Anna Matlack Richards

Anna Matlack Richards
Born Anna Matlack
1834
Died 1900
Nationality American
Spouse William Trost Richards
Anna Matlack Richards, A New Alice in the Old Wonderland, (Lippincott,1895).

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 woman she published fictions, plays, and poems, including a fictional autobiography as by "Mrs. A. M. Richards" entitled Memories of a Grandmother in 1854. In 1856 she married landscape and maritime painter William Trost Richards. They traveled abroad frequently and lived in Cornwall, England, from 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. Anna Richards Brewster, their sixth child, 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 by Mrs. A. M. Richards (Boston: Gould and Lincoln, 1854)
  • Dramatic Sonnets (1881)
  • A New Alice in the Old Wonderland (1895), illustrated by Anna M. Richards Jr.
  • Letter and Spirit, dramatic sonnets of inward life (1898)
  • Sintram and His Companions (1900), translated by Richards, illustrated by her daughter

References

  1. ↑ Tenney Brewster, William; Richards Brewster, Anna (1954). A Book of Sketches. p. 1.
  2. ↑ Matlack Richards, Anna (1881). Dramatic Sonnets. Newport, R.I.: Richards Brothers. pp. Preface, n.d.
  3. ↑ 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


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