With its proximity to the cultural hub of New York City and its quieter suburban and rural landscapes, Connecticut was fertile ground for artists and writers in the period of Modernist movements between 1913 and 1979. Many of these cultural figures are well known through biographical and critical studies. Creative Places seeks to show how place played a significant role in creative work, and how in turn the artists and writers influenced communities in Connecticut.
Grace Zaring Stone
Fiction
1891 – 1991
Novelist, whose work was translated to the screen, and who was part of the literary and intellectual circle of poet James Merrill.
- Biography/Description of Work
Grace Zaring Stone was a descendant of Robert Owen, 19th century British social reformer. Grace Zaring’s mother died at her birth, and she grew up among her Owen relatives. She married Ellis Spencer Stone, an officer in the US Navy. She began writing stories and articles while stationed abroad, and used the settings for her novels, “The Heaven and Earth of Dona Elena” (1929), “The Bitter Tea of General Yen” (1933), and “Escape” (1939), the last set in a fictionalized Germany. She published Escape under the pseudonym Ethel Vance, to protect her husband who was serving in Paris, and her daughter Eleanor who was married and living in Hungary at the time. Three of Stone’s novels were made into films during the 1930s and 1940s. “The Bitter Tea of General Yen” in its film version, was an example of PreCode Hollywood, and featured a sexual relationship between an American woman and a Chinese man; after the enforcement of the Code, this type of content would not be permitted. The Stones, residents of New York City, purchased the house in Stonington as their vacation home. After Commodore Stone’s death in 1956, Grace Zaring Stone made Stonington her primary home and continued to write, publishing the novel “Althea” in 1962.
- Sources view
- Obituary. New York Times, October 1, 1991. [ http://www.nytimes.com/1991/10/01/arts/grace-zaring-stone-a-novelist-under-two-names-dies-at-100.html ]
- Associated Resource(s)