Larcom's earliest contribution to the Atlantic Monthly, when the poet James Russell Lowell was its editor, a poem, that in the absence of signature, was attributed to Emerson by one reviewer.

Also of note was "A Loyal Woman's No" which was a patriotic lyric and attracted considerable attention during the American Civil War.

According to her autobiography, A New England Girlhood, outlined from memory,[5] Beverly was a small village at this time where she was able to play with neighbor children.

Other favorites from a circulating library included The Scottish Chiefs, Paul and Virginia, Gulliver's Travels, and The Arabian Nights.

Her first work as a Lowell operative was in a spinning-room, doffing and replacing the bobbins, after which she tended a spinning-frame and then a dressing-frame, while looking out windows towards the river.

Later, she was employed in a "cloth-room," considered to be a more agreeable working-place because of its fewer hours of confinement, its cleanliness, and the absence of machinery.

There, she pursued her studies during leisure moments, some textbooks in mathematics, grammar, English or German literature usually laying open on her desk.

People moved about their every-day duties with purpose and zest, and were genuinely interested in one another; while in the towns on the seaboard it sometimes was as if every man's house was his castle in almost a feudal sense, where the family shut themselves in, on the defensive against intruders."

Still, she never lost her love and allegiance to the seaside area where she was born, while frequent visits kept up the charm, and gave her links to her home town.

[3] It was at one of the meetings of the literary circle, established among the "mill girls", that Larcom first met the poet, John Greenleaf Whittier, who was then in Lowell editing a Free Soil journal.

She taught under the auspices of a district committee, before whom, previous to induction to office, the candidate was obliged to hold up her right hand and swear to acquaintance, sufficient to instruct from, with writing, spelling, arithmetic, and geography.

Her salary was US$40 for three months; and once, when the time for payment arrived, and her brother-in-law visited the committee-man whose duty it was to make it, his reminder was met with the rather startled remark, as if the subject had never presented itself in so strong a light before:— "Forty dollars!

When the official was reassured by a statement of what Larcom's antecedents in study and achievement had been, he replied:— "Well, that's a good deal for her to ha' done!"

[8] Eventually, Larcom tired of life in the west, so she went back to Beverly, where, for a year or two, she taught a class of young ladies before accepting a position as teacher in Wheaton Female Seminary, at Norton.

She remained there for six years, conducting classes in rhetoric, English literature, and composition, while sometimes adding history, mental and moral science, or botany.

Previously to this,— as far back as during her early residence in Illinois,— some poems were published with the name, and some slight sketch of the writer, in Griswold's Female Poets of America; and at about the same time, verses of hers were printed in Sartain's Magazine.

A local literary magazine entitled The Larcom Review is named for her, as is the library at the Beverly High School.

Larcom's later writings, assumed a deeply religious tone, in which the faith of her whole life found complete expression.

Notwithstanding the fact that she really meant to set forth the image she had in her mind of her own elder sister, she unconsciously gave herself also, perhaps, through family likeness, in some touches of her portrayal of "Esther" in the Idyl.