Woman of the Century/Carrie Renfrew

RENFREW, Miss Carrie, poet and biographer, was born in Marseilles. Ill. She is a daughter of the late Silvester Renfrew, one of the pioneer settlers of Hastings, Neb., who died in 1888. She is one of a family of five children. CARRIE RENFREW. She was carefully educated and reared in a refined and cultured atmosphere. She received all the educational advantages of her native town, and she has supplemented tier school course with a wide course in reading. In childhood she was a thinker, a dreamer and a philosopher with a poetic turn of mind, but she did not "lisp in numbers" She waited until reason was ready to go hand in hand with rhyme, and then she began to write verses. She had not studied the art of rhyming, and some of her first productions showed the crudity to be expected where there was a lack of training in modes of expression. In spite of all drawbacks of that kind, she wrote well enough to attract attention, and her maturer work leaves nothing to be desired in the matter of form. In 1885 she became a contributor to the Chicago "Inter-Ocean," the "Woman's Tribune" and other prominent journals. In 1800 she began to contribute to the "Magazine of Poetry," and her poems have found wide currency. Her prose work includes a large number of biographies of prominent Nebraska women for this volume. She has written much in verse, and her work shows steady advancement in quality. She stands among the foremost of the literary women in Nebraska.