author
Matilda Wrench
d. 1866
A 19th-century writer and translator, she moved between fiction, religious biography, and social reform. Her work is best remembered for a novel set during the Highland famine and for a book on visiting women prisoners in Britain and abroad.
1 Audiobook
The Highland glen : or, plenty and famine
by Matilda Wrench
About the author
Matilda Wrench was a British author active in the mid-19th century. Library and public-domain records confirm her as the author of The Highland Glen; or, Plenty and Famine and Visits to Female Prisoners at Home and Abroad, and as the translator of Augustus Neander's The Life and Times of St. Bernard.
Her surviving books suggest a writer with wide interests. One side of her work was imaginative and historical, as seen in The Highland Glen; another was practical and reform-minded, focusing on prison visiting and the lives of women in custody. That combination gives her writing a strong moral and social purpose typical of much Victorian nonfiction.
Available records give her death year as 1866. Although not a widely known literary figure today, her books remain of interest to readers drawn to 19th-century religious writing, social history, and fiction shaped by questions of charity and reform.