Kirtland, Leila G. (Leila Griffing), 1877-1955

Leila Griffing Kirtland, a Presbyterian Church in the U.S. (PCUS) educational missionary to Japan, was born in 1877 in Memphis, Tennessee, and educated at the Clara Conway Institute, a Memphis girls school.

She studied music in New York, and arrived in Japan in the autumn of 1910 to teach kindergarten alongside Mary Fletcher Smythe at Kinjo Gakuin, a school for girls in Nagoya. Kirtland spent the next 21 years at Kinjo, retiring in 1932. Upon retirement from the school, Kirtland undertook evangelistic work in Marugame. She wrote two memoirs of female missionaries to Japan: "My Japanese Journal," under the pseudonym Laura Gordon Keith, an account of the fictional Eleanor Craven; and "Lumpy," a biography of fellow missionary Estelle Lumpkin.