BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Helen Magill completed her Ph.D. in Greek in 1877 at Boston
University. She served as principal of the Howard Collegiate Institute, a
girls' school in West Bridgewater, Massachusetts; taught briefly at Evelyn
College, a short-lived women's annex to Princeton University; and taught
physical geography at Brooklyn High School. In September 1887, while presenting
a paper at the annual meeting of the American Social Science Association, she
met Andrew Dickson White, a friend of her father, Edward Hicks Magill, then
president of Swarthmore College. This meeting was the beginning of a friendship
which led to marriage in 1890. She administered their household and traveled
with White to Russia and Germany. After White's death in 1918, she lived abroad
and in Ithaca, New York, and then retired to Kittery Point, Maine, where she
died in 1944.
