Despite her fertile oeuvre and the literary quality of some of her works, Harriet Prescott Spofford remains less known than most of her writing contemporaries. While Louisa May Alcott, Lydia Maria Child, Emily Dickinson, Sarah Orne Jewett, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Edith Wharton, and other nineteenth-century woman authors have long been critically acclaimed, Spofford still awaits to be fully (re-)discovered.
Harriet Elizabeth Prescott was born in 1835 as the first of seven children to Joseph Newmarch Prescott and Sarah Jane Bridges in Calais, Maine. She grew up in an intellectually vibrant atmosphere and was eager to learn, but opportunities for a formal education were limited due to the small-town setting a…
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Citation: Fischer, Katrin. "Harriet Prescott Spofford". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 10 May 2010 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=4176, accessed 31 October 2024.]
