Rebecca Sophia Clarke
Rebecca Sophia Clarke, born on February 22, 1833, in Norridgewock, Maine, was a notable American author recognized for her contributions to children's literature in the 19th century. Coming from a family of six children, she was educated at home and briefly attended a local academy before becoming a schoolteacher for a decade. After losing her hearing at 28, she returned to live with her sister, Sarah, where she spent the remainder of her life.
Clarke is best known for creating the beloved Little Prudy series, which debuted in 1861 and became a significant success, leading to six volumes published between 1864 and 1865. Writing under the pen name "Sophie May," she produced multiple series that captured the adventures of young characters, including Little Prudy's sister, Dotty Dimple, and Flaxie Frizzle. Her storytelling was praised for its authentic portrayal of childhood, distinguishing her work in a genre that often relied on didacticism. Throughout her career, she published numerous short stories and made a lasting impact, with her books reportedly selling over 300,000 copies by 1871. Clarke was also philanthropic, donating a building for a public library in her hometown. She passed away on August 16, 1906, and is remembered for her literary legacy, with her former home and the library listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
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Rebecca Sophia Clarke
Author
- Born: February 22, 1833
- Birthplace: Norridgewock, Maine
- Died: August 16, 1906
- Place of death: Norridgewock, Maine
Biography
Rebecca Sophia Clarke was born on February 22, 1833, in Norridgewock, Maine. Her father, Asa Clarke, and her mother, Sophia Bates, had six children, four girls and two boys. Rebecca was the fourth child. Clarke was homeschooled in Latin and Greek. She also attended the Female Academy of Norridgewock. In 1851, she joined one of her older sisters, who had married and settled in Evansville, Indiana. Clarke worked as a schoolteacher for ten years. At twenty-eight years old, deafness forced her to return to her parents’ home in Maine, where she lived for the rest of her life with her sister, Sarah Jones Clarke, who was seven years younger. Neither woman married.
In 1861, Clarke created the characters of what would become the popular Little Prudy series for a short story published by a friend at the Memphis Daily Appeal newspaper. This was the first of many short stories about the adventures of Prudy and Suzy Parlin and their cousins Grace and Horace Clifford that appeared in magazines such as Little Pilgrim and Robert Merry’s Museum as well as the Congregationalist. In 1863, William Taylor Adams, author of several children’s stories written under the name Oliver Optic, persuaded the publishers Lee and Shepard to purchase the rights to Clarke’s stories. The collected tales appeared from 1864 to 1865 as the six-volume Little Prudy series.
Until 1903, Clarke often wrote as Sophie May, a variation of her middle name paired with an auxiliary verb. Supposedly she had thought, “I may write again, and I may not.” She wrote at a time when children’s series books were both an established and popular genre in America.
Clarke’s second six-volume series for Lee and Shepard presented the adventures of Little Prudy’s sister, Dotty Dimple (1868-1869), and earned Clarke a ten-percent royalty. At her publisher’s urging, she continued the adventures of the Parlin clan in Little Prudy’s Flyaway series (1870-1873) and Little Prudy’s Children series (1894-1901). She introduced two series with new characters, the Flaxie Frizzle series (1876- 1884) and the Quinnebasset series (1871-1903) for older children.
Clarke was also a prolific writer of children’s short stories. Between August of 1861 and February of 1867, twenty of her stories appeared in Robert Merry’s Museum. This magazine was founded by Samuel Griswold Goodrich (the Robert Merry of the title), author of the immensely popular Peter Parley children’s series, and remained in print from 1841 to 1872. In 1868, the magazine was edited by Louisa May Alcott. Clarke also published two Christmas stories in the popular St. Nicholas Magazine in 1886 and 1888.
From 1886 to 1902, Clarke’s sister Sarah Clarke wrote her own children’s books under the name of Penn Shirley. She produced three three-volume series as well as a self-contained volume. However, they did not sell as well as Rebecca’s. In 1871, the American Literary Gazette reported that sales of Rebecca Clarke’s books topped 300,000 copies.
In the January, 1866, issue of the North American Review, Thomas Wentworth Higginson listed the top twenty-two children’s books of that year. The Little Prudy series placed third behind Oliver Optic’s Army and Navy Stories and Oliver Optic’s Boat-Club Series, both of which also ran six volumes each. Where Higginson criticized Adams (Oliver Optic) for being “hasty in point of execution” and including “caricatures of well-bred womanhood,” he praised Clarke’s series as “genius” because Little Prudy “alone is the real thing,” proving her author has “the rare gift of delineating childhood.” Clarke resisted the technique of the didactic narrator commonly used at this time, and her characters get into the kind of scrapes and mischievous adventures familiar to her readers from their own lives.
In 1902, Clarke donated a building for use as the Norridgewock Public Library. She died on August 16, 1906, and is buried in the town cemetery. Both the library, located on a street renamed Sophie May Lane, and her Greek Revival-style home are listed on the National Register of Historic Places.