Jenijoy La Belle, professor emeritus of English at the California Institute of Technology, passed away on January 28. She was 81 years old.
Dr. La Belle joined the Caltech faculty in 1969, making her the institution’s first woman to be hired into a tenure-track teaching position. At the time, the university did not enroll women undergradaute students. Eight years later, Dr. La Belle became the first woman to be awarded tenure at Caltech. She retired in 2007 after nearly four decades of service.
Throughout her long career, Dr. La Belle’s scholarship focused on the works of William Blake, William Shakespeare, and Theodore Roethke. She also wrote extensively on the imagery of women contemplating themselves in mirrors, a frequent theme she discovered in various works of nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature that was not commonly used for male characters. Her research on this subject led to her book, Herself Beheld: The Literature of the Looking Glass (Cornell University Press, 1988).
Dr. La Belle received her bachelor’s degree from the University of Washington and her Ph.D. in English from the University of California, San Diego, where she was a Woodrow Wilson Scholar.
Jenijoy was my very oldest friend…just down the road a ways outside Olympia, Washington. There are those, if we are very lucky, who make us better than we ever supposed ourselves could be. She was such a one. I miss my friend.
She stood out as a great scholar and a dedicated teacher on campus at Caltech. Her fight for her right to gain tenure was a landmark case that paved the way for future female faculty members at the institute and on campuses everywhere. She now resides with the great poets she so admired: Shakespeare, Blake, and Roethke.