Millicent Schwab Bender

Millicent Schwab Bender was an American author best known for Great Opera Stories: Taken from Original Sources in Old German, first published by Macmillan in 1912. The book adapts well-known opera tales into accessible prose, suggesting she wrote for readers who were curious about opera but may have been meeting these stories for the first time.

The collection includes retellings such as Haensel and Gretel, Lohengrin, The Flying Dutchman, Tannhäuser, The Master Singers, and Children of Kings. The work later entered the public domain and was preserved by Project Gutenberg, which helped keep her writing available to modern readers.

Available records also indicate that she was born in 1876 and died in 1974. Beyond that, reliable biographical details are scarce in the sources I could confirm, so her surviving reputation rests mainly on the charm and usefulness of her opera retellings.