author
Mary H. (Mary Helen) Fee
An American teacher and travel writer, she turned her years in the Philippines into vivid, first-hand books that capture the ambitions and contradictions of the U.S. colonial era. Her life later stretched from classrooms to wartime relief work, giving her writing an unusually wide view of the world.
2 Audiobooks
The Locusts' Years
by Mary H. (Mary Helen) Fee
A Woman's Impression of the Philippines
by Mary H. (Mary Helen) Fee
About the author
Born in 1864, Mary Helen Fee was an American educator and author whose work grew out of a life spent teaching, traveling, and observing people closely. She taught English and history before going to the Philippines in the early 1900s as part of the American education effort there.
Her best-known book, A Woman's Impression of the Philippines (1910), draws on those experiences and offers a personal account of life in the islands during a period of major political change. She also wrote The Locusts' Years, showing that her interests extended beyond travel writing into fiction as well.
Fee's life did not stay confined to the classroom or the page. During World War I, she served in canteen work in France, adding another chapter to a career shaped by public service and movement across continents. Today, she is remembered as a writer whose books preserve a distinctly American view of empire, education, and travel in the early twentieth century.