Anne Lynch Botta was born on November 11, 1815 and was the daughter of Patrick Lynch, who, having been imprisoned in England for taking part in the Irish Rebellion of 1798, refused allegiance to the British Government, and, in the first decade of the nineteenth century, came, an exile, to America. In Bennington, Vermont, he carried on a dry-goods business, and married, in 1812, Charlotte Gray, daughter of Lieutenant-Colonel Gray, an officer in the Revolution.
Anne Lynch Botta graduated from the Albany Female Academy in 1834.
As soon as Anne was able to make a home for her mother, after graduating from the Albany Female Academy, teaching for a time there and in a private family on Shelter Island, New York, she settled in Providence, Rhode Island. Here, in her own household, she continued to educate young women, and her home became a gathering place for the more cultured people of the community.
After the year 1845, when Miss Lynch moved to New York, taking a position as teacher of English composition in the Brooklyn Academy for Women, her home in Waverly Place was a center for the most brilliant intellectual and artistic life of the city.
In 1851, Miss Lynch spent a season in Washington while occupied in seeking through Congress delayed payment for her grandfather's military services. The paying of this debt by the Government brought easier circumstances to her and to her mother; and during 1853, she traveled abroad, giving some time to the study of art, particularly sculpture.
Guests from home and abroad were entertained at their residence at 25 West Thirty-seventh St. , which Emerson called "the house of the expanding doors. " Anne C. Lynch Botta's literary work was for the most part poetic, elevated in theme, simple and direct in style, as in the sonnets "The Ideal, " "The Ideal Found, " and "Vita Nuova. " Her personal charm is more evident, perhaps, in occasional verse, such as "To Juliette's Twins. "
During her residence in Providence and later, she contributed poetry to various magazines, particularly to the Democratic Review. Her collected poems, first published in 1849, went through three editions, but it could hardly be said that Mrs. Botta stood out with distinction from the host of sister poets composing verse in the same period.
Anne Botta was a noted portrait sculptor, who assisted in the 1889 founding of New York's Barnard College and established a prize given every fifth year by the Academie Francaise for an essay on "The Condition of Women". Despite urging Anne never penned an autobiography but following her death from pneumonia Botta gathered a number of pieces which were published as an 1893 posthumous memoir. In 1860 she published A Handbook of Universal Literature, which has gone through many editions and was a notable achievement for a woman of her time. This book served as a college text for more than 50 years, and in her later years. A hostess presiding with tact and simplicity over the first important salon in the history of American letters, Anne is a figure to be remembered in the social and literary life of the mid-nineteenth century.
Her success, that she had in her career, she attributed to learning early her own limitations. Diligent in her studies and artistic in her tastes, she found her power to do creative work less than her ability to stimulate others. People, she confessed, were the main passion of her life.
Quotations: "Beauty in art, in my opinion, does not consist in simply copying nature, but in retaining the true features of the subject, and breathing on them a breath of spiritual life, which should bring them up to their ideal form. "
Anne Charlotte Lynch inherited from her father, who died when she was not yet four, an ardent, poetic temperament and keen perceptions; from her mother, energy and good judgment.
Her personal charm, intuitive sympathies, and skill at repartee attracted to her modest drawing rooms, among others, Bryant, Horace Greeley, Margaret Fuller, Willis, and Poe; and hither came Bayard Taylor and R. H. Stoddard for their introduction to the literati of New York.
Anne was modest in character, devoted to family and friends, and, according to Willis, "equally beloved of man and woman". Slender, with dark hair and eyes, she bore herself with a certain grace and freedom of movement in harmony with a spirit of perpetual youth.
In 1855, Anne Lynch Botta married Prof. Vincenzo Botta.
