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wrote exclusively for the Daily Picayune where she received top billing. I expect that since she had known love and lost love she married Holbrook for status and security, but instead of security, she encountered trauma and scandal that affected her deeply until she met and fell in love with George Nicholson, her second husband.
A month after the wedding to Holbrook, Jennie Bronson, Holbrook?s divorced wife, a crazed woman with a Latin temperament, entered Eliza?s home. Brandishing a seven shooter, she shot twice at Eliza but missed. Eliza wrestled the gun away and yelled for the police. Jennie then began to beat Eliza over the head with a bay rum bottle causing deep wounds. Eliza called for the Irish laundry woman, who with the cook, freed Eliza and took her next door, then across the street, where she was attended to by a doctor. Meanwhile, Jennie found an ax and began to destroy the furniture. What followed was a legal mess that lasted years. Remember that it was reconstruction and that all government administrations were controlled by carpet beggars. Corruption and incompetence were rampant. I have yet to find out what eventually happened to Jennie.
Eliza had felt the rejection of her family when she left Gainsville, when she began publishing poetry, when she accepted the literary editorship of the Daily Picayune and upon marrying a divorced man. She had known the loss and rejection of love. But this was a public scandal with accusations of an affair before marriage and was a devastating attack on her life. How did she cope? During Eliza?s recuperation, with friends rallying by her side, she published her only book of poetry, Lyrics, containing 51 or her poems. But she still struggled to lift her spirit as shown by an article and poem in the Daily Picayune in September of 1874 about the trials of gallant women and the tribulations of the Poesy. While the poem was published earlier in the Times, it was reprinted to reflect her second trauma in life.
Before the marriage, Holbrook sold the paper, then, when it lapsed into financial trouble, he was made president by the company that bought it and later bought it himself. During that period Eliza and Holbrook traveled to Chicago, New York and Canada. Eliza?s account of the trip was published in the Daily Picayune on two occasions. The narrative shows a free spirited girl on her first real vacation. Her eyes were opened to magnificent architecture, museums, and famous people. She was exposed to a culture different than the south. She loved it all except the bustiers in fashion at the time. Much of Eliza?s nature can be learned from her letters, articles and her poetry.
Before Holbrook could turn around the indebted newspaper, he died, leaving Eliza with the choice of retaining ownership of a bankrupt newspaper or accepting the $1000 dollars the state offered to bankrupt widows. At the urging of the business manager and editor, she kept the paper, much to the chagrin of her family. It was not proper for a genteel southern woman to enter business, especially with cigar smoking men in a news room . She defied her family once again.
Three months after Holbrook?s death she made the decision to keep the paper. The editor, Jose Quantro, a flamboyant Spaniard and expert duelist challenged anyone who would seek ill of the new female editor, to do it at the risk of death in a duel with him.
The business manager George Nicholson, invested his own savings in the paper acquiring 1/4 ownership.
George was married with children at the time, but there was an apparent relationship between the two as noted in a group of romantic and coquettish letters written by Eliza Jane to Uncle Nick. These letters, not usually ones that would appear in a family