Amy Kelly

Amy Kelly (May 5, 1877 – January 1, 1962) was an American educator and historian known for her life's work, Eleanor of Aquitaine and the Four Kings.

Early life and education Amy Ruth Kelly was born on May 5, 1877, in Port Clinton, Ohio, the oldest of three children of Malcolm Kelly and Susan Smith Kelly. Kelly completed her bachelor's degree at Oberlin College, her master's at Wellesley College, and capped her education with a stint at Harvard Summer School and a trip to France.

Career as an educator Upon returning from France, Kelly took the job of English department head at Lake Erie College. Her next move was to Wellesley as an instructor and then as an associate professor of English. While at Wellesley, she was hired as headmistress at Bryn Mawr School. In 1928, Katherine Scarborough of The Baltimore Sun wrote a full-page sketch about Kelly's career to that date, including the work she did in helping to plan a curriculum for Bennington College, which was expected at that time to open in 1930. Scarborough wrote, "Characteristically, Miss Kelly insists that her conclusions must not be regarded as an accepted program for the college, but it is an accepted fact by those closely in touch with the new institution that they will be followed in the main, if not in their entirety."

In 1942, after 24 years at Wellesley, Kelly retired.

Norman Cousins, editor of The Saturday Review of Literature, said of Kelly's book: "It is when the critic approaches the assessment of the author's style that superlatives seem feeble. Prose of this quality has not appeared in America in many a long day. Readers were unanimous that here was a narrative fashioned with a jeweler's skill by a writer of immaculate taste, a vast vocabulary, and unsurpassed grasp of her subject."

Personal life and death Kelly spent her final years in Miami, Florida, with her sister, Elizabeth. Stoneman Douglas wrote that during those years Kelly was "never very well, often very ill, and for the last year, dying."