author
Rosalind Richards
1874–1964
A keen observer of New England country life, this early 20th-century writer is best remembered for evoking the woods, farms, and small communities of Maine with warmth and detail. Her work offers a calm, close-up look at a rural landscape and way of life that were already beginning to change.
1 Audiobook
A Northern Countryside
by Rosalind Richards
About the author
Born in Boston in 1874, she was the daughter of Henry Richards and Laura E. Howe Richards, and was educated at the Collège de France and the Sorbonne. She later became closely associated with Gardiner, Maine, where she drew on the surrounding countryside for her writing.
Her best-known book is A Northern Countryside (1916), a portrait of rural Maine published by Henry Holt and Company and illustrated with photographs by Bertrand H. Wentworth. Surviving library and archival records also credit her with other books for younger readers, including The Nursery Fire, Little Brown, and Two Children in the Woods, as well as magazine writing.
She died in 1964. Although not widely known today, her writing preserves a vivid sense of place and an affectionate record of everyday life in northern New England.