Edith J. (Edith Jane) Broomhall

Edith J. Broomhall, sometimes listed as Edith Jane Broomhall, was an educator and textbook author active in the United States in the early 1900s. She is best remembered for Spoken Spanish (1918) and Spanish Composition (1921), books that were designed to help English-speaking students use Spanish more naturally and accurately.

The prefatory material preserved with Spoken Spanish shows that the work grew out of programs for La Tertulia, the Spanish club at North Central High School in Spokane, Washington. That detail gives a helpful glimpse of her work: she seems to have been closely involved in school-based language teaching and interested in giving students examples of everyday, colloquial Spanish that ordinary textbooks often missed.

Not much firmly confirmed biographical information appears to survive online beyond her publications and name records, so her books do most of the talking. They present her as a practical teacher who cared about clarity, idiom, and real usage—qualities that still make her work an interesting window into how modern-language teaching was approached a century ago.