author
Martha Pike Conant
1868–1930
An early 20th-century American scholar of English literature, she is best remembered for a pioneering study of Oriental themes in eighteenth-century fiction. She also helped preserve family history in print by editing letters and records connected with Charlotte Howard Conant.
1 Audiobook
The Oriental tale in England in the eighteenth century
by Martha Pike Conant
About the author
Born on February 25, 1868, in Greenfield, Massachusetts, Martha Pike Conant was an American literary scholar and writer. She is most closely associated with The Oriental Tale in England in the Eighteenth Century, a study first published in the early 1900s and later made widely available through Project Gutenberg.
Her work explored how so-called Oriental and pseudo-Oriental stories shaped eighteenth-century English fiction, tracing connections with French sources and with well-known works such as Rasselas and Vathek. The book is still of interest to readers who enjoy literary history and the development of English fiction.
Conant also appears as co-editor of A Girl of the Eighties: At College and at Home, drawn from the family letters and records of Charlotte Howard Conant. She died on May 11, 1930, in Natick, Massachusetts.