Ellen Mordecai (1790–1884)

Ellen Mordecai was born  in Virginia. After the death of their mother, Ellen and her sister Rachel were sent to Richmond to live with their maternal grandmother, and they received their early education from their aunts. In 1809, when Ellen was 19, she and Rachel and their brother Solomon helped their father open the Mordecai Female Seminiary, a boarding school for girls in their home in Warrenton, North Carolina. In addition to teaching, Ellen also had the job of supervising the girl students day and night. In 1818, her father closed the school and the family moved to Richmond. Ellen continued to teach her young half-sisters, and later her nieces and nephews. She never married and, as was expected of unmarried women at that time, spent weeks or months at a time in the homes of her relatives caring for family members. During the 1840s and early 1850s, she worked as a governess in New York City. She converted to Christianity and persuaded her brother Solomon to convert as well. Her sister Rachel Mordecai Lazarus converted on her deathbed. Ellen's experiences and spiritual conflict in deciding to abandon her family's Jewish faith was the basis of her books Past Days (1841) and The History of a Heart (1845). She also published some shorter articles in the New York Review. She wrote a semi-autobiographical novel entitled Fading Scenes Recalled; or, The By Gone Days of Hastings under the pseudonym "Esther Whitlock." Ellen Mordecai preserved copies of the many letters that she and her sister wrote to and received from novelist Maria Edgeworth, as well as her own voluminous personal journals and correspondence.