Charlotte Champe Stearns, was a school teacher, poet, social worker, and the mother of poet T. S. Eliot.
Background
Charlotte was born in Baltimore, Maryland. She was born the second daughter and second of nine children of Charlotte and Thomas Stearns. Her father was a merchant who attempted living in different cities, before he settled down as a merchant partner in the trading firm of Stearns & Bailey in Boston, Massachusetts.
Education
Charlotte attended private school and graduated from the advance class of the State Normal School of Framingham, Massachusetts in 1862.
Career
Her teaching career led her to Pennsylvania, Milwaukee, Antioch College, back to Framingham and to the Saint Louis Normal School in Saint Louis, Missouri. South. Charlotte was a writer of poems. Many of her poems appeared in religious periodicals.
A collection of her poems, Easter Songs, was published in 1899.
She was interested in the dramatization of events from medieval and Renaissance history that reflected the struggles of men who died for their faith. Charlotte"s tone in her poetry was that of a dignified passion.
She also wrote a biography of her father-in-law, William Greenleaf Eliot, a Unitarian minister and leading citizen of Saint Louis. Charlotte died in Cambridge in 1929 at eighty-sixty of a cerebral thrombosis.
After her cremation, her ashes were buried next to her husband"s plot in Bellefontaine Cemetery in Saint Louis.