author
Elizabeth Oakes Prince Smith
1806–1893
A pioneering 19th-century American writer, lecturer, and women's rights advocate, she built a career that stretched across poetry, novels, essays, children's books, and public speaking. Her work helped bring arguments for women's equality into mainstream literary and lecture culture.
1 Audiobook
The Sagamore of Saco
by Elizabeth Oakes Prince Smith
About the author
Born in Maine in 1806, Elizabeth Oakes Smith went on to become a remarkably versatile literary figure whose career lasted for decades. She wrote poetry, fiction, essays, plays, children's literature, and journalism, and she was also known as a popular lecturer.
She is especially remembered for linking her writing to reform. Alongside her literary work, she spoke and wrote in support of women's rights, and her essays on women's position and potential helped make her an important voice in early American feminism.
Smith's long career reflects how active and ambitious women writers could shape public life in the 19th century, even when the literary world offered them limited space. Today she is often valued both for the breadth of her writing and for the energy she brought to debates about women's equality.