Woman of the Century/Frances Irene B. Griswold

GRISWOLD, Mrs. Frances Irene Burge, author, born in Wickford, R. I., 28th April, 1826. She is a daughter of Rev. L. Burge and Elizabeth Frances Shaw. Mrs. Griswold inherited from her father, many of those traits of character most FRANCES IRENE BURGE GRISWOLD. . clearly manifest in her writings. He was a man of lofty purposes, broad sympathies and tender Christian piety. The child grew to womanhood beneath the historic shades of St Paul's Narragansett Church, of which her father was for twenty years the rector. Mrs. Griswold began to publish her literary work in 1853. and, though thirty-two volumes have already been published, besides innumerable fugitive articles for newspapers and other periodicals, her fruitful pen is not yet idle. Perhaps the most widely known of her books are the "Bishop and Nanette" series, which, as a carefully prepared exposition of the Rook of Common Prayer, have long been in use in advanced classes of Episcopal Sunday-schools; "Sister Eleanor's Brood," a story of the lights and shadows of a country clergyman's family life, in which the gentle, optimistic nature of the author works in its best vein, and which is understood to figure, under a thin veil of fiction, the actual experience of her mother, and the third book, "Asleep," to whose pages so many have turned for comfort in bereavement. Mrs. Griswold is an ardent Episcopalian, and the church has been from her earliest youth a spur to her glowing imagination and the outlet of her abundant energy. Her Christmas and Easter poems represent her most finished poetic work. She has been twice marriea. After the death of her first husband, Allen N Smith, of Stockbridge, Mass., she became the wife of her distant kinsman, Judge Elias Griswold, of Maryland. Judge Griswold passed the latter days of his life in Brooklyn, N. Y., the home through many years of Mrs. Gris- wold's family, where she still resides. Mrs. Griswold descended, on her father's side, from the Mucklestons of Muckleston Manor, Oswestry, and on her mother's side, from the Brentons of Hammersmith, England. Most of her books were written under the name of F. Burge Smith.