Eleanor Percy Lee
1820—1849
Eleanor Percy Lee (nee Ware) wrote in collaboration with her sister Catherine Anne Warfield, and together they were known as the Two Sisters of the West. Eleanor and her sister were born in Mississippi, the daughters of Major Nathaniel A. Ware and Sarah Percy. Their mother was institutionalized for insanity after Eleanor’s birth and died in 1836; the sisters grew up in Philadelphia, where Eleanor was educated by a governess and at private French tutor. They visited their father’s plantations in Florida and Mississippi and traveled to Europe. Eleanor married Henry William Lee, a cousin of Robert E. Lee, in 1840. They settled on a plantation with 85 slaves in Hinds County, Mississippi.
The sisters were brought together by their mother’s illness and their father’s frequent absences and somewhat difficult temperament. They address the subject of their mother’s death in some of their poems. They collaborated on The Wife of Leon, and Other Poems by Two Sisters of the West (1843) and Indian Chamber, and Other Poems (1846).
Eleanor Lee died of yellow fever in Natchez, Mississippi.
The sisters were brought together by their mother’s illness and their father’s frequent absences and somewhat difficult temperament. They address the subject of their mother’s death in some of their poems. They collaborated on The Wife of Leon, and Other Poems by Two Sisters of the West (1843) and Indian Chamber, and Other Poems (1846).
Eleanor Lee died of yellow fever in Natchez, Mississippi.