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Links to Oakes Smith related sources on the Web

• The Sinless Child and Other Poems 1843 see also this link
  The FULL TEXT of The Sinless Child and Other Poems(1843), ed. John Keese, produced as part of the "Making of America" collection, University of Michigan

• "The Sinless Child" (1842)
  This link, from Stephen Railton's page, Uncle Tom's Cabin and American Culture at the University of Virginia acknowledges "Eva" from Oakes Smith's "The Sinless Child" as a model for Stowe's Eva in Uncle Tom's Cabin. Either Railton or Chadwick Healey's transcription (the source of Railton's link) misdates the poem, which was originally printed in The Southern Literary Messenger in 1842.

• The Literary Maiden blog offers a good handful of Oakes Smith’s uncollected poems, but more important, more poems from her contemporaries publishing in similar journals. The sub-title of this blog is telling: “a compendium of obscure 19th century writing.”

• Loren Elizabeth Christie's blog now on Long Island Living History includes a fascinating array of original research on Elizabeth Oakes Smith, featuring many local links to her hometown of Patchogue, Long Island, where Oakes Smith spent much of her life after 1859.  We are especially grateful to Loren for her discovery of Henry Inman's portrait of Oakes Smith from the mid 1840s, which she unearthed in an obscure catalog of Frank Bulkeley Smith's art collection published in 1920.  

• Links to many of Oakes Smith's full-length works (full text) are available at the Hathi Trust Digital Library and/or Project Gutenberg: 

  • Riches Without Wings; or, The Cleveland Family (1838)

  • The Poetical Writings of Elizabeth Oakes Smith (1846)

  •  The Salamander (1848)

  • The Lover's Gift; or, Tributes to the Beautiful (1848)

  • Shadowland; or, The Seer (1852)

  • The Newsboy (1854)

  • Bertha and Lily; or the Parsonage of Beech Glen, a Romance (1854)

  • The Sagamore of Saco (1868)

• Additional Sources to Consider:

  • “About Elizabeth Oakes Smith” - Facebook

  • The Broadview Anthology of American Literature Volumes A & B: Beginnings to Reconstruction - The Broadview Press

  • Elizabeth Oakes (Prince) Smith - Academic Dictionaries and Encyclopedias

  • “Elizabeth Oakes Smith, 1806-1893” - Sonnet Central

  • “Elizabeth Oakes Smith’s Lyrical Activism” - UNC Press

  • “Feminism and Free Love” - H-Net

  • “Feminist Author and Women’s Rights Activist”

  • “Frozen Dolls and Famous Actresses: A Tale of Two Charlottes” - Agugliaro, Siel

  • “The Genius of Liberty” - Durack

  • “Greely, Horace (1811-1872) to Elizabeth Oakes Smith” - The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History

  • “A Guide to John Henry Ingram's Poe Collection” - University of Virginia Library

  • Heaven's Interpreters: Women Writers and Religious Agency in Nineteenth-Century America - Reed, Ashley

  • “Illustration of a Picture: Nineteenth-Century Writers and the Philadelphia Pictorials” - Patterson, Cynthia

  • “It’s an Urban Legend” - Twitter

  • Writers of the American Renaissance: An A-to-Z Guide - Knight, Denise D.

  • “Mrs. Elizabeth Oakes Smith” - Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore

  • “Photo of the Week: March 2, 2019— From the SCHS Library Archives” - Polhemus-Annibell, Wendy

  • “The Poetical Writings of Elizabeth Oakes Smith” - Whitesell, David R. & Valerie Wingfield

  • Remembering Sappho: transatlantic ‘Lesbian Nations’ in the long nineteenth century - H. J. E. Champion

  • "The Sanctity of Marriage." Woman's Rights Commensurate With Her Capacities and Obligations (1853)

  • “Smith, Elizabeth Oakes” - Maine-An Encyclopedia

  • “Today in Feminist History: Suffragists Flock to National Women’s Rights Convention (September 8, 1852)” - Dismore, David

  • “Woman Suffrage Timeline” - National Women’s History Museum

  • "The Year in Conferences—2018" - ESQ: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture

  • “Woman's rights, ballad” (1853) - Waters, Horace

• Christine Ladd-Franklin by Samantha Ragsdale.   This biography of Christine Ladd Franklin (1847-1930) indicates Oakes Smith's influence on the next generation of feminist thinkers:

Even as a toddler, Christine was attending women's rights lectures with her mother, such as one given by Elizabeth Oakes Smith. In a letter to her sister, Riar, Augusta once wrote of Elizabeth Oakes Smith's lecture, saying "women belonged not only in the pulpit, a place for which they were peculiarly suited, but also every place where a man should be."

Last Updated: 01.29.2024