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Harriet Elizabeth Prescott Spofford
1835–1921
An American writer of gothic tales, poetry, and novels, she brought vivid atmosphere and psychological intensity to 19th-century magazines and books. Her work helped push popular fiction toward something stranger, darker, and more daring.
3 Audiobooks
Stories of Intellect
by Rebecca Harding Davis, Thomas De Quincey, Charles Dickens, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Baron Edward Bulwer Lytton Lytton, Edgar Allan Poe, Harriet Elizabeth Prescott Spofford
Three Heroines of New England Romance
by Alice Brown, Louise Imogen Guiney, Harriet Elizabeth Prescott Spofford
The Children of the Valley
by Harriet Elizabeth Prescott Spofford
About the author
Born in Calais, Maine, in 1835, Harriet Elizabeth Prescott Spofford became known for richly imaginative short fiction, novels, poetry, and essays. She studied at what is now Colby College, though family circumstances kept her from graduating, and she soon turned to writing professionally.
Her breakthrough came with the story "In a Cellar," published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1859 after support from editor James Russell Lowell. Readers came to associate her with lush prose, gothic moods, and stories that explored obsession, beauty, danger, and the hidden pressures of domestic life.
Spofford continued publishing for decades and was also active in literary and cultural circles in New England. She died in 1921, leaving behind a body of work that later readers have valued for its originality, emotional intensity, and place in the development of American gothic and sensation fiction.