*Wylie, Elinor Morton Hoyt1885╨1928poet and novelistBorn on September 7, 1885, in Somerville, New Jersey, Elinor Hoyt grew up from the age of two in Rosemont, a Philadelphia suburb, and from twelve in Washington, D.C., where her father served as assistant U.S. attorney general and later as solicitor general. She attended private schools and in 1904 graduated from the Holton-Arms School in Washington. In 1905 she was married to the scion of a socially prominent navy family; she left him in December 1910 and eloped to England with Horace Wylie, a Washington lawyer 17 years her senior, whose wife refused him a divorce. The scandal was widely publicized. At the outbreak of World War I they returned to the United States and lived in Boston and then in Augusta, Georgia. They were married in August 1916. In 1919 they moved back to Washington, D.C. There Elinor White met a number of literary figures engaged in war-related work╤William Rose BenÄt, Edmund Wilson, Sinclair Lewis, John Dos Passos, and others╤and was emboldened to submit some of her poems for publication. (In 1912 her mother had had a few printed privately and anonymously in London under the title Incidental Numbers.) In 1921 a volume of her poems was issued commercially as Nets to Catch the Wind, which was warmly received by critics and the public. Technically skillful, sensuous, drawing upon both the Metaphysical and the Romantic poets for imagery and diction, her poems struck a responsive chord in a general readership that more experimental poets missed. With the success of the book she moved to New York City, and, aided by her striking beauty and her air of easy elegance, became a leading figure in literary society. She and Wylie were divorced in 1923, and in October of that year she married William Rose BenÄt. In the few years that remained to her she produced a remarkable quantity of work. Subsequent books included Black Armour, poems, 1923, Jennifer Lorn, a novel, 1923, The Venetian Glass Nephew, a novel, 1925, The Orphan Angel, a novel, 1926, Trivial Breath, poems, 1928, Mr. Hodge and Mr. Hazard, a novel, 1928, and Angels and Earthly Creatures, poems, 1929. Her novels in particular exhibited her gift for fantasy; The Orphan Angel, for example, imagined the later life of Percy Bysshe Shelley if he had been saved from drowning and had been brought to America. She summered frequently at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire and in England. She died in New York City on December 16, 1928. Her Collected Poems, edited by BenÄt, appeared in 1932 and her Collected Prose in 1933. Ästyl ` ! ¬ 5¬ $ 5¬ 7 !I 3 5¬ 4 !I ƒ !I ▓ !I ε !I !I 5¬ !I ê !I ö !I ú !I ░ !I ┴ !I ┌ !I δ !I √ !I !I !I ) !I A !I V !I r !I ╗ !I ╦ !I ╥ !I σ !I
