1918 – 2009

Perényi wrote fiction and features for magazines as well as memoirs, novels, and biography. She tended her Stonington garden for many years and it became the subject of her book “Green Thoughts,” in which she used the garden as a lens for memoir, social commentary and philosophy. She and her mother, Grace Zaring Stone, were also part of the social and intellectual circle of poet James Merrill, which helped to change Stonington from a maritime community to an intellectual and artistic center or colony.

Biography/Description of Work

Eleanor Stone was an only child whose father was a diplomat. As a result, she traveled extensively with her parents, including to Budapest where she met her future husband, a young Hungarian progressive named Zsigmond Perenyi, as a young woman of 19. They married within a year and lived in his family’s castle in Ruthenia, then under Czech control. With the onset of World War II, she returned to the US in 1940, while her husband joined the Resistance. The couple divorced after the war and Eleanor Perényi and her son Peter lived in New York where she worked for art gallery owner Julian Levy, and wrote and edited for a number of magazines including Harper’s Bazaar and Mademoiselle. She visited her mother at their Stonington house until her own retirement when she moved to Stonington full-time. She became seriously involved in the garden, urban in scale but relatively large for the densely-populated village setting. Her book “Green Thoughts” came about as a result of several decades of gardening during which she discovered and wrote about organic methods, perennials, and native plants, which she wove into a book along with elements of memoir.

Sources view

Perényi, Eleanor Stone. More was Lost. Little Brown and Company, Boston, 1946. Green Thoughts: a Writer in the Garden. Random House, New York, 1981.
New York Times obituaries and book reviews. ×

Associated Resource(s)

• 53 Main Street, Stonington