author
Margaret Symonds
1869–1925
Travel, place, and family memory come together in these books by a writer who grew up close to literary life and made Italy and the Alps feel vividly real on the page. Her work ranges from historical travel writing to a personal memoir of her father, John Addington Symonds.
1 Audiobook
The Story of Perugia
by Margaret Symonds, Lina Duff Gordon
About the author
Margaret Symonds (also known as Madge Vaughan after her marriage) was a British writer born in 1869, the daughter of the author and critic John Addington Symonds. She collaborated with her father on Our Life in the Swiss Highlands and later published books of her own, including The Story of Perugia, Days Spent on a Doge's Farm, and Out of the Past.
Her writing is especially associated with Italy and with places shaped by history, art, and landscape. In Out of the Past, published in 1925, she turned from travel writing to family remembrance, offering a memoir of her father and preserving part of the world in which she was raised.
She married William Wyamar Vaughan in 1898 and died in 1925. Although she is less widely known than her father, her books still attract readers interested in literary families, travel writing, and late Victorian and early 20th-century views of Europe.