Annie Eliot Trumbull

Annie Eliot Trumbull worked across novels, short stories, and plays while maintaining deep ties to Hartford, Connecticut. St. Valentine’s Day is her one-act comedy for female characters, published in Boston by W. H. Baker in 1892. The compact play uses a parlor setting, modern dress, valentines, mistaken expectations, and conversation about courtship to create its comedy. Bibliographic records describe the work as seventeen pages and identify it with Baker’s edition of plays. Trumbull also wrote the novels White Birches, Rod’s Salvation, Mistress Content Cradock, and Life’s Common Way, along with A Christmas Accident and Other Stories. Her literary work appeared in periodicals including The Atlantic and Scribner’s, and she participated in Hartford’s civic and literary life. She also helped preserve the Mark Twain house. St. Valentine’s Day represents the theatrical side of a career that moved among fiction, short forms, local cultural work, and plays prepared for performance by community groups.