Elizabeth Weston Timlow (1861-1930)

Elizabeth Weston Timlow was the principal of a private girls school in Washington, D.C., and the author of seven children's books. She was also a lecturer on psychology and metaphysics who took young women on the "grand tour" of Europe to enrich their cultural perspectives.

But in 1914, in the middle of one of these tours, she and her charges were stuck in England at the outbreak of World War I. Deeply depressed as her proper Victorian world crumbled around her, she regained her sense of peace by writing this book.

She visited Monadnock every year from 1900 to her death in 1930. During her last years, she lived in Fitzwilliam, N.H., within sight of Mount Monadnock.