Two Alice Cary Anecdotes...

21 July 2023: Spent a lot of today reading about Alice Cary (and her sister, Phoebe) and found myself moved by repeated references to this bit of information about their lives as aspiring writers: "According to their biographers, and in the legends the tour guides at Cary Cottage keep alive, the sisters wrote their earliest verse at night, by the aid of a 'saucer of lard with rag wick,' in order to avoid the wrath and contempt of their stepmother" (Fetterley and Pryse 1). 

And one more--again, it comes up more than once in the scholarship: "Ames’s biography opens with a ghost story that Cary related to her friend Ada Carnahan in 1869. The Cary family had just completed a new house across a ravine from their previous home. One afternoon while they were still living in the old house, the family looked out and saw Cary’s thirteen-year-old sister Rhoda holding baby Lucy in the open door of the new house. As the family watched, Rhoda, who had actually been upstairs watching Lucy, came down and joined them in observing the apparition. They continued to watch as the woman with the child began to 'slowly sink, sink, sink into the ground, until she disappeared from sight.' Rhoda died a year later in November, followed by Lucy in December. Cary continued: 'Lucy has been seen many times since by different members of the family in the same house, always in a red frock, like one she was very fond of wearing....Since the apparition in the door, never for one year has our family been free from the shadow of death. Ever since, some one of us has been dying" (Berthold 172-3).

Works Cited

Berthold, Dennis. “The Haunted Narrators of Clovernook: Alice Cary’s Village Gothic.” Haunting Realities: Naturalist Gothic and American Realism, edited by Monika Elbert and Wendy Ryden, University of Alabama Press, 2017, pp. 161–73. 

Fetterley, Judith, and Marjorie Pryse. “Alice Cary: 1820-1871.” Legacy, vol. 1, no. 1, 1984, pp. 1–3. JSTOR.