Frances Carruth Prindle

Born in 1867, Frances Weston Carruth Prindle was an American author whose work is linked with late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century popular fiction. She is best known today for Those Dale Girls, a novel first published in 1899.

Prindle wrote during a lively period in American publishing, when magazines and book publishers were creating a large audience for domestic stories and books for younger readers. Her surviving public record is fairly limited, but period sources and library records show that she was an active published writer at the time.

Although she is not widely known now, her work offers a glimpse into the tastes of her era: character-centered storytelling, social observation, and an interest in the lives of girls and young women. That makes her books a small but engaging part of American literary history.