Harriet Winslow Sewall (1819–1889)

Harriet Winslow Sewall was born in Portland, Maine, into a Quaker family. She was educated in Portland and at a boarding school in Providence, Rhode Island. She began writing poetry at an early age. She took an interest in the Transcendentalist movement and became a women's rights advocate and opponent of slavery. In 1848, she married Charles List, a journalist, but after he fell ill, she supported them with the help of her family. After his death, she remarried in 1857 to her late sister's husband, Samuel Sewall, a lawyer and fellow abolitionist. An inheritance from her father in 1861 enabled her to devote time and resources to philanthropy. In 1883, she edited and published the letters of her friend Lydia Maria Child. A collection of her own poems was published in 1889.