Sue Petigru Bowen

Susan Dupont Petigru King-Bowen (October 23, 1824 – December 11, 1875) was a 19th-century American socialite, realist, fiction writer and novelist. Her work, which included Busy Moments of an Idle Woman (1853), Lily: A Novel (1855), Sylvia’s World: Crimes Which the Law Does Not Reach (1859), and Gerald Gray’s Wife (1864), focused on subversive portrayals of South Carolina aristocracy, in which men toyed with women’s affections, women plotted against one another’s best interests, and mothers forced daughters to choose wealth over romance.

Childhood

Susan Dupont Petigru, known as "Sue", was born on October 23, 1824, as the youngest of four children. She was raised in her family’s home on Broad Street, within the center of Charleston’s elite business and social district. Her father, James Petigru, was an attorney and politician, while her mother, Jane Amelia Petigru, was the daughter of a rich Charleston planter. Her father was gone at least four months of the year on business, and the rest of the time thoroughly preoccupied with work.

Her mother suffered an emotional breakdown when Sue was only two years old. Her oldest brother, eight-year-old Albert, died from a fall off their third-floor bannister. This event, coupled with caring for three young children and three of James’s adolescent sisters, left Jane Amelia a physical and emotional wreck. She began to develop a series of illnesses, some real and some feigned, which increased her social isolation and encouraged a lifelong addiction to morphine. James’s sister Harriette wrote that Jane Amelia was an “unnatural” woman who "lies in bed from morning till night with every luxury about her & complains of poverty", and furthermore “makes her husband's time at home wretched.” Another sister-in-law, Louise Porcher, stated Jane Amelia possessed “heartless selfishness” and an obsession with “flattery & adulation,” all traits that would later be ascribed to her daughters.