Helen Leah Reed | |
---|---|
Born | March 13, 1861/62 St. John, New Brunswick, Canada |
Died | July 21, 1926 Manchester, Massachusetts, U.S. |
Occupation | writer |
Alma mater | Radcliffe College |
Genre |
|
Notable works | Brenda series |
Notable awards | Sargent Prize, from Harvard University |
Helen Leah Reed (1861/62 - 1926) was a Canadian-born American author. [1] An essayist, a contributor to periodical literature, and the author of a volume of poems, a novel, and a series of historical stories for girls, [2] she was also interested in education and philanthropy. [2]
Helen Leah Reed was born in St. John, New Brunswick, Canada, [1] March 13, 1861 [2] /62. [3] Her parents were Dr. Guilford Shaw and Ella (Berryman) Reed. Her father was born at Wilmot, Nova Scotia, and died at Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1908. He was the son of Granville Bevil and Leah (Green) Reed of Nova Scotia. He was of New England ancestry, and his Reed forbears, who were Loyalists, had migrated to Nova Scotia in the epoch of the Revolution. Helen traced her ancestry also to Roger Williams and to the Greene family of Rhode Island and other Colonial families. Her mother was the daughter of John Berryman of St. John, granddaughter of John and Catharine (Edgar) Berryman of England, and the great-granddaughter of Peter and Elizabeth (Annesley) Wade of New York, who were Loyalists. [3] Helen's parents came to Boston in 1865. [2] Helen's siblings were: Ethel, Arthur, Edwin, Harry, John, and Catharine. [3]
Reed studied at Radcliffe College in its early days and was admitted there to the degree of Bachelor of Arts in 1890, from which she graduated. [3] She was a student of Latin and Greek, and in 1890, was the first woman to win the Sargent Prize, offered by Harvard University for a metrical translation from Horace, [2] which version was published in Scribner's Magazine . [3]
Reed was the author of the "Brenda books", which she was induced to undertake because of her close acquaintance with young girls and their needs. [3] Her works included:Miss Theodora, Badger, 1898; Brenda, Her School and Her Club, Little Brown, 1900; Brenda's Summer Rockley, 1901; Brenda's Cousin Radcliffe, 1902; Brenda's Ward, 1903; Irma and Nap, 1904; Amy in Acadia, 1905; Irma in Italy, 1908; Napoleon's Young Neighbor, 1907; Serbia-a Sketch, Serbian Distress Fund, 1916; Memorial Day and Other Verse, DeWolfe & Fisk Co., 1917; [1] [2]
A keen student of Latin and Greek and a lover of poetry, [4] Reed's interest in Horace continued after graduation, working on translations with an intention to publish a volume. Her published translations were selected as representative translations for the edition de luxe of Horace, prepared by the Bibliophile Society. [3]
She was a contributor to The Springfield Republican . [1]
Reed was a member and officer of The Folklore Society for a number of years, and belonged also to the Boston Authors Club, the Circolo Italiano, Authors' League of America, and various other organizations in the U.S. and abroad. [2] [1]
With the exception of ten years in Cambridge (beginning 1918), [2] she lived almost all her life in Boston, where her parents went at the end of the Civil War. [3]
Reed traveled widely in the U.S. and in Europe. [3]
Helen Leah Reed died at Manchester, Massachusetts, at the summer home of her sister, Mrs. Everett Morss, on July 21, 1926. [2] [4]
In 1927, a bequest of US$1,000 was received under the will of Helen Leah Reed as a memorial to Guilford S. Reed, and was funded as the "Guilford Reed Fund", the income to be applied to the purchase of books of non-fiction. [5]
Elizabeth Cabot Agassiz was an American educator, naturalist, writer, and the co-founder and first president of Radcliffe College. A researcher of natural history, she was an author and illustrator of natural history texts as well as a co-author of natural history texts with her husband, Louis Agassiz, and her stepson Alexander Agassiz.
Helen Stuart Campbell was an American author, economist, and editor, as well as a social and industrial reformer. She was a pioneer in the field of home economics. Her Household Economics (1897) was an early textbook in the field of domestic science.
Jeannette Leonard Gilder was an American author, journalist, critic, and editor. She served as the regular correspondent and literary critic for Chicago Tribune, and was also a correspondent for the Boston Saturday Evening Gazette, Boston Transcript, Philadelphia Record and Press, and various other papers. She was the author of Taken by Siege; Autobiography of a Tomboy; and The Tomboy at Work. Gilder was the editor of Representative Poems of Living Poets ; Essays from the Critic ; Pen Portraits of Literary Women; and The Heart of Youth, an anthology; as well as the owner and editor of The Reader: An Illustrated Monthly Magazine.
Sarah Knowles Bolton was an American writer. She was born in Farmington, Connecticut. In 1866, she married Charles E. Bolton, a merchant and philanthropist. She wrote extensively for the press, was one of the first corresponding secretaries of the National Woman's Christian Temperance Union (N.W.C.T.U.), and was associate editor of the Boston Congregationalist (1878–81). Bolton traveled for two years in Europe, studying profit-sharing, female higher education, and other social questions. Her writings encouraged readers to improve the world about them through faith and hard work.
