Society of the Painted Window: Marjorie Hope Nicolson

Form the Smith College Archives

Two further members of the Society of the Painted Window were Clyde W[allace] Nicolson (1892-1977) and his sister Marjorie Hope Nicolson (1894-1981).  Clyde was one year ahead of his sister, in the Class of 1913, while she was in Cline's Class of 1914.  Clyde also studied at the Michigan College of Mines (B.S. 1916), and served in W.W.I, before going to work in industry at the Cleveland Cliffs Iron Company in Ishpeming, Michigan.

Marjorie Hope Nicolson, on the other hand, had a long and highly distinguished career in academia, getting her Ph.D. at Yale (1920), and teaching at a number of colleges.  She served as Dean of Smith College from 1929-1941, declining in 1939 to become its President. In 1941 she became a full Professor at Columbia University, gaining in 1954 a Chair which  she held until her retirement in 1962.  She authored and edited over a dozen books, of which I will here call attention to only one, her study of the development of the imaginary voyage in literature from Lucien through the modern era of Verne, H.G. Wells, and C.S. Lewis, Voyages to the Moon (1948).

A more detailed account of Nicolson's career can be found here.