author
Rachel Hayward
b. 1886
Known today mostly through a small cluster of early 20th-century books, this elusive writer published fiction and travel writing that still feels vivid and curious. Her surviving work suggests a taste for movement, atmosphere, and lives lived a little off the ordinary path.
1 Audiobook
The Hippodrome
by Rachel Hayward
About the author
Rachel Hayward is a little-documented early 20th-century author whose catalog is now known mainly through library and public-domain records. Those records identify her as born in 1886 and connect her with The Hippodrome (1913) and Letters from Là-Bas (1914).
The Hippodrome has had an especially long afterlife: it survives in library collections and is also available through Project Gutenberg, which has helped keep Hayward's name in circulation. Contemporary catalog records for Letters from Là-Bas show it was published in London by W. Heinemann in 1914.
Beyond those bibliographic facts, reliable biographical detail is scarce, so it is hard to say much with confidence about her life, career, or later years. What can be said is that her work places her among the many once-published authors whose books outlasted the personal record, leaving readers to meet them first through the writing itself.