Louisa Caroline Tuthill (née, Huggins; pen names, various; July 6, 1799 – June 1, 1879) was an American author, one of the most successful in the 19th-century.
She edited Young Lady's Reader (New Haven, 1840); Mirror of Life (Philadelphia, 1848); and Beauties of De Quincey (Boston, 1861).
One of her amusements during girlhood was to write, stealthily, essays, plays, tales, and verses, all of which, however, with the exception of two or three school compositions, were committed to the flames previous to her marriage.
As a solace, Mrs. Tuthill used her pen to contribute frequently to literary periodicals, but always anonymously, and with so little regard to fame of authorship as to keep neither record nor copy of her pieces.
It was an octavo volume of tales and essays, having in view the completion of a young lady's education after her leaving school.
It shows at once a fertile imagination and varied reading, sound judgment, and a familiar acquaintance with social life.
[5] They have the graces of style and thought which would commend them to the favourable consideration of the general reader, with charms that made them the delight of children.
During the composition of these juvenile works, she continued her occupation of catering for "children of a larger growth", and gave to the world, in 1846, a work of fiction, entitled My Wife, a tale of fashionable life of the present day, conveying, under the garb of an agreeable story, wholesome counsels for the young of both sexes on the all-engrossing subject of marriage.
These counsels were conveyed under the fiction of an imaginary correspondence between a young mother, just beginning to dress her first baby, and an experienced aunt.
There are few topics in the whole history of the management and the mismanagement of a child, during the first and most important stages of its existence, that are not discussed, with alternate reason and ridicule, in this volume.