Born: 23 December 1862, Ireland
Died: 20 June 1926
Country most active: International
Also known as: NA
This biography is republished from The Dictionary of Irish Biography and was written by Frances Clarke. Shared by permission in line with Creative Commons ‘Attribution’ (CC BY) licencing.
Jordan, Kate (1862–1926), novelist and playwright, was born 23 December 1862 in Dublin, the daughter of Michael James and Kathleen Jordan. Her father, an academic, came from a family that included numerous academics, musicians and artists. When Kate was three her family emigrated to America, settling in New York City where her father became a professor. Educated at home by tutors and at private schools, she began to write at a very young age. Gartner reported the story that the imaginative Kate ‘told her classmates that she was born on the high seas on a pirate ship causing her teacher to warn her mother that “either she will one day write fiction or she is one of those natural liars to whom truth is unattractive” ’. Encouraged by her father, Kate published her first story at the age of twelve, beginning a writing career that lasted fifty years. She contributed stories and poems to the popular magazines and journals of the day: the Century, Colliers, Every Week, McClure’s and the Saturday Evening Post, and built up a large and loyal readership. One of her earliest successes was ‘The kiss of gold’, which appeared in Lippencott’s Monthly in October 1892.
Her novels include The other house (1892), A circle in the sand (1898), Time the comedian (1905), The creeping tides (1913), Against the winds (1919) and The next corner (1921). Her last novel, Trouble-the-house (1921), includes autobiographical references to her childhood. Her novels tended to the melodramatic but were characterised by well-developed characters and skilfully constructed plots. The Boston Transcript described her in 1921 as a ‘born storyteller who can touch the veriest trifle and turn it out, not a joy forever, but a pleasure in the moment’.
Jordan also wrote and adapted several plays, including the four-act melodrama ‘The masked woman’, which ran for 115 performances in 1922–3, ‘Secret springs’ which had a run of twenty-four performances in 1914–15, and ‘Mrs Dakon’ which had two performances in 1909; they appear to have been benefits for the Association for the Aid of Crippled Children. She also wrote ‘A luncheon at Nick’s’ (1903), ‘The pompadour’s protégé’ (1903), and ‘The right road’ (1911). She wrote one children’s book, The happifats and the grouch (1917). Her novel Time the comedian (1905) was adapted in 1925 for the silent screen by Fanny and Frederick Hatton, starring Theodore Kosloff as Time.
Over the years Jordan travelled extensively, spending long periods in both France and England. A member of the Pen and Brush Club and the Lyceum (London) and the Writer’s Club in London, she was also associated with the Society of American Dramatists and the Authors’ League of America. She was a member of the Cos Cob art colony of American impressionist painters that flourished between 1890 and 1920. In 1897 she married Frederic M. Vermilye , a New York broker from Pittsfield, Massachusetts. She continued to publish under her maiden name.
Despite having a lively personality and many friends, she became deeply depressed after her husband’s death and her health began to fail due to hypertension. Toward the end of her life she developed insomnia over her anxiety to finish a novel. Ironically, it was the story of a young woman who committed suicide. In April 1926 she left her residence at the Hotel Touraine to live with her niece Mrs George A. Reeder in Mountain Lakes, New Jersey. On 20 June 1926, she boarded the Boontown-Denville trolley where other passengers noticed she appeared nervous. She was found the following morning in a clump of scrub pines clutching a bottle of Lysol. The coroner ruled her death a suicide. Her ashes were buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Tarrytown, New York.