A Guide to the Papers of Elinor Wylie, 1921-1928 Wylie, Elinor, Papers 8287, etc.

A Guide to the Papers of Elinor Wylie, 1921-1928

A Collection in
The Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature
Special Collections
The University of Virginia Library
Accession Number 8287, etc.


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Processed by: Special Collections Staff

Repository
Special Collections, University of Virginia Library
Accession number
8287, etc.
Title
Papers of Elinor Wylie 1921-1928
Physical Characteristics
This collection consists of 166 items.
Language
English

Administrative Information

Access Restrictions

There are no restrictions.

Use Restrictions

See the University of Virginia Library’s use policy.

Preferred Citation

Papers of Elinor Wylie, Accession #8287, etc., Special Collections, University of Virginia Library, Charlottesville, Va.

Acquisition Information

8287: Deposit: June 16, 1966; Gift, July 1, 1991. 8287-a: Purchase: January 26, 1968. 8287-b: Deposit, January 11, 1971; Gift, July 1, 1991. 8287-c: Purchase, June 7, 1978. 8287-d: Deposit: June 12, 1978; Gift, July 1, 1991.

Processing Information

Virtually all of the items in this collection were undated by Wylie. Most of the dates now associated with items were assigned by Stanley Olson, author of Elinor Wylie: A Biography. Dates assigned to the material are, in many cases, only tentative. For example, Olson noted that Elinor Wylie was at the McDowell Colony in the summers of 1922 and 1923; as her fellow "colonists" were effectively the same on both occasions, it is extremely difficult to determine in which year the letters "from McDowell" were written.

Mr. Olson also provided explanatory notes for many of the letters; these notes were recorded on collection folders and have been transferred to the appropriate scope/content note for each item in the guide.

Biographical/Historical Information

Elinor Morton Hoyt Wylie, born September 7, 1885, Somerville, New Jersey; died December 16, 1928, New York, New York; married Philip Hichborn, 1906; eloped with Horace Wylie, December, 1910, and moved with him to England as Mr. and Mrs. Horace Waring; returned to U.S., 1914; married Wylie, August 7, 1916 (separated, 1921, divorced, 1923); married William Rose Benét , 1923; children: (first marriage) Philip Hichborn III, (second marriage) one son (died in infancy). Poet and novelist; poetry editor Vanity Fair, 1923-1925; editor Literary Guild, 1926-1928; contributing editor, New Republic, 1926-1928. Works: Incidental Numbers (London : Privately printed, 1912); Nets to Catch the Wind (New York : Harcourt, Brace, 1921); Black Armour (New York : Doran, 1923); Jennifer Lorn: a Sedate Extravaganza (New York : Doran, 1923); The Venetian Glass Nephew (New York : Doran, 1925); Elinor Wylie (New York : Simon & Schuster, 1926); The Orphan Angel (New York : Knopf, 1926) Trivial Breath (New York : Knopf, 1928); Mr. Hodge & Mr. Hazard (New York : Knopf, 1928); Angels and Earthly Creatures: a Sequence of Sonnets (Henley-on-Thames, The Borough Press, 1928); Angels and Earthly Creatures (New York : Knopf, 1929); Birthday Sonnet (New York : Random House, 1929); Collected Poems of Elinor Wylie (New York : Knopf, 1932); Last Poems of Elinor Wylie (New York : Knopf, 1943)

In her lifetime Elinor Hoyt Wylie won notoriety for her unconventional private life and acclaim for her poems and novels. Carl Van Doren celebrated her as a "poet and queen of poets." Prominent members of the New York literary scene in the 1920s--such as Edmund Wilson, Carl Van Vechten, and her third husband, William Rose Benét --admired her beauty and literary achievements.

The daughter of Henry Martyn and Anne McMichael Hoyt, Wylie was born on September 7, 1885 into a socially and politically prominent family in Somerville, New Jersey. (Later, believing Somerville insufficiently romantic, she hoped that people would imagine Paris or Persepolis as her place of birth.) Her family moved to Rosemont, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philadelphia, in 1887. In 1897 her father became assistant attorney general of the United States, taking the family to Washington, D.C. Although her life outwardly traced a romantic course, her three marriages never brought her the emotional fulfillment she sought, and her poetic success never erased her self-doubts. A perfectionist, shy and uncertain of her talents, Wylie required unqualified approval from others. Hers was a complex and contradictory nature. Her poetry articulates her central conflicts: a desire for love that led to a series of disappointing marriages, a delicate sensitivity which often made her wish to escape a hostile and unlovely world, a yearning for transcendent spiritual vision that she felt was beyond the reach of her limited gifts.

As a young woman growing up in an aristocratic family, Wylie was groomed for the life of a socialite. Yet she had a questing intellect as well. Her sister, Nancy Hoyt, asserts that Elinor was "passionately interested in her school work," with a love of books and an artistic avocation. Her scholarly interest is reflected in the meticulous research underlying her novels. But, despite the urging of her teachers at Miss Baldwin's School in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, and at Mrs. Flint's (later the Holton Arms) school in Washington, her parents did not allow her to continue her education. Instead, she was launched as a debutante. Although the social career her parents deemed appropriate began brilliantly, it could never absorb her interests and energies completely.

