I send you by the same mail with this a copy of "The Home, School and Nation"2 which contains a short article on your life and work.3 If the article is inaccurate in important particulars, will you kindly let me know, that I may correct the mistake.
I felt, when the editors asked me for an article
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on your life and work, that I had not the proper material
since I had never even seen you, and know nothing of your personal history. But my debt of gratitude to you, through
your writing, is so great that I could not refuse the opportunity of introducing new readers to you.
For you have been literally an inspiration
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in my life. I can not analyze the subtle something which comes to me through your poems; but it is
new life. It rouses many questions.
May there be before you long and peaceful years of happy life, and may you be to many other lives what you have been to mine
Sincerely Yours Jennette B. Perry Vassar College, Poughkeepsie September 16th, 1890Correspondent:
Jennette Barbour Perry Lee
(1861–1951) was an American author and educator, and a graduate of Smith
College. Lee taught at Vassar College between 1890 and 1893, Western Reserve
University in Cleveland from 1893 to 1896, and later returned to Smith College
as a faculty member in the English Department from 1901 to 1913, after her
marriage to Gerald Stanley Lee in 1896. She retired from education in 1913 to
focus on her writing career and is author of numerous titles, including A Pillar of Salt (New York: Houghton Mifflin and Company,
1901), The Woman in the Alcove (New York: Charles
Scribner's Sons, 1914), and The Other Susan (New York:
Charles Scribner's Sons, 1921). For more information, see Annie Russell Marble,
A Study of the Modern Novel: British and American Since
1900 (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1928), 352.