author
Emma Howard Wight
A busy literary life took shape in Baltimore, where journalism, fiction, and magazine work came together in a career that reached a wide popular audience. Best remembered today for novels, stories, and newspaper writing, she built her reputation steadily after being encouraged to publish her early work.
1 Audiobook
The Little Maid of Israel
by Emma Howard Wight
About the author
Emma Howard Wight was an American author and newspaper correspondent born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1863. Biographical sources agree that she showed a talent for writing early, studied at the Academy of Visitation, and at first wrote mainly for her own amusement before beginning to publish more seriously.
Her work appeared in newspapers and magazines, and she became known as a versatile popular writer. Contemporary and reference sources note that Bertha von Hillern encouraged her to pursue publication, and that her articles were widely reprinted. She also published fiction, including novels and shorter pieces, and her work is still easy to trace today through library and public-domain collections.
Wight died in 1935. While she is not as widely read now as some of her contemporaries, her career offers a vivid glimpse of the path open to a successful American woman writer in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.