author
Maude Rea Parkinson
1860–1938
A keen-eyed Irish traveler and teacher, she turned two decades in Romania into a lively portrait of a country in transition. Her writing blends curiosity, humor, and close observation of everyday life.
1 Audiobook
Twenty years in Roumania
by Maude Rea Parkinson
About the author
Born around 1860 in Ulster, Ireland, Maude Rea Parkinson studied both in her native country and in Magdeburg, Germany. Before settling in Romania, she traveled widely in Europe and worked as a governess in Vienna, where she first heard about the country that would shape her best-known book.
In 1889 she moved to Bucharest as an English teacher and spent roughly twenty years there. Those years became the basis for Twenty Years in Roumania, first published in the early 1920s, a memoir and travel account that records Romanian society, customs, and city life with warmth, detail, and a strong outsider's perspective.
Today, Parkinson is remembered mainly for that book, which offers readers a vivid glimpse of Romania at the turn of the twentieth century. Her work remains valuable not just as travel writing, but as a personal record of how one observant visitor came to know and care deeply about a place far from home.