Yda Hillis Addis — Collected Poems

Yda Hillis Addis was still a Los Angeles schoolgirl when her poems began appearing in the city’s newspapers in 1874. They are ambitious, melancholy, formally alert pieces full of bells, ghosts, transformations, paintings, storms, and women testing the limits placed around them. Addis would go on to travel in Mexico, translate and reshape oral narratives, write Gothic fiction and California history, survive a disastrous public marriage, and apparently begin a second life under another name. This edition gathers the verse that can presently be recovered from original newspaper and magazine pages, including the long “Alvarado of Madrid,” and restores the opening chapter of one of Southern California’s most remarkable writing lives.

Yda Hillis Addis was born in Leavenworth, Kansas, on 3 October 1857 to photographer Alfred Shea Addis and Sarah Hillis Short Addis. Her childhood included travel in northern Mexico, where she learned Spanish and encountered the communities, legends, and landscapes that later shaped her journalism, translations, folklore, and fiction. The family reached Southern California through San Pedro in 1873 and settled in Los Angeles. Addis entered the newly opened Los Angeles High School and became one of its first seven graduates in 1875. While still a student she participated in the Los Angeles Lyceum and literary clubs and published repeatedly in the Los Angeles Express and Los Angeles Herald. Nine poems from 1874 are presently identified, including “Transformed,” “Silent Cities,” “Two Scenes,” the prize-winning “Death Chimes,” and “The New Galatea.” “Alvarado of Madrid” followed in The Californian in 1881, when Addis was still documented in Los Angeles.

After teaching in Tustin and Los Angeles, Addis expanded into travel writing, journalism, folklore, translation, and fiction. Her work appeared in The Argonaut, The Californian, Overland Monthly, and newspapers. She is now especially remembered for an early English-language version of the La Llorona story and for Gothic tales such as “A Human Tigress.” Her writing both preserves Mexican narratives and reflects the unequal ethnographic habits of nineteenth-century Anglo publishing. In the late 1880s Addis gathered material for a regional history of Santa Barbara, San Luis Obispo, and Ventura Counties. She married lawyer and politician Charles A. Storke in 1890; the marriage collapsed into divorce, litigation, imprisonment, and institutionalization amid claims that older accounts too readily repeated as neutral fact. Her 1891 county history was her only separately published book. For decades she was said to have escaped an asylum and disappeared around 1901. Documentary research summarized by Ashley C. Short instead makes a persuasive case that she lived as Adelayda Hillis Jackson and died in a San Antonio state hospital in June 1941, though the identification should still be described as a scholarly conclusion rather than an uncontested fact.