author
Martha Pike Conant
1868–1930
A literary scholar with a strong interest in how stories travel across cultures, she is best known for a study of eighteenth-century English fiction and its fascination with Eastern tales. Her work also helped preserve family history through a later volume built from letters and records.
1 Audiobook
The Oriental tale in England in the eighteenth century
by Martha Pike Conant
About the author
Martha Pike Conant was an American author and scholar born in 1868 in Greenfield, Massachusetts. She is best known for The Oriental Tale in England in the Eighteenth Century (1908), a study published in Columbia University’s comparative literature series that examines how Eastern and pseudo-Eastern narratives influenced English fiction.
She was credited as Martha Pike Conant, Ph.D., and her work shows a careful, research-driven approach to literary history. Rather than writing popular fiction, she focused on criticism and documentation, tracing how translated and adapted tales shaped writers and readers in the English-speaking world.
Conant also contributed to biographical and family history writing. She is associated with A Girl of the Eighties: At College and at Home, a book drawn from the letters of Charlotte Howard Conant and other records, which reflects her interest in preserving personal history as well as literary culture. She died in 1930.