- Cora Crane
-
Stephen Crane and a woman thought by some researchers to be Cora Crane.
Cora Crane (July 12, 1865 – September 5, 1910) was an American writer, journalist and brothel owner. She was married to Captain Donald William Stewart, one of the key figures in the War of the Golden Stool between the British and the Ashanti, but she is best known as the common-law wife of writer Stephen Crane until his death in 1900.
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Early life
Cora Ethel Eaton Howarth was born July 12, 1865 in Boston, Massachusetts to John Howarth and Elizabeth Holder. She led a life of refinement, socialized with the well-educated of Boston and gained recognition for her talent in short story writing.[1]
A move to New York City proved to be a series of adventures and misadventures for her. Because unmarried women required chaperons, Cora married her first husband, Thomas Vinton Murphy, who was the son of the former Collector of the Port of New York. They went into business, running munitions and a gambling house. Two years later she married Captain Donald William Stewart, the son of Sir Donald Martin Stewart, 1st Baronet who was the Commander in Chief of India for Queen Victoria. Cora liked England, where she cut a social swath after the fashion of fellow American Jennie Jerome, who had married Lord Randolph Churchill in 1874. However, when Captain Stewart was assigned to India, Cora elected to stay behind as what they called an Empire widow. During their marriage, her husband became the British Resident in the Gold Coast (now Ghana), and was heavily involved in the War of the Golden Stool against the Ashanti. After moving to England to the family estate, Cora quickly became disenchanted with life in the country, and she threw herself into the glamorous swing of London society. Almost immediately she found herself in the middle of a highly publicized affair with the heir of the Chase Bank fortune.[2]
Stewart always hated Cora for not remaining faithful to him in his absence. She made a fool of him after he lowered himself, in the eyes of British society, by making an honest woman of a wayward wife. After sailing into American waters on a private yacht, Cora apparently quarreled with her yachtsman lover and swam ashore in her shift, to start from scratch in Jacksonville, Florida. Calling herself Cora Taylor, she bought the Hotel de Dreme from its proprietor, Ethel Dreme, and remodeled it into a popular "nightclub" called the Hotel de Dream. The elegant establishment was not technically a brothel because, though a man could meet a girl there, they had to go elsewhere to conduct "business".[2]
Life with Stephen Crane
Writer and journalist Stephen Crane went to Jacksonville en route to Cuba to cover the Spanish-American War. He stayed in the St. James Hotel. He was already famous for his book The Red Badge of Courage, a Civil War novel. Cora, whose legal name was Lady Stewart, met Crane in 1896, and soon became his lover. She later called herself Cora Crane, despite the fact that the couple was never legally married. They maintained a tumultuous relationship until his death.[2]
Cora Crane became known as the first female war correspondent when she traveled with Stephen to Greece to cover the Greco-Turkish War for the New York press. Her pen name was Imogene Carter. After the war, the Cranes settled in England, socialized with the literary elite and joined the Fabian Society. While there, they camouflaged their limited finances while entertaining lavishly. They leased Ravensbrook, a villa in Oxted, where Cora was a celebrity due to her status as Lady Stewart and her actions in a scandal involving the wife and mistress of Harold Frederic. When Frederic died, his legal wife had his mistress, Kate, jailed for manslaughter because Kate, a Christian Scientist, had summoned a faith healer to pray for the dying man. Entangled in the squabble were the potential royalties from Frederic's posthumous bestseller, The Market Place. Pillars of Victorian morality, among them prominent publishers' wives, rallied behind the legal wife, raising funds for her children in newspaper campaigns. Cora Crane took the illegitimate children to Brede Place while their mother was in jail, and she ran a parallel campaign to raise funds for them. This prompted Joseph Conrad to call Cora "the only Christian in sight."[2]
While visiting Badenweiler, Germany, a health spa on the edge of the Black Forest, Stephen Crane died of tuberculosis at the age of 28. In his will he left everything to Cora. He is buried in his home state of New Jersey.
Return to Jacksonville
Cora returned to Jacksonville in 1901 while the City was still in ruins following the Great Fire. Miraculously the Ward Street Bordello District had escaped the general destruction, and she quickly found financing to build her signature brothel in the LaVilla District. Called "The Court", it was located at the Southwest corner of Ward (Now Houston) and Davis Street. The two-story brick building had 14 bedrooms (parlour rooms), ballroom, kitchens, and dining room and an annex with eight bedrooms. Business boomed and within short order Cora had expanded to partial ownership in several other "resorts" as well as building a grand tropical bordello at Pablo Beach that she called the Palmetto Lodge.[2]
On June 1, 1905, Cora married Hammond P. McNeill, the 25-year-old son of a prominent South Carolina family, and an employee of Cora's as the manager of The Annex, a bar she partially owned at the Everett Hotel. He was also the nephew of Anna McNeill Whistler, the mother of the artist and subject of his famous painting known as Whistler's Mother. McNeill shot and killed a lover of his wife's, although he was acquitted because the laws of the time allowed this type of protection. The couple was divorced shortly afterward. The divorce decree forbade her using the name McNeil, therefore, she reverted to using Crane.
Cora became a regular contributor to the leading publications of the country, including Smart Set and Harpers Weekly. Toward the end of her career, however, she became restless and took on the Bohemian lifestyle, similar to what Stephen Crane had done in New York while he wrote The Red Badge of Courage. She had been planning to return to Europe and take up her writing again in a European atmosphere.[2]
For the last three years of her life, she spent much of her time in Pablo Beach, Florida (now Jacksonville Beach), but she maintained a home in the city of Jacksonville. She suffered a stroke after helping push a stranded car out of the sand, went back to her house and died there on September 5, 1910 aged 45. She is buried in the Evergreen Cemetery in Jacksonville, Florida.
Notes
External links
Categories:- 1865 births
- 1910 deaths
- People from Jacksonville, Florida
- Writers from New York
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