According to one of her biographers, Elizabeth Madox Roberts, upon seeing a portrait of Elizabeth Barrett Browning captioned "Poet," declared at the tender age of eight that she too wished to be a poet. Her childhood resolution was fulfilled. Although she is remembered today more for her fiction than her poetry, she published during her lifetime a small but generally excellent body of poetry.

Most of Roberts's life was spent in Kentucky, a fact which had a major influence on her writing. She was born in 1881 in Perryville, Kentucky, but her family moved in 1884 to nearby Springfield, another rural community which would become the basis for many of the small towns depicted in her poetry and fiction. Roberts's parents, Simpson and Mary Elizabeth Brent Roberts, were influential in a variety of ways for the aspiring writer. Her father was never successful financially; he ran a store and worked...