After more than thirty-five years as a professional concert pianist and music teacher, Jeannette Haien, in her 60s, began her second career as a novelist. Her first novel, The All of It, published in 1986, garnered the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the Academy of Arts and Letters.

Born in Dayton, Ohio, to a Dutch immigrant-industrialist father and a violinist mother, she received a bachelor's degree in English and a masters degree in music from the University of Michigan.

Jeannette performed extensively as a pianist throughout the Midwest before and immediately after her 1948 marriage to Ernest Ballard. In 1950, the Ballards moved to New York City, from then on their permanent home. Pursuing her professional career under her maiden name, Jeannette Haien taught piano privately and, subsequently, as a member of the piano faculty of Mannes College of Music (1969-1991). She toured biennially with the cultural outreach programs of the United States Information Agency in Europe, Asia and Central America throughout the 1960s and 1970s.