She never sent anything to the press till nearly twenty years old, when she began writing short anonymous letters to the daily papers, on subjects of passing interest. At the age of twenty-three, in 1854, she married Watts Todd Miller, and added the name of Miller to her own. The couple would have four children. From 1858 to 1869, she put aside writing in order to raise her children. The couple lived in
Chicago,
Illinois, and after about 1875, in
Brooklyn,
New York. It was not till the youngest was beyond babyhood did she touch literary work again. Toward the latter part of this domestic period, she began to write an occasional letter to a paper, when feelings grew too strong for silence. It was then she assumed the name Olive Thorne, and later when the pseudonym was somewhat widely known, and the possession of two names became inconvenient, she added her own married name Miller. She began for children, and for several years she never attempted writing for others. Miller's first article for children, on the making of china, was published in 1870. Gradually, she drifted into sketches of natural history, having a fresh, vivid way of depicting the personality of bird or beast, that made it an acquaintance at once, and proved irresistible to every youngster. These early sketches, published everywhere, were collected in 1873 and made into a book which had a steady, regular sale,
Little Folk in Feathers and Fur, appearing in the mid-1870s. Later she made a second collection of her animal sketches which she called ''Queer Pets at Marcy's''. Meanwhile, she wrote her first long story, "Nimpo's Troubles," which ran as a serial in
St. Nicholas Magazine during its first years. A year or two after she wrote her fourth and last book for children,
Little People of Asia. Her first use of the
pseudonym, Olive Thorne Miller, was in 1879. In 1880, she became an avid bird watcher, introduced to the study of birds by
Sara A. Hubbard, director of the Illinois
Audubon Society. Miller studied captive birds, as well as birds in the wild in a series of field trips across the country during the period 1883–1903. Her work in this field, after publication in
The Atlantic and other magazines, was published in several volumes. The first of eleven bird-related books,
Bird Ways, appeared in 1885;
In Nesting Time followed. In addition to writing on birds and their behavior, she contributed to the journal of the Audubon Society. She was a proponent of the movement to prevent hunting of birds for use of their plumes in the millinery trade. In 1901, along with
Mabel Osgood Wright and
Florence Merriam Bailey, Miller became one of the first three women raised to elective membership in the American Ornithologists' Union. Miller published articles in religious weeklies and other publications, among them ''
Harper's Weekly and the Chicago Tribune''. Across her writing career, she produced an estimated 780 articles, one booklet on birds, and 24 complete books. Her work was acknowledged by professional biologists for its highly accurate research and observation. After the death of her husband in 1904, Miller moved to
Los Angeles,
California. She died there on 25 December 1918. ==Selected works==