Alice Cary was an American poet, and the older sister of fellow poet Phoebe Cary.
Background
Alice Cary was born on April 26, 1820 in Ohio, United States. She was descended from John Cary, who in 1630 taught the first Latin class in America, in Plymouth, Massachusetts. A lineal descendant, in the sixth generation, from John, was Robert Cary, a pioneer farmer, who lived on a bit of land eight miles north of Cincinnati; a man of poetic temperament which the hardships of life had left undeveloped. His wife, Elizabeth Jessup, was a superior woman whose eagerness for culture was not quenched by the toil of bringing up a family of nine children; of these Alice was the fourth. The primitive conditions of her early life afforded few opportunities for intellectual development, yet these she improved so zealously that when she was eighteen years of age a poem from her pen appeared in a Cincinnati paper.
Education
Her parents lived on a farm bought by Robert Cary in 1813 in what is now North College Hill, Ohio. The farm was 10 miles (16 km) north of Cincinnati, a good distance from schools, and the father could not afford to give their large family of nine children a very good education. But Alice and her sister Phoebe were fond of reading and studied all they could.
Career
In 1849, Cary, together with her sister Phoebe, four years her junior, issued a volume entitled Poems of Alice and Phoebe Cary. The next year the two made a journey to New York and New England, which was especially significant to them because of a visit they paid to Whittier, which he commemorated in his poem "The Singer. " The favorable reception given the collected poems and a disappointment in love moved Alice Cary to make her home in New York City in 1850, and later to send for Phoebe and a younger sister.
Literary work was not then liberally paid, but the sisters lived economically, kept out of debt, and Alice worked so unremittingly and successfully that by 1856 she was well established and drew about her a brilliant circle of friends. To the home on Twentieth St. for the next fifteen years came on Sunday evenings a group, congenial and distinguished, of men and women of literary tastes.
Despite the fact that she was an invalid during her later years, she worked unremittingly. This toil, partly necessary for maintaining the household and partly the conscientious effort to waste no moment of talent, injured to some extent the quality of her poetry.
Widely read during her lifetime, her poems are too diffuse, too tinged with sadness, too didactic for the taste of to-day; but there is in them a genuine poetic feeling, a sincere love and interpretation of nature which is attractive. Her prose works, especially Clovernook Papers (1852), had a large sale in this country and in Great Britain; a second series was issued in 1853. In 1855 Clovernook Children proved popular with young people. Her other publications were Hager, a Story of Today (1852), Lyra and Other Poems (1852), Married, Not Mated (1856), Pictures of Country Life (1859), Ballads, Lyrics and Hymns (1866), Snow-Berries (1867), The Bishop's Son (1867), The Lover's Diary (1868).
Alice died of tuberculosis in 1871 in New York at age 51. The pallbearers at her funeral included P. T. Barnum and Horace Greeley. Alice Cary is buried alongside her sister Phoebe in Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn, New York.
Religion
The breadth of her religious sympathies attached her to the Universalist Church and she accepted most of its doctrines.
Membership
She was the first president of the first woman's club (the Sorosis) in America.
Personality
The social charm of the two sisters more than their reputation as poets was the chief attraction. Alice seemed to her friends greater and sweeter than any song she ever sang. Full of unselfish interest in individuals, she was an intelligent and eager champion of the great causes making for human advancement.