Harriet Prescott Spofford

Born in Calais, Maine, in 1835 Spofford moved with her pa-rents to Newburyport, Massachusetts, which was ever after her home, though she spent many of her winters in Boston and Washington, D.C. She attended the Putnam Free School in Newburyport, and Pinkerton Academy in Derry, New Hampshire from 1853 to 1855. At Newburyport her prize essay on Hamlet drew the attention of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who soon became her friend, and gave her counsel and encouragement.Spofford began writing after her parents became sick, sometimes working fifteen hours a day. She contributed story papers for small pay to Boston. In 1859, she sent a story about Parisian life entitled In a Cellar to Atlantic Monthly. The magazine's editor, James Russell Lowell, at first believed the story to be a translation and withheld it from publication. Reassured that it was original, he published it and it establis-hed her reputation. She became a welcome contributor to the chief periodicals of the United States, both of prose and poetry.Spofford's fiction had very little in common with what was regarded as representative of the New England mind. Her gothic romances were set apart by luxuriant descriptions, and an unconventional handling of female stereotypes of the day. Her writing was ideal, intense in feeling. In her descriptions and fancies, she reveled in sensuous delights and every variety of splendor.In 1865, she married Richard S. Spofford, a Boston lawyer. They lived on Deer Island overlooking the Merrimack River atAmesbury, a suburb of Newburyport, where she died on August 14, 1921.When Higginson asked Emily Dickinson whether she had read Spofford's work Circumstance,Books: Sir Rohan's Ghost, 1860 The Amber Gods, and Other Stories, 1863, republished 1989 Azarian: An Episode, 1864 New England Legends, 1871 The Thief in the Night, 1872 Art Decoration Applied to Furniture, 1878 The Servant Girl Question, 1881 Marquis of Carabas, 1882 Poems, 1882 Hester Stanley at St. Mark's, 1883 Ballads About Authors, 1887 A Scarlet Poppy, and Other Stories, 1894 Old Madame, and Other Tragedies, 1900 That Betty, 1903 The Ray of Displacement and other stories, 1903 Old Washington, 1906 The Fairy Changeling, 1910 A Little Book of Friends, 1916 The Elder's People, 1920