Maria Gowen (or Gowan) Brooks (pen name, A Lover of Fine Arts and Maria Del Occidente; 1794 – November 11, 1845) was an American poet. She impressed Edgar Allan Poe and the English Poet Laureate, Robert Southey, who promoted her best-known poem Zophiël. Early life and education Abigail Gowen was born in Medford, Massachusetts, 1794. Her father was a man of literary tastes, and she was exposed to a lot of poetry at home. By age nine, she had memorized a large quantity of prose. When Abigail was thirteen, her father died, bankrupt. She immediately came under the care of a Boston merchant named John Brooks. He was a man more than thirty years older than she was, to whom she had already been betrothed. She finished her education and married him. Career For a while she and John lived prosperously, but "financial reverses" eventually reduced them to living in comparative poverty. Abigail began to write poetry as consolation. Around this time, she changed her name to "Maria Abigail", which would eventually become, simply, "Maria". Also around this time, at age nineteen, she had written her first epic poem. It is described as a "metrical romance", which she never published. In 1820, Brooks published a collection of her poetry, Judith, Esther, and other Poems, under the pseudonym "A Lover of Fine Arts". In 1823, the husband died, and Brooks went to live with her brother on his coffee plantation in Manzanas, Cuba. He died soon after her arrival, which left her with a "settled income". During this time, she began to write the poem she would become most famous for: Zophiël, or the Bride of Seven, based on the story of Sara in the Book of Tobit. In 1824, Brooks made a sojourn to Canada, where she became engaged to a Canadian soldier she had met in New England (prior to John Brooks’ death). However, they became estranged, "through a series of misunderstandings", and Brooks subsequently attempted suicide, twice. Upon returning to the United States, in 1825, she published the first canto of Zophiël in Boston. In 1826, Brooks began a correspondence with the English Poet Laureate, Robert Southey, who praised her work heartily and gave her the pseudonym "Maria Del Occidente" (Maria of the West). He regarded her as "the most impassioned and imaginative of all poetesses", but time did not sustain this verdict. She also caught the attention