Lesley Crawford Keogh died peacefully at Danbury Hospital on Saturday, March 25, attended by her husband, sons, and daughter-in-law. She was 68 years old.

Lesley was born in Providence, RI, on Nov. 2, 1954. Her family lived briefly in Wellesley, MA, and Madison, NJ, and in 1968 settled in Wilton. She graduated from Wilton High School in 1972 and attended Briarcliff College later that fall. Beckoned by liberatory promise, and having perhaps intuited Briarcliff’s imminent bankruptcy, she quickly relocated to Boulder, CO.

After returning to Connecticut, and while working at the Beiersdorf cosmetics factory in South Norwalk, she met John Keogh — the love of her life. They married in 1979 and until her death were inseparable. In 1982, she began working at the Bethel Public Library and became a fixture of its children’s department. In 2001, she moved to the Wilton Library, where she organized and participated in a wide array of programs and helped engender a passion for reading among the community’s children and young adults.

Lesley was thoughtful, generous, and principled. She was a gifted storyteller, and her memory for trivia was a steel trap. Above all else, Lesley was an insatiable reader and was never once seen outside reaching distance of a book. She had a particular affection for horror, folklore, historical fiction, UK police procedurals, and comics. The cultivation of her taste was a lifelong project, and she held the work of Stephen King, Oscar Wilde, Roald Dahl, John D. MacDonald, Donna Tartt, Jean Shepherd, Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, and Garth Ennis in great esteem. She was also a devotee of 19th- and 20th-century English, American, and Irish poetry, and she was especially fond of Robert Graves, Edna St. Vincent Millay, William Butler Yeats, Carl Sandburg, Siegfried Sassoon, and Philip Larkin (whose “This Be The Verse” she’d avail herself of any opportunity to quote).

In her spare time, she maintained a collection of carefully-appointed dollhouses and undertook an extensive variety of crafting projects. She vacationed regularly at Long Beach Island, NJ, with her family, and visited many of New England’s sites of historical, paranormal, and esoteric interest, scouring antique shops all along the way for just one more piece of Wedgwood jasperware — very specifically in the Portland blue, as the eponymous Wedgwood blue is much less striking.

She is survived by her husband, John William Keogh, Jr; sons John Gordon Keogh and James Gallagher (Rebecca) Keogh; grandson, Luke James Keogh; sisters Anne (Charles) Ambuhl, Amory (Kevin McFarland) DeMeo, and Sarah Sullivan; brothers Douglas (Jacqueline) Smith and Donald (Katherine) Smith; as well as many nieces and nephews.

A celebration of her life will be held on Sunday, June 25 at 11 a.m. in the Wilton Library’s Brubeck Room. In lieu of flowers, donations in Mrs. Keogh’s memory may be made to Wilton Library.