Grace Denio Litchfield

Grace Denio Litchfield
"A Woman of the Century"
Born	November 19, 1849 Brooklyn Heights, Brooklyn, New York, U.S.
Died	December 4, 1944(1944-12-04) (aged 95) Goshen, New York, U.S.
Occupation	Poet, novelist
Language	English
Nationality	American

Grace Denio Litchfield (November 19, 1849 – December 4, 1944) was an American poet and novelist.

Grace Denio Litchfield was born in Brooklyn Heights in New York City on November 19, 1849. She was the youngest daughter of Grace Hill Litchfield and Edwin Litchfield, an attorney.^[1] Litchfield's sister, Francese Hubbard Litchfield Turnbull, was the author of Val Maria and several other books and was also the longtime president of the Woman's Literary Club of Baltimore, into which Litchfield was inducted as an honorary member in 1890.^[2]

Starting when she was a child, and despite ill health, Litchfield wrote almost constantly. She did not begin to publish until she was in her late-thirties. From that point on she published numerous works of poetry, fiction, and drama in newspapers and magazines including Harper's, Century, The Atlantic, St. Nicholas, The Wide Awake, and the New York Independent.^[1]

Litchfield published her first novel, Only an Incident, in 1883.^[3] Over the next thirty years, she published eight novels with major publishing firms including G.P. Putnam's Sons, Dodd Mead, and Little, Brown.

Litchfield was in Mentone, on the Italian Riviera, when that portion of Italy was visited by the earthquake of February 23, 1887, and narrowly escaped death under the falling walls of her residence.^[4] Her account of the earthquake on the Riviera, In the Crucible, was published in 1897.

Litchfield also published works in dramatic verse, including Vita (1904) and Nun of Kent (1911).^[5]

Litchfield's spent much of her early life alternating between her childhood home in Brooklyn Heights and living abroad in Europe.^[3] Beginning in 1888, she made her home in Washington, D. C., where she built a house on 2010 Massachusetts Avenue NW, where she lived for the next fifty years.^[1] She also kept a summer home on Central New York's Lake Minnewaska. Litchfield died in Goshen, New York on December 4, 1944.

• Goodwin, Etta Ramsdell (1898). "The Literary Women of Washington." Chautaquan 27.6 (Sept. 1898): 583-85.
• This article incorporates text from this source, which is in the public domain: Willard, Frances Elizabeth; Livermore, Mary Ashton Rice (1893). A Woman of the Century: Fourteen Hundred-seventy Biographical Sketches Accompanied by Portraits of Leading American Women in All Walks of Life (Public domain ed.). Moulton. p. 465.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Grace Denio Litchfield.

English Wikisource has original works by or about:

Grace Denio Litchfield

• "Grace Denio Litchfield (1849-1944)," The Woman's Literary Club of Baltimore Archive.

• The Grace Denio Litchfield Collection at Johns Hopkins University
• Works by Grace Denio Litchfield at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about Grace Denio Litchfield at the Internet Archive