This collection is made up of letters that Elizabeth Clementine Kinney received from magazine editors John S. Hart and George R. Graham in 1849 and 1850. John S. Hart wrote to Kinney from the offices of Sartain's Union Magazine on December 15, 1849; January 10, 1850; and March 12, 1850. He discussed financial compensation for Kinney's contributions to the October 1949, November 1949, and December 1850 issues of Sartain's, his selection of two of her poems for a future issue, and his willingness to critique an ode that Kinney had written. He explained that he had found few faults with the ode and that he had sent her a printed proof copy because he did not want her to think that he had forgotten about the poem. George R. Graham wrote to Kinney from Philadelphia on April 27, 1850, commenting on her upcoming move to Italy and expressing his desire to travel there himself. He also promised to reserve a section of the July issue of Graham's Magazine for Kinney's contributions.
Elizabeth Clementine Dodge was born in New York City on December 18, 1810, the daughter of David Low Dodge and Sarah Cleveland. She and her first husband, Edmund Burke Stedman of Hartford, Connecticut, married in 1830 and had three children: Julia Clementine, Edmund Clarence, and Charles F. Following her husband's death in 1835, she married William Burnet Kinney (1799-1880), a journalist from Newark, New Jersey, in 1841. Kinney, a writer, contributed to periodicals such as Sartain's Union Magazine and Graham's Magazine, and publishing standalone works such as Felicita: A Metrical Romance and Bianca Cappello: A Tragedy. The Kinney family lived in Italy during and after William's appointment as U.S. Ambassador to Sardinia in the early 1850s, and returned to Newark, New Jersey, around 1865. Elizabeth Clementine Kinney died in 1889.