Anne Sullivan

Short Biography

Anne Mansfield Sullivan Macy, born Johanna Sullivan (April 14, 1866 – October 20, 1936), was a teacher best known as the instructor and companion of Helen Keller. She is also known as Annie Sullivan. Anne Sullivan was the oldest of five children, born in Feeding Hills, a subsection of the town of Agawam, Massachusetts. Her parents, Thomas Sullivan and Alice Cloesy, were impoverished cooks who left Ireland in 1847 during the Potato Famine. Her mother suffered from tuberculosis and died when Anne was eight years old. Her father was an alcoholic farmhand who abandoned his three surviving children after his wife died. Although her sister Mary was sent to live with an aunt, when Annie was ten, she and her brother Jimmie moved in with other relatives. When Helen was six years old, in 1887, Anne moved in and acting as her governess started teaching her. Sullivan began by teaching Helen Keller nouns using the sign language alphabet signed into Keller`s palm that had been developed by Spanish monks in medieval times. After its adoption by French educators, it was adapted by British and American educators including the founder of the Perkins Institution, Samuel Gridley Howe. On May 2, 1905, Sullivan married a Harvard University instructor and literary critic, John Albert Macy (1877–1932), eleven years her junior, who had helped Keller with her publications. The three lived together. However, within a few years, their marriage began to disintegrate. By 1914 they had separated, though they never officially divorced.Sullivan Macy and Keller were lifelong companions who lived, worked, and traveled together. In 1932 they were each awarded honorary fellowships from the Educational Institute of Scotland. They also were awarded honorary degrees from Temple University. By 1935, Sullivan Macy became completely blind. She died after a coma at age 70, with Keller holding her hand. When Keller herself died in 1968, her ashes were placed in the Washington National Cathedral next to Anne`s.