Sarah Anne Ellis Dorsey A recent biographer has written that
"throughout her life, Sarah Anne Ellis Dorsey sought to combine
the routines of a typical plantation lady with a sense of
feminine intellectuality which superior learning and wealth made
possible." Born in Natchez to wealthy and influential parents,
she experienced the best of what life in the Old South had to
offer. Her romanticized view of the antebellum period would
later lead to her connection with Jefferson Davis and the Lost
Cause that he came Sarah Ellis married Samuel Worthington Dorsey
in 1853, and between 1862 and 1877 she wrote six novels and one
nonfiction work, Recollections of Henry Watkins Allen (1866).
The Dorseys moved to Beauvoir on the Mississippi Gulf Coast in
1873 because of Samuel's health. He died in 1875. In December
1876 Sarah Dorsey met Jefferson Davis and invited him to
consider coming to Beauvoir to work on his memoirs. He accepted
the offer the next month and began dictating Rise and Fall to
Dorsey in February 1877. Davi