face-to-face with 'forgotten' forest author

Since the start of the Reading the Forest project our team have been rediscovering authors and books with strong connections to the Forest of Dean. Some of these have been known about by local historians and book collectors – though we’ve often been able to dig deeper and discover more about them. But some authors we’ve come across had seemingly been totally lost to the Forest’s collective memory. One of these was Ada M. Trotter, author of Forest of Dean set novels Heaven’s Gate (1886) and Bledisloe (1887). Over the past few years one of our team has become…well, to be honest quite obsessed with finding out all he can about this Aylburton-born writer and journalist. He has been slowly adding his findings to Trotter’s author profile page on the Reading the Forest website, though admits that he’s way behind in sharing all the fascinating info he’s found out. One thing though as eluded him all this time and that is finding a picture of the author. Whilst during the course of his research he’s come across photos of her sister (a prominent US Suffragist), her brother-in-law (Ross-born Geologist, Edward Claypole), and one of her brothers, he’s not found a picture of her anywhere – until now!

One of his regular ‘Ada M. Trotter’ searches on e-bay just last week turned up a copy of an 1894-5 annual of the Girls Own Paper – a journal for girls and young women that she regularly contributed to. And amongst the seller’s images of the book was one of the inside covers, and it featured photographic portraits of the contributors. Needless to say, our Trotter enthusiast (obsessive!) successfully bid on the book and recently received delivery. So here, at last, is Ada M(ary) Trotter, author and journalist, born in the Forest of Dean, emigrated to Canada and later lived in the USA.

Meanwhile, images (sketches, portraits, photographs) continue to elude us for S.M. Crawley-Boevey, Margaret Mushet, William S. Wickenden, P. J. Ducarel, H. G. Nicholls, Mabel K. Woods, and Catherine Drew. So, if you have or know of a picture of any of these – we would absolutely love to see them!