Biography

She was born Eliza Calvert in Bowling Green, Kentucky on February 11, 1856 and was known to all as "Lida." Her mother, Margaret Younglove (1829-1920), was a native of Johnstown, New York. Her father, Thomas Chalmers Calvert (1826-1898), was born in Giles County, Tennessee to Eliza Caroline Hall Calvert and her husband Samuel Wilson Calvert, a Presbyterian minister. It was her grandmother's name, Hall, that Lida would use as her pen name.

When Lida was 14, her family life changed dramatically. Outwardly prospering as a lawyer, entrepreneur and bank manager, her father was found to have misappropriated funds of his bank to fuel his speculative ventures. Forced into bankruptcy and fearing for his safety, Thomas Calvert abruptly left town and spent more than a decade as a fugitive.

Until 1883, when the governor pardoned Thomas Calvert, Lida and her family struggled. Her mother, it is said, took in washing. Lida nevertheless attended a local private school and studied for a year at the Western Female Seminary in Oxford, Ohio. Helping to support her mother, three sisters and brother by teaching, Lida also began to write poetry. In 1879, Scribner's magazine accepted two of her poems for publication, paying her $15 (worth about $300 in 2006).

Lida published at least six more poems before July 8, 1885 when, at the age of 29, she married 44-year-old William Alexander Obenchain. A Virginia native and Civil War veteran, Major Obenchain had turned aside from his ambition to become a lawyer to follow his beloved Robert E. Lee into the field of education. In 1883 he had become president of Ogden College, a small men's school in Bowling Green.

William Alexander Obenchain (1841-1916)

Lida and William Obenchain's marriage concluded a courtship of more than six years. After suffering the repercussions of her father's unprincipled drive for wealth and prestige, perhaps Lida was drawn to the Major's courtly Southern ways and devotion to a life characterized by self-denial and the performance of duty. Before long, however, the burdens of a married woman weighed heavily upon her. She became the mother of four children: Margery, William Alexander Jr. (Alex), Thomas Hall and Cecilia (Cecil). Housekeeping and child care duties left her exhausted and with little time to write. Even more frustrating was the fact that neither law nor custom assigned her household labor any monetary value; as a married woman, she was expected to "make do" on her husband's modest salary.

"Surely genius should furnish exemption from domestic labors. It does in the case of man, and it should in woman's case, too." ("Women and Literature," New York Times, Jan. 16, 1898)

Around the time of her second child's birth, Lida began to read the Woman's Journal, a suffragist newspaper founded in Boston in 1870. "After that," she later remarked, "I knew just where I stood." She began to write passionately in support of suffrage and to work for the Kentucky Equal Rights Association, circulating petitions, sponsoring lectures and distributing both original and syndicated articles to as many as 100 newspapers across the state.

"One thing that increases my difficulties is that I have no room of my own, and writing in the confusion of family life is one of the things that has worn my nerves out." (Letter to Laura Clay, 1909)

It was her suffrage work, and in particular her outrage over laws which denied married women control of their own property or custody of their children, that compelled Lida to write her most successful short story. In 1898 Cosmopolitan published "Sally Ann's Experience." Reprinted in the Woman's Journal, the Ladies' Home Journal, in magazines and newspapers as far away as New Zealand, and in booklet form by Little, Brown & Company of Boston, the story became familiar to thousands more through platform readers, teachers of expression and chautauqua performers.

"I'd like to know how it is that a woman, that had eight hundred dollars when she married, has to go to her husband and git down on her knees and beg for what's her own. Where's that money ‘Lizabeth had when she married you?" says she, turnin' round and looking Jacob in the face. "Down in that ten-acre medder lot, ain't it?–and in that new barn you built last spring."
("Sally Ann's Experience")

"Sally Ann's Experience" became the first chapter of a collection of stories, Aunt Jane of Kentucky, published in 1907. The stories employed the then-common device of a double narrative, in which the elderly "Aunt Jane" told her stories to another, younger woman visitor, who then relayed them to the reader. Originally turned down by 8 publishers, the book was listed for much of that year among the top 6 most popular books sold in cities like Louisville, Boston, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Indianapolis and St. Louis.

Two more collections of stories followed: The Land of Long Ago (1909) and Clover and Blue Grass (1916). Lida published a short novel, To Love and to Cherish, in 1911.

". . . and I cordially recommend the first chapter of 'Aunt Jane of Kentucky' for use as a tract in all families where the men folks tend to selfish or thoughtless or overbearing disregard of the rights of their womenkind."
(President Theodore Roosevelt, 1907)

Lida's interest in the craft of the mountain weavers of Tennessee, Virginia, North Carolina and Kentucky produced A Book of Hand-Woven Coverlets, published in 1912. While researching the book, Lida would emerge from her Bowling Green home, stop farmers bringing wagonloads of tobacco to market covered with old coverlets, and buy pieces for use as illustrations. The book was one of the first of its kind, detailing coverlet designs, colors and names and calling for the rescue of neglected examples of this art.

"She can easily convince you that the hand-woven coverlet is an American institution."
(reviewer)

Obenchain home, 1353 Chestnut St., Bowling Green Ky.

While proud of the success of her short fiction, Lida had planned to stop writing "Aunt Jane" stories by the time she completed The Land of Long Ago. The death of her husband in 1916 and the growth of her children to adulthood left her certain that she could devote more time to becoming a "literary lady"; in particular, she was anxious to publish a volume of her poetry, a book of essays and a book on basketry. Unfortunately, more family duties intervened after her oldest daughter Margery, who had married and moved to Dallas, Texas, contracted tuberculosis. Lida joined the family there, where she helped raise her two young grandchildren until Margery's death in 1923. Although Lida continued to write, her most productive years were over. She remained in Dallas, where she became increasingly incapacitated by arthritis. She died on December 20, 1935.

For further reading, consult Eliza Calvert Hall: Kentucky Author and Suffragist (University Press of Kentucky, 2007)

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Last modified September 3, 2002.

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