author
Frances Ann Wood
b. 1840
A firsthand witness to the earliest days of Vassar College, this American educator and librarian left behind a warm, observant memoir of campus life when higher education for women was still new. Her writing offers a rare close-up view of the people, routines, and ambitions that shaped one of the first women's colleges in the United States.
1 Audiobook
Earliest Years at Vassar: Personal Recollections
by Frances Ann Wood
About the author
Born as Frances Ann Wood, she is better known in many historical sources as Frances Shimer. She was an American educator born in New York in 1826 and became one of the founders of the Mount Carroll Seminary in Illinois, the school that later became Shimer College.
She is also remembered as the author of Earliest Years at Vassar: Personal Recollections, published in 1909. In that book, written as a librarian, she looked back on the opening years of Vassar College and described everyday student life, early traditions, and the atmosphere of a pioneering women's institution.
Because the name "Frances Ann Wood" appears in records in more than one form, the best-confirmed literary identity here is the educator and memoirist later known as Frances Shimer. If this refers to a different Frances Ann Wood born in 1840, the surviving public sources I found do not clearly confirm that author's biography.