Priscilla Cooper Tyler and the American Scene, 1816-1889

Elizabeth Tyler Coleman was a great-granddaughter of President John Tyler and a graduate of the University of Alabama and of Swarthmore College. She was the first female faculty member in the English Department at the University of Alabama, where she taught from 1927 to 1962.

"Priscilla Cooper Tyler... is described as 'one of the first girls born and bred a lady who ever defied the prejudice against the theater as a profession for women.'... Contains interesting sidelights on social and political life in New York, Pennsylvania, Washington, and Alabama. The disruptive effects of the Civil War and its painful aftermath are vividly revealed." - South Atlantic Quarterly "This modest and charming biography... is a period piece. While Thomas Cooper rose and fell, and Robert Tyler fled a lynching party, and Priscilla gallantly learned her lines and eventually bore her babies, it is the picture of the period illustrated by one family that will attract the reader. William Godwin, Washington Irving, Mary Shelley, Charles Dickens, Daniel Webster, and a host of political figures parade through the pages and are rescued from time by personal letters, conversations, and Priscilla; intelligent, sensitive, now humorous, again pathetic, always bright and courageous." - The Personalist"