Mildred Aldrich

Mildred Aldrich was an American journalist and writer.

Aldrich was born in 1853 in Providence, Rhode Island. She grew up in Boston, taught at elementary school there and went on into journalism.

For 12 years, she worked as secretary to the manager of the Boston Home Journal and contributed under the pseudonym H. Quinn. Aldrich also edited The Mahogany Tree, a journal of ideas. She joined the Boston Journal in 1894, and moved the following year to the Boston Herald as a drama critic.

In 1898 Aldrich moved to France, becoming a member of the circle of writers associated with fellow expatriates Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. Here she found a mixed portfolio of work as a foreign correspondent, translator and an agent for US theatre producers, as well as writing articles for American magazines.

In July 1914 Aldrich moved to a house called La Creste at Huiry, thirty miles east of Paris. "I have come to feel the need of calm and quiet - perfect peace" she wrote. Ironically the First World War began three months later and this site, with its clear view of the Marne valley, would gave Aldrich her greatest writing success. She had a birds-eye view of the first Battle of the Marne, and began to write a series of letters which were collected in four wartime volumes. A Hilltop on the Marne (1915) first appeared as a serialised account in the Atlantic Monthly. It was followed by further biographical accounts, On the Edge of the War Zone The Peak of the Load  and When Johnny Comes Marching Home . They are emotive first-person narratives, recollecting the individuals and events of Aldrich's own war years.

Told in a French Garden, August, 1914 is Aldrich's sole work of fiction, relating a dinner party where nine guests each tell a story.

In 1926 Aldrich 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).

Aldrich received the French Legion of Honor 1922 for her war work and her influence on behalf of the US entry into the war. 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.