Mildred Aldrich

Mildred Aldrich (November 16, 1853[1] – February 19, 1928) was an American journalist and writer.

Portrait of Mildred Aldrich

Biography

She was born in 1853 in Providence, Rhode Island. She grew up in Boston, taught at elementary school there and went on into journalism.[2] She wrote for the Boston Home Journal, the Boston Journal and the Boston Herald. She started the short-lived The Mahogany Tree in 1892.[2]

In 1898, she moved to France, and, while there, became a friend of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas.[2] She worked as a foreign correspondent and translator.

Aldrich moved to Huiry, near Paris, in 1914, only months before the outbreak of the First World War.[2] Her house there overlooked the Marne river valley, and her experiences during the First Battle of the Marne, as detailed in her letters to friends in the U.S., constitute her first book, A Hilltop on the Marne (1915). Following the success of that work, Aldrich produced three more collections of her wartime letters. On the Edge of the War Zone (1917) contains letters dating from the aftermath of the Marne battle until the entry of the U.S. into the war, The Peak of the Load (1918) details most of the final year of the war, and When Johnny Comes Marching Home (1919) describes her experiences in the months immediately following the war's end.

Aldrich also produced one novel, Told in a French Garden, August 1914 (1916), and in 1926 completed an autobiography entitled Confessions of a Breadwinner, which resides in the collections of the Schlesinger Library at Harvard University, but has never been published (although digital images of the typed manuscripts are displayed on the Harvard University website).[2]

Aldrich received the French Legion of Honor 1922 for her war work and her influence on behalf of the US entry into the war.[3] In February 1928, she suffered a heart attack and died a few days later at the American Hospital in Neuilly. She is buried at the Church of St Denis in Quincy-Voisins.

Bibliography

Collections of letters
  • A Hilltop on the Marne (1915)
  • On the Edge of the War Zone (1917)
  • The Peak of the Load (1918)
  • When Johnny Comes Marching Home (1919)

Novel
  • Told In A French Garden, August 1914 (1916)

References
  1. Who was who among North American authors, 1921–1939, v. 1 A-J. Detroit: Gale Research Co. 1976. p. 22. ISBN 0810310414.
  2. "Harvard University Library". Archived from the original on 2018-07-02. Retrieved 2007-12-22.
  3. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English, Virginia Blain, Patricia Clements and Isobel Grundy, eds (London, Batsford, 1990), p. 15. ISBN 0713458488.

Slattery-Christy, David. Mildred on the Marne. Mildred Aldrich Frontline Witness 1914-1918. Spellmount/History Press, United Kingdom, 2013. ISBN 9780752497686

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