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Moulton, Ellen Louise Chandler, , Connecticut 1835 1908 Female Writer writer of verse and juvenile stories, daughter of Lucius Lemuel and Louisa Rebecca (Clark) Chandler, was born in Pomfret, Connecticut She attended the school of the Rev. Roswell Park there and then went for a year to Emma Willard's Female Seminary at Troy, N. Y.
One of her Pomfret schoolmates was James McNeill Whistler, who gave her one of his juvenile paintings, which she always preserved.
She later knew him well in London.
From 1876 on, she spent summers and autumns in Europe and came to be quite at home in London, where she numbered among her friends Monckton Milnes (Lord Houghton), Browning, Carlyle, Holman Hunt, Madox Brown, Burne-Jones, the Rossettis, William Morris, Swinburne, Watts-Dunton, Pater, the Meynells, Hardy, and Meredith.
She wrote for many newspapers and magazines.
In The Poems and Sonnets of Louise Chandler Moulton (1909), published in the year after her death, are collected many of her verses which had appeared in earlier publications.
She edited, with biographies, A Last Harvest (1891) and The Collected Poems of Philip Bourke Marston (1893), by the blind poet Marston, and Arthur O'Shaughnessy, His Life and His Work, with Selections from His Poems (1894).
For Recent English Dramatists (1901) she wrote the life of Stephen Phillips.
Though there is truth in the statement, some of her poetry escapes this judgment.
Her sonnets are her best work and have been highly praised.
During the last year of her life she carried on a correspondence with Clara Louise Burnham, through whose instrumentality she endeavored to find help in the teachings of Christian Science.
Women (1897), vol.
Lib. ; the bulk of her correspondence, classified by Arlo Bates, went to the Lib.
Her parents were rigid Calvinists and her upbringing, from which all frivolity was excluded, may have been responsible for the strain of melancholy in her mature personality.
Though devoted to her only child, a daughter, she was not domestic in her tastes and found her happiness in her writing and in friends whose pursuits were similar to her own.
Her published volumes include several books of bed-time stories for children and some travel reminiscences, of which the best known, perhaps, is Lazy Tours in Spain and Elsewhere (1896).
Lady Wilde, mother of Oscar Wilde, once said to her: "I have read your poems, but they deal with the sorrows and emotions of one individual; they have naught in them of the passion of the world" (Rittenhouse, post, p. 606).
On Aug. 27, 1855, a few weeks after leaving school, she was married to William U. Moulton, a Boston journalist and publisher, who died Feb. 19, 1898.
See: Harriet Prescott Spofford, biographical introduction to The Poems and Sonnets of Louise Chandler Moulton (1909); Lilian Whiting, Louise Chandler Moulton, Poet and Friend (1910); Who's Who in America, 1908-09; Frances E. Willard and Mary A. Livermore, Am.
After her marriage she resided in Boston, where her Friday salon was frequented by artists, musicians, and writers, among them Lowell, Whittier, Longfellow, and Holmes.
