Woolsey, Sarah Chauncey (1835–1905)

American author and poet . Name variations: Sarah Chauncy Woolsey; (pseudonym) Susan Coolidge. Born on January 29, 1835, in Cleveland, Ohio; died of a heart condition on April 9, 1905, in Newport, Rhode Island; daughter of John Mumford Woolsey (a land agent and businessman) and Jane (Andrews) Woolsey; cousin of Abby Howland Woolsey (1828–1893), Jane Stuart Woolsey (1830–1891), and Georgeanna Muirson Woolsey (1833–1906), all Civil War relief and hospital workers; niece of Theodore Dwight Woolsey (1801–1889), an educator; studied at private schools in Cleveland; educated at the Select Family School for Young Ladies in Hanover, New Hampshire; never married.

Selected writings:

The New-Year's Bargain (1872); What Katy Did (1873); What Katy Did at School (1874); Mischief's Thanksgiving, and Other Stories (1874); Nine Little Goslings (1875); For Summer Afternoons (1876); Eyebright (1879); Verses (1880); The Diary and Letters of Frances Burney , Madame d'Arblay (ed., 1880); Crosspatch, and Other Stories, Adapted from the Myths of Mother Goose (1881); A Guernsey Lily; or, How the Feud Was Healed (1881); My Household of Pets by Théophile Gautier (trans., 1882); A Round Dozen (1883); A Little Country Girl (1885); What Katy Did Next (1886); A Short History of the City of Philadelphia from its Foundation to the Present Time (1887); Clover (1888); Just Sixteen (1889); A Few More Verses (1889); In the High Valley: Being the Fifth and Last Volume of the Katy Did Series (1890); Rhymes and Ballads for Girls and Boys (1892); The Letters of Jane Austen , Selected from the Compilation of Her Great Nephew Edward, Lord Bradbourne (ed., 1892); The Barberry Bush, and Eight Other Stories about Girls for Girls (1893); Not Quite Eighteen (1894); An Old Convent School in Paris, and Other Papers (1895); Curly Locks (1899); A Rule of Three (1904); A Sheaf of Stories (1906); Last Verses (1906).

The eldest of five children, Sarah Chauncey Woolsey was born in 1835 in Cleveland, Ohio, the daughter of John Mumford Woolsey and Jane Andrews Woolsey . Her father, a descendant of Jonathan Edwards, had graduated from Yale University and moved to Cleveland five years earlier to start his own business. The Woolsey children, consisting of four girls and one boy, were encouraged to pursue active lives in the outdoors and grew up in an attractive home on Euclid Avenue. From an early age, Woolsey enjoyed telling and writing stories. An independent student, she enthusiastically pursued literature and history while neglecting less-favored subjects. After attending private schools in Cleveland, Sarah and her sisters were sent to a private school for girls in New Hampshire, the setting of which later inspired Woolsey's successful children's stories.

At age 20, Sarah moved with her family to New Haven, Connecticut, where her uncle, Theodore Dwight Woolsey, was president of Yale University. During the Civil War, Woolsey worked in different hospitals for the wounded. She met and began a close lifelong friendship with the author Helen Hunt Jackson , known by the pseudonym "H.H." A story published in Scribner's Monthly Magazine by H.H., "Joe Hale's Red Stockings," features a character closely modeled after Woolsey. Following the death of her father in 1870, Woolsey traveled abroad for two years and, upon returning to the United States, followed her family to Newport, Rhode Island, where Jackson was living. The Woolseys built a charming house where Sarah would live for the remainder of her life, except for summer excursions to Maine and occasional visits to Europe.

Woolsey had previously published articles in magazines, and she submitted a collection of her children's stories to Roberts Brothers, which published them in 1872 under the pseudonym of Susan Coolidge. (Woolsey chose the name because her sister Jane Woolsey had previously published stories under the name "Margaret Coolidge.") The most popular of her children's books was the "Katy Did" series, published between 1873 and 1890. Basing the central character, Katy, upon herself, Woolsey depicted the lives of children in ways that were heavily influenced by her own family's experiences. These stories broke with the more traditional popular forms of moralizing tales to depict heroic, bold schoolgirls.

In addition to her children's books, Woolsey wrote poetry for adults, edited scholarly works, and continued to submit stories, verse, and travel articles to such prominent publications as Out-look, Woman's Home Companion, and Scribner's. She also worked as a manuscript reader for Roberts Brothers and then Little, Brown.

Woolsey built a summer home with her unmarried sister Dora Woolsey in Oneonta, New York, during the late 1880s. The two also visited their sister Jane on Mount Desert Island in Maine during the summers. In Boston, she stayed with Sarah Wymann Whitman and visited with Sarah Orne Jewett and William James. In her later years, Woolsey enjoyed a modest amount of wealth and leisure. She died of a heart condition in her home in Newport on April 9, 1905. She was buried on Dorset Island at Glen Cove, Long Island, where the first Woolsey had settled in 1623.

sources:

Jackson, Kenneth T., ed. Dictionary of American Biography. NY: Scribner.

James, Edward T., ed. Notable American Women, 1607–1950. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1971.

MacDonald, Ruth K. "Sarah Chauncy Woolsey," in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 42: American Writers for Children Before 1900. Detroit, MI: Gale Research, 1985, pp. 397–400.

Drew Walker , freelance writer, New York, New York