Adele Amelia Gleason

(1850 - 1930)

Adele Amelia Gleason was an American doctor and writer. She published one novel, The Georgia Belle (1895), and a poetry collection, Songs and Verses for Christmas (1888), that, in the words of John Jeremiah Sullivan, “consists entirely of hauntingly mournful elegies to lost or broken love,” many of which “speak achingly of love for a woman.” She traveled widely, campaigned on behalf of prostitutes and unwed mothers, founded a sanitarium at Harper's Ferry and a "social settlement" called Mortimer House in Buffalo, NY. She died in an insane asylum and was buried in Elmira, NY, in the same graveyard as her former neighbor, Mark Twain.