[1] 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,[2] she was also interested in education and philanthropy.

[3] Reed studied at Radcliffe College in its early days and was admitted there to the degree of Bachelor of Arts in 1890, from which she graduated.

[3] She was a student of Latin and Greek, and in 1890, was the first woman to win the Sargent Prize, offered by Harvard University for a metrical translation from Horace,[2] which version was published in Scribner's Magazine.

[1][2] With the exception of ten years in Cambridge (beginning 1918),[2] she lived almost all her life in Boston, where her parents went at the end of the Civil War.

[3] Helen Leah Reed died at Manchester, Massachusetts, at the summer home of her sister, Mrs. Everett Morss, on July 21, 1926.