Zoe Kincaid Penlington
Zoe Kincaid (later Penlington), from the 1902 yearbook of the University of Washington
Born	Zoe Rowena Kincaid (1878-03-02)March 2, 1878 Peterborough, Ontario, Canada
Died	March 28, 1944(1944-03-28) (aged 66) Ventura, California, U.S.
Occupation(s)	Journalist, arts critic, editor
Relatives	Trevor Kincaid (brother)

Zoë Rowena Kincaid Penlington (March 2, 1878 – March 28, 1944) was a Canadian-born American journalist, critic, and editor. She wrote Kabuki: The Popular Stage in Japan (1925), considered "the first extensive study of kabuki in English". ^[1] (Her first name is written both with and without the diaeresis in sources.)

Zoe Kincaid was born in Peterborough, Ontario ^[2] and raised in Olympia, Washington, ^{[3] [4]} the daughter of Robert Kincaid and Mary Margaret Bell Kincaid. Her father was an Irish-born Canadian surgeon and a veteran of the Union Army in the American Civil War. Her older brother Trevor Kincaid became a noted biologist. ^[5] She graduated from Olympia High School, and from the University of Washington in 1902. ^{[6] [7]} In college she was the founding editor of the yearbook and the literary editor of the school newspaper. In 1908, she was elected president of the University of Washington Alumnae Association. ^[8]

Kincaid worked as a journalist in Washington state as a young woman, ^[9] especially at The Westerner, a regional literary magazine. ^[8] She moved to Tokyo in 1908, to write and teach English. ^[10] She was founding co-editor Japan Magazine, an English-language monthly launched in 1910 ^[11] as the official publication of the Tokyo Industrial Association. ^[12] Her first article for Japan Magazine was a profile of meteorologist Itaru Nonaka [ ja] and his wife Chiyoko, who maintained a weather station on Mount Fuji. ^[13]

With her husband Penlington she also helped produce The Far East, a weekly English magazine. ^{[14] [15]} The magazine's offices were destroyed in the 1923 Great Kantō earthquake. She was a theatre critic, ^{[16] [17]} and a member of the International Press Association of Japan. ^[8] She wrote Kabuki: The Popular Stage in Japan (1925), the first English-language book about the kabuki tradition, ^[18] and "a much needed and very important history of the popular Japanese stage," according to The New York Times reviewer Charles DeKay. ^[19] She also wrote about noh dance-dramas ^[20] and bunraku puppetry. ^{[17] [21]} She worked with a translator to adapt two kabuki plays by Kido Okamoto, published as The Human Pillar and The Mask-Maker. ^[8]

• "Nonaka the Mountaineer" (1910) ^[13]
• "The Hidden Genius of the East" (1921) ^[22]
• Kabuki: The Popular Stage of Japan (1925) ^[23]
• "Playgoing in Present-Day Japan" (1926) ^[24]
• "The Stage of Today in Japan" (1927) ^[25]
• "The Virile Drama of Japan" (1927) ^[20]
• " Hina Matsuri: The Girls' Festival" (1927) ^[26]
• "An International Theater" (1927) ^[27]
• The Mask-maker: A Drama in Three Acts (1928) ^[28]
• Tokyo Vignettes (1933) ^[29]

Kincaid married British journalist John Newton Penlington in 1910. ^[10] Her husband died in 1933, ^{[30] [31]} and she returned to the United States permanently in 1941. She died from a ruptured appendix in 1944, at the age of 66, while visiting her sister in Ventura, California. ^[18]

• Works by Zoe Kincaid at Project Gutenberg
• "Baseball team visiting Japan, University of Washington, 1908", University of Washington Libraries; Penlington is one of the two women in this photograph