Passionate and gifted, Ella Maria Dietz wanted to be an actress, but such a dream was not acceptable for young ladies in 1847 so instead she studied art and music. In 1864 at the age of seventeen, she married Edward Clymer, a wealthy, forty-one-year-old, Harvard-educated lawyer and railroad magnate responsible for the building of the Eastern Pennsylvania Railroad.
Ella was soon begging for a divorce. Whatever happened between them is lost to history, but no divorce was forthcoming. However, less than ten years after the birth of a son, she made an acclaimed debut in Lady of Lyons on the New York City stage under her maiden name, fulfilling her childhood dream.
In 1874, accompanied by her brother and sister, who were also aspiring actors, she traveled to Paris to study drama. Following her studies at the Conservatoire of Paris, she settled in England where she performed Shakespearean works in London and across the country. She became well-known for her depictions of Juliet, Ophelia, Portia, and Pauline, adapting plays such as Faust and designing costumes and scenery and music for the productions.
During this period, she also published her first book of poems The Triumph of Love (1877), performed dramatic readings to workers’ groups, and participated in the women’s suffrage movement.
In 1883, Edward Clymer, her estranged husband, died of a stroke. She was in England at the time and was not mentioned in his estate. But upon returning to New York, she retired from the stage and took up writing in earnest, publishing, in 1884, the Triumph of Time and, in 1885, The Triumph of Life.
Reviewers praised her poems for their spiritual and mystical approach to love and religion. A reviewer in The Academy commented on the “pure and tender womanliness contained in everything the book contains.” [The Christian Socialist (1884). The Christian Socialist: A Journal for Those who Work and Think Public domain ed.]. Emily Faithful in Victoria Magazine wrote that her works “touch deepest chords of poetic feeling.”
The following poem is taken from the Triumph of Love.
Le’Envoi
Plight me no troth, pledge me no word;
Should I clip the wings of my forest bird?
Soar high; fly free,
Thy soul is with me.
All thy heart feels
Of pleasure or pain,
O’er my heart steals
Like an echoed refrain;
When thy eyes shall afar
Seek the beam of some star
In the soft southern night,
I too feel its light.
Works by Ella Maria Dietz
To Learn More About Ella Dietz
Almost all information about Ella Maria Dietz, including my own, is taken from A Woman of the Century: Fourteen-Hundred-Seventy Biographical Sketches edited by Francis Willard and Mary Ashton Livermore, 1893.
We walk through life o’er steep and stony ways
We singers who make other lives so sweet
We gain the heights with torn and bleeding feet,
And hear perchance some far-off word of praise.
Ella Maria Dietz The Triumph of Time p. 43