Her work was conservative; she did not write anything that she felt was improper for children to hear, and was described as consisting of "respectable but not highly distinguished or passionate phrases to the conventional wisdom of her time and place".

[2] Her maternal grandparents were natives of France, who fled to South Carolina from San Domingo (i.e. Haiti) at the time of the successful slave insurrection in that island,[4][3] near the close of the 18th century.

There was the long journey to Vermont the summer she was 18 months old, and her young mother's death only four days after reaching the state which it had been hoped would give her health.

Clear and vivid was her memory of that trip down the Hudson River taken with her father when she was three years old, and of their arrival at the small boarding school on then fashionable Bleecker Street.

It was at Middlebury, in a one-story school house on Pleasant Street, that she began the study of Latin, the subject of all others most useful in her adult life, as she declared.

The feat was recalled by President John M. Thomas when in 1910 he conferred on her the degree of Doctor of Letters from Middlebury College, an honor which with characteristic modesty she accepted as a tribute to the women of her generation.

[2] Dorr's poems were characterized by strength and melody, sweetness and sympathy, a thorough knowledge of poetic technique, and through all, a high purpose which rendered such work of lasting value.

On the title page of the book she had chosen to write the words Tennyson put into the mouth of voyage-hungry Ulysses,[2] My purpose holds To sail beyond the sunset and the baths Of all the western stars until I die.

[1] Dorr belonged by friendship and association to that New England group of poets and writers famous in American literature through the names of Longfellow, Emerson, Whittier, Holmes, and Lowell.

The group following these, that including Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Edmund Clarence Stedman, and William Dean Howells, also knew and valued her both as friend and fellow craftsman.

Writing of Dorr in his book, The Builders of American Literature, Francis H. Underwood remarked, "If one can judge from her poems, she must lead an ideal life."

She made earnest efforts to draw the attention of her countrywomen to ways of calm, domestic quiet, and to emancipate them from the thraldom of foolish fashion.

To live the life of true culture and practical benevolence, ready to uplift to heights of delightful song, and to cheer, encourage and quietly reprove as necessity demands — this was her mission.

To "The Maples" in its more than half-century of life came many authors; among them Emerson, searching the vicinity for the lost grave of his grandfather who died in the American Revolutionary War.

Holmes', the one she knew best of the Cambridge group, Stedman's, R. H. Stoddard's, his wife's, Howells'—But to name them all would be to recite a long list of the makers of American literature.

One of the pleasantest consequences of her last public appearance at the Howells' birthday dinner was the personal touch it gave her with the English poet, William Watson.

She served as president of the association, and gave to the library, in memory of her husband, what was said to be the finest and most complete collection of books on political science to be found in New England at the time, and one of the best in the English-speaking world outside of the University of Cambridge.