Edith Gough Row collection, 1936-1989

Full finding aid (pdf)

Collection Scope and Content

This collection includes published poetry, correspondence, and “Memoir of my grandmother, Edith Row” by Robin St. John Conover.

Biographical/Historical Note

Edith Gough Row was born in 1895 and raised in Perry, Maine but lived the bulk of her adult life in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She left Perry after finishing school and married Arthur Row. The newlyweds moved into his parents’ townhouse in Cambridge and Edith found herself running the three story rooming house for Harvard students. Around this time, her poetry began to get published in Boston area newspapers. During World War II, her poetry took a more serious turn. Shortly after her husband’s death in 1954, Row moved back to Maine, to an old sea captain’s house up the street from her childhood home. Her frustration with the narrowness of her surroundings eventually caused her to go south for the long Maine winters. Her ambivalence toward Maine and her neighbors often found its way into her poetry of this period. She died in 1975 while visiting her children in Pennsylvania.