Ellen F. Mason

Ellen Francis Mason was born in Brookline on June 24, 1846, daughter of wealthy Boston merchant Robert Means Mason and Sarah Ellen Francis. Robert Means Mason was the son of U.S. Senator Jeremiah Mason, and he had a successful career as a partner in several merchant firms of Boston, the final being Mason & Lawrence. Sarah Ellen Francis was the youngest daughter of another prominent Boston merchant, Ebenezer Francis. The couple married in 1843, and several years after that, Jeremiah Mason died, leaving his son a sizable inheritance. It was around the time of Sarah Orne Jewett’s early diary entries that Mason participated in the founding of an organization that would give many women educational opportunities previously unavailable to them. Mason and her peers could afford to hire tutors and had ample time to pursue higher education independently, but without those advantages it was extremely difficult, even impossible, for the average woman. With this in mind, Anna Eliot Ticknor founded the Society to Encourage Studies at Home in 1873. The Society, often called SH, was one of the first correspondence schools in the United States, run by women (on a volunteer basis) and open to all women who were committed to a course of independent study, for a yearly fee of $2.00. The founding committee included: Anna Eliot Ticknor (Secretary and Treasurer), Mrs. Louis Agassiz, Elizabeth C. Cleveland, Lucretia Crocker, Ellen W. Gurney, Katharine P. Loring, Ellen F. Mason, Elizabeth W. Perkins, Mrs. Ticknor, Anna’s mother, and Samuel Eliot, who served as chairman. In the first term, there were six volunteer correspondent teachers and 45 students in seven states; by the time of Anna Eliot Ticknor’s death in 1897, there were hundreds of teachers and thousands of students. Ticknor and the others envisioned a program that would be accessible to women of all backgrounds and economic circumstances. In the midst of this and her other pursuits, Mason evidently found time to devote to her own studies, especially Classics. In 1879, Charles Scribner’s Sons published a volume of her translation of some selections from Plato, Socrates: A Translation of the Apology, Crito, and Parts of the Phaedo of Plato. The translation was anonymous, though her identity was known by 1880, and her work carried the endorsement of a glowing introduction by Harvard Greek professor W.W. Goodwin. This was followed by three more volumes of Plato selections: A Day in Athens with Socrates (1883), Talks with Socrates About Life (1886), and Talks with Athenian Youths (1890). The Athenæum has copies of three of these books with publishers’ cloth bindings designed by Sarah Wyman Whitman.