Frost, Frances

About the author

Frances Frost (1905–59) was educated at Middlebury College and the University of Vermont. She wrote several volumes of poetry (and was the mother of the poet Paul Blackburn). Although she won prizes for her poetry (The Yale Prize for her early poems; the Golden Rose Award of the New England Poetry Club and the Shelley Memorial Award) she never achieved national renown. It was as a children’s author that she earned much of her living, writing the popular Windy Foot series, about the Clark family and their Shetland pony Windy Foot. Set in North America, the series describes a solidly rural existence, where horses were a necessary part of life; a possibly idyllic world, where life was hard work, but the community pulled together and helped one another out.

Frances Frost’s own life did not reflect the solid and traditional life she portrayed; although Vermont inspired her novels and poetry, she did not live there beyond her early adulthood. Margaret Edwards in her Sketch of a Vermont Poet, called her “both a success and a failure in the most perplexing combination.” Edwards believed Frances Frost’s alcohol dependency held some of the key to her lack of major success, together with her “peculiar psychological pain, a blend of fear, regret, angst, pride and restlessness.”

Finding the books
All are reasonably easy to find in the US. Very good first editions with dustjackets tend to be expensive. None of the Windy Foot titles had a British publication.

Links and sources
Terri A. Wear: Horse Stories, an Annotated Bibliography, Scarecrow Press, 1987
Many thanks to Alison McCallum for the photographs and author info, and to Lisa Catz for the summaries.
Margaret Edwards on Frances Frost and her poetry (PDF from the Vermont Historical Society)
Frances Frost – biographical information from the University of California, which holds some of her papers, via the Online Archive of California.
A fan page on the Windy Foot novels.