Lizette Woodworth Reese and her twin sister, Louisa, were born, according to their mother, “in the worst storm of the winter” of 1856 at their maternal grandparents’ house in Waverly, Maryland. Of Welsh descent on her father’s side and German on her mother’s, she early learned to love, as she recalls in one poem, the “Saxon tang” which “clung to our elders’ speech.” Her preference then for the Anglo-Saxon monosyllable came naturally to her reticent, yet vivid, lyrics, which seem to blend what she called the “silent” tendency of her father’s Welsh ancestry, while retaining the vivacity of her talkative, musically inclined mother, Louisa Gabler Reese.

Reese’s mother and the young twins moved in with her parents during the Civil War while her husband, David Reese, served with the Confederate forces and her brother with the Union. In A Victorian Village, Reese recalls the Civil War days in the border state of Maryland: “Between the blue forces and the gray we were ground between two millstones of terror.” Against this terror stood her sprightly, devoutly religious mother from whom the girl acquired a love of gardening and growing things—the lilac bushes, hawthorn trees, daffodils, and succory blossoms which the visual and olfactory imagery of her poetry constantly evokes.

As a well-read girl of seventeen with what she called the “gift of authority,” Reese began teaching English at St. John’s Parish School in Waverly. After two years, she transferred to the Baltimore district where she taught in three different high schools, eventually retiring in 1921 from Western High after a forty-five-year career. To honor her on the occasion of her retirement, Western High erected a bronze tablet inscribed with her celebrated sonnet “Tears.”

Although she never married, lived all her life near or in Baltimore, and taught English for more than four decades, Reese was not a sheltered “schoolmarm.” She was a founding member of “The Women’s Literary Club of Baltimore” and enjoyed an active public life that included readings and lectures for civic and literary groups. She knew and corresponded with many members of literary society, especially Louise Imogen Guiney, Edmund Clarence Stedman, John Hall Wheelock, Untermeyer, and Mencken. Although Reese was a woman of literary affairs, the world of her poetry is the Maryland world of trees, flowers, and country lanes where she first learned, through her own sensory perception, the metaphorical equivalence between a mood and the natural stimuli that engender it.