Frances Sargent Osgood, a popular member of New York literary circles in the 1840s, achieved national recognition as a poet by satisfying the contemporary ideal of the woman poet and developing connections with editors, publishers, and fellow authors in Boston; Philadelphia; Providence, Rhode Island; Charleston, South Carolina; and New York. By the early twentieth century she had been relegated to a niche of literary history as a sentimentalist whose lyrical facility and personal charms led Edgar Allan Poe to praise her extravagantly. Recent scholars of women's poetry acknowledge her distinctive voice and examine her artful negotiation of social and literary conventions.

The sixth of seven children of Joseph Locke, a merchant, and his second wife, Mary (Ingersoll) Foster, Frances Sargent Locke was born in Boston 18 June 1811 and spent much of her youth in Hingham, Massachusetts. By her own account she was a happy, petted child. She was educated...