Mother Goose is the name given to an archetypical country woman, who is supposedly the originator of the Mother Goose stories and rhymes. Yet no specific writer has ever been identified with such a name. The first known mention appears in an aside in a versified chronicle of weekly happenings that appeared regularly for several years, Jean Loret's La Muse Historique, collected in 1650. His remark, ...comme un conte de la Mere Oye ("...like a Mother Goose story") shows that the term was already familiar by 1650.

In spite of facts such as those above, there are urban ledgends familiar to tourists of Boston, Massachusetts, that the original Mother Goose was a Bostonian wife of an Isaac Goose, either named Elizabeth Foster Goose (1665-1758) or Mary Goose (d. 1690, age 42) who is interred at the Granary Burying Ground on Tremont Street.