Western Professor Laura Laffrado Authors New Book: ‘Selected Writings of Ella Higginson: Inventing Pacific Northwest Literature’

Award-winning Western Washington University Professor of English Laura Laffrado’s new book, “Selected Writings of Ella Higginson: Inventing Pacific Northwest Literature,” was recently published by the Whatcom County Historical Society and is now available at Village Books, the Whatcom County Historical Society website, Amazon, and will soon be at Western’s bookstore.

“Selected Writings” brings back into print writings of celebrated author Ella Rhoads Higginson, a Bellingham-based writer of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Higginson’s reputation as a well-known American author faded due to her singular position as a literary writer from the Pacific Northwest. Throughout her literary career, Higginson published hundreds of poems, stories, and essays in leading magazines and newspapers, while also writing books including the novel “Mariella, of Out-West,” that was published in 1902, and the nonfiction book “Alaska, the Great Country,” published in 1908.

“The main purpose of this book is to make Ella Higginson’s writing available to a new generation of readers. Higginson’s work was so popular during her lifetime but had gone completely out of print and hadn’t been available since the 1920’s at the very latest,” Laffrado said.

The book includes an introduction, notes and other materials written by Laffrado that reclaim Higginson as a significant voice in American Literature.

Laffrado’s previous books include “Uncommon Women: Gender and Representation in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Women’s Writing,” which discusses provocative, highly readable nineteenth-century American texts that complicate notions of self-writing and female agency and “Hawthorne’s Literature for Children,” which examines a long-neglected aspect of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s literary career in his writings for children.

For more information on her new book, contact Laura Laffrado at (360) 650-2886 or Laura.Laffrado@wwu.edu