She was the daughter of the former Harriet C. Crosby and Hanson A. Risley, a prominent civil servant who later worked for the Secretary of the Treasury and resided in Washington, D.C.[1] She was the fourth of five children, though her three elder siblings died young.

Former Secretary of State William Henry Seward, widowed in 1865, took such an interest in Olive Risley beginning in 1868 that Gideon Welles wrote in his diary: "There is much gossip in relation to a projected marriage between Secretary Seward and a Miss Risley.

Seward had also lost his daughter Fanny in 1866, a close friend of Olive, whose mother died the same year.

[3] Olive, her younger sister Harriet Risley and their father, traveled together to California in the summer of 1870 with Seward, where Hanson left the group.

In Shanghai, when one couple left the group to return home and George Seward, accompanied by his wife, took up his post as the new U.S. consul general in Shanghai, Seward and the two young women faced the prospect of continuing as a gossip-provoking trio.

In order to curtail gossip and family worries that they might marry, Seward formally adopted Olive as his daughter in 1870, though her father was still alive.

When they returned to New York, Risley and Seward began work on a travel book about their experiences, drawing largely on her journal from the trip.

The statue stands in front of a private residence on North Carolina Avenue and Sixth Street, SE, in Washington, D.C. Risley's head is turned to the left as if gazing toward nearby Seward Square, named for her adoptive father.