Charlotte Bates was born in New York City. She was the youngest of six children, and while she was still an infant her father, Hervey Bates, died, causing her mother, Eliza Endicott Bates, to relocate the family to Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Education
Educated Cambridge, Massachusetts, where for many years she had private pupils.
Career
After public education and private tutoring, Bates accepted a position at the Salisbury School for Young Ladies as an instructor of English in September 1888. She published a volume of verse, under the title, Risks and Other Poems (1879) which contains approximately 120 poems, including ten sonnets, ten French translations (which were originally done for Longfellow"s Poems of Places) and five epithalamia. She also contributed many articles to magazines, and edited the Longfellow Birthday Book (1881), Seven Voices of Sympathy (1881), and the Cambridge Book of Poetry and Song (1882).
In editing the first-named works she cooperated with the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, whom she also assisted in compiling his Poems of Places.
She was mentioned by Doctor Franklin Johnson in his eulogy of Longfellow in 1882. She published the poem, "The Heart"s Easter" (March 30, 1902) in the New York Times and the poem "Solace" (May 1894) in Harper"s Magazine.