author
Anne M. Mitchell
1847–1929
A 19th-century American writer from the Mitchell family of Nantucket, she is remembered for fiction shaped by the years after the Civil War and by her work in education. Her best-known surviving title, The Freed Boy in Alabama, reflects that interest in learning, character, and social change.
1 Audiobook
The freed boy in Alabama
by Anne M. Mitchell
About the author
Born in 1847, Anne Maria Mitchell was part of the well-known Mitchell family of Nantucket. A biographical sketch from the Maria Mitchell Association identifies her as the daughter of William Forster Mitchell and Charlotte Coffin Dow Mitchell, and notes that she was known in the family as Annie Maria.
Her writing seems closely connected to her early experience in education. Sources connected with her work and family history say that her father served as a school superintendent for freed children in Tennessee, and that she herself taught there for a time while still young. That background helps explain why her fiction often centers on learning, moral growth, and the lives of newly freed African American children after the Civil War.
She published at least one known book in 1869, The Freed Boy in Alabama, issued by the Presbyterian Board of Publication. Library and public-domain records also connect her with Martha's Gift and with the name Anne Maria Mitchell Payne, suggesting that some of her work appeared under her married name as well.