page_title: Eleanor Elkins Widener
section_title: Titanic survival and Widener Library
hierarchical_section_title: Eleanor Elkins Widener / Titanic survival and Widener Library
caption_attribution_description: English: George Dunton Widener, Jr., Horace Trumbauer, and Eleanor Elkins Widener in Harvard Yard, with Sever Hall in background
context_page_description: Eleanor Elkins Widener was an American heiress, socialite, philanthropist, and adventuress best remembered for her donation to Harvard University of the Widener Library‍—‌a memorial to her elder son Harry Elkins Widener, who perished in the sinking of the RMS Titanic.
  Widener later married Harvard professor Alexander Hamilton Rice Jr., a surgeon and explorer.
  She subsequently accompanied Rice on a number of expeditions, including one on which she "went further up the Amazon than any white woman had penetrated" and, purportedly, he was attacked by cannibals.
context_section_description: In 1912 she and her husband traveled to Paris with their elder son Harry, in search of a chef for their new hotel, Philadelphia's Ritz Carlton. On April 10 they embarked at Cherbourg on the RMS Titanic for their return to America. On the night the ship sank they hosted the ship's captain, Edward Smith, at dinner in its À la Carte Restaurant.
  George, Harry, and their valet all perished in the sinking, but Eleanor and her maid survived. 
  Soon after, Widener donated, at a cost of $3.5 million (equivalent to $70 million in 2018), the Harry Elkins Widener Memorial Library to Harvard University. (Harry Widener, who was "intensely interested in the collection of rare and valuable books", had graduated from Harvard College in 1907.)  She also rebuilt St. Paul's Protestant Episcopal Church in Elkins Park, a section of Cheltenham Township, as a memorial to George Widener, and gave a $300,000 science building to Pottstown, Pennsylvania's The Hill School, from which Harry Widener had graduated in 1903.
caption: Widener, son George (left), and Widener Library architect Horace Trumbauer in Harvard Yard
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