Helen Ashe Hays

Helen Ashe Hays was an American author active in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Online book records link her to children's books such as The Princess Idleways and The Adventures of Prince Lazybones, and Other Stories, showing an early interest in imaginative storytelling for younger readers.

She also wrote nonfiction, including A Little Maryland Garden and The Antietam and Its Bridges, the Annals of an Historic Stream. Those titles suggest a writer with a strong feel for place, especially for Maryland landscapes, gardening, and local history.

Archival material at Northwestern notes that after her marriage she was known as Helen Nutting and lived in Paris in the 1920s, where she moved in literary circles that included the Joyce family, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and Sylvia Beach. Even from the small surviving record available online, she comes across as a versatile author whose work joined domestic life, history, and fantasy in an approachable way.