Nora Perry was born in Dudley, Massachusetts in 1831. Her parents relocated to Providence, Rhode Island, throughout her childhood. Her father worked in the mercantile business there. She was educated both at home and in private schools. She obtained a diverse and liberal education in several fields. Perry wrote "The Shipwreck" when she was eight years old. At the age of eighteen, she began writing for publication as a newspaper correspondent. In 1859-60, Harper's Magazine published her first serial story, "Rosalind Newcomb". She spent much of her later years in Boston, where she penned society letters for the Chicago Tribune and became the Boston correspondent for the Providence Journal, Rhode Island's most influential newspaper. Perry was friends with Sarah Helen Whitman. Perry died in Dudley on May 13, 1896. Perry's writing was appealing to even the most prudish reader, yet she avoided any evident moral aim in her novels. Nonetheless, her work was of the moral order, demonstrating lofty thought and meticulous polishing. Her eulogy to Vasco Nunez de Balboa, the first European to sight the Pacific Ocean from the isthmus of what is now Panama, demonstrates her poetic voice. Her fiction was "briskly told" and, like her verses, appealed to the sensibilities of the general reading audience.