Today is the birthday of Elinor Morton Wylie (born Elinor Hoyt, 1885-1928), whose novels and poetry were very popular in her short lifetime, though she was as famous for her “ethereal beauty and personality” as she was for her literary works. (I struggle with that too. It’s a burden.)

Wylie was born in Somerville, New Jersey, and raised in Rosemont, Pennsylvania, and Washington, D.C., where her father eventually became solicitor general of the United States. Her family was upper crust: think Boston Brahmin, but without the Boston. (Pennsylvania should get its own term.) Wylie was a debutante and, at first, a society wife, married to Philip Hichborn, son of a rear admiral. (“Rear” admiral: snicker. Sorry, I have a twelve-year-old son.) But in 1910 she ran off to England with a married lawyer, Horace Wylie, and the two lived together under the Cloud of Scandal (I’m picturing cumulonimbus clouds, big dark towering columns) until 1916, by which time Horace’s wife had finally divorced him and Wylie’s husband had killed himself, leaving the two free to marry, just in time for them to tire of one another.

By then, Wylie had had a book of poetry published privately and anonymously (Incidental Numbers, 1912), and had begun to connect with literary circles in Washington and New York City, where she eventually settled. In 1921, she published another collection publicly, Nets to Catch the Wind, which was very well received and may contain her best work. In 1923, she divorced Wylie, married the writer William Rose Benét, published a book of poems entitled Black Armour, and published her first novel, Jennifer Lorn: A Sedate Extravaganza, which was not only well received but was celebrated with a torchlight parade through Manhattan. (Huh.)

Wylie went on to write a couple more collections of poetry and several more novels, including The Venetian Glass Nephew (1925) and Mr. Hodge and Mr. Hazard (1928), considered her best fiction; the former is actually a reversal of the Pygmalion story, in which a woman falls in love with someone made out of glass (like you do) and asks to be turned into glass herself (not practical, but whatever). She also separated from husband #3 and fell in love with yet another married man, Henry de Clifford Woodhouse, which inspired her to write nineteen sonnets included in her collection Angels and Earthly Creatures (1928).

Wylie had suffered from extremely high blood pressure her entire adult life and died of a stroke at only 43. Her work remained popular and critically acclaimed for a time, then fell somewhat out of favor and fashion after the 1950s, then experienced something of a revival in the 1980s when feminist critics began to examine her work. Her poem “Cold Blooded Creatures” begins:

Man, the egregious egoist,

(In mystery the twig is bent,)

Imagines, by some mental twist,

That he alone is sentient

Of the intolerable load

Which on all living creatures lies…

(Read the whole thing here. It’s a very short poem and I quite like it.)

Have a mild and lovely Friday and stay scrupulously honest to the data.