Zoe Kincaid Penlington

Zoë Rowena Kincaid Penlington (March 2, 1878 – March 28, 1944) was a Canadian-born American journalist, critic, and editor. She wrote ''Kabuki: The Popular Stage in Japan'' (1925), considered "the first extensive study of ''kabuki'' in English". (Her first name is written both with and without the umlaut in sources.)

Early life and education

Zoe Kincaid was born in Peterborough, Ontario and raised in Olympia, Washington, the daughter of Robert Kincaid and Mary Margaret Bell Kincaid. Her father was an Irish-born Canadian surgeon and a veteran of the Union Army in the American Civil War. Her older brother Trevor Kincaid became a noted biologist. She graduated from Olympia High School, and from the University of Washington in 1902. In college she was the founding editor of the yearbook and the literary editor of the school newspaper. In 1908, she was elected president of the University of Washington Alumnae Association.

Career

Kincaid worked as a journalist in Washington state as a young woman, especially at ''The Westerner'', a regional literary magazine. She moved to Tokyo in 1908, to write and teach English. She was founding co-editor ''Japan Magazine'', an English-language monthly launched in 1910 as the official publication of the Tokyo Industrial Association. Her first article for ''Japan Magazine'' was a profile of meteorologist and his wife Chiyoko, who maintained a weather station on Mount Fuji.

With her husband Penlington she also helped produce ''The Far East,'' a weekly English magazine. The magazine's offices were destroyed in the 1923 Great Kantō earthquake. She was a theatre critic, and a member of the International Press Association of Japan. She wrote ''Kabuki: The Popular Stage in Japan'' (1925), the first English-language book about the ''kabuki'' tradition, and "a much needed and very important history of the popular Japanese stage," according to ''The New York Times'' reviewer Charles DeKay. She also wrote about ''noh'' dance-dramas and ''bunraku'' puppetry. She worked with a translator to adapt two kabuki plays by Kido Okamoto, published as ''The Human Pillar'' and ''The Mask-Maker.''

Publications

* "Nonaka the Mountaineer" (1910)
* "The Hidden Genius of the East" (1921)
* ''Kabuki: The Popular Stage of Japan'' (1925)
* "Playgoing in Present-Day Japan" (1926)
* "The Stage of Today in Japan" (1927)
* "The Virile Drama of Japan" (1927)
* " Hina Matsuri: The Girls' Festival" (1927)
* "An International Theater" (1927)
* ''The Mask-maker: A Drama in Three Acts'' (1928)
* ''Tokyo Vignettes'' (1933)

Personal life

Kincaid married British journalist John Newton Penlington in 1910. Her husband died in 1933, and she returned to the United States permanently in 1941. She died from a ruptured appendix in 1944, at the age of 66, while visiting her sister in Ventura, California.

References

External links

"Baseball team visiting Japan, University of Washington, 1908"
University of Washington Libraries; Penlington is one of the two women in this photograph

{{DEFAULTSORT:Penlington, Zoe Kincaid
1878 births
1944 deaths
American theater critics
Canadian women non-fiction writers
American expatriates in Japan
University of Washington alumni
Writers from Ontario
Writers from Olympia, Washington
20th-century American non-fiction writers
20th-century American journalists
20th-century American women writers
20th-century Canadian non-fiction writers
20th-century Canadian journalists
20th-century Canadian women writers
American women journalists
Canadian women journalists
Canadian theatre critics
Canadian emigrants to the United States