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Kate Douglas Wiggin

1911 Encyclopedia Britannica

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KATE DOUGLAS WIGGIN (1857-), American novelist, daughter of Robert N. Smith, a lawyer, was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on the 28th of September 1857. She was educated at Abbott Academy, Andover, Massachusetts, and removed in 1876 to Los Angeles, California. She taught in Santa Barbara College (1877-1878), established in San Francisco the first free kindergartens for poor children on the western coast (1878), and, with the help of her sister, Miss Nora Archibald Smith, and of Mrs Sarah B. Cooper, organized the California Kindergarten Training School (1880). She married, in 1880, Samuel Bradley Wiggin of San Francisco, who died in 1889. In 1895 she married George Christopher Riggs, but continued to write under the name of Wiggin. Her interest in children's education was shown in numerous books, some written in collaboration with her sister, in both prose and verse. But her literary reputation rests rather on her works of prose fiction, which show a real gift for depicting character and an original vein of humour. The best known of these are: The Birds' Christmas Carol (1888); Penelope's English Experiences (1893); Marm Lisa (1896); Penelope's Progress (1898), being Penelope's experiences in Scotland; Penelope's Irish Experiences (1901); The Diary of a Goose-Girl (1902); and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1903).