author
Abertine D. Mandall
Best known as the co-author of the 1916 book Seven Maids of Far Cathay, this little-documented writer is remembered through a single unusual work shaped by cross-cultural storytelling and English-language teaching in early 20th-century China.
1 Audiobook
Seven Maids of Far Cathay: Being English Notes From a Chinese Class Book
by Mary Forman Ledyard, Abertine D. Mandall
About the author
Abertine D. Mandall is a little-known author whose name is chiefly preserved through Seven Maids of Far Cathay: Being English Notes From a Chinese Class Book. Library and bookselling records consistently credit Mandall as a co-author of that title alongside Mary Forman Ledyard.
The book was published in 1916 by P. Elder and Company. In the Project Gutenberg edition, the foreword explains that the material grew out of a classroom exercise at the Woman's Anglo-Chinese College in Neuchang, China, where writings by seven Chinese students were recorded and then arranged for publication with help from the college president.
Because reliable biographical information about Mandall is scarce in the sources I could confirm, it is safest to remember her mainly in connection with this one collaborative volume. Even so, the survival of the book in public-domain archives has given her a modest afterlife as part of an unusual literary record of education, language learning, and cultural exchange.