In 1905, apparently on the rebound from a short-lived romance, Wylie married Philip Simmons Hichborn and gave birth to his son Philip Hichborn III in September 1907. Hichborn proved to be emotionally unstable. During this difficult marriage, Wylie began to suffer from the high blood pressure and migraine headaches which would plague her throughout her life. Wylie's first two novels, Jennifer Lorn (1923) and The Venetian Glass Nephew (1925) describe women suffering in disastrous marriages. The husbands in both books compel their wives to become decorative objects. Attempting to meet these needs, the heroines are destroyed. Undoubtedly, Wylie's account is at least partially autobiographical.

She left Hichborn in December 1910, eloping with a married lawyer, Horace Wylie, and leaving behind her son, who was raised by Hichborn's sister Martha Pearsall. Wylie's elopement and abandonment of her child became a highly publicized scandal in conservative Washington. The couple lived in England as Mr. and Mrs. Horace Waring to escape publicity and social ostracism. (As late as 1927, the League of American Pen Women in Washington countermanded an honor-guest breakfast invitation they had extended to Wylie.)

Horace Wylie encouraged Elinor's literary interests. In 1912 she published privately a small book of poems, Incidental Numbers, none of which she later found worthy of inclusion in her subsequent volumes. The poems, written between 1902 and 1911, indicate some of the themes she would continue to explore--magic, love, entrapment and isolation--and reveal her indebtedness to the poets of the aesthetic movement. Wylie kept this anonymous collection secret, claiming in a 1919 letter to Harriet Monroe, editor of Poetry, "I have never published anything--never tried to, until the last few weeks."

When Britain entered World War I the Wylies returned to the United States, living in Boston, Augusta, Georgia, and Washington, D.C. They were distressed by family coldness, bad financial straits, social disapproval, and Elinor's poor health. Perhaps out of guilt for the loss of her son, Elinor eagerly wished for a child. From 1914 to 1916 she had several miscarriages, one stillbirth, and a premature child who died after a week. She perceived this inability to produce a child as a personal failure. She felt estranged from Wylie and wrote bitterly about her frigidity in poems such as "This Hand " ( Black Armour , 1923). After Horace Wylie at last succeeded in obtaining a divorce from his wife and Hichborn had committed suicide, they were married on August 7, 1916. But the strains of their position had already damaged the fiber of the relationship. Elinor withdrew emotionally from Horace as she grew increasingly involved in her literary career.

Friends such as John Dos Passos, John Peale Bishop, and Edmund Wilson convinced her to take her writing seriously. In November 1919 she sent some poems to Poetry, hesitantly, for she feared her work was not "modern enough" for the magazine. Wylie's reluctance is understandable, for her work looked back toward her literary forerunners, and did not participate in the contemporary experimentation with free verse. Throughout her career, Wylie wrote in rhyming stanzas, often working with ballads and sonnets. But Monroe allayed her concerns, and asked for more poems, publishing four in the May 1920 issue ( "Atavism, ""Fire and Sleet and Candlelight, ""Silver Filigree, " and "Velvet Shoes, " which would become her most widely anthologized poem). As her work began to gain recognition and acceptance, Wylie devoted herself to her writing.

One of her strongest supporters at this time was her brother Henry's friend William Rose Benét . Benét encouraged Wylie to submit her work and frequently acted as her literary agent, placing her poems and advising her about contracts and projects. On the strength of her growing literary reputation, Wylie separated from her husband and moved to New York in 1921. Here she captivated the literary world with her slender, tawny-haired beauty, personal elegance, acid wit, and technical virtuosity. Her success was almost legendary: Carl Van Vechten organized a torchlight parade to celebrate publication of her first novel, Jennifer Lorn, in 1923. In the same year, at perhaps the height of her powers and fame, she divorced Wylie and married Benét. Yet, remarks which Edmund Wilson quoted in his diary before the wedding suggest that the marriage was doomed from the start. According to Wilson, "When I expressed my doubts about their union, she said with her harsh and callous laugh: 'Yes, it would be a pity that a first-rate poet should be turned into a second-rate poet by marrying a third-rate poet.'"

During the period from 1921 to her death in 1928, Wylie's literary output was astonishing. She published four volumes of poetry and four novels, as well as--less significantly--essays and reviews, and served for a time as literary editor of Vanity Fair. Nets to Catch the Wind (1921) won critical acclaim, receiving the Poetry Society's Julia Ellsworth Ford Prize. The book, a substantial advance over her juvenilia, contains much of her best work. Writers such as Edna St. Vincent Millay, Louis Untermeyer, and Edmund Wilson praised it for its precision, its clarity, and its jewel-like brilliance.

