[1] Known as Mrs. E. Burke Collins in the literary world, she wrote for the press and was one of the small group of women writers of her era who earned more than US$6,000 a year with their writing.

Frederic Whiting, of Great Barrington, Massachusetts, whose published genealogy traces the family back 600 years.

Yet she enjoyed companionship, and often attracted a circle of little friends, who would sit around her for hours, listening to her stories, improvised as rapidly as she could utter them.

[4] At the age of 15 (or 19) years, she married Emmett Burke Collins (1842–1872),[5] a disabled Union Army veteran, and a rising young lawyer of Rochester.

[1][4] Soon after, the husband having lost re-election as a Justice of Peace, they sought the mild climate of Louisiana, removing to Ponchatoula where her father-in-law had a plantation.

Though that journalistic venture was a large pecuniary loss to her, it gave her such prestige that applications to become a regular contributor poured in from different publishers.

[4] Sharkey, characterized as a strong dramatic writer, wrote several successful novels, chiefly representing life in the South, more especially the pine woods of Louisiana, at that time, an almost untapped field in literature.

One especially, entitled "A Dream that Came True", was pronounced "a perfect poem, from the hand of a master," by an eminent writer connected with Frank Leslie's Publishing House.

[1] A third marriage, in 1884, was with Robert R. Sharkey, a Mississippi cotton planter, who was the nephew and sole male descendant of Governor William L. Sharkey, of Mississippi, who was United States Senator for several terms and judge in the United States Supreme Court.

Mr. and Mrs. Sharkey spent their summers in their country residence, known as "Hillside," on the Greensburg Road near Tangipahoa, Louisiana.