Anna Bowman Dodd was an American author from New York. Her first book was Cathedral Days, and her second The Republic of the Future, was also successful. She published novels, such as Glorinda, as well as a book on Normandy, In and Out of Three Normandy Inns. She wrote short stories, essays and a series of articles on church music. After Dodd wrote a paper on the Concord School of Philosophy for Appleton's Magazine, English journals copied it, a French translation was reprinted in Émile Littré's Revue Philosophique, and the author found her services in growing demand. She was engaged by Harper's Magazine in 1881 to furnish an exhaustive article on the political leaders of France, which she prepared for by going to France, in order to study the subject more closely. The paper's editor, Henry Mills Alden, pronounced it as 'the most brilliant article of the kind we have had in ten years'. Before returning to the U.S., she visited Rome and prepared a description of the carnival for Harper's. Dodd died in 1929.
Aubertine Woodward Moore was an American musician, writer, musical critic, translator, and lecturer. She resided in Madison, Wisconsin, since 1877, and lectured extensively, especially on Norwegian literature and music. She gave piano recitals and concerts in Boston, Philadelphia, and New York City. Moore was a founder of the Wisconsin Conservatory of Music.
Mary F. Eastman was an American educator, lecturer, writer, and suffragist of the long nineteenth century. A native of Lowell, Massachusetts, she resided in Tewksbury for many years. She taught in the high and normal school for girls in Boston, and was among the first to be thought competent to teach and control the students of a winter school in Lowell. Her later teaching was in Boston's Charlestown and also Somerville, Massachusetts. At the request of Horace Mann, she went to Ohio to aid in the work of education which he had undertaken at Antioch College. Eastman thought that suffrage was the highway to all other reforms. She is remembered for her expertise in the lecture-field of women's rights.
Mary Elizabeth Sherwood was an American author and socialite. She wrote short stories, poetry, several books, and etiquette manuals, in addition to contributing to many magazines and translating poems from European languages. Among her writings are The Sarcasm of Destiny, A Transplanted Rose, Manners and Social Usages, Sweet Briar, and Roxobel. Better known as Mrs. John Sherwood, some of her literary works were published as "M.E.W.S." or "M.E.W. Sherwood".
Helen M. Winslow was an American editor, author, publisher, and journalist. She began her work on Boston papers. Winslow served as dramatic editor on The Beacon, 1891–97; editor, Woman's Club Department, Boston Transcript, 1893–98; editor, Woman's Club Department of the Delineator, 1897, and again 1912; editor and publisher, The Club Woman, 1897-1904; and she was the publisher of the Official Register of Women's Clubs in America from 1897. She was the author of Salome Sheppard, Reformer. 1893; Concerning Cats, 1900; Concerning Polly, 1902; Literary Boston or To-day, 1902; The Woman of To-morrow, 1905; The President of Quex, 1906; Peggy at Spinster Farm, 1908; A Woman for Mayor, 1910; The Pleasuring of Susan Smith, 1912; and At the Sign of the Town Pump, 1913. She collaborated with Frances Willard in Occupations for Women, and with Marie Wright in Picturesque Mexico.
Caroline M. Sawyer was a 19th-century American poet, writer, and editor. Her writings ranged through a wide variety of themes. Born in 1812, in Massachusetts, she began composing verse at an early age, but published little till after her marriage. Thereafter, she wrote much for various reviews and other miscellanies, besides several volumes of tales, sketches, and essays. She also made numerous translations from German literature, in prose and verse, in which she evinced an appreciation of the original. Sawyer's poems were numerous, sufficient for several volumes, though they were not published as a collection.
Dorothea Rhodes Lummis Moore was an American physician, writer, newspaper editor, and activist. Although a successful student of music in the New England Conservatory of Music, in Boston, she entered the medical school of Boston University in 1881, and graduated with honors in 1884. In 1880, she married Charles Fletcher Lummis, and in 1885, moved to Los Angeles, California, where she began practicing medicine. She worked as dramatic editor, musical editor, and critic at the Los Angeles Times. She was instrumental in the formation of a humane society which was brought about through her observations of the neglect and cruelty to the children of the poor, and Mexican families, visited in her practice; and the establishment of the California system of juvenile courts.
Alice Ames Winter was an American litterateur, author and clubwoman. She served as president of the General Federation of Women's Clubs (GFWC).
Evelyn Campbell was a British-born American actress.
Delia Lyman Porter was an American author, social reformer, and clubwoman. She was a prominent civic worker, associated with the prohibition and the parent–teacher association movements. Porter published books, calendars, short stories, compilations, articles, and religious outlines.
Ada Josephine Todd was an American author and educator.
Alice Blanchard Coleman was an American missionary society leader. She served as president of the Woman's American Baptist Home Mission Society and of the Council of Women for Home Missions (1908-16). Coleman was a trustee of Hartshorn Memorial College, Richmond, Virginia; Spelman Seminary, Atlanta, Georgia; and the New England Baptist Hospital, Boston. Writing as "Mrs. George W. Coleman", she made at least two contributions to periodical literature, "The Women's Congress of Missions", 1915, and "Recent developments in Mormonism", 1918. All of Coleman's life was spent in the old South End of Boston.
Rebecca Richardson Joslin was an American writer, lecturer, benefactor, and clubwoman. Joslin's education and affiliations were centered in Boston, Massachusetts. She published one book and many essays, lectured on a wide range of topics, and traveled in the U.S. and abroad. Her will provided for several charitable bequests.
Charlotte E. Gray (1873–1926) was an American novelist and religious writer whose books were published between 1911 and 1923.
Emma Dunning Banks was an American actress, dramatic reader, teacher, and writer.
Helen Augusta Whittier (1846–1925) was an American editor, lecturer, and clubwoman. She was a lecturer and teacher of art history, as well as business woman in the textile industry, being the first woman in Lowell, Massachusetts to run a mill.