Letters of Josephine Preston Peabody, 1917-1921

Poet and playwright Josephine Preston Peabody was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1874, the daughter of Charles Kilham Peabody and Susan Josephine Morell Peabody. She had two sisters, Marion and Florence. (Her parents had another daughter, Maud, who died before Peabody was born.) After the death of her father in 1882, the family moved to Dorchester, Massachusetts. She attended Girls' Latin School in Boston, Massachusetts, and was a special student at Radcliffe College from 1894 to 1896. From 1901 to 1903 she was an instructor in English at Wellesley College. In 1906, she married Lionel Simeon Marks, a British engineer and professor at Harvard University; they had two children, Alison and Lionel. In 1909 she won the Stratford Prize Competition for her verse play The Piper: A Play in Four Acts, based on the pied piper legend. The play was performed at Stratford-upon-Avon's Memorial Theatre in 1910 as part of its Shakespeare Summer Season and was also produced in London in 1910 and at the New Theatre in New York City, in 1911. Her other works include The Wayfarers: A Book of Verse (1898); Fortune and Men's Eyes: New Poems, with a Play (1900); In the Silence (1900); Marlowe: A Drama in Five Acts (1901); The Singing Leaves; a Book of Songs and Spells (1903); The Wings (1905); The Book of the Little Past (1908); The Singing Man (1911); The Wolf of Gubbio (1913); New Poems (1915); and Portrait of Mrs. W.: A Play in Three Acts (1922), a play about Mary Wollstonecraft. Peabody was a pacifist and feminist and much of her work addressed issues affecting women, children, and working people. Peabody joined the British socialist organization the Fabian Society in 1909. She died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1922.