Native authors did not begin publishing fiction until the mid-nineteenth century. Although her writing has long been neglected, Betsey Guppy Chamberlain (1797-1886) was also one of the first people to protest in fiction the injustices the dominant society inflicted on Native people. Born in Brookfield, New Hampshire, Chamberlain was of Flemish / English and Native ancestry from a tribe of the Algonkian Confederacy, possibly Abenakie and Narragansett. Chamberlain married Colonel Josiah Chamberlain in 1820. After his death, Chamberlain married and was widowed three more times in Massachusetts and in Du Page County, near Chicago.

Chamberlain published thirty-three prose works in Lowell Offering I (1841), and Lowell Offering 2 (1842). Four more appeared in The New England Offering I (1848). All were collections of writing by women working in the Lowell mills. One of the most interesting and bizarre is “A Fire Side Scene,” a brief story of how the settlers burned the Miami Indians in the battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794. “The Indian Pledge” tells of a Connecticut settler who cruelly refuses to give an Indian food and water; later he depends on that Indian to keep him from starving. Many of Chamberlain’s stories about women record village life and legends, told from a woman’s point of view. Throughout, she demonstrates keen observation and the storytelling power to create memorable portraits and to capture local dialects. Despite her talent as a writer, Chamberlain ceased publishing after she left Lowell.