Anne Warner (novelist)

Anne Richmond Warner French (14 October 1869 – ) was an American popular humorous author, best known for her local color stories about the character Susan Clegg.

Anne Warner was born on 14 October 1869 in Saint Paul, Minnesota, the daughter of lawyer William Penn Warner and Anna Elizabeth Richmond. In 1888, when she was 18, she married Charles Elting French, a Minneapolis flour manufacturer twenty five years older than her. They had two children: Anna Hathaway French (April 6 1892-December 17, 1892) and Charles Elting French (born September 19, 1896).

Her first published work was an extensive family genealogy, An American Ancestry (1894). She lived for two years in Tours, France and published her first novel, His Story, Their Letters (1902), a story told in conversations of a man and a woman who fall in love in Tours but eventually marry other people. She moved back to Saint Paul in 1903, but soon returned to Europe permanently, living in Hildesheim, Germany and Marnhull, Dorset, England.

Other novels by Warner include A Woman's Will (1904), about an American widow courted by a German musician, and The Rejuvenation of Aunt Mary (1905), a family drama about an aunt who disinherits and then reconciles with her nephew. Warner's most popular works were about Susan Clegg, a woman who retells local gossip to her friend Mrs. Lathrop, who is often asleep in her rocking chair.

Warner died of a cerebral hemorrhage on 3 February 1913 in Dorset.