author
Grace Denio Litchfield
1849–1944
A prolific American poet and novelist, she turned a life shaped by travel, illness, and observation into fiction, verse, and short stories that reached major magazines and book publishers. Her work often drew on European settings and on the emotional texture of everyday experience.
1 Audiobook
Only an Incident
by Grace Denio Litchfield
About the author
Born in Brooklyn Heights on November 19, 1849, Grace Denio Litchfield was an American poet and novelist who grew up in a prominent family and was educated privately in the United States and Europe. Accounts of her life note that she spent long periods confined to bed in her early years, an experience that seems to have deepened the reflective tone of her writing.
She published fiction, poetry, and short stories across the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Her novels included Only an Incident, Criss-Cross, and The Knight of the Black Forest, and her poems appeared in well-known magazines before being gathered in Collected Poems in 1913. Several sources also connect her literary interests with the influence of her sister, writer Francese Litchfield Turnbull, and with her involvement in Baltimore's Woman's Literary Club.
Litchfield lived a long literary life and died in Goshen, New York, on December 4, 1944. Though she is not as widely read now as some of her contemporaries, her career shows the range of women’s writing in her era, from magazine verse to travel-shaped fiction and quietly observant prose.