Josephine Preston Peabody

Josephine Preston Peabody

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"The Journey": illustration by Elizabeth Shippen Green for a series of poems by Josephine Preston Peabody, entitled "The Little Past", which relate experiences of childhood from a child's perspective. Poems and illustration were published in Harper's Magazine, December 1903.

Josephine Preston Peabody (May 30, 1874 – December 4, 1922) was an American poet and dramatist.

Biography

Peabody was born in New York and educated at the Girls' Latin School, Boston, and at Radcliffe College. She also participated in George Pierce Baker's Harvard Workshop 47.^[1][2]

In 1898, she was introduced to fifteen-year-old Khalil Gibran by Fred Holland Day, the American photographer and co-founder of the Copeland-Day publishing house, at an art exhibition. Shortly thereafter Gibran returned to Lebanon but the pair continued to correspond.^[3]

From 1901 to 1903, she was instructor in English at Wellesley. The Stratford-on-Avon prize went to her in 1909 for her drama The Piper, which was produced in England in 1910; and in America at the New Theatre, New York City, in 1911. Composer Grace Chadbourne used Peabody's text for her songs "Green Singing Book" and "Window Pane Songs".^[4][5]

On June 21, 1906 she married Lionel Simeon Marks, a British engineer and professor at Harvard University. They had a daughter, Alison Peabody Marks (July 30, 1908 – April 7, 2008), and a son, Lionel Peabody Marks (February 10, 1910 - January 25, 1984).^[6][7][8]

Selected works

• Old Greek Folk Stories Told Anew (1897)
• The Wayfarers: A Book of Verse (1898)
• Fortune and Men's Eyes: New Poems, with a Play (1900)
• In the Silence (1900)
• Marlowe (her first play),^[9]
• The Singing Leaves; a book of songs and spells (1903)
• The Wings (1905), a drama
• The Book of the Little Past (1908)
• The Piper: A Play in Four Acts (1909)
• The Singing Man (1911), poems
• The Wolf of Gubbio (1913)
• New Poems (1915)

References

1. "Peabody, Josephine Preston, 1874-1922. Letters to George Pierce Baker, 1901-1909., 1901-1909". Harvard University: Hollis for Archival Discovery.
2. "Josephine P. Peabody, Noted Author, Dies at 45". New York Tribune. 5 December 1922.
3. Gibran, Jean (1998). Kahlil Gibran: His Life and World. Interlink Books. ISBN 156656249X.
4. The Delineator. Butterick Publishing Company. 1913.
5. Office, Library of Congress Copyright (1914). Catalog of Copyright Entries. U.S. Government Printing Office.
6. Woman's who's who of America, 1914–15. p. 540. wikisource.org
7. Lionel Simon Marks. findagrave.com
8. Lionel P. Marks Obituary. https://www.nytimes.com/1984/01/27/obituaries/lionel-p-marks.html. nytimes.com
9. "Modern Miracle Play Verse". The Independent. Jul 6, 1914. Retrieved July 28, 2012.

•  This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Gilman, D. C.; Peck, H. T.; Colby, F. M., eds. (1905). "Josephine Preston Peabody". New International Encyclopedia (1st ed.). New York: Dodd, Mead.

External links

• Works by Josephine Preston Peabody at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about Josephine Preston Peabody at the Internet Archive
• Works by Josephine Preston Peabody at Hathi Trust
• Works by Josephine Preston Peabody at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
• January 23, 1916, New York Times: Free Verse Hampers Poets and Is Undemocratic; Josephine Preston Peabody Says That, Nevertheless, the War Is Making Poetry Less Exclusive and the Imagiste Cult Will Be Swept Away
• Poems by Josephine Preston Peabody at English Poetry