[2] She was characterized as a woman of rare executive ability, a good speaker, and was noted for her charity work.

Her father was a prominent merchant of Boston,[7] and had been an agent and treasurer of the Pacific Mills in Lawrence, Massachusetts.

Dr. Edward Everett Hale advised her to write for his magazine, Old and New (previously known as Christian Examiner[10]), which was her first literary work.

In the winter of 1883–84, she edited three volumes of selections from Ann and Jane Taylor, Mrs. Barbauld and Miss Edgeworth.

[7] Oliver engaged in research regarding the lives and reminiscences of some Colonial American women, and also upon the Browning Concordance, edited by Dr. J. W.

[7] She was a state trustee of the Danvers Lunatic Asylum (now, Danvers State Hospital); president of the Salem Society for the Higher Education of Women; president of the Visiting Nurse Association of Marblehead; founder, vice-president, and president of the Thought and Work club of Salem; a member of the New England Women's Club; of the North Shore club of Lynn, Massachusetts, of the Essex Institute, Salem, and an associate member of the New England Woman's Press Association.

In that place had lived in the time of the American Revolution her great-grandfather, Col. David Mason, who figured in "Leslie's Retreat," at the North Bridge, in February, 1775.

Colonel Mason was, it was said, a correspondent of Dr. Benjamin Franklin, and gave in Salem, as early as 1774, the first advertised public lecture on the subject of electricity.

In 1890, Oliver bought a small piece of land on Doliver's Cove, the earliest settled part of the historic town of Marblehead, Massachusetts.