Poems

Lucy Hamilton Jones was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on 20th January 1835 to a wealthy family.

Much of her early life remains unaccounted for except that at school she contributed verses to Godey's Lady's Book.

In 1854, she married Robert E. Hooper, a native of Philadelphia, and they resided there for several years.

Soon after her marriage, a commercial crisis ruined her husband's business and she took to writing as a full-time profession. She contributed regularly to newspapers and magazines, and was associate editor of Our Daily Fare, issued with the Great Central Fair held by the U.S. Sanitary Commission in Philadelphia in 1864. The first 100 copies of her debut poetry book were presented by Hooper to the fair for its benefit.

Lippincott's Monthly Magazine began publishing in 1868, and she became a constant contributor and assistant editor until she took her first visit to Europe, in 1870. The following year a second volume of poetry was published, including most of those from the first volume, with important additions.

However, Hooper was mainly supplying stories, articles and poems to the leading American periodicals of the day, a task which she did for two decades.

Her husband was appointed vice-consul general in Paris in 1874, and she became Paris correspondent for the Philadelphia Evening Telegraph, the Baltimore Gazette, the American issue of the Art Journal, Appleton's Journal, Lippincott's Magazine, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and the Paris American Register.

Hooper was also a gifted translated and wrote ‘Poems with Translations from the German of Geibel and Others’ (1864) and ‘The Nabob’, translated from the French of Alphonse Daudet.

Her original novels were ‘Under the Tricolor; or the American Colony in Paris’, (1880); ‘The Tsar's Widow’, (1881) and a four-act drama, entitled ‘Helen's Inheritance’, the latter was first produced in 1888, in a French version, in Paris and debuted in New York the following year.

Lucy H Hooper died on 31st August 1893 in Paris. She was 58. She was buried at the Laurel Hill Cemetery, Philadelphia.