Jenijoy La Belle, Emeritus Professor of English, succumbed on January 28, 2025, at the age of 81.
La Belle was an academic authority on William Blake, William Shakespeare, and Theodore Roethke, and she penned works addressing concerns regarding women’s identities and physical representations in 19th- and 20th-century literature.
Born on November 5, 1943, and brought up in Olympia, Washington, La Belle obtained her BA from the University of Washington in 1965, followed by a PhD in English from UC San Diego in 1969. She embarked on her college journey aspiring to become a poet, however, according to her personal narrative, in a 2008 oral history conducted for the Caltech Archives, she recognized by the conclusion of her studies that she desired to dedicate her life to reading, interpreting, and teaching literature.
La Belle centered her dissertation around the works of Roethke, an American poet with whom she had trained at the University of Washington during his last class before his premature passing in 1963 at just 55 years old. Roethke, acclaimed as one of the foremost American poets of the 20th century (having earned numerous honors, including the Pulitzer Prize), had traditionally been perceived as an introspective poet drawing solely from his personal experiences. La Belle identified many earlier poets throughout Roethke’s poetry—Dante, John Donne, Emily Dickinson, William Butler Yeats, T.S. Eliot, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge—and endeavored to situate Roethke’s verses within this literary tradition.
In 1969, La Belle became the inaugural female hire for a tenure-track teaching role at Caltech. She was unaware of her groundbreaking status during her hiring process, and during her initial year there, the campus had no female undergraduates. Local media extensively covered her historic appointment, which La Belle later described as overwhelming. Reflecting on her experience in her 2008 oral history interview, she remarked how she “envied the male professors with their pipes. A male student would pose a question, and the professor would pack the tobacco, relight it, inhale slowly, exhale, and then respond. I felt as though I had no means of delay. I sensed I needed to reply immediately and also fulfill every request made of me.” In 1977, La Belle achieved the distinction of being the first woman to attain tenure at Caltech, a hard-earned acknowledgment of her scholarly contributions.
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, recalls La Belle as “a gracious and generous colleague” and “a talented and dedicated educator who inspired me to value the remarkable characteristics of our undergraduate students and aided me in understanding how to connect with them.”
La Belle’s dissertation eventually evolved into the publication The Echoing Wood of Theodore Roethke (Princeton University Press, 1976). During the 1970s, she collaborated with Robert Essick (who, similar to La Belle, was a Woodrow Wilson scholar at UC San Diego) to compose introductions and commentaries for reprints of two notable works uniting literature and visual art: 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 initiated research on a recurring theme she discovered in literature from Gustave Flaubert to Leo Tolstoy—namely, women reflecting upon themselves in mirrors, a motif seldom represented in male characters. As she stated in her work Herself Beheld: The Literature of the Looking Glass (Cornell University Press, 1988), “All men possess faces, yet many women are their faces.”
Before her tenure at Caltech, La Belle conducted research at The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, frequently visiting its reading room throughout her time at Caltech. During her visits to The Huntington, La Belle encountered several captivating literary enigmas, including a small leather-bound collection of poetry that she ultimately discovered to have been penned in the 17th century by a young English noblewoman, Constance Aston. Among its various verses, it contained a few poems that La Belle identified as the creations of Aston’s brother Herbert, whose literary works were previously thought to have been lost.
On another occasion at The Huntington, La Belle observed when a book conservator extracted a William Blake drawing from an acidic mat board, unveiling a sketch of a standing woman on the reverse side. La Belle identified hints that this drawing was also by Blake, concluding that the sketch represented an earlier form of a later watercolor depicting a scene from Dante’s Divine Comedy.
In a 1994 article published in the Los Angeles Times, La Belle expressed, “Some may settle for paradise after death; I aspire to visit the Huntington Library and Art Gallery in San Marino. It is a sanctuary of tranquility, sophistication, and scholarship.”
La Belle is also remembered for her groundbreaking series of Shakespeare courses, developed in partnership with Shirley Marneus, the then theater arts director at Caltech. Together, they selected a Shakespearean play for TACIT (Theater Arts at Caltech) students to perform. Subsequently, La Belle’s class would read that specific play (along with others), experiencing its rehearsal, staging, and performance. La Belle commented that the experience was “invigorating,” enabling students to “transition from page to stage . . . from wordplay to swordplay.” Her students exhibited eagerness to delve into Shakespeare’s language: “The more complex and challenging it is, the more [Caltech students] are inclined to engage with it. They tackle it like a problem set. I have been astonished by what they can extract from a specific passage.”
Cindy Weinstein, the Eli and Edythe Broad Professor of English, fondly recalls her peer as “a friend and mentor; generous and encouraging. Throughout our years at Caltech, we forged a connection over our shared passion for literature and mutual dedication to our students. I remember how close she remained with her parents (she visited them in Washington State whenever possible), drawing significant personal strength from them. Nonetheless, what I will cherish the most is this: everything Jenijoy touched radiated beauty, from her impeccably arranged office in Dabney to her handwriting, from the illustrations she selected for her book covers to the prose within them. She was instrumental in developing the English department, and she brought joy to all of us in the process.”
“For those of us who entered HSS [the Humanities and Social Sciences Division] following Jenijoy’s retirement, she became somewhat of a legend—the first woman faculty member who championed recognition with tenure,” remarks 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. “This reputation was also true during her time. At a recent gathering of the first women undergraduates at Caltech, Jenijoy was fondly recalled as a source of encouragement and inspiration on campus. Her influence touched many lives throughout her extensive career at Caltech.”
La Belle stepped down from her position at Caltech in 2007. She is survived by her long-term partner, Robert Essick, emeritus professor of English at UC Riverside.