Alice Ilgenfritz Jones was a late nineteenth-century American novelist and essayist whose work spanned gothic romance, historical fiction, and early feminist science fiction. Born in Ohio in 1846, she spent the majority of her life in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. She began her literary career contributing travel essays to Lippincott's Monthly Magazine before transitioning to book-length fiction. Her debut novel, High-Water Mark, was published under the pseudonym "Ferris Jerome" and presented a gothic romance set against the backdrop of a Midwestern prairie town.\n\nJones is most widely remembered for her 1893 collaborative novel, Unveiling a Parallel. Co-written with Ella Robinson Merchant and published under the joint pseudonym "Two Women of the West," the book is a landmark work of early feminist utopian literature. The novel depicts a male traveler's journey to Mars, where he encounters egalitarian societies that challenge the gender norms and social inequalities of late Victorian America.\n\nBeyond her utopian writing, Jones explored diverse themes in her later novels. Her book Beatrice of Bayou Têche focuses on the life of an enslaved woman who achieves agency and expression as an artist, while The Chevalier de St. Denis is a historical novel set during the eighteenth century. Jones continued writing until her death in 1906, which occurred while she was vacationing in Cuba.
