SOURCE: “Lydia H. Sigourney,” in The Female Prose Writers of America with Portraits, Biographical Notices, and Specimens of Their Writings, E. H. Butler & Co., 1852, pp. 76–92.

In the following essay, Hart presents a study of Sigourney's life and works with excerpts from her prose.

Justice has hardly been done to Mrs. Sigourney as a prose writer. She has been so long, and is so familiarly, quoted as a poet, that the public has in a measure forgotten that her indefatigable pen has sent forth almost a volume of prose yearly for more than a quarter of a century—that her prose works already issued number, in fact, twenty-five volumes, averaging more than two hundred pages each, and some of them having gone through not less than twenty editions. She has indeed produced no one work of a thrilling or startling character, wherewith to electrify the public mind. Her writings...