls (Seattle: Lowman and Hanford, 1897); reprinted Macmillan, 1902
• Four-Leaf Clover: A Little Book of Verse (Bellingham, Washington: Edson & Irish, 1901)
• Mariella of Out-West (NY: Macmillan, 1902).
• The Voice of April-Land and Other Poems (NY: Macmillan, 1903)
• Alaska, the Great Country (NY: Macmillan 1908)
• The Vanishing Race (Bellingham, Washington: C.M. Sherman, 1911)