Lulah Ragsdale (February 5, 1861 – December 26, 1953) was an American poet, novelist, and actor from the U.S. state of Mississippi. She was one of the state's first women writers. Her novels included The Crime of Philip Guthrie, 1892; A Shadow's Shadow, 1893; Miss Dulcie from Dixie, 1917; Next-Besters, 1920. Her short stories appeared in periodicals such as The Lotus, The Smart Set, The Delineator, Young's Magazine, and Today's Housewife , while Ragsdale's poetry appeared in The Times-Democrat, The Chap-Book , Harper's, Magazine of Poetry, The Boston Arena, and Munsey's Magazine. Along with poetry, she also studied drama, and was a successful actress. Ragasdale also wrote a few plays and screenwrites were picked up for some of her novels, including the 1919 American silent drama film, Miss Dulcie from Dixie. However, it was Ragsdale's novels, written in the 1890s through the 1920s, which earned her a reputation as a writer.
Early life and education
Tallulah James Ragsdale was born February 5, 1862, at Cedar Hall, the stately plantation home of her mother's family -the Hookers- then in Lawrence County, Mississippi, later absorbed into the newer county of Lincoln. She was the only child of the Confederate officer, James Lafayette Ragsdale, who died in battle during the American Civil War. James was descended from several generations of the family name in the U.S., prominent in Colonial Virginia. The ancestry was originally Scotch-English. His immediate line moved to South Carolina, his father later settling in Georgia. While a very young man, James Ragsdale chose Brookhaven, Mississippi, for permanent residence, when the Illinois Central Railroad laid its tracks through that town.
In Brookhaven, he married Martha Louise Hooker, one of the Hooker girls as they were known throughout the South; their family was luminant in Mississippi history and were from England, direct descendants of Captain William Hooker, who died of yellow fever at Pascagoula. Charles E. Hooker, known as Mississippi's "silver-tongued orator," was a member of this family. The maternal grandmother of Lulah Ragsdale was Anne Ray to whom the Native American statesman, Greenwood Le Flore, for whom Leflore County, Mississippi and the city of Greenwood, Mississippi, are both named, once proposed marriage, and at whose estate "Malmaison," her grandparents were afterwards often entertained. One of Martha's ancestors was Nathaniel Hooker, a pilgrim father, whose immediate descendants settled in Virginia. She grew up in the Capt. Jack C. Hardy House in Brookhaven, Mississippi.
Lulah's early education was conducted by her mother. At an early age, Ragsdale became an unsatisfiable reader, always seeking the weird, the unreal, the mystic; or else, the vivid, the passionate, the glowing in prose and poetry. The characters in her favorite books became her best friends, and in the constant company of such unreal creatures as she most fancied, her thoughts, her manners and her conversation became very odd and unchildlike.
Discerning Lulah's trend of tastes, the mother exacted the memorizing of long poems which fed into Lulah's poetic and dramatic talents. At a sufficiently mature age, Lulah was placed in Whitworth Female College in Brookhaven. Without interruption, Lulah continued her course of study until her graduation, age 16, always taking first rank in "expression" and composition and always just "getting-by" on mathematics. The young student read voraciously such books as her mother permitted her to have: Scott's novels, Dickens, George Eliot, with an occasional dip into St. Elmo for lighter reading; added to these were Shakespeare and other standard poets.
Her college days had been punctuated by acrostics to her schoolmates. Several of her essays having been written in verse, her English instructor, Professor R. S. Rickets, afterwards affiliated with Millsaps College, Jackson, Mississippi, urged her to take her poetry seriously and to express herself by rule of dactyl and spondee.
After graduation, for a few years, Ragsdale led the visiting, dancing, happy-go-lucky life of the young "Main Street" girl but always with a latent desire burning under her other interests to go upon the stage. She was also writing verse at this period, because there was no resisting that which came to her inspirationally, but which she made no effort to force into print.