author
Frances S. Howe
1842–1937
An adventurous New England traveler and longtime music teacher, she turned years of carriage journeys into a lively memoir full of movement, scenery, and practical observation. Her best-known book follows two women on the road through thousands of miles of late 19th- and early 20th-century travel.
1 Audiobook
14000 miles, a carriage and two women
by Frances S. Howe
About the author
Born in Leominster, Massachusetts, in 1842, Frances Sophronia Howe became known both as a music teacher and as the author of 14000 Miles, a Carriage and Two Women. She spent much of her life in Leominster, where local records and later memorial accounts describe her as a widely known resident.
Her reputation as a writer rests on a remarkable record of extended carriage travel. In the foreword to her book, she explains that many of the pieces first appeared in the Boston Evening Transcript and later in the Leominster Daily Enterprise, growing into an account of more than 14,000 miles of journeys through New England, New York, and Canada.
Howe died in 1937 at the age of 95. What still makes her stand out is the combination of everyday independence and quiet daring in her work: she wrote not as a distant celebrity, but as a sharp-eyed traveler who preserved a vivid picture of the roads, landscapes, and rhythms of her time.