Lucy Foster Madison

Lucy Foster Madison (1865-1932) was an American schoolteacher who became a busy writer of historical fiction and biography for young readers, published mainly by the Penn Publishing Company of Philadelphia. Born Lucy Foster in Kirksville, Missouri, she taught school in Missouri before a newspaper story prize in 1893 turned her toward fiction. Her Peggy Owen books, set during the American Revolution, did well enough that Penn billed her on later title pages as the author of that series, and she wrote standalone tales too, among them A Maid at King Alfred's Court (1900) and the biography Joan of Arc, the Warrior Maid (1919). She moved with her husband to a farm near Hudson Falls, New York, in 1924 and died there in 1932.