Elizabeth Chase Akers Allen (October 9, 1832, Strong, Maine

Strong, Maine

Strong is a town in Franklin County, Maine, United States. The population was 1,259 at the 2000 census. Strong is home to the annual Sandy River Festival.-History:...

 – August 7, 1911, Tuckahoe, New York

Tuckahoe, New York

Tuckahoe is the name of some places in the U.S. state of New York:*Tuckahoe, Suffolk County, New York*Tuckahoe, Westchester County, New York...

) was an American

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 author

Author

An author is broadly defined as "the person who originates or gives existence to anything" and that authorship determines responsibility for what is created. Narrowly defined, an author is the originator of any written work.-Legal significance:...

, journalist and poet.

Biography

Born Elizabeth Anne Chase, she grew up in Farmington, Maine, where she attended Farmington Academy. She began to write at the age of fifteen, under the pen name

Pen name

A pen name, nom de plume, or literary double, is a pseudonym adopted by an author. A pen name may be used to make the author's name more distinctive, to disguise his or her gender, to distance an author from some or all of his or her works, to protect the author from retribution for his or her...

 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

Feminism

Feminism is a collection of movements aimed at defining, establishing, and defending equal political, economic, and social rights and equal opportunities for women. Its concepts overlap with those of women's rights...

 Paulina Kellogg Wright Davis

Paulina Kellogg Wright Davis

Paulina Kellogg Wright Davis was an American abolitionist, suffragist, and educator.Paulina Kellogg was born in Bloomfield, New York, to Captain Ebenezer Kellogg and Polly Saxton. The family moved to the frontier near Niagara Falls in 1817...

. While in Europee 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

Benjamin Paul Akers

Benjamin Paul Akers was an American sculptor, from Maine.-Early life:Born in Saccarappa, Maine in 1825, Akers moved to Boston in 1849 where he was an apprentice...

, 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

New York

New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...

. In 1866 a collection of her poems was published in Boston.

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.

Among her works, which include both prose and poetry

Poetry

Poetry is a form of literary art in which language is used for its aesthetic and evocative qualities in addition to, or in lieu of, its apparent meaning...

, 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)