ADMINISTRATIVE INFORMATION    

View this Letter
This letter can be viewed online at:  https://www.stonybrook.edu/libspecial/collections/manuscripts/smithletter_sbuspec_sc502.pdf

Title
Elizabeth Oakes Prince Smith Collection

Collection Number
SC 502

OCLC Number
1543373530

Creator 
Elizabeth Oakes Smith (August 12, 1806-November 15, 1893)

Provenance 
Donated by Robert and Paulette Greene in November 1988.

Extent, Scope, and Content Note 
Extent: 1 letter (8 pages)
Date: October 10, 1884, written from Blue Point, Long Island, New York
Dimensions: 21 x 13 cm.
Context: Letter written by Elizabeth Oakes Smith to Sallie Holley, Blue Point, Long Island, New York on October 10, 1884.

Elizabeth Oakes Smith (née Prince) was a distinguished poet, fiction writer, editor, lecturer, and advocate for women’s rights. She was born in 1806 near North Yarmouth, Maine, and married Seba Smith, a journalist and editor of The Eastern Argus, at the age of sixteen. Together they had six sons: Benjamin, Rolvin, Appleton, Sidney, Alvin, and Edward Oaksmith. Alongside her domestic responsibilities, Smith frequently assumed editorial control of her husband’s publications during his absences. Much of her early work appeared anonymously or under the pseudonym “Ernest Helfenstein,” as well as under the signature “E.”

Smith played an influential role in nineteenth-century reform movements, particularly women’s rights. She was nominated for the presidency of the National Women’s Rights Convention and became the first woman to lecture regularly within the Lyceum Movement, an important forum for adult education and intellectual exchange in antebellum America. In 1859, she and her husband retired to their residence, The Willows, in Patchogue, New York, where she continued her literary production and began work on her autobiography.

Following Seba Smith’s death in 1870, Smith sold The Willows and relocated to Blue Point, New York, to reside with her son Alvin. The present letter was written during this period. In her later years, she alternated her residence between Blue Point and the home of her son Appleton in North Carolina. Elizabeth Oakes Smith died in 1893 and was interred in Lakeview Cemetery in Patchogue alongside her husband and youngest son, Edward. Her autobiography, A Human Life, referenced in this letter, remained unpublished.

Sallie Holley (b. 1818) was a prominent abolitionist and antislavery lecturer. Her novel, A Life for Liberty, was published in New York in 1899. She maintained a sustained correspondence with Elizabeth Oakes Smith, who may have provided editorial guidance on her literary work.

Arrangement and Processing Note
Transcription and research by Nicole Shaw, intern, 2015. 
Finding aid and transcript updated by Kristen J. Nyitray in January 2026.

Language
English 

Restrictions on Access
The collection is open to researchers without restriction.

Rights and Permissions 
Stony Brook University Libraries' consent to access as the physical owner of the collection does not address copyright issues that may affect publication rights. It is the sole responsibility of the user of Special Collections and University Archives materials to investigate the copyright status of any given work and to seek and obtain permission where needed prior to publication.  

Citation 
Elizabeth Oakes Prince Smith Collection, Special Collections and University Archives, Stony Brook University Libraries.

Subjects
Smith, Elizabeth Oakes Prince, 1806-1893 -- Correspondence.
Holley, Sallie, 1818-1893 -- Correspondence.
Women authors -- 19th century.
Friendship.
Feminists -- United States -- 19th century. 

Transcript

Blue Point, L.I. Oct 10 1884
Miss Sallie Holley,

I have been doing my utmost to find a chance to reply to your welcome and beautiful letter of the 20th ult, with its lovely specimen of the roses from your Eden. I wanted to write you a letter as is a letter, having no news, I wanted to tell you, that you do not, cannot realize how happy you are in having such a lovely retreat—the world shut out, and you privileged to be so entirely yourself. No one says why do you so? You are monarch of all you survey, and can achieve your beneficent work without let or hindrance—royally your own work.

My study of you seems to have been warmly welcomed by the public, even our village paper published it entire, and several paragraphs and references have been quoted and sent me. I hope the Index sent you a good supply of the number. I sent you half of what came to me here. I suppose Fowler and Wells have written to you for a Photograph. They wrote me for one, and would like they said to use my sketch &c. Tell me if you have suffered in consequence. I hope ot but that it will open the eyes of people to appreciate your work. I should say, though they have doubtless communicated with you in the matter, that F & W wish to have a portrait of you engraved for their maga.

Ere this you doubtless have the Brooklyn Magazine, and will relive that day of loveliness when we went to the old Yeocomico. I wish Mr Fallen will see that the Rev. Mr. Brooke has a copy of it and will you please present my kind regards to the members of the Fallen family. I should have been so happy to pass a few days with them, but I was needed at home. Say all that is kind to Mrs. Strong about our last visit, which we might so well have enjoyed. I recall her genuine face with interest and shall not soon forget those pleasant well-mannered children. I spoke to her about some Sunflower seeds, which I shall try to send her.

Oh! those fine rides, how I wish I it had been possible for me to join you! but no—I hardly go off the premises, am obliged to keep steadily at my pen or the thousand nothings essential in a household. The two girls send love, and are delighted at the promise of the baskets, as they were with the gifts from you I brought them. They are in great demand for singing and recitations in the village Concerts—Last night a carriage was sent several miles to take the to one at Waverly, where they seem to have been greatly admired. Their Father is far from well—but I try not to distrust the future.

I have written Mr. Bok (who by the way sent me this nice paper) what you say about the Brooklyn Magazine, and he promised to send you several copies with Circulars &c. The young man is working a great deal too hard; but finds time to write Aurora very pretty love letters—not over [hot?], which she receives with a sweet girlish delight. I have just read about a woman who lived to be a hundred and twenty years and then died young! It seems to me in her case she ought to throw out the century, call herself 25 and go in for a lover. Age has so little to do with the heart. I find charming people, who count up years! Old Montaigne whom you know I greatly affect says “love suits only the young” and he talks about being old at fifty—but Miss Gurney had a most tender, maidenly love for him at 60. There things come home to me because of a trifle that occurred since my return—but as the song says, “I’m over young to marry yet!!

Do you know I am greatly please that your friends in Virginia took a liking to me. I was very much pleased with their simple, unaffected manners, and charming good sense and wish I could meet them again. Who knows? I shall not forget them. Oh! that fruit! What delicious fruit! and the roses! ah! It was a dream of Arcadia at your house, and I love to speak of it daily and of you.

I am urged to make my Autobiography ready for the public, and after reading what I have written I am encouraged to think it will not be presumptuous in me to write and print my story, but nobody would be willing to write his innermost, and if there is any magnitude in a character, the steps toward it seem puerile.

I dropped a postal to Mrs. Miller since my return but have no reply. We have kept the pomagranite till yesterday as it retained some prettiness, but we opened it, put the seends away for planting. Thank you for the Castor beans—they are much larger and finer color than our seeds of the same species and I have promised to give a part of yours my daughter-in-law to plant in N.C.

I have much more, that were I with you in our twilight talks, would be said, but now only that I am affectionately Yours

Elizabeth Oakes Smith