Maria Gowen Brooks

Maria Gowen Brooks was an American poet.

She was born Abigail Gowen in Medford, Massachusetts. Her father was a man of literary tastes, and she was exposed to a lot of poetry at home by age nine, she had memorized a large quantity of prose. Unfortunately, when Abigail was 13, her father died, bankrupt. She immediately came under the care of a Boston merchant named John Brooks. He was a man more than thirty years older than she was, to whom she had already been betrothed. She finished her education and married him. For a while she and John lived prosperously, but financial reverses eventually reduced them to living in comparative poverty. Abigail began to write poetry as consolation. Around this time, she changed her name to Maria Abigail, which would eventually become, simply, Maria. Also around this time, at age nineteen, she had written her first epic poem. It is described as a metrical romance, which she never published.

Source: Wikipedia