author
H. Rea (Hannah Rea) Woodman
b. 1870
Best remembered as a Kansas writer and educator, this early 20th-century author wrote plays, poems, and local-history work shaped by a life that began on the American frontier. Her story is especially striking because she grew up in Wichita and later turned that background into books for young readers and community audiences.
1 Audiobook
The Sweet Girl Graduates: A Farce in Three Acts and an Epilogue
by H. Rea (Hannah Rea) Woodman
About the author
Born in Jacksonville, Illinois, in 1870, Hannah Rea Woodman soon moved with her family to Wichita, Kansas, where she grew up in the city’s early years. Sources describe her as an American writer and educator, and Kansas archival material preserves manuscripts and printed items connected to her long writing career.
Woodman wrote under the name H. Rea Woodman and published a range of works, including children’s plays, light comedy, poetry, and local or historical writing. Surviving bibliographic records connect her with titles such as The Sweet Girl Graduates, The Master's Birthday, The Noahs Afloat, and Wichitana 1877–1897.
What makes her especially memorable is the mix of frontier history and literary work in her life story. Accounts from Kansas and reference sources say that as a small child she was briefly taken by Arapaho people and then returned, an episode that became part of the dramatic legend surrounding her early years; later, she became one of the women writers associated with Wichita’s cultural history.