Anna Matlack Richards (1834–1900) was a 19th-century American children's author, poet and translator 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 Philadelphia, often called Philly, is the largest city in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the sixth-largest city in the U.S., the second-largest city in both the Northeast megalopolis and Mid-Atlantic regions after New York City. Sinc ...

, Pennsylvania. As a young woman she published fictional works, 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 William Trost Richards (November 14, 1833 – November 8, 1905) was an American landscape artist. He was associated with both the Hudson River School and the American Pre-Raphaelite movement. Biography William Trost Richards was born on Novembe ...

. They traveled abroad frequently and lived in

Cornwall Cornwall (; kw, Kernow ) is a historic county and ceremonial county in South West England. It is recognised as one of the Celtic nations, and is the homeland of the Cornish people. Cornwall is bordered to the north and west by the Atlantic ...

, England, from 1878 to 1880. The couple had eight children, only five of whom lived past infancy. Matlack educated the children at home to a pre-college level in the arts and sciences. One of the couple's sons,

Theodore William Richards Theodore William Richards (January 31, 1868 – April 2, 1928) was the first American scientist to receive the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, earning the award "in recognition of his exact determinations of the atomic weights of a large number of the ...

, 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". In the 1890s, she published comic poems for children in the popular children's magazines ''

Harper's Young People ''Harper's Young People'' was an American children's magazine between 1879 and 1899. The first issue appeared in the fall of 1879. It was published by Harper & Brothers. It was Harper's fourth magazine to be established, after '' Harper's Magazine ...

'' 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.

Selected works

* ''Memories of a Grandmother'' by Mrs. A. M. Richards (Boston: Gould and Lincoln, 1854) * ''Dramatic Sonnets'' (1881) * ''Letter and Spirit'' (1891), * '' A New Alice in the Old Wonderland'' (1895), illus. by her daughter as Anna M. Richards Jr. * ''Letter and Spirit: Dramatic Sonnets of Inward Life'' (1898), illus. by her daughter as Anna Richards * ''Sintram and His Companions'' (1900), by de la Motte Fouque, as translated by A. M. Richards, illus. by Anna Richards

References

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. . * Judith Kafka Maxwell (ed) ''Anna Richards Brewster, American Impressionist'', University of California Press, 2008,

External links

''Memories of a Grandmother''
(1854) at

HathiTrust Digital Library HathiTrust Digital Library is a large-scale collaborative repository of digital content from research libraries including content digitized via Google Books and the Internet Archive digitization initiatives, as well as content digitized locally ...

''Dramatic Sonnets''
(1881) at the

Internet Archive The Internet Archive is an American digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It provides free public access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, software applications/games, music, ...

''A New Alice in the Old Wonderland''
(1895) at Internet Archive

(1898) at HathiTrust * {{DEFAULTSORT:Richards, Anna Matlack 1834 births 1900 deaths Writers from Philadelphia 19th-century American writers 19th-century American women writers