Susan Dupont Petigru King-Bowen (24 October 1824 – December 1875) was a 19th-century socialite, realist, fiction writer and novelist. Her work, which included Busy Moments of an Idle Woman (1853), Lily: A Novel (1855), Sylvia’s World: Crimes Which the Law Does Not Reach (1859), and Gerald Gray’s Wife (1864), focused on subversive portrayals of South Carolina aristocracy, in which men toyed with women’s affections, women plotted against one another’s best interests, and mothers forced daughters to choose wealth over romance. Due to her lack of in-text references to the American Civil War, slavery or the abolitionist movement, Sue’s work has been widely ignored among critics. It is only recently, as part of a renewed interest in 19th-century women writers, that her writing has begun to receive critical attention.
Sue King was born on October 23, 1824, the youngest of four children. She was raised in her family’s spacious home on Broad Street, within the center of Charleston’s elite business and social district. Her father, James Petigru, was a successful attorney and politician, while her mother, Jane Amelia Petigru, presented a strong lineage as the daughter of a rich Charleston planter. Yet her childhood seemed a mostly unhappy one. James was gone at least four months of the year on business, and the rest of the time thoroughly preoccupied with work. Jane Amelia, already anxious and high-strung, suffered a sort of emotional breakdown when Sue was only two years old. Her oldest brother, eight-year-old Albert, died from a fall off their third-floor bannister. This event, coupled with caring for three young children and three of James’s adolescent sisters, left Jane Amelia a physical and emotional wreck. She began to develop a series of illnesses, some real and some feigned, which increased her social isolation and encouraged a strong, lifelong addiction to morphine. James’s sister Harriette wrote that Jane Amelia was an “unnatural” woman who “lies in bed from morning till night with every luxury about her and complains of poverty,” and furthermore “makes her husband’s time at home wretched.” Another sister-in-law, Louise Porcher, stated Jane Amelia possessed “heartless selfishness” and an obsession with “flattery and adulation,” all traits that would later be ascribed to her daughters. Sue, while living with her mother as an adult, referenced her past behavior: “Poor Mama! She has been accustomed to have Papa make-believe he thought her dying whenever she went on so, that she can’t give up the dodge and my conscience can’t let me perform such comedies. I must reserve my sympathy until it is really needed…”
Sue attended school first at Madame Talvande’s French School for Young Ladies in Charleston, along with classmate Mary Boykin Chesnut, and later at Madame Binsse’s in Philadelphia. At Talvande’s in particular she received a heavy dosage of French, the required language for both instructional and social dialogues, but she also studied chemistry, botany, astronomy, literature, rhetoric, German, art, dancing and music. Academic tutelage, however, was only one component of these programs. The young women attended social gatherings amongst their Madame’s acquaintances, during which they were expected to learn and practice their grace and etiquette. Sue, expecting the urban North to contain a world of excitement and adventure, was frequently discouraged by the social restrictions created by her father’s unwillingness to produce appropriate financing. She frequently wrote back complaining of malaise and depression, which her father claimed was feigned. Years later, Sue wrote that “it is so long since I have left this part of the country nine years; and when I was at the North, I was too young to appreciate or know its advantages.”
While he did not encourage her reckless spending, Sue’s father did encourage her love of reading and writing. He wrote Sue in a letter that “more than a week ago, I had the pleasure of hearing from you, and then resolved that I would take the very earliest opportunity of expressing the pleasure, which your well-formed and easily legible character of writing gave me. I never could enter into the refinement that sets no value on a fine hand…I will allow you an almost boundless latitude of innovation in other habits; such as reading – studying – I mean reading novels and studying amusements.” Yet, like many fathers interested in their daughters marriage prospects, James Petigru lamented that “Sue I am afraid will after all of our pains turn out a wit.” This ambivalence describes much of James’s devotion to his daughter: encouraging her ambitions and her self-expression, while at the same time pleading with her to compose her rhetoric, discourse and style in a more respectable manner. James himself recognized that Sue bore both his own wit and temperament, without any ability or desire to control it.
The Panic of 1837 was a detrimental blow to James Petigru’s financial affairs. He had invested heavily in Mississippi’s speculated land market, and the new requirement of gold specie backing forced him to sell, among other items, his land holdings, his rice plantation, and most of his 137 slaves. Payments to creditors took almost the entirety of his wealth, and left him with only his home and his law office. Because of these dramatic losses Sue’s mother, Jane Amelia, pushed both daughters to marry for wealth. Eldest Caroline was the first daughter to cede, marrying William Carson, a man twice her age, in 1841. Sue followed two years later, marrying Henry Campbell King in 1843.
