Elizabeth Chase Allen

Elizabeth Akers Allen, c. 1881

Elizabeth Chase Akers Allen (October 9, 1832 – August 7, 1911) was an American author, journalist and poet.

Biography

Born Elizabeth Anne Chase on October 9, 1832, in Strong, Maine. She grew up in Farmington, Maine, where she attended Farmington Academy. She began to write at the age of fifteen, under the pen name "Florence Percy",^[1] and in 1855 published under that name a volume of poems entitled Forest Buds. In 1851 she married Marshall S. M. Taylor, but they were divorced within a few years. In subsequent years she travelled through Europe; in Rome she became acquainted with the feminist Paulina Kellogg Wright Davis. While in Europe she served as a correspondent for the Portland Transcript and the Boston Evening Gazette. She started contributing to the Atlantic Monthly in 1858.^[2] She married Paul Akers, a Maine sculptor whom she had met in Rome, in 1860; he died in 1861. In 1865 she married E. M. Allen, of New York. In 1866 a collection of her poems was published in Boston. She died on August 7, 1911 in Tuckahoe, New York.

A couplet for which she is remembered consists of lines 1 and 2 from her poem "Rock Me to Sleep, Mother" (1859), which runs:

Backward, turn backward, O time, in thy flight;
Make me a child again, just for to-night.

Allen died in Tuckahoe, New York on August 7, 1911.

Selected list of works

• Forest Buds from the Woods of Maine (1855)
• Poems (1866–1869)
• Queen Catharine's Rose (1885)
• The Silver Bridge, and Other Poems (1885)
• Two Saints (1888)
• The High-Top Sweeting, and Other Poems (1891)
• The Proud Lady of Stavoven (1897)
• The Ballad of the Bronx (1901)
• The Sunset Song, and Other Verses (1902)

References

1. Leonard, John William; Marquis, Albert Nelson, eds. (1908), Who's who in America 5, Chicago: Marquis Who's Who, Incorporated, p. 17.
2. "Allen, Elizabeth Anne Chase Akers". Encyclopædia Britannica. 2006. Encyclopædia Britannica Premium Service. February 24, 2006.

External links

• Works by or about Elizabeth Chase Allen at Internet Archive
• Works by Elizabeth Chase Allen at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
• Sheet music for "Rock Me to Sleep, Mother", Columbia, SC: Julian A. Selby, 1862, from the Confederate Imprints Sheet Music Collection