Jennie Lee (c. 1854 – 3 May 1930) was a Victorian Era English stage actress, singer and dancer whose career was largely entwined with the title role in Jo, a melodrama her husband, John Pringle Burnett, wove around a relatively minor character from the Charles Dickens novel, Bleak House. She made her stage debut in London at an early age and found success in New York and San Francisco not long afterwards. Lee may have first starred in Jo around 1874 during her tenure at San Francisco's California Theatre, but her real success came with the play's London debut on 22 February 1876 at the Globe Theatre in Newcastle Street. Jo ran for many months at the Globe and other London venues before embarking for several seasons on tours of the British Isles, a return to North America, tours of Australia and New Zealand and later revivals in Britain. Reduced circumstances over her final years forced Lee to seek assistance from an actor's pension fund subsidised in part by proceeds from Royal Command Performances. Early life and career Emily Lee was born in London, the daughter of Edwin George Lee, an artist of some note who worked in the mediums of watercolour and wood engraving. Her father counted among his friends the writer Charles Dickens and artist John Everett Millais. Lee would sometimes accompany her father to the latter's studio, where, on occasion. she would sit for the artist; as did her maternal aunt, Anne Ryan, the young woman depicted in his painting, A Huguenot. Lee was raised in a large household that included seven siblings and her father's younger brothers, whom she liked to call "her three wicked uncles". Lee once described her father as austere and that what fun she found as a child often occurred surreptitiously or while he was away on one of his frequent painting excursion. Often during these absences she would sneak into her father's library to read books normally forbidden to her or organise family plays with the help of her three uncles. In the fall of 1869, some eighteen months after her father's death, Lee made her stage debut at London's Lyceum Theatre as one of the twelve pages in Chilpéric, an opéra bouffe with libretto and music by Hervé. At the same venue later in 1870, Lee was a crossing sweeper in Hervé's operetta, Le petit Faust, and in July 1870