Elizabeth Oakes Smith was among the most highly regarded and best-known literary women of mid-nineteenth-century America. In a chapter on Oakes Smith in his memoir, Fifty Years Among Authors, Books, and Publishers (1884), the influential editor J. C. Derby observed, "In the brilliant coterie of men and women who graced the literary circles of New York forty years ago, none excelled in intellectual capacity the subject of this sketch." Oakes Smith's poems, essays, and sketches were solicited by prominent magazines of the day, including Godey's Lady's Book, the Home Journal, and Graham's Magazine. Edgar Allan Poe greatly admired her poem in seven cantos, "The Sinless Child," and enthusiastically praised her work in print. The powerful critic Rufus W. Griswold edited the 1845 collection of her complete poems, and George Ripley reviewed her novels in the New-York Tribune. Herman Melville included lines from her poem "The Drowned Mariner" in the "Extracts...