Emma Catherine Embury
| Emma Catherine Embury | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born |
Emma Manley February 25, 1806 New York City |
| Died |
February 10, 1863 New York City |
| Occupation | author |
Emma Catherine Embury (February 25, 1806 – February 10, 1863) was an American author and poet.
Biography
She was born Emma Manley in New York City on February 25, 1806. She was the eldest child of Dr. James R. Manley and Elizabeth Post.[1] She became a regular contributor of juvenile verse and stories to the New York Mirror by the age of twenty. Many of her early writings were printed under the pseudonym "Ianthe".[1] On May 10, 1828, she married Daniel Embury, a Brooklyn banker.
In 1828, Embury published her first collection of poems, Guido, a Tale: Sketches from History and Other Poems, and in 1830, she published her first book of prose, Pictures of Early Life.[1] For a time, she was one of two "lady editors" for Graham's Magazine in Philadelphia, along with Ann S. Stephens.[2] During the 1830s and 1840s, she served as a host or guest at literary salons in New York City in the circle including Anne Lynch Botta and Frances Sargent Osgood.[1]
Embury's literary career was cut short by chronic illness beginning in the late 1840s. She died in Brooklyn on February 10, 1863.[1]
Critical response
Embury was praised in her lifetime for writing works emphasizing domesticity and feminine virtue with moral messages appropriate for children. A critic for The United States Democratic Review, for example, wrote that her book Pictures of Early Life was "highly interesting and instructive; and of a character which should place it in the hands of youth, as well to instruct as to interest and amuse".[3]
Selected works
- Guido: A Tale (1828)
- Pictures of Early Life (1830)
- Constance Latimer: or, The Blind Girl (1838)
- American Wild Flowers in Their Native Haunts (1845)
- Glimpses of Home Life: or, Causes and Consequences (1848)
- The Waldorf Family: or, Grandfather's Legend (1848)
Other works published posthumously:
- Poems of Emma C. Embury (1869)
- Prose Writings of Emma C. Embury (1893)
References
- 1 2 3 4 5 Burtner, Amy L. "Emma Catherine Embury (1806–1863)" in Writers of the American Renaissance: An A-to-Z Guide, Denise D. Knight, ed. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2003: 109. ISBN 0-313-32140-X
- ↑ Quinn, Arthur Hobson. Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998: 330. ISBN 0-8018-5730-9
- ↑ Burtner, Amy L. "Emma Catherine Embury (1806–1863)" in Writers of the American Renaissance: An A-to-Z Guide, Denise D. Knight, ed. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2003: 110. ISBN 0-313-32140-X
External links
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Wikimedia Commons has media related to Emma Catherine Embury. |
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"Embury, Emma Catharine". The American Cyclopædia. 1879.
- "Embury, Emma Catherine". Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography. 1892.
- Emma C. Embury, from Portraits of American Women Writers, Library Company of Philadelphia