Harriet Elizabeth Prescott Spofford

Born in Calais, Maine, in 1835, she moved with her family to Newburyport, Massachusetts, as a teenager and later attended Pinkerton Academy in New Hampshire. She rose to national attention in 1859 when The Atlantic Monthly published her story In a Cellar, helping launch a long literary career.

She went on to write novels, short stories, poems, essays, criticism, memoir, and children’s literature, becoming one of the most widely published American authors of her time. Readers and critics have especially remembered her for Gothic romances and for work that pushed beyond the usual limits placed on women characters in the nineteenth century.

She married Richard Smith Spofford in 1865 and spent much of her life connected to Massachusetts literary circles. After her death in 1921, her reputation continued through renewed interest in her eerie, imaginative fiction, including the often-anthologized story Circumstance.