Zoë Rowena Kincaid Penlington (March 2, 1878 – March 28, 1944) was a Canadian-born American journalist, critic, and editor. She wrote Kabuki: The Popular Stage in Japan (1925), considered "the first extensive study of kabuki in English".[1] (Her first name is written both with and without the diaeresis in sources.)
Early life and education
Zoe Kincaid was born in Peterborough, Ontario[2] and raised in Olympia, Washington,[3][4] the daughter of Robert Kincaid and Mary Margaret Bell Kincaid. Her father was an Irish-born Canadian surgeon and a veteran of the Union Army in the American Civil War. Her older brother Trevor Kincaid became a noted biologist.[5] She graduated from Olympia High School, and from the University of Washington in 1902.[6][7] In college she was the founding editor of the yearbook and the literary editor of the school newspaper. In 1908, she was elected president of the University of Washington Alumnae Association.[8]
Career
Kincaid worked as a journalist in Washington state as a young woman,[9] especially at The Westerner, a regional literary magazine.[8] She moved to Tokyo in 1908, to write and teach English.[10] She was founding co-editor Japan Magazine, an English-language monthly launched in 1910[11] as the official publication of the Tokyo Industrial Association.[12] Her first article for Japan Magazine was a profile of meteorologist Itaru Nonaka [ja] and his wife Chiyoko, who maintained a weather station on Mount Fuji.[13]
With her husband Penlington she also helped produce The Far East, a weekly English magazine.[14][15] The magazine's offices were destroyed in the 1923 Great Kantō earthquake. She was a theatre critic,[16][17] and a member of the International Press Association of Japan.[8] She wrote Kabuki: The Popular Stage in Japan (1925), the first English-language book about the kabuki tradition,[18] and "a much needed and very important history of the popular Japanese stage," according to The New York Times reviewer Charles DeKay.[19] She also wrote about noh dance-dramas[20] and bunraku puppetry.[17][21] She worked with a translator to adapt two kabuki plays by Kido Okamoto, published as The Human Pillar and The Mask-Maker.[8]
Kincaid married British journalist John Newton Penlington in 1910.[10] Her husband died in 1933,[30][31] and she returned to the United States permanently in 1941. She died from a ruptured appendix in 1944, at the age of 66, while visiting her sister in Ventura, California.[18]