Early life Dorsey was born to Mary Malvina Routh and Thomas George Percy Ellis, a
planter in
Natchez, Mississippi, in 1829. From the prominent southern Percy family, she was the niece of
Catherine Anne Warfield and
Eleanor Percy Lee, the "Two Sisters of the West," who while young published two volumes of poetry together. Catherine Anne Warfield went on to publish a number of novels, which achieved significant popular acclaim, including
The House of Bouverie, a
gothic novel in two volumes, which was a bestseller in 1860. She and Ellis became quite close after her sister Eleanor died in 1849, with Sarah Anne encouraging her to write again. Sarah Anne's father died when she was nine in 1838. Her widowed mother Mary soon remarried to Charles Gustavus Dahlgren, of Swedish descent. Her stepfather, who saw great potential in Sarah, engaged
Eliza Ann Dupuy as her tutor. Dupuy had also taught Dorsey's aunts Catherine and Eleanor. Later, about 1838–1841, Dahlgren sent Dorsey to Madame Deborah Grelaud's French School in
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, founded in the 1790s by a refugee from the
French Revolution. Mme Grelaud was a
Huguenot, and the school was
Episcopal. There, Dorsey excelled in music, painting, dancing, and languages, quickly gaining fluency in Italian, Spanish, German and French. She published her first fictional work in 1863–1864 in the
Southern Literary Messenger, which serialized her novel
Agnes Graham, which featured a heroine modelled on herself. The
romantic novel had a young woman fall in love with her cousin, whom she planned to marry until learning about their common blood line. The success of the serials prompted her aunt Catherine's Philadelphia publisher, Claxton, Remsen and Haffelfinger, to republish the work in book form after the Civil War. Other fictional works by Dorsey include
Lucia Dare (1867), with a heroine modelled on her own experiences in fleeing Louisiana for Texas during the war. Its descriptions were considered harrowing by contemporary readers. She also completed
Athalie (1872), and
Panola (1877). In 1866, Dorsey published a biography of
Henry Watkins Allen, the wartime governor of Louisiana. They had first met in 1859, when both the Dorseys and Allen were traveling in the Rhine River Valley in Europe. She also used her study as a way to evaluate the role of women in the southern male-dominated society. The highly regarded work is considered to be an important contribution to the
Lost Cause legend of southern memory. There, Davis began to write his memoir,
The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government. Dorsey was instrumental in his success, organizing his day, motivating him to work, taking dictation, transcribing notes, editing and offering advice. Rumors quickly began to fly that the two were having an illicit affair, and it was nearly "an open scandal," but they refused to yield to it. Varina Davis became enraged and refused for a long time to set foot on Dorsey's property. Eventually she accepted Dorsey's invitation to live there and moved into one of the guest cottages at Beauvoir. That summer, Sarah Dorsey nursed Varina through a long debilitating illness. Soon afterward, Sarah Dorsey learned that she had inoperable tumours in her breast. As her health declined, Varina Davis became her primary nurse. Recognizing that she was dying, Dorsey rewrote her will in 1878. She bequeathed all her capital and Beauvoir, to Jefferson Davis. The Dahlgren family sued but failed to break the will. ==Legacy ==