Susan E. Wallace was the pen name of Susan Arnold Elston Wallace, an American author and travel writer born in 1830 in Crawfordsville, Indiana, and she died in 1907. She was the daughter of Isaac Compton Elston, a prosperous local merchant and landowner, and she grew up in a household that valued reading and education, which shaped her lifelong devotion to literature. In 1852 she married Lew Wallace, who would go on to serve as a Union general in the Civil War, as territorial governor of New Mexico, as United States minister to the Ottoman Empire, and as the author of the best selling novel Ben-Hur. Her marriage placed her at the center of a life filled with travel, political upheaval, and literary ambition, and she used the experiences gained through her husband's postings to inform much of her own writing. Susan Wallace spent significant time in New Mexico while her husband served as territorial governor, and the unfamiliar landscape, culture, and history of the region gave her material for essays and sketches that she later gathered into books. She also lived abroad during her husband's diplomatic service in Constantinople, and this exposure to the Near East, its customs, and its ancient history fed directly into her published work. She wrote with the eye of an educated outsider curious about the places she visited, blending travel narrative with personal reflection and historical detail. Her published works include The Land of the Pueblos, a collection of essays and travel writing drawn from her time in the American Southwest, and Along the Bosphorus and Other Sketches, which reflects her years in Turkey. She also wrote The Storied Sea, a volume concerned with the eastern Mediterranean, and The Repose in Egypt, a shorter devotional and literary piece. In addition to these books she contributed poems, essays, and articles to magazines and newspapers of her day, building a modest but respected literary reputation apart from her husband's much larger fame. Though she never achieved the wide renown that Ben-Hur brought to Lew Wallace, Susan E. Wallace was recognized in her own time as a capable and graceful prose stylist, particularly skilled at travel writing that combined observation with reflection. She balanced her own literary ambitions with the demands of being a political and diplomatic wife, and she managed the household and correspondence that supported her husband's public career while continuing to write and publish. She died in 1907, having left behind a body of work that offers a window into nineteenth century American travel literature and into the life of a woman writer working in the shadow of a famous spouse while still carving out her own voice.
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