Hey, remember last week when I was all excited about modernist lady writers, most of whom were north of 2 on the Kinsey scale? Just remembered my two favorite pieces of trivia from that long Wikipedia trawl:
1) Dolly Wilde, Oscar’s niece and last surviving bearer of the name, was one of (heiress and arts patron) Natalie Barney’s later lovers; an earlier one was Olive Custance, who then married Lord Alfred Douglas. There were quite a lot of merry round-robins of sexual partners, but that one stood out to me.
2) Poet and playwright Michael Strange took up with another lady writer later in life, after her rich husband(s) had died, which wasn’t uncommon; but her lover was Margaret Wise Brown — the writer of Goodnight, Moon and many other children’s picture-book classics. (For the record, Brown was a better writer than Strange, who wasn’t quite the combination of Millay and Maeterlinck that she wanted to be.)
I happened to know who Michael Strange was before I knew who Margaret Wise Brown was, thanks to an old collection of Vanity Fair articles that fell into my hands at the right time, and it weirds me out that her Wikipedia article is under her given name (Blanche Oelrichs), for a couple of reasons. First and primarily is that Michael Strange was the name she published under all her life, from her first discreet poems in the 10s to her memoirs in the 50s; even if it was originally a pseudonym to disguise the fact that she was a woman (and, more to the point, of a fairly prominent social background), by the time she married John Barrymore in 1920 she was famous as Michael Strange (a pan of her play Clair de Lune, which insinuated that it was only staged due to Barrymore’s influence, was headlined “For the Love of Mike”) — it wasn’t anonymity, but modernist identity-play, that the pseudonym provided. The other reason is that identifying her as “Blanche Oelrichs” positions her as the daughter of her parents and as the wife of her various husbands — as a social figure rather than a literary one. It’s probably true that her social life is more important to posterity than her literary life (being the mother of even a minor Barrymore trumps her little-read poems and plays), but she gave herself a pen name for a reason, and if we’re to be interested in her for her own sake, then we should honor it. Whatever Wikipedia’s editorial reasons for using her given name (I’m guessing the original was adapted from an academic encyclopedia of literary biographies, but those people would call Mark Twain “Samuel Clemens” and George Eliot “Mary Anne Evans,” and they’re wrong), the (mis)identification has been compounded by the fact that everyone on the Internet uses Wikipedia as an infallible source; pre-2005 knowledge of her has effectively been erased.
(On the other hand, it is nice to have another name to search under, since the boxer Michael Strange and the Afghanistan War casualty Michael Strange fetch plenty of results too.)