Wylie, however, was aware of her limitations. In her poetry and prose she satirized the aesthetic excesses of which she herself was often guilty. Her first two novels, Jennifer Lorn and The Venetian Glass Nephew, deal with the conflicting claims of art and nature, depicting the destruction of heroines who succumb to others' demands that they become art objects. Yet, even as she satirized the inhumanity of an aesthetic sensibility that values decorative objects over humans, she often allowed the sensual richness of her prose to subvert thematic development. Similarly, her essay "Jewelled Bindings, " written in 1923 while she was composing Black Armour, is both defense and critique of her technique. She contended that she is a minor writer, defining herself in the images of a crafter rather than an artist; hers is a "small clean technique." The article explains her vision, but also admits to its shortcomings: Wylie believed that she might create a "gilded bird," but not the living bird who could sing in the work of an "authentic genius." Such a genius was Wylie's idol, Percy Bysshe Shelley.

Wylie's interest in romanticism grew from her strong identification with Shelley, dating from her first reading of the poet when she was seven. Her enthusiasm for Shelley may have occasionally verged on obsession: she spent early royalties to purchase some of his letters; she sometimes entertained fantasies of Shelley's return to life; she argued Shelley's merits at dinner parties, and she wondered how he would have responded to her. In a poetic self-caricature, "Portrait in Black Paint, " she mocks her "peculiar schism."

The highest tribute she paid Shelley was to write two novels about him, The Orphan Angel (1926) and Mr. Hodge & Mr. Hazard (1928). The first of these is an elaborate fantasy of Shelley's returning to life and traveling through the American West in the company of David Butternut, a Yankee sailor, searching for a mysterious and beautiful woman whom he hopes to rescue. Critics were polarized in their responses to this novel. Its chief difficulty is that it fails to achieve Wylie's purpose, that of kindling admiration for the heroic poet. Instead, the novel becomes a picaresque exploration with minimal plot interest. The second of these novels recounts the decline of romanticism in the tale of "the last Romantic poet" (a composite of Shelley and Wylie) vanquished by the bourgeois world of the Victorians, a world that cannot accept his values and his poetry. Critics agree that this book is her best novel.

Wylie dedicated her third volume of poetry, Trivial Breath (1928), to Shelley. Also new in this volume is the cynical treatment of love in such poems as "The Puritan's Ballad. " Biographical evidence suggests that the cynicism was a mask to conceal the pain of yet another failure of love.

By late 1926 her marriage to Benét had lost its charm for Wylie. Although she would not divorce him, she had begun to live apart, spending her time in and near London. In May 1927 she wrote to Horace Wylie, affirming a continuing love for him, in spite of her remarriage, but the following year, she experienced a new love which she felt to be the supreme one of her life. The object of this affection was Henry de Clifford Woodhouse, whose home Wylie had visited, and whose wife she had befriended. Wylie and Woodhouse took walks together and discussed philosophy.

While arranging the poems for her 1929 collection Angels and Earthly Creatures. Wylie returned to New York for a Christmas visit to Benét. On the evening of December 16, 1928 she set down the completed typescript of her poems, picked up a volume of John Donne's sermons, and called to Benét for a glass of water. When he brought it to her, she walked toward him, murmured "Is that all it is?," and fell to the floor, dead of a stroke.

Scope and Content

The Papers of Elinor Wylie consist of poetry manuscripts, correspondence and miscellaneous newsclippings. The collection contains 30 poems, fragments, and quotations by Wylie. Some of the poetry manuscripts were included in her letters and have been retained there.

The majority of the letters were written to William Rose Benét between 1921 and 1923. They discuss her work on Nets To Catch the Wind, Black Armour, Jennifer Lorn, and an unpublished novel; publication of Nets To Catch the Wind; her efforts to rent her house and leave Washington; financial troubles; her trips to New York; some family news; summers at the MacDowell Colony; Benét's work for Henry Canby at the New York Post; her work for Vanity Fair; and, her health. The letters are filled with her sentiments for Benét and her hopes and plans for the future.

Other correspondence includes a letter of Wylie to William Stanley Beaumont Braithwaite thanking him for his review of Nets To Catch the Wind; to Grace Wolcott Hazard Conkling planning a visit and giving thanks; to Robert Newton Linscott sending delayed thanks; and, to Donald Friede agreeing to edit poems by Warren Gilbert. The papers also contain letters of Benét to Teresa Frances Thompson Benét regarding a Harvard Yale football game, to Wylie encouraging her job search, to Donald Friede regarding Wylie's death, and 3 Christmas cards to the senior Benéts.

Fellow MacDowell Colony residents mentioned in the letters include Edward Arlington Robinson, DuBose Heyward, Douglas Moore, Mary and Padraic Colum and Herbert Gorman.

Arrangement

The collection is arranged in three series: Series I, Literary Manuscripts is arranged chronologically. Poetry manuscripts originally enclosed in letters are retained with the letters in the correspondence series. Series II, Correspondence is arranged alphabetically by surname of correspondent and subarranged chronologically. Poetry manuscripts originally enclosed in letters are retained with the letters in this series. Series III is arranged by physical format.

Significant Persons Associated With the Collection

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Contents List

Series I: Literary Manuscripts
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Series II: Correspondence
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Series III: Miscellaneous Clippings and Photographs
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