She began to do reporting and book-reviewing for educational and literary journals, still without any pay in money, but happy at being occasionally paid in books.

[1] In 1861, at the beginning of the Civil War, she procured the advance sheets, in the French language, of Agénor de Gasparin's Uprising of a Great People.

While the war lasted, she translated many French books into English, calculated to rouse patriotic feeling, and was, at one time, summoned to Washington, D.C. to write for the statesmen, receiving only her board at a hotel.

Her parents took all possible pains with her education, and her physical strength was sufficient to carry her through an uninterrupted course in different academies and a series of lessons with masters at home.

Being self-taught, and not hearing either language, she never learned to speak them but made herself so proficient in them in later years that she could translate almost any book from either German or French, reading them aloud in English.

[4] When Booth was about thirteen years of age, the family moved to Brooklyn, New York,[4] and there her father organized the first public school that was established in that city.

She took a small room in the city and went home only for Sundays, as the communication between Williamsburg and New York was very slow in those days, and the journey could not be made in less than three hours.

She translated Joseph Méry's André Chénier and Edmond François Valentin About's The King of the Mountains for Emerson's Magazine, which also published Booth's original articles.

She next translated Victor Cousin's Secret History of the French Court: or, Life and Times of Madame de Chevreuse (1859).

Washington Irving sent her a letter of cordial encouragement, and D. T. Valentine, Henry B. Dawson, William John Davis, Edmund Bailey O'Callaghan, and numerous others provided her with documents and assistance.

"My Dear Miss Booth," wrote historian Benson John Lossing, "the citizens of New York owe you a debt of gratitude for this popular story of the life of the great metropolis, containing so many important facts in its history, and included in one volume accessible to all.

It was so well-received that the publisher proposed Booth should go abroad and write popular histories of the great European capitals, London, Paris, Berlin, and Vienna.

After she received an advance copy of Count Agénor de Gasparin's Un Grand Peuple Qui Se Releve ("Uprising of a Great People"), she at once saw her opportunity in how she could be of assistance.

A large paper edition of the work was taken by well-known book-collectors, extended and illustrated by them with supplementary prints, portraits, and autographs.

[10] One copy, enlarged to folio and extended to nine volumes by several thousand maps, letters, and other illustrations, was owned in the city of New York.

During the entire war, she maintained a correspondence with Cochin, Gasparin, Laboulaye, Henri Martin, Charles Forbes René de Montalembert, and other European sympathizers with the Union.

She received hundreds of appreciative letters from statesmen — Henry Winter Davis, Senator James Rood Doolittle, Galusha A.

Grow, Dr. Francis Lieber, Dr. Bell, the president of the Sanitary Commission, and a host of others, among them Cassius M. Clay, and Attorney-General James Speed.

She had thought of adding to this number, at the request of James T. Fields, an abridgment of George Sand's voluminous Histoire de ma vie; circumstances, however, prevented the completion of the work.

[14] In the year 1867, Booth undertook another enterprise in assuming the management of Harper's Bazaar, a weekly journal devoted to the pleasure and improvement of the home.

Through its columns, its editor made her hand felt in countless families for nearly sixteen years and helped to shape the domestic life of a generation.

[16] She lived in New York City, in the neighborhood of Central Park, in a house which Booth owned, with her longtime companion, Mrs. Anne W. Wright,[17] a friendship that was begun in childhood.

There were always guests, and in the salon, every Saturday night, there was an assemblage of authors, singers, players, musicians, statesmen, travelers, publishers, and journalists.