Eliza Leslie

Eliza Leslie was born in 1787 into a Philadelphia family that respected the arts and education. Her father, Robert, a member of the American Philosophical Society and a friend to Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, soon noticed his daughter Eliza’s keen mind and decided to have her educated at home in languages and the fine arts. Eliza quickly took advantage of this educational opportunity, developing a razor sharp knack for learning and for writing. However, her father’s premature death in 1803 put the family into a bad financial situation that necessitated both creativity and practicality from the family. They responded promptly. Eliza’s mother covered the practical end by running a boarding house with her children’s assistance, while Eliza did both by developing a talent for cooking and combining that with her creative writing skills. Soon this combination led to fame and the monetary rewards that followed. Her recipe book, Seventy-Five Receipts for Pastry, Cakes, and Sweetmeats, published in 1827, generated international acclaim and high sales. This first triumph then paved the way for further success as a writer of fiction when her cookbook publishers, Munroe and Francis, encouraged Eliza to try her hand at other writing genres. Eliza Leslie's original juvenile fiction immediately poured forth from the presses, also to great acclaim. Then, with her fame firmly established, she further advanced her career. After successfully progressing from compiling culinary collections to sketching stories and essays for youth, she moved seamlessly to writing realistic, complex fiction for adult women. However, this was not a neat, progressive, no looking back movement through a hierarchy of genres. To the contrary, her publication history proves that she wrote, edited, and revised all three—cookbooks, juvenile fiction, adult fiction—throughout her career. At her peak it was reported that no writer of fiction in the USA had ever had a wider or more interested circle of readers than Leslie.