Josephine Preston Peabody
, 1874 - 1922
Josephine Preston Peabody (b. 30th May, Brooklyn New York) was an American poet, playwright and author.
Peabody grew up in Brooklyn until the death of her father in 1884, where financial troubles caused her family to move to Dorchester, Massachusetts. Having learnt from her family to love literature and theatre, Peabody had her first work published aged fourteen, in The Woman’s Journal in 1888. It was initially not clear that her education would be able to continue beyond the Girls’ Latin School in Boston (1889–92), but after her poems were accepted by the Atlantic Monthly and Scribner’s Magazine, the support of a patron allowed her to attend Radcliffe College in Cambridge, Massachusetts until 1896.
In 1897, Peabody published the children’s anthology of Greek myth Old Greek Folk Stories Told Anew. In 1898, her career in poetry took off, with the publication of the verse book The Wayfarers (1898). In 1900, she published Fortune and Men’s Eyes, a one-act play based on Shakespeare’s sonnets, and Marlowe (1901), a verse play about Christopher Marlowe.
Peabody lectured at Wellesley College in Massachusetts on poetry and literature from 1901 to 1903. In 1902, she toured in Europe, and in 1906, she married Lionel S. Marks, a Harvard engineering professor. Peabody continued to publish frequently for the rest of her life. Her work includes poems for children, a play about Mary Wollstonecraft, a drama about Francis of Assisi and The Singing Man, a collection of poems concerning social injustice in 1911.
The Britannica entry on Peabody notes that ‘Her early verse shows the influences of Shakespeare, Robert Browning, and the Pre-Raphaelites, especially Christina Rossetti; it is marked by delicacy, clarity, and a certain otherworldliness.’
Sources:
Britannica (accessed: August 2, 2022).
Bio prepared by Robin Diver, University of Birmingham, robin.diver@hotmail.com
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