Grace Denio Litchfield, poet and novelist, was born November 19, 1849 in Brooklyn , New York. She is the daughter of Grace Hill Litchfield and Edwin Litchfield, and the sister of Francese Hubbard Litchfield Turnbull, the first president of the Woman’s Literary Club. Litchfield began writing at an early age, as she was bedridden due to illness for much of her life. Many of her poems, such as “In My Window-Seat”, “Pain”, “Day-dreams”, “In the Hospital” are reflective of the pain she experienced due to illness, as well as the time she spent in recovery within the confines of her room. She spent much of her time in Europe before moving to Washington D.C.

Litchfield is one of the more prolific writers in the Woman’s Literary Club, and as such, she was named an Honorary Member of the Club. Though some of her publications were at first rejected, following her first publication in 1882, Litchfield was published many times in Harper’s Magazine, The Century, The Atlantic, and others magazines.

I am very intrigued by Grace Denio Litchfield for several reasons. First of all, she is the sister of my least favorite person in the Club, Francese Turnbull. I spent much of last summer transcribing the minutes from the first few years of the Club, and thus know Mrs. Turnbull very well. From my research, my transcriptions, and my own imagination, Mrs. Turnbull seems like an evil dictator who shuts down some of the more progressive women of the Club. So it was surprising when I read about the kindness, modesty, and optimism that characterized Grace Denio Litchfield. How could these two drastically different women be bred from the same family? To this question I have no answer.

Another reason I find Litchfield interesting is because of her fiction writing. While her poetry focuses heavily on themes of nature, all I can really say about it is that it’s nice. Her fiction, however, has a lot more depth I think than her poems. For one, her fiction is funny. I was taken aback when I found myself laughing out loud to some of her sentences. For instance, in Only an Incident, Litchfield writes,

“It was another article of the Joppian creed that there was no such thing possible as a purely Platonic friendship between a young man and a young woman; there must always be ‘something in it’: either a mitten for him, a disappointment for her, or wedding-cake for all–generally and preferably, of course, the wedding-cake;–and belonging to such friendship as lawfully as a tail belongs to a comet, was a great, wide-spreading area of gossip.”

See, funny right? Even Grace Denio Litchfield had her fair share of disappointing boys. Her works focus heavily on women, especially societal expectations of women marrying, women working, and women writing. I am pretty interested to discover what other gems Grace Denio Litchfield has to offer.