Born in Boston on October 8, 1794, Caroline Howard grew up in a succession of nearby towns until her widowed mother settled in Cambridge in 1804. Her schooling was similarly irregular. She wrote verse for her private amusement from an early age, but she was mortified when one of her poems was printed without her knowledge in a local newspaper about 1811. In 1817 she allowed a second to appear in the North American Review. In December 1819 she married Samuel Gilman, a Unitarian minister with whom she moved to Charleston, South Carolina. Her writing career was slow to develop. In 1832 she began publishing the weekly Rose-Bud, or Youth╒s Gazette, one of the earliest children╒s magazines in America. It became the Southern Rose, with a somewhat broader family audience in 1835, and Gilman continued to edit and publish it until 1839. In it she serialized her first novel, published in book form in 1834 as Recollections of a Housekeeper under the pseudonym ╥Clarissa Packard.╙ The book was a portrait of domestic life in New England; its Southern counterpart, Recollections of a Southern Matron, appeared in 1838.
In these books, as in much of her writing, Gilman╒s aim was to explain one section of the nation to the other, to display the essential unity between them that she perceived as founded on the domestic level, and to offset thereby the growing stresses between North and South on the political level. Subsequent books included The Poetry of Travelling in the United States, humorous sketches, 1838, The Lady╒s Annual Register and Housewife╒s Memorandum-Book for 1838, a domestic almanac, 1838, The Letters of Eliza Wilkinson during the Invasion of Charleston, an edited collection, 1839, Tales and Ballads, 1839, Love╒s Progress, a romance, 1840, Ruth Raymond, 1840, Oracles from the Poets, selections intended for family reading aloud, 1844, The Sibyl, or, New Oracles from the Poets, 1848, Verses of a Life Time, her own poems, 1849, A Gift Book of Stories and Poems for Children, 1850, and Oracles for Youth, 1852. During the Civil War she lived in Greenville, South Carolina, and was active in Confederate volunteer and relief work. Her home and possessions in Charleston were destroyed, but she returned to that city in 1865 and lived there until 1882, when she joined a daughter in Washington, D.C. She died in Washington on September 15, 1888.
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