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Elizabeth Chase Taylor Akers Allen (Florence Percy) (1832-1911) American poet and editor. She was born in Strong, Maine and suffered abuse and neglect after her mother died when she was 4. Educated at Farmington Academy, she began working at the age of 13 and writing under the pseudonym 'Florence Percy' at the age of 15. In 1851 she married Marshall Taylor, whom she divorced after he abandoned her and their daughter. She became an assistant editor of the Portland Transcript and, following publication of her first book, Forest Buds, from the Woods of Maine (1856), regularly contributed to Atlantic Monthly.
From 1859 to 1860 she traveled in Europe as a news correspondent. In 1860 she married Benjamin Akers, who died the following year. During the Civil War, she worked as a government clerk in Washington and tended wounded soldiers. Her poem 'Rock Me to Sleep' (Saturday Evening Post, 1860), a plaintive cry to a dead mother, was set to music and gained widespread popularity during the war. She married Elijah Allen in 1864. Later verse was collected in Silver Bridge.