Alice Ilgenfritz Jones

Born in Shanesville, Ohio, on January 9, 1846, she spent most of her life in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and wrote both fiction and travel pieces, including essays for Lippincott's Monthly Magazine. Her first novel, High-Water Mark (1879), appeared under the pen name "Ferris Jerome".

She is most often remembered for Unveiling a Parallel (1893), a speculative novel written with Ella Merchant and originally published under the joint name "Two Women of the West." The book imagines life on Mars to explore gender roles and social expectations, and it has since become an important early work of feminist science fiction.

She also wrote Beatrice of Bayou Têche (1895) and The Chevalier de St. Denis (1900), showing her interest in very different settings and historical periods. Sources found during this search agree on her birth year, but some give her death as March 5, 1906, while library catalogs sometimes list 1905; because of that conflict, it is safest to say she died in the early twentieth century while traveling in Cuba.