author
Martha Noyes Williams
1813–1879
A 19th-century American travel writer and editor, she is best remembered for a vivid memoir that joins firsthand impressions of China with a dramatic Civil War–era captivity story at sea. Her work offers an unusual window into long-distance travel, religion, and everyday life from a woman’s point of view.
1 Audiobook
About the author
Born in 1813 and dead in 1879, Martha Noyes Williams was an American writer whose published work includes A Year in China; and a Narrative of Capture and Imprisonment, When Homeward Bound, on Board the Rebel Pirate Florida. That book was issued under the name Mrs. H. Dwight Williams and later made her the best-known of her surviving works.
Her writing stands out because it brings together several kinds of experience at once: travel narrative, memoir, and wartime testimony. In A Year in China, she records a journey to China in the early 1860s and then recounts the capture of her homeward-bound vessel by the Confederate raider Florida, giving readers a rare personal account shaped by observation, endurance, and strong narrative clarity.
Williams also edited Voices from the Silent Land; or, Leaves of Consolation for the Afflicted, showing a broader literary and devotional side beyond travel writing. A reliable portrait image was not clearly available from the sources I checked, so no profile image is included here.