Julia Caroline Ripley Dorr (February 13, 1825 – January 18, 1913) 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 books include Farmingdale (1854), Leanmere (1856), Sibyl Huntington (1869), Poems (1872), Expiation (1873), Friar Anselmo and Other Poems (1879), The Legend of the Baboushka,—a Christmas Poem (1881), Daybreak,— an Easter Poem (1882), Bermuda,—an Idyl of the Summer Islands (1884), and Afternoon Songs (1885). Early years and education Julia Caroline Ripley was born in Charleston, South Carolina, on February 13, 1825. Her mother, Zulma De Lacy Thomas, shared a mingled Huguenot and Catholic descent. Her maternal grandparents were natives of France, who fled to South Carolina from San Domingo (i.e. Haiti) at the time of the successful slave insurrection in that island, near the close of the 18th century. Her father, William Young Ripley, was born in Middlebury, Vermont, the son of one of Vermont's pioneers, and it is through him that she was descended from some of the first New England immigrants, including William Bradford, governor of Plymouth Colony, and William Ripley, who arrived in Hingham, Massachusetts, in 1638. She referred to her early girlhood as the most eventful part of her life. There was the long journey to Vermont the summer she was 18 months old, and her young mother's death only four days after reaching the state which it had been hoped would give her health. There was the sojourn in New York, where William had established himself in business, and where he wanted his little daughter's company. Clear and vivid was her memory of that trip down the Hudson River taken with her father when she was three years old, and of their arrival at the