A Memorial Of
Alice and Phoebe Cary
With Some Of Their Later Poems

By Mary Clemmer Ames

Illustrated by Two Portraits on Steel

Published By Hurd And Houghton
New York
1876

Antique hardcover.
Green cloth binding.
Stamped & gilt binding decoration.
Beveled boards.
Colored-coated endpapers.
5.25" x 7.5"
351 pages.

Biographies of sisters Alice and Phoebe Cary (1820-1871 and 1824-1871).

Author Mary Clemmer Ames ( 1831-1884) was a 19th-century American journalist, author, and poet. She wrote poetry and prose, including novels.
She resided with the sisters in New York while estranged from her husband.
Ames was one of the highest paid women journalists of the era, and applied her skills here:  "months were consumed in writing to, and waiting for replies from, long time friends of the sisters" and working through "the mass of Alice and Phoebe's unedited papers."
The result is a comprehensive memorial of the two women's lives, attempting to ensconce the sisters within the American literary canon as well as celebrating their activist contributions.


This book also includes over 50 of the Cary sisters' later poems , such as :
The Might of Love
The Settler's Christmas Eve
God Is Love
Life's Mysteries
Faded Leaves
A Sea Song
Morning In The Mountains
The Thistle Flower
The Little House On The Hill
The Old House
The Fire By The Sea
Putting Off The Armor
The Christmas Sheaf
The Barefoot Boy
Christmas
Old Pictures
Nobody's Child
Amy's Love Letter
Spring Flowers
Etc., Etc.

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Good Condition.
Some light binding wear, some sloss of cloth at the head of the spine.
The binding is otherwise good.
( see the photos )
Old name and date on the front endpaper.
No other writing.
No markings.
The pages and the two steel-engraved plates are in very good condition.

Carefully poacked for shipment to the buyer.

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Biographical Information:

Alice Cary (1820-1871)
Phoebe Cary (1824-1871)
Writers and Poets.

Born near Cincinnati, Ohio, Alice on April 26, 1820 and Phoebe on September 4, 1824, the Cary sisters grew up on a farm and received little formal schooling. Nevertheless they were for their time well educated, Alice by their mother and Phoebe by Alice, and the girls early developed a taste for literature.
The sisters' mother died in 1835. Two years afterwards their father married again.
Their stepmother was wholly unsympathetic regarding their literary aspirations.
To the full extent of their strength, the girls aided in household labour, but the sisters also persisted in a determination to study and write.  When the day's farm work was done, they did so. Sometimes they were refused the use of candles , but a saucer of lard with a bit of rag for a wick provided light after the rest of the family had retired.

Alice's first published poem appeared in the Sentinel, a Cincinnati Universalist newspaper, when she was 18. For 10 years thereafter she continued to contribute poems and prose sketches to various periodicals with no remuneration. Phoebe began to write under Alice's guidance and had her first poem published in a Boston newspaper about the time of Alice's first.
Their work attracted the favorable notice of Edgar Allan Poe , Horace Greeley , John Greenleaf Whittier and Rufus W. Griswold, through whose recommendation their joint works were published as Poems of Alice and Phoebe Carey (1850). Some two-thirds of the poetry was the work of Alice. Their book's modest success encouraged the sisters to move to New York City.

In New York City, Alice and Phoebe became regular contributors to Harper's, the Atlantic Monthly, and other periodicals. Alice, much more prolific than her sister, enjoyed the higher reputation during her lifetime, although Phoebe was later held in greater critical esteem for the wit and feeling of her poems. Their salon became a popular meeting place for the leading literary figures of New York, and both women were famed for their hospitality.

Among Alice's books were two volumes of reminiscent sketches entitled Clovernook Papers (1852, 1853), three novels and several volumes of poetry. Phoebe devoted much of her time to keeping house and, in later years, to caring for Alice. As a result, she published only Poems and Parodies (1854) and Poems of Faith, Hope and Love (1868), but one of her religious verses, " Nearer Home " ( sometimes called, from the first line, " One Sweetly Solemn Thought "), became widely popular as a hymn.

Both sisters supported the women's rights movement. Phoebe was for a short time an assistant editor of Susan B. Anthony's paper The Revolution.
In 1868 Alice reluctantly agreed to serve as first president of Sorosis, the pioneer women's club founded by Jane Croly.

After a long struggle with tuberculosis, Alice died in New York City on February 12, 1871
Exhausted by grief, Phoebe succumbed to hepatitis a few months later on July 31, 1871, in Newport  , Rhode Island .
The  sisters were buried in Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn, New York.