Dates

• Existence: 1840 - 1931

Biography

Eliza Frances Andrews was born in Washington, Georgia, on 1840 Aug 10 to a prominent slaveholding family. Andrews was a strong supporter of Georgia's secession from the Union during the Civil War. In 1864, she and her sister Metta were sent to her sister's plantation in Georgia to be safe from General Sherman's approaching forces. During this time she kept a diary, later to be published as The War-Time Journal of a Georgia Girl.

After the war, the Andrews family had very little money left. And when Andrews's father died, she chose to support herself rather than marry for financial stability. She published articles, novels, and another of her diaries. Her fiction was very popularly received.

She began teaching in 1873, when she was living with her brother Garnett in Yazoo City, Mississippi. She continued as a teacher or lecturer for several decades in different cities, although she disliked the profession for much of her life.

In 1903 she published the first of her two botany textbooks, Botany All the Year Around. In 1911, she published a college textbook for botany, A Practical Course in Botany. The book won her much acclaim both in America and abroad. She lived on the royalties of these books in her later years.

Andrews also moved to Rome, Georgia, in 1911, where she stayed until her death. She died on 1931 Jan 21 and was buried in Washington, GA with her family.

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