Alice Ilgenfritz Jones

The first novel, High-Water Mark, appeared under the pen name "Ferris Jerome" and was a Gothic romance set in a prairie town.

B. Lippincott & Co..[1][2] The title refers to a fictional prairie town where the action takes place, but the book is more like a Gothic romance than a pioneer story.

[5] Alice Jones's next published work was the 1893 utopian science fiction Unveiling a Parallel, written together with Ella Robinson Merchant [ca] under the joint pseudonym "Two Women of the West".

[9] In 1895, Jones published Beatrice of Bayou Têche, a story about a light-skinned mixed-race enslaved woman who embarks on an artistic career after being freed.

[10] Jones knew the New Orleans area and the bayous from personal experience, since she regularly visited her sister in Jennings, Louisiana.

[20] Another reviewer, Veronica Hollinger, while listing the book as one of a "trilogy of significant works", found that "Jones and Merchant are not particularly sophisticated writers, and it is unlikely that Unveiling a Parallel will displace Herland from its position as the classic early feminist utopia.

"[21] According to the 2001 re-edition of Beatrice of Bayou Têche, described by reviewer Joan Hall as "long out of print and rarely discussed by literary critics", Jones was "the first white woman to take the intersection of race, gender, and creativity as her primary subject".