Born in Claremont, New Hampshire, on February 18 probably of 1813 (some sources say 1817), Harriet Farley grew up from 1819 in Atkinson, New Hampshire, where she was educated in the local academy headed by her father. In 1837, to help support her family and possibly also to seek a certain independence, she made her way to Lowell, Massachusetts, and obtained a position in a textile mill. She eagerly threw herself into the lectures and other activities that promoted culture among the girl operatives of the Lowell mills, and in December 1840 she attracted some attention when her reply to Orestes Brownson╒s criticisms of the working conditions in the mills was published by the Lowell Offering. The Lowell Offering, a magazine written by and for the mill girls, changed ownership in October 1842, and Harriet Farley was invited to become editor. Harriot Curtis, another mill girl, became her coeditor in 1843.
Under Harriet Farley╒s direction the Offering was a literary magazine of the most conventional sort, publishing moral and inspirational pieces that were meant to demonstrate the intelligence and refinement of the working girls and women of Lowell. The magazine attracted much attention as far away as Great Britain, where an anthology of pieces from it was published in 1844. The determined respectability of the magazine foundered in the rising tide of labor unrest of the middle 1840s, however. Explicitly refusing to discuss the issues of hours, wages, and working conditions, the Offering lost its appeal to its own audience. Criticism of the magazine, led by Sarah Bagley, led to its demise in December 1845.
In 1847 Farley published Shells from the Strand of the Sea of Genius, a collection of homilies, many of them originally published in the Offering. In September of that year she revived the magazine as the New England Offering, but after less than three years it went under again in March 1850. She then moved to New York City, where she contributed to Godey╒s Lady╒s Book. In 1851 she edited a collection of her father╒s Discourses and Essays on Theological and Speculative Topics, and in 1853 she published Happy Nights at Hazel Nook, a children╒s book. After her marriage in 1854 to John I. Donlevy she wrote no more, but after his death she published a Christmas book, Fancy╒s Frolics, 1880. She died in New York City on November 12, 1907.
