About

    Jennifer Ruth CODE (Née Bemis) was born in Melbourne, Australia on May 18, 1944 and died September 12, 2025 in Mornington, Australia. As the daughter of an Australian war-bride (Beryl Jean Borchardt) and a U.S. Marine (Forrest Warren Bemis), her life and career spanned two continents.  

 

    In 1945, Code traveled with her mother to Oxford, Massachusetts, where she would spend her childhood. She loved her Swedish grandparents deeply and the time she spent with them on their farm. She loved libraries, books, skating on frozen ponds, and her close group of friends with whom she would remain connected throughout her life. 

 

    After her marriage to Australian Trevor Williamson Code in 1968 and the birth of their three children, William Nicholas (still-born), Genevieve Ruth, and Ingrid Kristina, Code enrolled to study at the University of Melbourne in 1974. She studied English and Scandinavian Literature and Languages, first graduating with a Bachelor of Arts. She continued on to graduate studies with a focus on Scandinavian literature. She was the first woman and the first Australian to receive The Strindberg Scholarship and was invited to live and study at the Strindberg Museum in Stockholm. She gave papers at numerous conferences in the United States, Europe, and Russia, and in 1993, was awarded her PhD from the University of Melbourne for her dissertation on the post-inferno plays of the Swedish writer, August Strindberg. Code’s translations and interpretations of Strindberg’s work were highly recognized internationally and she advised on several productions of Strindberg plays. 

 

    In the 1990s, Code returned to the United States where she worked as Manager of Acquisitions at the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachusetts. During this period, she began writing short prose pieces and longer fiction works. Code was a member of the Worcester County Poetry Association and contributed to publications and programming, including a collaboration with the Worcester Arts Museum on their Hudson River paintings. After more than a decade spent in Massachusetts, she returned to Australia in 2004 where she served as Co-Chair of the Deakin Literary Society in Melbourne. In 2021 her novel, The Mad Angel, was published.