author
Rosa Vertner Jeffrey
1828–1894
A pioneering Southern writer, she built a national audience with poetry and fiction shaped by wit, feeling, and a lively literary voice. Her work made her one of the best-known women of letters connected with Kentucky in the 19th century.
1 Audiobook
Daisy Dare, and Baby Power Poems
by Rosa Vertner Jeffrey
About the author
Born Rosa Vertner Griffith in Natchez, Mississippi, in 1828, she was raised in part in Kentucky and became known as a poet and novelist with strong ties to Lexington. Early in her career she contributed writing under the name "Rosa," and her literary reputation grew well beyond the South.
She published poetry as well as fiction, with books including Poems, by Rosa, Daisy Dare and Baby Power, The Crimson Hand and Other Poems, and the novels Woodburn and Marsh. Reference works and historical collections describe her as one of the first Southern women whose writing drew broad attention across the United States.
Her life also included marriages under the surnames Johnson and later Jeffrey, the name by which she is best remembered. She died in 1894, leaving behind a body of work that reflects both literary ambition and a distinctive 19th-century American voice.