Anna Matlack Richards
American writer
Anna Matlack Richards (1834–1900) was a 19th-century American children's author, poet and translator best known for her fantasy novel, A New Alice in the Old Wonderland.
Biography
Anna Matlack was raised in a prominent intellectual Quaker family in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. As a young woman she published fictional works, plays, and poems, including a fictional autobiography as by "Mrs. A. M. Richards" entitled Memories of a Grandmother in 1854. In 1856 she married landscape and maritime painter William Trost Richards. They traveled abroad frequently and lived in Cornwall, England, from 1878 to 1880. The couple had eight children, only five of whom lived past infancy. Matlack educated the children at home to a pre-college level in the arts and sciences.
One of the couple's sons, Theodore William Richards, would later win the 1914 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Anna Richards Brewster, their sixth child, went on to become an important painter in her own right, having received an early arts education from her father as well.
The public source identifies “Anna Matlack Richards” as american writer. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Anna, Matlack and Richards.
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The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 25, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q28921775. VIAF identifies the subject as 70433842. The Library of Congress control number is n86864850. 1 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1834, 1900, 1854 and 1856.
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This entry incorporates text from “Anna Matlack Richards” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.