Helen Leah Reed

Helen Leah Reed (1861/62 – 1926) was a Canadian-born American author. An essayist, a contributor to periodical literature, and the author of a volume of poems, a novel, and a series of historical stories for girls, Her parents were Dr. Guilford Shaw and Ella (Berryman) Reed. Her father was born at Wilmot, Nova Scotia, and died at Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1908. He was the son of Granville Bevil and Leah (Green) Reed of Nova Scotia. He was of New England ancestry, and his Reed forbears, who were Loyalists, had migrated to Nova Scotia in the epoch of the Revolution. Helen traced her ancestry also to Roger Williams and to the Greene family of Rhode Island and other Colonial families. Her mother was the daughter of John Berryman of St. John, granddaughter of John and Catharine (Edgar) Berryman of England, and the great-granddaughter of Peter and Elizabeth (Annesley) Wade of New York, who were Loyalists. she lived almost all her life in Boston, where her parents went at the end of the Civil War.

In 1927, a bequest of was received under the will of Helen Leah Reed as a memorial to Guilford S. Reed, and was funded as the "Guilford Reed Fund", the income to be applied to the purchase of books of non-fiction.

Awards and honours Sargent Prize, Harvard University Miss Theodora: A West End Story (1898) illus. Florence Pearl England Napoleon's Young Neighbor (1907) (non-fiction) Memorial Day, and Other Verse (Original and Translated) (c. 1917) Serbia: A Sketch (c. 1917)

Book chapter "Women's Work at the Harvard Observatory". The National Exposition Souvenir (1893)

Series Brenda Brenda, Her School and Her Club (1900) illus. Jessie Willcox Smith Brenda's Summer at Rockley (1901) illus. Jessie Willcox Smith Brenda's Cousin at Radcliffe (1902) Brenda's Bargain: A Story for Girls (1903) Amy in Acadia: A Story for Girls (1905) illus. Katharine Pyle Brenda's Ward: A Sequel to Amy and Acadia (1906)

Irma Irma and Nap (1904) Irma in Italy: A Travel Story (1908)