She was born in Andover, Massachusetts, the youngest of the twelve children of John and Elizabeth Davis Peters; her elder sister was the miniaturist Clarissa Peters Russell, whose husband Moses was also a miniaturist.
[1] She graduated from Andover's Abbott Academy, where she learned painting and drawing, in 1836, and spent the next few years painting miniature portraits of prominent locals before moving to Boston at the age of twenty-six.
The following year she showed another, at the Brooklyn Art Association, under the sobriquet "Madam Grozelier".
[1] She also produced lithographs, and after her husband's death supported herself by painting over photographs in oil or pastel.
[4] A portrait of two girls by her is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the date of the watercolor-on-ivory painting is unknown.