The courtship between Henry and Sue was not an entirely romantic one. While not quite a catch, Henry King was considered the best Sue could hope for, considering her developing reputation as both saucy and outspoken. In terms of physical appearance, Sue was also less attractive than her fair-haired older sister. As historians Jane and William Pease described her, “Sue never made the splash as a belle that Caroline did. She lacked the winsome expression, the long curls, and the delicate coloring that contemporary ideas of beauty dictated. Severely nearsighted, she stumbled and bumbled when she most wanted to be graceful.”
Sue at first rejected Henry’s marriage proposal, much to the admonishment of her mother and sister. Her aunt Louise Porcher, on the other hand, considered it “safer and wise to refuse than accept,” for she could not “bear that so young a girl should be urged on that subject, as it is a step one cannot retrieve when once taken, and all the trials it may entail must be borne alone and in silence, as it is one of the few trial[s] that the sympathy of friends cannot alleviate but rather enhances.” Sue thought Henry “very short very broad and very round shouldered, and withal a little lame,” and Aunt Louise echoed that his looks presented a potential wife “substantial objection.” Yet Sue accepted his second request, and a month later their marriage capped off what her father called a “nine days’ wonder” of unexpected success. Sue was just nineteen, the youngest age at which any Petigru woman (of three generations) would tie the knot.
The marriage worked out well for Sue’s father, as James Petigru partnered in law practice with Henry and his own successful father, fellow attorney Judge Mitchell King. While Henry was almost as disinterested in his professional career as Sue King was in her domestic career, James eventually put Henry in charge of their practice’s many law students, a position in which he thrived.
Henry was, in all aspects, an unambitious man. The newlyweds spent their first two-and-a-half years of marriage living with Henry’s parents, during which their only child, Adele Allston King, was born. They didn’t leave the Kings’ home, in fact, until Henry’s step-mother arranged for him to purchase an inherited house on Tradd Street through the funding of Henry’s father. Henry wrote frequently to his parents and extended family, often lamenting the lack of letters he received in turn. Despite the success of James, Mitchell and Henry’s law firm, Henry had few clients of his own, and his financial mismanagement, coupled with Sue’s lavish spending, forced him to borrow heavily from family members.
Their first years of marriage were amiable enough, with both partners humoring the other’s peculiar faults. Aunt Jane North described the tenuous relationship in a letter (slightly edited from source for clarity) to her sister Adèle: “for instance, [Henry] will say [Sue] is too lazy sleeping all day – well, Henry, says she, why did you not find that one before? It would have saved a great deal of trouble on both sides. Now, tho’ this is said in good humour and taken in good part, it is nevertheless playing with edged tools…” When Sue looked back fondly on her unmarried life, a time when “the hours did dance away right joyously,” Henry responded that she was “‘a great goose for talking so’ with a side glance at little [Adele] to point his remark.”
Six years into their marriage, what little warmth existed between Henry and Sue had declined precipitously, and she began a series of long, extended visits to the North with her sister Caroline. These trips were done under the auspices of Caroline’s ailing health, but for both women the more pressing reason was an escape from their troubled marriages. Caroline’s husband William had become an abusive alcoholic, and Sue tired of her husband’s malaise at home, as well as his drinking and gambling while away. Sue had also become cynical of “the stupid, self-sufficient, wearisome styles of young ladies” in Charleston. She criticized Southern women “who have not three ideas, who spoil a little French, who play a little music, and have not a grain of agreeability,” and proclaimed that “it was a wise dispensation of Providence which places no loftier aspirations within them.” These trips were taken sans Sue’s young daughter, Adele, and the prolonged absences may have provoked the later discord between mother and daughter.
In 1853, the publication of Sue’s first book, Busy Moments of an Idle Woman, provided her with favorable critical notices and yet another reason for Sue and Caroline to leave home and tour the Northeast. One critic, while concerned over Charleston society's potentially negative reaction, called her first work "decidedly a clever book ... The Authoress is a true woman – her eye never fails to take in at a glance the whole dress of every lady she meets, and she reports it with, perhaps, rather too much detail." In Washington, Sue wrote that they “seem to have been followed by ‘the men,’ perfectly monopolized and idolized– even clergy-men followed in their train – they repeated that no women before had ever had such a successful career in Washington.” Sue’s father James was equally impressed with his daughter:
In 1855, Sue followed up Busy Moments with Lily: A Novel, and in 1959 a novel and short story collection under the shared title Sylvia’s World: Crimes Which the Law Does Not Reach. Her family members responded favorably to the quality of her writing, but far less so to its clearly biographical content. One cousin called her stories “the mere embodifications of what she has seen,” while another found her characters “extremely mortifying” since “every body recognizes them." A third was discomfited that she was able "to recognize so many of the anecdotes" in Sue's satirical depictions of troubled marriages and courtships. King published her work anonymously, as encouraged by her father, who believed that “the interest would be better kept up by standing in the reserve and making the authorship a sort of secret … it can’t be more, considering how many are in the plot.”
