Amelia E. Barr

Born in England on March 29, 1831, Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr later built her life and career in the United States as a novelist and teacher. After marrying Robert Barr, she emigrated to America and spent important years in Texas, an experience that would later feed the settings and atmosphere of her fiction.

Barr began publishing fiction relatively late, but she went on to become a highly productive and popular author. She wrote dozens of novels, many of them historical stories set in Britain or America, and readers especially remembered her for Remember the Alamo (1888), a novel that drew on Texas history.

Her life was marked by personal loss, including the 1867 yellow fever epidemic that killed her husband and three of her sons. She supported her family through teaching and writing, eventually achieving literary fame and financial security. Barr died in New York on March 10, 1919.