Early Life
The eldest of four children, she was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Her father was a chemist and her mother a social worker. Her early childhood was spent in a succession of Quaker communities in the mountains of North Carolina and in Raleigh. She didn't attend a school until she was 11 and this unorthodox upbringing enabled her to view "the normal world with a certain amount of distance and surprise".
She graduated at 19 from Duke University, and completed graduate work in Russian studies at Columbia University in New York City. She worked as a librarian and bibliographer before moving to Maryland.
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“Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians ...”
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