Maria Gowen Brooks

Maria Gowen (or Gowan) Brooks (pen name, A Lover of Fine Arts and María Del Occidente; 1794 – November 11, 1845) was an American poet. She impressed Edgar Allan Poe and the English Poet Laureate, Robert Southey, who promoted her best-known poem Zophiël.

Early life and education

Abigail Gowen was born in Medford, Massachusetts, 1794. Her father was a man of literary tastes, and she was exposed to a lot of poetry at home. By age nine, she had memorized a large quantity of prose. When Abigail was thirteen, her father died, bankrupt. She was taken under the care of a her widowed brother-in-law John Brooks, a Boston merchant who was more than thirty years older than she was. As her legal guardian, he proposed to her when she was 14 and they married when she was 16. She became the stepmother of his two children and the couple had an unhappy marriage, especially after John lost his fortune in investments related to the War of 1812.

Career

With the family's financial reverses and living in comparative poverty, Abigail began to write poetry as consolation. Around this time, she changed her name to "Maria Abigail", which would eventually become, simply, "Maria". Also around this time, at age nineteen, she had written her first epic poem. It is described as a "metrical romance", which she never published.

In the hopes of earning some income, in 1820 Brooks published her first collection of poetry, Judith, Esther, and other Poems, under the pseudonym "A Lover of Fine Arts". In 1823, the husband died, and Brooks went to live with her brother on his coffee plantation in Manzanas, Cuba. He died soon after her arrival, which left her with a "settled income". During this time, she began to write the poem she would become most famous for: Zophiël, or the Bride of Seven, based on the story of Sara in the Book of Tobit.