Adelaide O’Keeffe (1776–1855) published eight collections of children’s poetry, four novels, a prose retelling of the stories of seven Old Testament patriarchs, and an extensive memoir of her father John O’Keeffe, the blind Irish playwright, librettist, and theatre composer. She was her father’s amanuensis for many years, and when he retired from the theatre, she supported him through her writing and her work as a governess. Historical novels and children’s literature, particularly children’s poetry, were O’Keeffe’s forte. She authored the first verse novel for children in 1819, A Trip to the Coast, and as a key contributor to the best-selling, two-volume series Original Poems for Infant Minds (1804, 1805), she helped establish the rhetorical structure of nineteenth-century children’s verse: three- and four-beat lines, constant rhyme, short length, simple language, and domestic content. Her most popular work, Patriarchal Times, offers a lucid, character-driven narrative of early biblical patriarchs, their wives, and their children. Because it avoided depicting these figures through the lens of predestination, it was compelling to both Christian and Jewish readers. As a novelist, O’Keeffe drew upon her own cosmopolitan life story: she was the child of a failed, mixed religious marriage (Irish Catholic father and Irish Protestant mother) and was raised in Ireland, England, and France. Her novels often depict the traumatic life-long impact of parental separation upon children which she then ties to religious and national conflict.