Evangeline Wilbour Blashfield

Evangeline Wilbour Blashfield (September 1, 1858 – November 15, 1918) was an American writer, historian and translator.

Biography Blashfield was born on September 1, 1858, in Little Compton, Rhode Island, United States. Her father was egyptologist and translator Charles Edwin Wilbour and her mother was feminist, suffragist and writer Charlotte Beebe Wilbour. She had three siblings: Theodora, Victor and Zoe. She was educated at the convent school of the Sisters of Saint Mary the Virgin. She then studied at finishing schools in Florence, Italy, and in Paris, France, becoming fluent in French and Italian with knowledge of German, Arabic and Latin. They lived in New York City from 1882. and a collection of biographies of women, Portraits and Backgrounds: Hrotsvitha, Aphra Behn, Aïssé, Rosalba Carriera (1917). as the basis of her own work on Behn. She called for investment in public art and beauty.

Blashfield died of the Spanish Flu on November 15, 1918, in New York, New York, United States, aged 60.

In 1919, a granite and mosaic memorial foundation was gifted by the Municipal Art Society of New York to the city in Blashfield's memory, located at Bridgemarket beneath the Queensboro Bridge in Manhattan, New York City. In June 2003, 85 years after Blashfield's death, restoration work took place on the memorial fountain.

Select publications

Afloat on the Nile (1891) A Day with the Donkey Boys (1892) Italian Cities (1900) Masques of Cupid (1901) The Education of a Saint (1904) Portraits and Backgrounds: Hrotsvitha, Aphra Behn, Aïssé, Rosalba Carriera (1917)