Anna Matlack Richards
Anna Matlack Richards | |
|---|---|
| Born | Anna Matlack 1834 |
| Died | 1900 |
| Nationality | American |
| Spouse | William Trost Richards |
Anna Matlack Richards (1834–1900) was an American children's author, poet and translator who is best known for her fantasy novel, A New Alice in the Old Wonderland.
Biography
Anna Matlack was raised in a prominent intellectual Quaker family in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. As a young women she published fictions, plays and poems, including a pseudonymous fictional autobiography entitled Memories of a Grandmother in 1854. In 1856, she married landscape and maritime painter William Trost Richards. Matlack and Richards frequently traveled abroad, living in Cornwall, England between 1878 to 1880. The couple had eight children, five of whom lived past infancy. Matlack educated the children at home to a pre-college level in the arts and sciences.[1] One of their sons, Theodore William Richards, would later win the 1914 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Their sixth child, a daughter, Anna Richards Brewster, went on to become an important painter in her own right, having received an early arts education from her father as well.
In 1881, Matlack published Dramatic Sonnets, a collection of verses designed 'to give expression to every possible form of conflicting thought and feeling'.[2] In the 1890s, she published comic poems for children in the popular children's magazines Harper's Young People and The St. Nicholas Magazine. The success of these comics led her to publish A New Alice in the Old Wonderland in 1895, which featured illustrations by her daughter Anna Richards Brewster. Mother and daughter collaborated on several publications, including Letter and spirit, dramatic sonnets of inward life, published 1898, and a translation of a German folktale, Sintram and His Companions, published in 1900.[3]
Publications
- Memories of a Grandmother, published in 1854
- Dramatic Sonnets, published in 1881
- A New Alice in the Old Wonderland, published in 1895
- Letter and spirit, dramatic sonnets of inward life, published in 1898
- Sintram and His Companions, translation published in 1900
References
- ^ Tenney Brewster, William; Richards Brewster, Anna (1954). A Book of Sketches. p. 1.
- ^ Matlack Richards, Anna (1881). Dramatic Sonnets. Newport, R.I.: Richards Brothers. pp. Preface, n.d.
- ^ Brewter McClatchy, Susan (2008). Maxwell, Judith (ed.). Anna Richards Brewster American Impressionist. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press. p. 12. ISBN 978-0-520-25749-8.
Sources
- Sigler, Carolyn (1996). "Brave New Alice: Anna Matlack Richards's Maternal Wonderland". Children's Literature 24, pp. 55–73. Reprint at Project Muse (muse.jhu.edu).
- Sigler, Carolyn, ed. (October 1997). Alternative Alices: Visions and Revisions of Lewis Carroll's "Alice" Books: An Anthology. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky. ISBN 0-8131-2028-4.
- Judith Kafka Maxwell (ed) Anna Richards Brewster, American Impressionist, University of California Press, 2008, ISBN 9780520257498
External links
- Memories of a Grandmother, published 1854, at Hathitrust Digital Library
- Dramatic Sonnets, published in 1881, at the Internet Archive
- A New Alice in the Old Wonderland, published 1895, at the Internet Archive
- Letter and spirit, dramatic sonnets of inward life, published 1898, at HathiTrust Digital Library
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