Alice Cary
Alice Cary was an American poet and author born on April 26, 1820, in Mt. Healthy, Ohio, as the fourth of eleven children in a modest farming family. From a young age, she showed a passion for storytelling and poetry alongside her sister Phoebe, despite limited access to formal education. After her mother’s death and her father’s remarriage, Cary faced increased domestic responsibilities but continued to pursue her literary interests. She published her first poem at eighteen and gained wider recognition in 1847 with works published under the pen name Patty Lee.
Cary moved to New York City in 1850, where she and her sisters lived and wrote together, achieving financial independence through their work. She became known for her short stories and essays, often drawing inspiration from her rural upbringing, with her notable collection "Clovernook" reflecting the complexities of life in the Ohio Valley. Throughout her career, Cary hosted literary salons, engaging with prominent figures of her time, including abolitionists and suffragists. Although her writings are viewed as sentimental by contemporary standards and are largely out of print, they remain significant for their portrayal of women's perspectives in 19th-century America. Cary passed away on February 12, 1871, and her childhood home was later preserved in her honor.
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Subject Terms
Alice Cary
Author
- Born: April 26, 1820
- Birthplace: Mt. Healthy, Ohio
- Died: February 12, 1871
- Place of death: New York, New York
Biography
Alice Cary was born in the rural town of Mt. Healthy, Ohio, on April 26, 1820, the fourth of eleven children. Her parents, Robert Cary and Elizabeth Jessup Cary, had a small farm near Mt. Healthy, north of Cincinnati. As a child, Cary and her sister Phoebe loved to make up stories and poems, and they read eagerly from the family’s meager collection of educational books. There was a school nearby, but Cary’s responsibilities at home meant that she attended irregularly.
In 1835, Cary’s mother died, and her father remarried two years later. His new wife did not value reading and writing, and Cary found her chores consuming more of her time. Still, she read and wrote when she could, and when she was eighteen years old she published her first poem, “The Child of Sorrow,” in a Cincinnati paper. After seeing several more poems published, she received her first payment for her work in 1847, for poems published in The National Era under the pen name Patty Lee. This national publication brought her not only ten dollars, but also greater recognition.
By 1848, Cary had connected with the editor and critic Rufus Griswold, who would soon edit a collection of Edgar Allan Poe’s works, and in 1850 the newspaper editor Horace Greeley came to Ohio to meet her. A year earlier, Cary had published her first book, a collaboration with her sister titled Poems of Alice and Phoebe Cary. In November of 1850, Cary moved to New York City to live the life of a writer. A year later, Cary’s sisters Phoebe and Elmina also moved to New York, and the three women lived and wrote together in adjoining hotel rooms, supporting themselves entirely through their own work. Cary’s writing turned to short stories and essays that reflected her upbringing on the farm in the Ohio Valley, though she continued writing poetry. Her work appeared regularly in the Ladies’ Repository, Harper’s, and The Atlantic Monthly.
Cary’s first collection of stories was Clovernook: Or, Recollections of Our Neighborhood in the West, based on characters and settings from her childhood. The stories, like her life, were filled with hard work, poverty, sorrow, and death, but the book sold well and made Cary famous. Over the next fifteen years, Cary published several more books of short stories and poetry, and she continued to publish regularly in magazines. Eventually she earned enough to buy a large house, where she and her sisters held weekly salons, hosting important literary figures and intellectuals such as suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, and the poet John Greenleaf Whittier.
Cary died on February 12, 1871, at the age of fifty, and was buried in Brooklyn. Her family preserved their childhood home in her memory, and it later became a home for blind women. Though her books are considered too sentimental and didactic by modern standards and are no longer in print, they are still studied as important early depictions, presented in a woman’s voice, of daily life in the Ohio Valley region.