page_title: Julia C. R. Dorr
section_title: Career
hierarchical_section_title: Julia C. R. Dorr / Career
caption_attribution_description: English: The Maples, residence of Mrs. Julia C.R. Dorr, Rutland, Vt.
context_page_description: Julia Caroline Ripley Dorr was an American author who published both prose and poetry. Although she wrote a number of novels and works on travel, she was best known for her poetry. Her work was conservative; she did not write anything that she felt was improper for children to hear, and was described as consisting of "respectable but not highly distinguished or passionate phrases to the conventional wisdom of her time and place." She had a keen sense of form and, working as she did in several mediums, to her belonged the distinction of never attempting to say in verse what might better find expression in prose. To her sense of form she added a clear-seeing eye, and the ability so to fit words together as to make others see what she saw.
  Her work has constantly appeared in the foremost publications and her books have followed each other at regular intervals. Some of her early books included, Farmingdale, Leanmere, Sibyl Huntington, Poems, Expiation, Friar Anselmo and Other Poems, The Legend of the Baboushka, —a Christmas Poem, Daybreak, — an Easter Poem, Bermuda, —an Idyl of the Summer Islands, and Afternoon Songs.
context_section_description: On February 22, 1847, she married Seneca M. Dorr, of New York. After her marriage, for a decade they lived in an old Dutch manor house in Ghent, New York. In that house, the first three of her five children were born, and there her public literary life began. In 1847, he sent one of her poems, without her knowledge, to the Union Magazine, and this was her first published poem. In the following year, her first published story, "Isabel Leslie", gained a US$100 prize offered by Sartain's Magazine. Edward Everett Hale and James Russell Lowell were also among the prize winners. The Dorr family then pulled up stakes and started for the far west by way of Rutland. The intended visit turned into something far different as they built a new home, "The Maples".
caption: "The Maples"
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