Northern-born Caroline Lee Hentz was an educator of young ladies and a prolific author of best-selling romantic literature. An author of plays, poems, and stories for magazines, she turned exclusively to fiction in the 1840s. Her most celebrated fictional effort was The Planter's Northern Bride (1854), a Southern response to Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852).

Caroline Lee Whiting was of Puritan stock; her ancestor, the Reverend Samuel Whiting, immigrated to Massachusetts in 1636, where his family became prominent. Born in Lancaster, Massachusetts, on 1 June 1800, Caroline was the youngest of the eight children of Revolutionary War colonel John Whiting and his wife, Orpah. The family had deep roots in New England, and three of her brothers had served in the army as officers. On 30 September 1824 she married Nicholas Marcellus Hentz, a political refugee from France, a restless pedagogue, a compiler of French language texts, and the author of a book...