In 1916, Forbes joined her older sisters Cornelia and Katherine in Madison, Wisconsin, where Cornelia was in graduate school and Katharine was teaching. During this time she attended the classes at the University of Wisconsin.
While in Wisconsin, Forbes joined the editorial board of the Wisconsin Literary Magazine, alongside another future Pulitzer Prize winner, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. In 1919, she returned to Worcester. In late December she began working for the editorial department of Houghton Mifflin Company in Boston. From 1924 to 1926, she wrote feature articles for the Boston Evening Transcript.
On January 14, 1926, Forbes married attorney Albert L. Hoskins Jr., and left Houghton Mifflin. The couple moved to New York City. Her first novel, O Genteel Lady! was published in 1926 and was selected as the second book for the Book of the Month Club. In 1928 A Mirror for Witches was published. In 1933, she and Albert Hoskins divorced. Although she retained her married name, she wrote under her maiden name, Esther Forbes.
Forbes returned to Worcester in 1933, where she lived with her mother and unmarried siblings. At this time, her mother began working closely with Forbes on the research for her novels, often at the local research library, the American Antiquarian Society.
Forbes died on August 12, 1967, aged 76, in Worcester, of rheumatic heart disease. Her manuscripts were donated to Clark University in Worcester. The royalties for her historical novels were donated to the American Antiquarian Society,[4] which also has the research notes on her unfinished work on witchcraft in early New England.
