Elizabeth Oakes (Prince) Smith was one of the first American women to earn a national reputation as a fiction writer. In her mid forties she abandoned that career to work as an advocate for labor reform, temperance, and women's rights, becoming the first woman to lecture nationally on the lyceum circuit. Though much of her work remains uncollected and unpublished at the turn of the twenty-first century, the thousands of pages of writing she produced over a career spanning eight decades--letters, editorials, poetry, stories, lectures, novels, essays, memoirs, and autobiography--provide an unparalleled cultural and political record of the nineteenth-century woman's experience.

Elizabeth Oakes Prince was born near North Yarmouth, Maine, on 12 August 1806, to Sophia (Blanchard) and David Prince, a merchant seaman. When her father died at sea in 1809, Smith's two grandfathers--starkly contrasting in religious and social temperaments--filled paternal roles, creating a division in Smith's personality traceable throughout her...