Harriet Elizabeth Prescott Spofford (April 3, 1835–August 14, 1921) was a notable American writer remembered for her novels, poems and detective stories. Born in Calais, Maine, she moved with her parents to Newburyport, Massachusetts in 1849. She attended the Putnam Free School in Newburyport, and Pinkerton Academy in Derry, New Hampshire from 1853 to 1855. When her parents became sick, of necessity she set to work as a writer, sometimes laboring fifteen hours a day. Spofford's gothic romances were set apart by luxuriant descriptions, and an unconventional handling of female stereotypes of the day. In 1859, she submitted to Atlantic Monthly a story about Parisian life entitled "In a Cellar." The magazine's editor, James Russell Lowell, at first believed the story to be a translation, and withheld it from publication. Reassured that it was original, he published it, and it established her reputation. She became a welcome contributor to periodicals. In 1865, she married Richard S. Spofford, a Boston lawyer, and they resided on Deer Island overlooking the Merrimack River at Amesbury, where she died. When Thomas Wentworth Higginson asked Emily Dickinson whether she had read Spofford's work "Circumstance," Dickinson replied, "I read Miss Prescott's "Circumstance", but it followed me in the dark, so I avoided her." (Atlantic Monthly, October 1891).