author
Maude Rea Parkinson
1860–1938
An Irish-born writer and teacher, she turned two decades in Romania into a lively firsthand portrait of a country in transition. Her best-known book blends travel writing, memoir, and sharp social observation.
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 Ireland and in Magdeburg, Germany. Before settling in Romania, she traveled in Europe and worked as a governess in Vienna, where she first heard about the country that would shape her writing.
In 1889 she moved to Bucharest and spent about twenty years there, working as an English teacher and moving through many layers of Romanian society. Those experiences became the basis of Twenty Years in Roumania (1921), a memoir-like account valued for its vivid scenes of everyday life, customs, and social change.
Parkinson is remembered less as a novelist than as a perceptive observer of place. Her writing offers modern readers a warm, detailed window into Romania at the turn of the twentieth century.