Alice Ilgenfritz Jones

Alice Ilgenfritz Jones (January 9, 1846 – March 5, 1906) was an American author. Born in Ohio, she spent most of her life in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. She wrote travel essays for Lippincott's Monthly Magazine and several novels. The first novel, High-Water Mark, appeared under the pen name "Ferris Jerome" and was a Gothic romance set in a prairie town. Her most notable work is the 1893 feminist utopia Unveiling a Parallel. She wrote it with Ella Robinson Merchant, and they called themselves the "Two Women of the West". Jones also wrote a novel about an enslaved woman who becomes an artist, Beatrice of Bayou Têche, and a historical novel set in the 18th century called The Chevalier de St. Denis. She died during a vacation in Cuba.

Biography
Alice Ilgenfritz was born on January 9, 1846, in Shanesville, Ohio. Her parents were Henry and Anna Ilgenfritz (Murray). They moved to Clarksville, Iowa, in 1863; her father traded furniture and at some point became mayor. Alice, who lived in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, for most of her life, went to school at the Evansville Seminary in Evansville, Wisconsin.

Under the pen name Ferris Jerome, she wrote the 1879 novel High-Water Mark published by J. B. Lippincott & Co.. The title refers to a fictional prairie town where the action takes place, but the book is more like a Gothic romance than a pioneer story. In the following years, she wrote further fiction and also travelogues that were published in Lippincott's Monthly Magazine. She described travels to the lakes of Minnesota and to the Red River of the North. In 1884, she married Hiram Edward Jones, a furniture merchant in Cedar Rapids. Her husband was a widower who had a small daughter. Alice Jones's next published work was the 1893 utopian science fiction Unveiling a Parallel, written together with Ella Robinson Merchant under the joint pseudonym "Two Women of the West". The book, set on Mars, shows two societies where men and women are equal. Jones's and Merchant's motivation as well as their respective contributions to the book are not known. In 1895, Jones published Beatrice of Bayou Têche, a story about a light-skinned mixed-race enslaved woman who embarks on an artistic career after being freed. Jones knew the New Orleans area and the bayous from personal experience, since she regularly visited her sister in Jennings, Louisiana. Her final novel was The Chevalier de St. Denis, a historical novel set in the 18th century. On March 5, 1906, during a six-week vacation in Cuba with her husband, Jones died from a cerebral hemorrhage. She was buried in Oak Hill Cemetery in Cedar Rapids.

Reception
Jones's 1879 novel High-Water Mark has been described as "the first Iowa novel" by the literary historian Clarence Andrews. In 1890, the librarian Theodore S. Parvin included Jones in his list of Iowa authors. The 1893 Unveiling a Parallel was not widely reviewed and was out of print and difficult to obtain for nearly a century. Duangrudi Suksang, a reviewer of the 1991 re-edition described it as a "pioneering feminist work". Another reviewer, Veronica Hollinger, while listing the book as one of a "trilogy of significant works", found that "Jones and Merchant are not particularly sophisticated writers, and it is unlikely that Unveiling a Parallel will displace Herland from its position as the classic early feminist utopia." According to the 2001 re-edition of Beatrice of Bayou Têche, described by reviewer Joan Hall as "long out of print and rarely discussed by literary critics", Jones was "the first white woman to take the intersection of race, gender, and creativity as her primary subject". At the time of publication, both Beatrice and The Chevalier de St. Denis were positively reviewed. One 1895 reviewer stated that the topic of slavery had "seldom been handled more forcefully" than in Beatrice, excepting only Uncle Tom's Cabin. In 1901, Bethel Coopwood, reviewing The Chevalier, found it a "well written historical novel" and "above the average of its kind in the market".