Grace Donworth

Donworth was born on July 22, 1857, in Machias, Maine,^[2] the daughter of Patrick Enright Donworth and Mary Eliza Baker Donworth.^[3] Her father was a lumberman, and her four brothers became lawyers.^[4] Her brother George Donworth was a judge in Washington state.^[5] Her younger brother Albert B. Donworth was also a writer.^[6][7] She graduated from Notre Dame Academy, with further art training in Boston.^[3]

Donworth taught school in Massachusetts and Maine.^[3] She was regent of the Machias chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR).^[8] She also belonged to the American Folklore Society and the Boston Authors Club.^[9]

Donworth joined other women in Providence, Rhode Island, to assemble relief shipments to the victims of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake; while there, she wrote humorous letters to a fellow aid worker, Miss Stockbridge, in the persona of an "unsophisticated and old fashioned"^[10] seamstress. Those became her "Jennie Allen" stories. Stockbridge shared the letters with her brother and with a DAR meetings, and they eventually came to the attention of Mark Twain.^[3]

Mark Twain enjoyed Donworth's "Jennie Allen" writings.^[4] They were first presented to him as genuine correspondence,^[11] but he soon knew they were Donworth's creation: "'Jennie's' letters are an innocent fraud, and a quite justifiable one, since they make pleasant reading and can harm no one," he wrote in a 1906 letter.^[12][13] He helped her find a publisher, and promoted her works to his audiences.^[3] In Everybody's Magazine, J. B. Kerfoot called The Letters of Jennie Allen "the best piece of homely fun of the year."^[14]

• The Letters of Jennie Allen (1908)^[15] (first published in Ladies' Home Journal)^[3]
• Down Home with Jennie Allen (1910)^[16]

Donworth died in Machias, on November 25, 1945, aged 88.^[17] Her papers are in the Maine State Library.^[18]