Jennette Lee

Jennette Barbour Perry was born on November 10, 1860, in Bristol, Connecticut,[1] to Mary (Barbour) and Philemon Perry.[2] She started teaching at an elementary school near Bristol at age 15.[3][4] After studying subjects including Greek on her own, she took the entrance exam to enter Smith College in 1882 and graduated in 1886.[5][6]

From 1890 to 1893, Lee taught English at Vassar College,[5] and from 1893 to 1896 she was head of the department of English in the College for Women at Western Reserve University (now Case Western Reserve University).[1] From 1904 to 1913, she was a professor of English language and literature at Smith.[5]

Lee's first published work was a short story called "Bufiddle", which appeared in The Independent on August 4, 1887.[3][7][8] Her first novel was Kate Wetherill: An Earth Comedy, published by The Century Company in 1900.[9] According to a review in the Chicago Tribune, Kate Wetherill is about "the evolution of a woman's soul".[9] It is divided into three parts: hell, purgatory, and heaven.[9] Another contemporary review regarded Kate as an example of "the New England type of woman" who was "becoming conspicuously prominent in the fiction of the day".[10]

Her novel A Pillar of Salt (1901) is about life in a Connecticut factory village.[3] Its main characters are a "thrifty, practical minded wife" and a "dreaming unpractical husband".[11] The husband tries to patent an invention which his employer tries to claim; the wife "has no faith in his invention" and tries to "discourage" him.[12]

The Son of a Fiddler (1902) describes Spencer Gordon (the "fiddler", a violinist) and his son Alec. Alec eventually finds his mother, an actor in Boston, and enters the "theatrical life".[13][14]

The Ibsen Secret: A Key to the Prose Dramas of Henrik Ibsen (1907), a work of criticism, compares the drama of Henrik Ibsen to the novels of Henry James and argues that Ibsen's symbolism can be decoded by a reference to a "central theme or motive" given by an "object or event".[15]

Mr. Achilles (1912) is set in Chicago, where Lee lived for three years. Lee got the idea for the novel's protagonist from a story she heard Jane Addams tell of a Greek person who came to Chicago, looking forward to telling Americans about Greek mythology and ruins. She did not start writing the novel until a year or two later. Its first part was published in Harper's Magazine; later chapters were serialized in The Outlook in 1911.[16] Mr. Achilles is the first American novel in which a Greek immigrant, fruit stand owner Achilles Alexandrakis, appears as a protagonist.[17] The novel, in which Achilles rescues a kidnapped daughter of an industrialist, attempts to tackle prejudice against immigrants and nouveaux riches.[18]

The Taste of Apples (1913) is about a shoemaker with his head in the clouds and his practical-minded wife who live in a New England town called Bolton (possibly Bolton, Massachusetts, or Bolton, Connecticut). They take a trip to London where they meet a "real live English lord".[19][20]

Unfinished Portraits (1916) is a set of fictionalized biographical sketches of historical artists and musicians, including Franz Schubert, Frédéric Chopin, Giorgione, and Albrecht Dürer. The section on Chopin reportedly "created a controversy in Europe" because some of its fictional statements were taken as factual.[21]

Her short story "The Cat and the King", published in the Ladies' Home Journal in 1919, describes love between two women college students. Lillian Faderman argues that "[t]he probable lack of sophistication of most Journal readers explains perhaps why love between women could be treated in such positive terms at so late a date".[22]

In 1896, Jennette married Gerald Stanley Lee.[5] As of 1901, she and Gerald lived in Northampton, Massachusetts.[3] From 1926 to 1933, they ran an institution called the "Training School for Balance and Coordination" in New York.[23] She died on October 10, 1951, in Northampton.[24][25]