Lucy (Poate) Stebbins, 1886-1958

Author Lucy (Poate) Stebbins, known to her family as Daisy, was the third of five children born to Belle (Marsh) and Thomas Pratt Poate, Baptist missionaries in Japan. LPS was born in Portsmouth, England, while her parents were on furlough, and returned with them when she was nearly two years old. Although her father was originally from England, her mother was American, and the family settled in western New York State in 1892. LPS was educated in the public schools and graduated from the Fredonia Normal School in 1904. She taught school in Sherman and Mt. Vernon, N.Y. until her marriage in 1910 to Howard Leslie Stebbins. In 1919 HLS was named librarian of the Social Law Library in Boston. The family, which now included three children (Richard, Elizabeth, and Marabelle) moved to Newton, Mass., where they resided until 1943, when they moved to Cambridge. Preoccupied with her domestic work, LPS was not able to satisfy her literary aspirations until her children were in school. She was a literary advisor to the H.R. Huntting Co. of Springfield, Mass., until 1928 when she published Old Adam's Likeness, the first of eight novels, and began her writing career. Her biographical and critical works include A Victorian Album: Some Lady Novelists of the Period (1946) and London Ladies: True Tales of the Eighteenth Century (1952), and three books written with her son Richard Poate Stebbins: Enchanted Wanderer: The Life of Carl Maria von Weber (1940), Frank Damrosch: Let the People Sing (1945), and The Trollopes: Chronicle of a Writing Family (1945). From 1945 to 1949 LPS sat on the advisory board of The Trollopian, a journal devoted to studies of Trollope and his contemporaries. She died in Boston in 1958. A full account of her life can be found in So Hard the Stones: Lucy Poate Stebbins and Her Life in Literature (1993) by RPS.