Alice French (March 19, 1850 – January 9, 1934), better known as Octave Thanet, was an American novelist and short fiction writer.

In 1856 the French family moved to Davenport, Iowa, where the father engaged in manufacturing agricultural implements.

[3] By 1890, she had been settled in her comfortable lifelong lesbian partnership with a widowed friend, Jane Allen Crawford (1851-1932), for close to a decade, dividing their year between their home in Davenport, Iowa, and their plantation in Arkansas.

For fifteen years, the home they shared in Arkansas known as Thanford, was also on the National Register (until its destruction by fire).

The piece was published in October 1878 in Lippincott's Monthly Magazine, which paid her forty-two dollars, the first money she earned from writing.

Her first works contained a social and economic bent, such as Schopenhauer on Lake Pepin: A Study, but she soon turned to short stories.

The Alice French House in Arkansas (Thanford) was the center of the area's literary and artistic life, with frequent galas and dinner parties hosting the literati and prominent citizens.

French also exercised other talents at Thanford; she had a woodworking shop, where she built shelves and simple furniture, and a darkroom, where she developed and printed photographs with chemicals she mixed herself, an experience that she described and illustrated in An Adventure in Photography, which was first published by Scribner’s in 1893.