Ask the Chatbot Games & Quizzes History & Society Science & Tech Biographies Animals & Nature Geography & Travel Arts & Culture ProCon Money Videos
Emmeline Grangerford
Introduction References & Edit History Related Topics
Quizzes
Two costumed actors performing a dance onstage. theater, performers. Hompepage blog 2009, arts and entertainment, history and society
The Literary World (Characters Quiz)
USA 2006 - 78th Annual Academy Awards. Closeup of giant Oscar statue at the entrance of the Kodak Theatre in Los Angeles, California. Hompepage blog 2009, arts and entertainment, film movie hollywood
Pop Culture Quiz
Britannica AI Icon
Adding us as a Preferred Source tells Google you trust our content, so our articles show up more often in your Google Search, Discover feed, and AI Overviews.
verifiedCite
While every effort has been made to follow citation style rules, there may be some discrepancies. Please refer to the appropriate style manual or other sources if you have any questions.
Select Citation Style
Feedback
Corrections? Updates? Omissions? Let us know if you have suggestions to improve this article (requires login).
Thank you for your feedback

Our editors will review what you’ve submitted and determine whether to revise the article.

External Websites

Emmeline Grangerford

fictional character
Written and fact-checked by
Britannica Editors
Encyclopaedia Britannica's editors oversee subject areas in which they have extensive knowledge, whether from years of experience gained by working on that content or via study for an advanced degree....
Britannica Editors
History

Emmeline Grangerford, fictional character, a poet and painter in Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn (1885). Upon viewing her works, Huck Finn naively echoes his hosts’ reverence for Emmeline’s maudlin elegies of deceased neighbours and her soppy crayon drawings of young ladies in mourning. One such drawing, a mawkish portrait of a woman weeping over a dead bird, is titled “I Shall Never Hear Thy Sweet Chirrup More Alas.”

Emmeline is a parody of Julia A. Moore, “The Sweet Singer of Michigan,” a notoriously bad American poet who was popular in the 1870s. Twain once remarked of Moore that she had “the touch that makes an intentionally humorous episode pathetic and an intentionally pathetic one funny.”

This article was most recently revised and updated by Kathleen Kuiper.