Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm

KATE DOUGLAS WIGGIN was born Kate Douglas Smith on September 28, 1856, in Philadelphia. She spent her early childhood in rural Maine and her early adulthood in California. After her step-father died, she and her sister, Nora, became responsible for supporting the family. Her first story, “Half-a-Dozen Housekeepers,” was published in St. Nicholas Magazine during this period. She also became involved in the kindergarten movement, an American offshoot of German educational experiments that were sweeping the progressive branches of the educational world. After training in Los Angeles, Wiggin established the first free kindergarten west of the Rockies, in San Francisco. She wrote her first novels, The Story of Patsy (1883) and The Birds’ Christmas Carol (1887), to raise money for the school. In 1881 she married Samuel Bradley Wiggin and moved with him to New York City in 1885. Although this constituted the end of her active teaching, she remained committed to educational issues her entire life, as a lecturer, writer, and, with her sister, Nora Smith, an editor. Samuel Wiggin died suddenly in 1889, and soon afterward Wiggin returned to her childhood home in Hollis, Maine. In 1895 she married George Riggs, an importer with whom she regularly traveled to Europe. These sojourns yielded material for subsequent literary productions, the most famous being the Penelope series, published between 1893 and 1915. During this period Wiggin also established firm friendships with literary notables such as Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, and Lady Gregory. She wrote prolifically, producing educational manuals; children’s fiction; and poetry, novels, and short stories for adults. The work for which Wiggin is best known, the novel Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, was published in 1903. Four of her novels were adapted for the stage. Late in her life she was invited by the San Francisco Examiner to participate in the Panama Pacific International Exposition as one of the six “most distinguished women in the world.” She died in England in 1923, shortly after completing her autobiography.

SUSAN K. HARRIS, Joyce and Elizabeth Hall Distinguished Professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of Kansas, is the author of The Cultural Work of the Late Nineteenth-Century Hostess: Annie Adams Fields and Mary Gladstone Drew, The Courtship of Olivia Langdon and Mark Twain, Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Novels: Interpretive Strategies, and Mark Twain’s Escape from Time: A Study of Patterns and Images. She is the editor of the Penguin Classics editions of A New-England Tale by Catharine Maria Sedgwick and The Minister’s Wooing by Harriet Beecher Stowe, as well as Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain and Mark Twain: Historical Romances.