author
Margaret Symonds
1869–1925
Remembered as "Madge" in her family, she wrote graceful travel books and memoirs shaped by Italy, the Alps, and a deeply literary home. Her work also preserves a daughter’s vivid view of writer John Addington Symonds and the world around him.
1 Audiobook
The Story of Perugia
by Margaret Symonds, Lina Duff Gordon
About the author
Margaret Symonds (1869–1925), later Margaret Symonds Vaughan, was an English writer known as "Madge." Archive records identify her as the daughter of writer John Addington Symonds and Janet Catherine North Symonds, and later the wife of educationalist William Wyamar Vaughan.
Her books suggest a strong interest in place, memory, and cultured travel. Confirmed titles include Days Spent on a Doge's Farm, The Story of Perugia, A Child of the Alps, Our Life in the Swiss Highlands—written with her father—and Out of the Past (1925), a memoir centered on John Addington Symonds.
That mix of travel writing and family remembrance gives her work its appeal today. She wrote from close experience, but with enough distance to turn family history and European landscapes into lively, readable prose.