Solita Solano

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Berenice Abbott : Solita Solano in Paris 1926

Solita Solano , actually Sarah Wilkinson (* 1888 in Troy , New York , † November 22, 1975 in Orgeval near Paris ) was an American editor , novelist , poet and journalist .

Life

Sarah Wilkinson, originally from the upper middle class, attended the Emma Willard Collage in Troy. After her father's death in 1903, she ran away from home and married her childhood friend, Oliver Filley, an engineer. The couple spent the next four years as a development worker in the Philippines , China and Japan . The marriage was unhappy and she left her husband. In 1908 she was an actress in New York, then a reporter in Boston. She first worked for the Traveler (from 1910) and from 1917 to 1918 for the Journal . At that time she changed her name to Solita Solano . At the end of 1918 she first became the leading theater critic at the New York Tribune , after professional difficulties there she worked for a theater producer and later as a freelance reporter for the National Geographic Society .

Maurice Brange: Au Café , 1922. Solita Solano and Djuna Barnes in Paris

At the end of 1919, Solano met journalist Janet Flanner at an event in the bohemian district of Greenwich Village and entered into a lesbian love affair that was not monogamous . In 1921 she traveled with her partner to Greece - where Flanner was supposed to report on Constantinople for "National Geographic" . The following year the couple traveled to France . In Paris they soon found their way into the intellectual-lesbian circles around Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas , Natalie Clifford Barney , Romaine Brooks and Djuna Barnes . Solano wrote three novels from 1924 to 1927, but they were unsuccessful and increasingly met with rejection from New York critics. Flanners wrote under the pseudonym Genêt the column Letter from Paris , which appeared from 1925 in the fashionable magazine The New Yorker and was financially profitable. Solano was Flanner's right-hand man, she researched, corrected her texts and typed. Their love affair gradually turned into a working relationship, but without waning completely. When Janet fell in love with the French singer Noel Haskins Murphy in 1932 and spent a lot of time in her house in Orgeval near Paris, Solano even came to terms with it and visited them regularly. After the outbreak of World War II , Solano and Flanner went back to New York.

In the 1940s, Solano separated from her longtime partner after she had an affair with the Italian radio reporter and single mother of a son, Natalia Danesi Murray. For her part, Solano fell in love with Elizabeth Jenks Clark. After the liberation by the Allies , she returned to France, where she died at the age of 87 as a result of a heart attack .

Trivia

  • Solano was involved in the women's rights organization Lucy Stone League , whose goal was, among other things, that women can keep their maiden name after marriage.
  • Together with Flanners, she was a member of the literary circle Algonquin Round Table , a loose group of journalists, writers and actors who met at the Algonquin Hotel on the Upper West Side .

literature

  • Berenice Abbott: Portrait of Solita Solano , Parasol Press, Ltd. (1981)
  • William Patrick Patterson: Ladies of the Rope: Gurdjieff's Special Left Bank Women's Group , Arete Pubns (1998) ISBN 1-879514-41-9
  • Andrea Weiss: Paris was a woman. The women from the Left Bank. Djuna Barnes, Janet Flanner, Gertrude Stein & Co. , new edition. Rowohlt, Reinbek 2006, ISBN 978-3-499-24224-3
  • Gabriele Griffin: Who's Who in Lesbian and Gay and Writing , Routledge, London (2002)

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Solano, Solita
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Wilkinson, Sarah (real name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American editor, novelist, poet, and journalist
DATE OF BIRTH 1888
PLACE OF BIRTH Troy , New York
DATE OF DEATH November 22, 1975
Place of death Orgeval near Paris