Caltech Mourns the Passing of Jenijoy La Belle, 1943–2025

Jenijoy La Belle, Professor of English, Emeritus, passed away on January 28, 2025. She was 81 years old.

La Belle was a scholar of William Blake, William Shakespeare, and Theodore Roethke, and she wrote about issues of women's identity and physical appearance in 19th- and 20th-century literature.

Born November 5, 1943, and raised in Olympia, Washington, La Belle earned her BA from the University of Washington in 1965 and her PhD in English from UC San Diego in 1969. She began college with the hope of becoming a poet, but by her own account, in a 2008 oral history for the Caltech Archives, by the time she graduated college she had "known for quite a while that I wished to spend the rest of my days reading and analyzing and teaching literature."

La Belle wrote her dissertation on the work of Roethke, an American poet whom she had studied with at the University of Washington in the last class he taught before his untimely death in 1963 at the age of 55. Roethke, one of the most prominent American poets of the 20th century (he won many awards for his poetry, including the Pulitzer Prize), had previously been read as an isolated poet who wrote from his own experiences. La Belle recognized references to many earlier poets in Roethke's work—Dante, John Donne, Emily Dickinson, William Butler Yeats, T.S. Eliot, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge—and sought to put Roethke's poetry in conversation with these traditions.

In 1969, La Belle was the first woman hired into a tenure-track teaching position at Caltech. She did not know she was the first woman on the professorial faculty when she was hired, and in her first year at Caltech there were no female undergraduates on campus. Local media made much of her history-making hire, which La Belle later said she found overwhelming. As she recalled in her 2008 oral history interview, she "envied the male professors their pipes. A male student would ask a question, and the professor would tamp the tobacco down, relight the pipe, slowly draw his breath in, slowly let his breath out, and then answer the question. I felt I had no delaying tactic. I had the sense that I had to answer everything right away, and also that I had to do everything that I was asked to do." In 1977 La Belle became the first woman to be awarded tenure at Caltech, a hard-won recognition of her academic achievements.

Kevin Gilmartin, the William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of English, Allen V.C. Davis and Lenabelle Davis Leadership Chair of Student Affairs, and vice president for student affairs, remembers La Belle as "a welcoming and generous colleague" and "a gifted and committed teacher who encouraged me to appreciate the extraordinary qualities of our undergraduate students and helped me understand how to reach them."

La Belle's dissertation was later published as The Echoing Wood of Theodore Roethke (Princeton University Press, 1976). La Belle also worked with Robert Essick (who, like La Belle, had been a Woodrow Wilson scholar at UC San Diego) during the 1970s to provide introductions and commentary for reprints of two classic books blending literature and visual culture: Night Thoughts or the Complaint and the Consolation, illustrated by William Blake (Dover Press, 1975) and Flaxman's Illustrations to Homer (Dover Press, 1977). In the 1980s, La Belle began researching a theme she found over and over again in literature from Gustave Flaubert to Leo Tolstoy, that of women contemplating themselves in mirrors—an image rarely seen with male characters. As she concluded in her book Herself Beheld: The Literature of the Looking Glass (Cornell University Press, 1988), "All men have faces, but many women are their faces."

Even before joining Caltech, La Belle conducted research at The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, and she continued to visit its reading room throughout her tenure at Caltech. At The Huntington, La Belle stumbled across several intriguing literary mysteries, including a small leather-bound compilation of poetry that she eventually found to be written in the 17th century by a young English noblewoman, Constance Aston. Among its other verses, it included a handful of poems that La Belle determined to be the work of Aston's brother Herbert, whose poems were previously believed to have been lost.

On another occasion, La Belle was at The Huntington when a book conservator removed a drawing by William Blake from an acidic mat board, revealing a sketch of a standing woman on the verso. La Belle saw evidence that this drawing too was by Blake. She determined that the sketch was most likely an early version of part of a later watercolor featuring a scene from Dante's Divine Comedy.

In a 1994 article for the Los Angeles Times, La Belle wrote, "Some may settle for heaven when they die; I hope to go to the Huntington Library and Art Gallery in San Marino. It is a paradise of peace, refinement and scholarship."

La Belle is also remembered for a pioneering series of Shakespeare courses in which she collaborated with Shirley Marneus, Caltech's then theater arts director. Together, La Belle and Marneus would select a Shakespearean play for TACIT (Theater Arts at Caltech) students to perform. Then, La Belle's Shakespeare class would read that play (along with others), and have the opportunity to see how it was rehearsed, staged, and performed. La Belle said that the experience was "exhilarating," helping students "move from page to stage . . . from wordplay to swordplay." Her students, she said, were eager to explore Shakespeare's language: "The harder and knottier it is, the more [Caltech students] are willing to work on it. They approach it as a problem set. And I've been amazed by what they can get out of a given passage."

Cindy Weinstein, the Eli and Edythe Broad Professor of English remembers her colleague as "a friend and mentor; generous and supportive. Throughout our years together at Caltech, we bonded over our love of literature and shared commitment to our students. I remember how close she was to her parents (she went to visit them in Washington State as often as she could) from whom she drew so much personal strength. But what I will remember most of all is this: everything Jenijoy touched was beautiful, from her perfectly appointed office in Dabney to her handwriting, from the images that she chose for the covers of her books to the prose in them. She helped create the English department and brought joy to all of us in the process."

"To those of us who joined HSS [the Humanities and Social Sciences Division] after Jenijoy's retirement, she was a kind of legend—the first woman on the faculty, who fought to be recognized with tenure," says Tracy Dennison, the Edie and Lew Wasserman Professor of Social Science History and Ronald and Maxine Linde Leadership Chair of the Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences. "But this was true in her time as well. At a recent gathering of the first women undergraduates at Caltech, Jenijoy was remembered fondly as a source of support and inspiration on campus. She touched many lives during her long career at Caltech."

La Belle retired from Caltech in 2007. She is survived by her longtime partner, Robert Essick, emeritus professor of English at UC Riverside.