Kate Douglas Wiggin, Bain News Service photograph (Library of Congress). Source · Public domain
About Kate Douglas Wiggin
Kate Douglas Wiggin (1856–1923) was born in Philadelphia and spent much of her childhood in Hollis, Maine, the country of the Saco River that she later turned into Riverboro. In California she became a pioneer of the kindergarten movement, opening the Silver Street free kindergarten in San Francisco in 1878 and training kindergarten teachers. She first wrote stories to raise money for that work, among them The Birds' Christmas Carol (1887), and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1903) became her best-known book, followed by New Chronicles of Rebecca (1907).
Frequently Cited
“God bless aunt Miranda; God bless the brick house that was; God bless the brick house that is to be!”
Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm follows Rebecca Rowena Randall from the age of ten to seventeen. Her widowed mother, Aurelia, is struggling with seven children and a mortgage on Sunnybrook Farm near Temperance, Maine, so Rebecca is sent instead of her capable older sister Hannah to live with her mother's unmarried sisters, Miranda and Jane Sawyer, in the old brick house at Riverboro, where she is to be educated.
