Dr. Janet Donalda McFee was born on October 29, 1863, in Beauharnois County, Quebec.

She entered McGill College in 1884 as one of the college's first women undergraduates. A brilliant student, she became especially interested in philosophy, which then included psychology and she graduated in 1888 (B.A.). She continued her studies at Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y. Later she went on to work with the founder of experimental psychology, Wilhelm Wundt, in Leipzig, Germany, and in 1895, she became the first woman graduate of McGill University to earn a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Zürich, Switzerland. In the 1900s, she worked as a school teacher in New York and translated texts from German to English and vice versa. In the early 1920s, she returned to Montreal, Quebec. She and her twin sisters made a world tour shortly before World War II and traversed across the widest part of India in 1937. At the age of 93, she took her first flight and went to Bermuda for the winter. She suddenly took ill the following spring and died there on March 5, 1957, in Tucker's Town. She is buried in Montreal, Quebec.