Elisabeth Stone

**Elisabeth Porter Stone** (May 11, 1871 - June 14, 1949) was an English-American poet, essayist, suffragist, and prominent figure of the early New England avant-garde.

## Life

Born Elisabeth Annet Porter in Poole, Dorsetshire to Orville Porter, a merchant active in the harbor area, and Annabelle (nee Stone), she grew up in a well off Roman Catholic family, the only daughter among three other sons. Educated in literature and language, from a young age she harbored feelings towards the same sex. Despite this, in 1890 she agreed to marry a man named Ernest A. Cole, the son of a business associate of her fathers and ten years her senior. The couple-to-be sailed to New York City in the United States, but upon the day of their planned return to England, Stone broke up with Cole, and remained in America.

Effectively cut off from her family and without any other vocation to speak of, she fell in with the bohemian artistic community, spending her time at various clubs and studios, hosted by some of the larger and smaller names in the burgeoning avant-garde and expressionist movement. Much of her early work reflects this period of transient living and romantic and sexual exploration. By 1896 she was a regular figure at several of New York's Women's Clubs, most notably the one hosted by Daisy Abbott. Around 1900 she became active with the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) after they began reaching out to Abbott's Club, as well as other prominent Women's Clubs, and she began to establish a presence in the early formations of first wave feminism.

In 1905 she met Li Xia, one of the founders of Tritian, at a suffragist meeting where she had accompanied her co-founder Elane Dawson. Stone and Li became romantically involved within that same year, and in 1907 they were living together in a 'Boston marriage', a common example of two women living together without any support from a male figure. Stone would describe these years as the most peaceful and stable of her life.

Li was murdered in the apartment they shared on August 30, 1911, and Stone was the one who found the body in the evening of that day, having left early that morning before the murder took place. Heartbroken, she disowned the apartment and thrust herself back into the artistic world, over the ensuing years engaging in a multitude of physical relationships with both men and women. She wrote *Windowpane* in 1918, which was her most well received and successful work to that point. Upon the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920 NAWSA was transformed into the League of Women Voters, which Stone remained active in. She was also heavily involved in Margaret Sanger's American Birth Control League (ABCL), and became an early supporter of the integration of people of color into what was a primarily white feminist movement at the time.

Stone maintained a unique and recognizable appearance; she had kept her head completely bald since her early years in the United States, and often wore a monocle.

## Later Years and Death

During the 1940s Stone was engaged romantically with Ida N. A. Mann, a widow of a wealthy businessman from Detroit, Michigan. The two settled in Manhattan in 1943. Throughout her life she only wrote by hand, never using a typewriter.

Stone suffered a debilitating stroke in 1956, causing her to lose motor control on the left side of her body. She began to write with an increased fervor in the years after this, as she was right handed, and wanted to capitalize her use of that hand while she still could. After her stroke she began to suffer from epileptic seizures. Stone had a second stroke in May of 1949, and died from cerebral hemorrhaging the following month.