Elizabeth Lee

Born in London in 1857, Elizabeth Lee was educated at Queen’s College, London, and spent her career teaching English in girls’ secondary schools. Alongside her classroom work, she built a reputation as a literary critic, biographer, and translator with a strong interest in French literature and education.

From 1907 to 1912 she served as secretary of the English Association, studying teaching methods in France and Germany and writing about how literature was taught there. In 1909, the French government recognized her educational work by naming her an Officier d’Académie.

Lee also wrote widely beyond education. She contributed many pieces on French literature to The Library, published books including Ouida: a Memoir and Lives of the Wives of Queen Victoria’s Prime Ministers, and wrote more than eighty biographies of women for the Dictionary of National Biography under the editorship of her brother, Sir Sidney Lee. She died in Kensington on July 10, 1920.