Petticoat Press: #4: Starry Path for Miriam Folline Leslie

Petticoat Press: #4 Starry Path for Miriam Folline Leslie by Becky Brown

Miriam Folline [Follin] Squier Leslie (1836–1914)

Above: many but not all her names: Miriam Florence Follin Peacock Squier Leslie Wilde as well as Frank Leslie. She legally adopted her husband's name after he died in 1880.

I don't know that Miriam Leslie ever actually wrote a newspaper column in her life but her story in publishing is so good we must include it. The divorce plot is our theme here but the women we are looking at this year were very different in character, personality and career. We can contrast last month's stern and plain Jane Cannon Swisshelm with her opposite, a woman we shall call Miriam Leslie.

Betsy Prioleau who wrote a recent biography of Miriam

must have had a wonderful time trying to track her through all those names.

See a preview of Diamonds & Deadlines: A Tale of Greed, Deceit & a Female Tycoon in the Gilded Age:
https://www.amazon.com/Diamonds-Deadlines-Deceit-Gilded-Female-ebook/dp/B09FNYRDZ7?asin=B09FNYRDZ7&revisionId=a548ac32&format=1&depth=1

A brief summary based on Prioleau's research:

Miriam was probably born to merchant Charles Follin of New Orleans and one of his enslaved women. Raised by Susan Danforth Follin, possibly a Follin legal wife, Miriam seems to have spent some time in a New York City bordello as a young woman in the late 1850s. 

In 1854 she was ordered at 18 to marry a man, perhaps a customer. David C. Peacock soon obtained an annulment. Her next husband was a social step up. In 1858 she married Ephraim G. Squier, an anthropologist who took a position with the Frank Leslie publishing firm as an editor. When he could not carry out his duties (ill or out of the country on an expedition) she covered his editorial work.

During the Civil War Miriam was named editor of Frank Leslie's Lady's Magazine and Gazette of Fashion. She later was appointed editor of all the Leslie's women's magazines.

Her acquaintance with Squier's boss Frank Leslie was soon intimate. Leslie, the publishing tycoon of his day, was born Henry Carter in England. The young artist and wood engraver became superintendent of engraving for the Illustrated London News. He brought his technological skills, wife Sarah Ann Whelan and three children under five when he emigrated to the U.S. 

Starry Path for Miriam Folline Leslie by Jeanne Arnieri

After divorces from their antebellum spouses Frank Leslie and Miriam married in 1874. The divorces were unpleasant. Leslie refused to support his wife whom Miriam remembered years later as "A sickly, uninteresting, irritable creature." Miriam's ex Squier was institutionalized in an insane asylum soon after his divorce.

Lincoln's assassin on the cover of Frank Leslie's, May, 1865

When her publisher husband died in 1880 she changed her name to his to better manage her new role as female press tycoon, one who it was said “monitored every facet of the company, from balance sheets to make-up and distribution."

The grieving widow in 1883

Starry Path for Miriam Folline Leslie by Denniele Bohannon

And then she married Oscar Wilde's brother Willie!

Aesthetes Oscar and Miriam's husband William Charles Kingsbury Wilde (1852-1899)

1892 Divorce from Willie Wilde

"The Baroness de Bazus"

After the fourth marriage Miriam was reluctant to go back to any name too prosaic so she began calling herself the Baroness de Bazus, based on her research into her French ancestry. The Baroness managed to keep a good deal of the money she earned over the years and the cash from the husbands. She left a huge bequest in her will to Carrie Chapman Catt to support the women's movement in 1914.

Starry Path by Becky Collis

The Block

Starry path from the Alice Brooks syndicated column, 1936

BlockBase #2346

Miriam seems to have followed a starry path, one she charted herself.

E.G. Squier edited a collection of Leslie's Illustrated Civil War pictures. The original sketches for some of these newspaper engravings are included in a large collection at the New York Public Library and the Library of Congress.
https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/collections/sketches-for-frank-leslies-illustrated-newspaper-138-original-drawings#/?tab=about&scroll=2

Civil War Quilts: Miriam Squier Leslie's Civil War

Madeleine B Stern did a biography Purple Passage: The Life of Mrs Frank Leslie in 1953---but she didn't have the access to sources we have today.

New York Sun, 1895

Sarah Whelan Leslie's obituary with plenty of gossip

Starry Path by Elsie Ridgley

Becky Collis is alternating the sampler blocks with a double nine-patch

and sashing them with a narrow strip and cornerstone.