Sue’s literary success and subsequent travels were paired with the increasing deterioration of her marriage to Henry. In the summer of 1856, Mitchell King wrote in his journal that his son’s “reference to Sue [was] very very unhappy,” and that Henry had provided him “very briefly and unsatisfactorily … a very lame account of their relations.” Cousin Carey North saw blame on both sides, calling Sue a “nearly mad, unfortunate woman, but others are not blameless” Rumor suggested Henry was carrying on a relationship with a slave woman. Sue’s writing, which focused almost exclusively on criticisms of marriage, could not have helped their precarious situation.
By 1861, Sue and Henry had unofficially separated which, by the nature of South Carolina’s marriage laws, was the farthest apart the two could hope to become. After joining the Confederate Army at the outbreak of the Civil War, Henry was shot in the stomach during the Battle of Secessionville, and died in the summer of 1862. Sue donned mourning, but cousin Carey North believed Sue had to “act considerably” in doing so.
The death of Henry was a blow to their daughter Adele, who had begun disassociating herself with her mother’s reckless behavior. “Aunts and cousins readily agreed that Sue had little sympathy for children and no talent as a mother,” according to Jane and William Pease. Sue was already mocking her daughter’s “affected and very absurd” behavior at age six, and the constant fighting between mother and father left the only child with little understanding of healthy social discourse. In later life Adele would make a complete break with her mother, and Sue would lament her inability to visit daughter and grandchildren.
The subsequent collection (mostly by Henry’s brothers and sisters) of her husband’s outstanding debts left Sue with little more than a $1,000. The war prevented her from finding suitable publishing for her next novel, Gerald Gray’s Wife, and its eventual release by Southern Field and Fireside provided no subsequent royalties. Public readings in the North were meagerly attended, and so she moved to Columbia, South Carolina to work as a clerk in the Confederate treasury office. In 1863, after the death of her father, Sue lived for almost a year with her widowed mother, although their relations were severely strained. Jane Amelia’s addiction had progressed to the point where she was begging Confederate officer George Alfred Trenholm to procure and smuggle morphine across enemy lines. At this point Sue was particularly depressed about her social affairs, writing that:
Sue left her mother in December 1863 to return to Columbia, where according to one cousin, she was determined “to make herself notorious during the sitting of the Legislature,” a prospect at which she wholly succeeded. Sue dressed in lavish outfits of bright coloring, equipped with the finest accoutrements her meager estate could provide. Her flirty behavior attracted the attention of a number of young soldiers and married officers from the Confederate army. Later in 1865, Sue was seen cavorting with victorious Yankees in Charleston, to which one gentleman responded “There goes Mrs K driven by a Yankee thief in my uncles Stolen Buggy.” Yet it was not until 1870, while working as a foreign-language clerk in Washington’s Post Office Department, that Sue participated in her most scandalous and damning public affair – her marriage to Radical Republican and carpetbagger Christopher Columbus Bowen.
Eight years her junior, Bowen was perhaps the only figure in Sue’s life whose notoriety exceeded that of her own. Born in Rhode Island, Bowen had worked a series of odd jobs until eventually making his way to Georgia, where he volunteered (after being threatened with conscription) in the Confederate cavalry. After forging a commanding officer’s signature on a furlough pass to gamble in Charleston and Savannah, Bowen was court-martialed and dishonorably discharged. He then hired a fellow soldier to murder said officer, for which he was arrested and imprisoned in Charleston. While Bowen was awaiting trial, the city of Charleston was successfully invaded by Union forces and Bowen, among other prisoners, was released. He then began working for the Freedmen’s Bureau, which he was fired from shortly thereafter for “irregularities in his accounts.” Afterwards he began acting as a pro-bono lawyer for newly freed slaves, and the connections he developed allowed him to become first a Republican delegate to South Carolina’s 1868 constitutional convention, and later the elected representative of its first congressional district.
In 1871, after marrying Sue, Bowen was arrested and tried on charges of bigamy brought by two former wives, one of which owned several brothels and was later convicted as a serial killer. Sue deftly and adamantly defended her husband both in court and in public, writing to one Washington newspaper that she knew “that he had been an orphan boy, without relations or friends; had drifted into the company of gamblers and prostitutes, and had lived their life until it had pleased the good god to lift him from the mire.” Bowen received a two-year prison sentence and a $250 fine, but Sue appealed to President Ulysses S. Grant, who eventually offered Bowen a full pardon.
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