author
Katherine Neville Fleeson
A missionary writer who helped preserve Lao oral tradition for English-language readers, she is best known for collecting and translating stories in Laos Folk-Lore of Farther India. Her work offers a rare glimpse of everyday life, beliefs, and storytelling in northern Siam and Laos at the end of the 19th century.
1 Audiobook
Laos Folk-Lore of Farther India
by Katherine Neville Fleeson
About the author
Katherine Neville Fleeson was an American missionary in Laos, born in 1859 and died in 1905. She is chiefly remembered for Laos Folk-Lore of Farther India (1899), a collection of stories she gathered while living in the region.
In the introduction to that book, she explains that the tales came from long residence among Lao communities and from hearing stories preserved orally rather than in print. That makes her work valuable not only as literature, but also as an early record of local folklore, customs, and religious ideas as she encountered them.
Modern editions and library records continue to credit Fleeson as the author of Laos Folk-Lore of Farther India, and some records also connect her with Laos Folklore of Northern Siam. For listeners interested in folktales, travel writing, or the history of cross-cultural collecting, her writing opens a window onto a world rarely described in English at the time.