The prodigal daughter

the long version

"Sometimes enigmatic and often shocking, Sherwood Bonner (Katharine Bonner McDowell, 1849-1883) defied accepted notions of what she ought or ought not to be. Born into the Mississippi planter aristocracy, she married at age twenty-one and bore a child. Less than two years later, however, she left her husband, daughter, and native state to pursue an education in Boston and fulfill her ambition of becoming a writer."--BOOK JACKET. "Described by one Boston gossip as "a statuesque blond with cataracts of yellow hair," Bonner was befriended by Henry Wadsworth Longellow, who became her mentor and patron, and by James Redpath, a fellow conspirator of John Brown and one of the era's leading radicals. During her short life, Bonner produced short stories, the novel Like Unto Like (1878), and the novella The Valours (1881). She faded into obscurity after her death, but in recent years her work has been rediscovered - thanks in large part to this biography, which was first published in 1981."--BOOK JACKET.