Harriet Prescott Spofford



Harriet Elizabeth Prescott Spofford (April 3, 1835–August 14, 1921) was a notable American writer remembered for her novels, poems and detective stories.

Biography
Born in Calais, Maine, in 1849 she moved with her parents to Newburyport, Massachusetts, which was ever after her home, though has spent many of her winters in Boston and Washington, D.C. She attended the Putnam Free School in Newburyport, and Pinkerton Academy in Derry, New Hampshire from 1853 to 1855. At Newburyport her prize essay on Hamlet drew the attention of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who soon became her friend, and gave her counsel and encouragement.

When her parents became sick, of necessity she set to work as a writer, sometimes laboring fifteen hours a day. She contributed to Boston story papers for small pay. In 1859, she submitted to Atlantic Monthly a story about Parisian life entitled “In a Cellar.” The magazine's editor, James Russell Lowell, at first believed the story to be a translation, and withheld it from publication. Reassured that it was original, he published it, and it established her reputation. She became a welcome contributor to the chief periodicals of the United States, both of prose and poetry.

Spofford's fiction had very little in common with what was regarded as representative of the New England mind. Her gothic romances were set apart by luxuriant descriptions, and an unconventional handling of female stereotypes of the day. Her writing was ideal, intense in feeling. In her descriptions and fancies, she reveled in sensuous delights and every variety of splendor.

In 1865, she married Richard S. Spofford, a Boston lawyer, and they resided on Deer Island overlooking the Merrimack River at Amesbury, a suburb of Newburyport, where she died.

When Higginson asked Emily Dickinson whether she had read Spofford's work “Circumstance,” Dickinson replied, “I read Miss Prescott's ‘Circumstance,’ but it followed me in the dark, so I avoided her.”

Publications

 * Sir Rohan's Ghost, 1860
 * The Amber Gods, and Other Stories, 1863, republished 1989
 * Azarian: An Episode, 1864
 * New England Legends, 1871
 * The Thief in the Night, 1872
 * Art Decoration Applied to Furniture, 1878
 * The Servant Girl Question, 1881
 * Marquis of Carabas, 1882
 * Poems, 1882
 * Hester Stanley at St. Mark's, 1883
 * Ballads About Authors, 1887
 * A Scarlet Poppy, and Other Stories, 1894
 * Old Madame, and Other Tragedies, 1900
 * The Ray of Displacement and other stories, 1903
 * Old Washington, 1906
 * The Fairy Changeling, 1910
 * A Little Book of Friends, 1916
 * The Elder's People, 1920
 * "The Amber Gods," and Other Stories, edited with an introduction by Alfred Bendixen. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1989.
 * The Moonstone Mass and Others edited by Jessica Amanda Salmonson (Ash-Tree Press, 2000) a selection of Spofford's best ghost stories with an informative introduction by Salmonson.