Though Laura Benét spent her career in the shadows of her famous family—brothers William Rose and Stephen Vincent Benét and sister-in-law Elinor Wylie—she was herself a poet, journalist, and biographer. She wrote biographies of Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, and a biographical novel about poet Emily Dickinson. An accomplished poet, Benét’s Fairy Bread was named, along with Wylie’s Nets to Catch the Wind, “among the best” poetry books of 1921 by the New York Times. She collaborated with artist Prentiss Taylor on a number of illustrated poetry broadsides, including “Christmas Eve,” which employs Taylor’s surprising images of “ants [sanding] the cold floor,” and Mary in a careworn posture to complicate the otherwise romantic tale of Christmas Eve.