Alice B. (Alice Bradley) Haven

Born in Hudson, New York, in September 1827, Alice Bradley Haven became known as an American poet and fiction writer whose work appeared widely in magazines such as Godey’s Lady’s Book and Graham’s American Monthly Magazine. Bibliographies of her work also show contributions under forms of her married names, including Alice B. Neal and Alice B. Haven, as well as the pen name “Cousin Alice.”

She married the humorist Joseph C. Neal in 1846, and after his death later married Samuel L. Haven in 1853. A later memoir by Cornelia Holroyd Bradley Richards helped preserve her reputation, and library records for that book identify her as Alice Bradley Haven, with her life ending in 1863.

Haven wrote both poems and domestic fiction, and the surviving record suggests that she was a steady, well-liked presence in American literary magazines of the 1840s and 1850s. Her writing has the warm, moral, family-centered tone that many readers of the period loved, which still makes her an interesting voice in nineteenth-century popular literature.