Alice Barber Stephens (1858–1932) was educated at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women (later called Moore College of Art & Design). In 1876, she was one of the first women to be granted admission into the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts where she studied under Thomas Eakins. Her illustration work appeared in Scribner’s Monthly, Harper’s Weekly, and The Ladies Home Journal. Her work was also featured on numerous books for Houghton Mifflin and Crowell publishers, including Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women,  Mary E. Wilkins’ The People of Our Neighborhood, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Stark Munro Letters, George Eliot’s Middlemarch, and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun.