Lesley Lee Francis ’52 kept a mass of press clippings in her desk. They documented a trip her mother and her grandfather took to South America in the mid-1950s.
“What am I supposed to do with this stuff?” she remembers asking herself at the time.
A decade later, it was looking through these papers that Francis first faced her grandfather’s legacy—her grandfather was Robert Frost.
Quickly she became “hooked” on researching her grandfather’s life as one of America’s greatest poets, turning a family connection and deep interest into a full-fledged occupation.
Francis first read her grandfather’s poetry as a child at home and memorized several of his poems. She saw him frequently and, like the rest of his close family, called him affectionately “RF.” Even today she recalls discussing with him the sound of poetry and “the strain of rhythm upon a meter.”
When her childhood impressions developed into a scholarly approach, Francis had finally found a place where could make a professional career of a personal pursuit.
She had already made a name for herself studying academic tenure and the status of women in higher education for the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). And as a Romance Languages professor she had experienced firsthand discrimination against women in academia.
By the time she started studying her grandfather, she had already raised a family of three daughters and had directed a summer school for American girls in Spain.
“I think it kind of falls naturally to women to wear many hats,” she says.
She confronted the same dilemma many of her Radcliffe classmates faced: finding recognition was difficult because of a history of “leaving women out on the edges.”
Recognition came in 1994 with the publication of a full-length Frost biography.
She’d finally etched a place for herself as a woman in the scholarly world.
Nothing Subtle About It
Francis says she has seen many doors barred to her as a woman, starting from her days at Radcliffe, when she was not allowed to enter Lamont Library.
A concentrator in modern European history, she swam in her free time and noticed the inequity in women’s athletics—the pool for female swimmers was “pathetic,” she says.
Read more in News
Sikh’s Sword Seized By School
