Widow, Sarah Josepha Hale (1788-1877) wrote and worked to support her family. As editor of first the American Lady’s Book and then Godey’s Lady Book she was arbitrator of American fashion and letters for over forty years.Read More →
Felicia Hemans, was an acclaimed poetess during her lifetime.Read More →
How would you feel if you were once an acclaimed poet, but long after your death all that is remembered of your writings are a few clever lines from your poems? Ella Wheeler Wilcox (1850-1900) did not expect to become a writer, but when her family fell on hard times, and they could no longer afford a subscription to her favorite magazine, The New York Mercury, she came up with the idea of submitting three poems. In return, she hoped to earn a subscription. Instead, she received a check for ten dollars. “The check from Leslie was a revelation,” she wrote in her diary. “IRead More →
“I ask no monument, proud and high to arrest the gaze of the passers-by; all that my yearning spirit craves is bury me not in a land of slaves.” Inscription, Contemplative Court, Smithsonian‘s National Museum of African American History and Culture. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825-1911) was a poet, abolitionist, and suffragist who first achieved renown through her antislavery poetry. Born in 1825, a free woman in Baltimore, she published her first book of poems at around the age of twenty. Before the Civil War, she moved to Pennsylvania, where she joined the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society and worked with William Stills helping slaves escape via theRead More →