Amanda M Douglas 
A Little Girl in Old Washington 

Amanda Minnie Douglas was an American writer of adult and juvenile fiction. She was probably best remembered by young readers of her day for the Little Girl series published over the decades flanking the turn of the twentieth century.

Her ‘A Little Girl’ series was one of the first examples of historical fiction for girls, while her Helen Grant books fall into the ‘college girl’ genre that became so popular at the turn of the 19th/20th centuries. Her Kathie’s Stories series – the first that she published – is a fairly typical example of 19th-century didactic moralism.

Douglas began by submitting short stories and poems to local publications. In time her stories appeared in editions of The New York Ledger, Saturday Evening Post and the Lady’s Friend Magazine. Her first novel, In Trust, was published in 1866 and sold some 20, 000 copies.

Learning from this first experience, Douglas made sure to retain the copyrights on all of her future works. She would go on to publish at least a novel a year until her retirement in 1913.