Elizabeth Akers Allen

Elizabeth Chase Akers Allen (October 9, 1832 – August 7, 1911) was an American poet, prose author, and journalist.

Life
Born Elizabeth Anne Chase in Strong, Maine, she grew up in Farmington, Maine, where she attended Farmington Academy. She began to write at the age of fifteen, under the pen name Florence Percy, and in 1855 published under that name a volume of poems entitled Forest Buds. In 1851 she married Marshall S.M. Taylor, but they were divorced within a few years.

In subsequent years she travelled through Europe; in Rome she became acquainted with the feminist Paulina Kellogg Wright Davis. While in Europe she served as a correspondent for the Portland Transcript and the Boston Evening Gazette. She started contributing to the Atlantic Monthly in 1858.

She married Paul Akers, a Maine sculptor whom she had met in Rome, in 1860; he died in 1861. In 1865 she married E.M. Allen, of New York. In 1866 a collection of her poems was published in Boston.

She died in Tuckahoe, New York, in 1911.

Writing
A couplet for which she is remembered consists of lines 1 and 2 from her poem Rock Me to Sleep, Mother (1882), which runs:

Backward, turn backward, O time, in thy flight; Make me a child again, just for to-night.

Publications
Among her works, which include both prose and poetry, are:
 * Forest Buds from the Woods of Maine (1855)
 * Poems (1866–1869)
 * Queen Catharine's Rose (1885)
 * The Silver Bridge (1885)
 * Two Saints (1888)
 * The High-Top Sweeting (1891)
 * The Proud Lady of Stavoven (1897)
 * The Ballad of the Bronx (1901)
 * The Sunset Song (1902)