Anne Richmond Warner French, writing under the name Anne Warner, was an American novelist and short story writer active during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Born in Saint Paul, Minnesota, in 1869, she married Charles Elting French, a flour manufacturer, at the age of eighteen. Although she began her publishing career with a detailed family genealogy, An American Ancestry, in 1894, she soon transitioned to fiction, drawing inspiration from her extensive travels and residency in Europe.
Warner lived for several years in France, Germany, and England, settings that frequently influenced her narrative backdrops. Her debut novel, His Story, Their Letters (1902), was set in Tours, France, and explored a romance through epistolary and conversational formats. She followed this with A Woman's Will (1904), which depicted the courtship of an American widow by a German musician, and The Rejuvenation of Aunt Mary (1905), a popular family drama centered on a disinheritance and subsequent reconciliation.
Warner achieved her greatest commercial and critical success through her humorous "local color" stories featuring the character Susan Clegg. These tales, which captured the regional flavor and social dynamics of American life, typically revolved around Clegg sharing local gossip with her neighbor, Mrs. Lathrop. Warner's literary career was cut short when she died of a cerebral hemorrhage in Dorset, England, in 1913 at the age of forty-three.
