Biography
Born Julia Ward in New York City, she was the fourth child of banker Samuel Ward and occasional poet Julia Rush Cutler. Among her siblings was Samuel Cutler Ward. Her father was a well-to-do banker. Her mother, granddaughter of William Greene (August 16, 1731 – November 30, 1809), Governor of Rhode Island and his wife Catharine Ray, died when Julia was five after having borne seven children by the age of 27.
In 1843, she married Samuel Gridley Howe (1801–1876), a physician and reformer who founded the Perkins School for the Blind in Boston, Massachusetts. They announced their engagement quite suddenly on February 21; though Howe had courted Julia for a time, he had more recently shown an interest in her sister Louisa.
Her book, Passion-Flowers, was published in December 1853. The book collected intensely personal poems and was written without the awareness of her husband, who was then editing the Free Soil newspaper The Commonwealth.
Read more about this topic: Julia Ward Howe
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