Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,324
By This is the grave of Frances Sargent Osgood.
Born in 1811 in Boston, Francis Locke grew up wealthy, the daughter of a prominent merchant. She went to the best girls’ schools and was encouraged, as were many young women from the region’s elite families, to engage in literary pursuits. She started to write poetry and had her first poems published in 1825.
In 1834, Locke met the artist Samuel Stillman Osgood at a gallery. They fell in love while she sat for a portrait from him and they married in 1836. They soon sailed for a long trip to England and a few kids, but the marriage was pretty unsuccessful and they were at least partially separated by 1843. They were back in New York by 1839 and she engaged heavily in the city’s literary life, publishing everything she could. She managed to get a few books of her poetry published, including The Poetry of Flowers and the Flowers of Poetry, in 1841, The Snowdrop, a New Year Gift for Children, in 1842, and Cries in New York, in 1846, among other works.
Osgood also had a huge fan in Edgar Allan Poe. This is interesting because Poe was so utterly contemptuous of most of his contemporaries, often for good reason, but also because he was a drunken crank. But he loved Osgood’s work and considered her one of the finest writers in America. This was not necessarily universally shared and Poe was of course unstable, but he was also well known in American literary circles and he spent some of his money, which of course came and went due to his own issues, on getting her work published and distributed more widely. They became good friends and may have had an affair. This is hard to know, but Poe had many affairs. Poe’s dying wife actually liked Osgood because he seemed to drink less when she was around. This all caused a minor scandal, including rumors that her third child, born in 1846, was Poe’s and not her husband’s. That’s probably not the case and both Osgoods fought the allegations, even if they didn’t really like each other anymore. In any case, this also forced the end of the relationship between Osgood and Poe by 1847.
Unfortunately, Osgood had come down with that great killer of the nineteenth century, tuberculosis. She got worse and worse, even as her husband came back to take care of her. She wrote as long as she could, but she died in 1850, at the age of 38. Sadly, both of her daughters, just kids, died the next year.
Francis Sargent Osgood is buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
If you would like this series to visit other 19th century American poets, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Henry Howard Brownell is in East Hartford, Connecticut and Richard Hovey is in North Andover, Massachusetts. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.