author
Mrs. Burton Harrison
1843–1920
A novelist, playwright, and memoirist from a prominent Virginia family, she wrote about American society with wit and firsthand knowledge. Her life stretched from the Civil War era into the early 20th century, giving her work a vivid sense of change and history.
4 Audiobooks
A Virginia Cousin, & Bar Harbor Tales
by Mrs. Burton Harrison
Latter-Day Sweethearts
by Mrs. Burton Harrison
The Carcellini Emerald, With Other Tales
by Mrs. Burton Harrison
The Old-Fashioned Fairy Book
by Mrs. Burton Harrison
About the author
Born Constance Cary in 1843, she became widely known in print as Mrs. Burton Harrison and also wrote under the pen name "Refugitta." She was an American writer whose work included novels, plays, short fiction, memoir, and essays, and she was remembered for bringing social observation and historical color to her writing.
Her early life was closely tied to the Civil War South, and that experience shaped some of her later memoir writing. After the war she married Burton Harrison and built a literary career that reached a broad readership, especially through fiction and magazine work. She moved in well-known social and political circles, which helped inform her portraits of American life.
Today she is often remembered both for her literary output and for the unusual range of worlds she witnessed firsthand—from wartime upheaval to Gilded Age society. That mix of personal history and storytelling gives her work an appeal that is part historical record, part lively entertainment.