Alice Cary (April 26, 1820 – February 12, 1871) was an American poet, and the older sister of fellow poet Phoebe Cary (1824–1871).
Alice Cary (April 26, 1820 – February 12, 1871) was an American poet, and the older sister of fellow poet Phoebe Cary (1824–1871).
Alice Cary was born on April 26, 1820, in Mount Healthy, Ohio, off the Miami River near Cincinnati. Her parents lived on a farm bought by Robert Cary in 1813 in what is now North College Hill, Ohio. He called the 27 acres (110,000 m2) Clovernook Farm. The farm was 10 miles (16 km) north of Cincinnati, a great distance from schools, and the daddy could not afford to find the child support for their large intimates of nine kids a very great education. But Alice and her sister Phoebe were loving of reading and studied all they could.
While the sisters were raised in a Universalist household and held embassy and religious views that were avant-garde and reformist, they often attended Methodist, Presbyterian, and Congregationalist services and were friendly with ministers of anything these denominations and others. According to Phoebe,
When Alice was 17 and Phoebe 13, they began to write verses, which were printed in newspapers. Their mommy had died in 1835, and two years like their daddy married again. Their stepmother was wholly unsympathetic vis-а-vis the school aspirations of Alice and Phoebe. For their part, while the sisters were ready and while comfortable to aid to the full extent of their strength in household labor, they persisted in a determination to examination and write when the day’s pretend was done. Sometimes they were refused the use of candles to the extent of their wishes, and the device of a saucer of lard later than a bit of rag for a wick was their only light after the burning of the relations had retired.
Alice’s first major poem, “The Child of Sorrow”, was published in 1838 and was praised by influential critics including Edgar Allan Poe, Rufus Wilmot Griswold, and Horace Greeley. Alice and her sister were included in the influential anthology The Female Poets of America prepared by Rufus Griswold. Griswold encouraged publishers to put forth a deposit of the sisters’ poetry, even asking John Greenleaf Whittier to allow a preface. Whittier refused, believing their poetry did not habit his endorsement, and after that noting a general be repulsed by for prefaces as a method to “pass off by aid of a known name, what on the other hand would not pass current”. In 1849, a Philadelphia publisher accepted the book, Poems of Alice and Phoebe Cary, and Griswold wrote the preface, left unsigned. By the spring of 1850, Alice and Griswold were often corresponding through letters which were often flirtatious. This correspondence over and over and done with with by the summer of that year.
The anthology made Alice and Phoebe well known, and in 1850 they moved to New York City, where they devoted themselves to writing and garnered much fame. There, they after that hosted receptions upon Sunday evenings that drew notable figures including P. T. Barnum, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, John Greenleaf Whittier, Horace Greeley, Bayard Taylor and his wife, Richard and Elizabeth Stoddard, Robert Dale Owen, Oliver Johnson, Mary Mapes Dodge, Mrs. Croly, Mrs. Victor, Edwin H. Chapin, Henry M. Field, Charles F. Deems, Samuel Bowles, Thomas B. Aldrich, Anna E. Dickinson, George Ripley, Madame Le Vert, Henry Wilson, Justin McCarthy; in short, all the noted contemporary names in the vary departments of literature and art might fairly be further to the list.
Alice wrote for the Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, Putnam’s Magazine, the New York Ledger, the Independent, and other studious periodicals. Her articles, whether prose or poetry, were gathered past into volumes which were received competently in the United States and abroad. She with wrote novels and poems which did not make their first announce in periodicals. Among her prose works were The Clovernook Children and Snow Berries, a Book for Young Folks.
In 1868, Horace Greeley wrote a brief joint biography of Alice and Phebe (as he spelled her name).
Alice died of tuberculosis in 1871 in New York at age 51. The pallbearers at her funeral included P. T. Barnum and Horace Greeley. Alice Cary is buried to the side of her sister Phoebe in Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn, New York.
The Cary Home stands today on the east side of Hamilton Avenue (US 127), on the campus of the Clovernook Center for the Blind and Visually Impaired in North College Hill.