This essay has been replaced by the essay in my new book of revised, expanded, and footnoted versions of my recent Tentaclii essays, Lovecraft in Historical Context: fifth collection.
Anne Tillery Renshaw (c.1890?-c.1940?)
24 Sunday Aug 2014
Posted in Historical context
“Man proposes; Woman disposes” ; ) I’ve always thought he needed a well-to-do, well-read, slightly older wife who would have let him write and kept an eye on him.
Lot to go into here…not many of Lovecraft’s letters to Anne Tillery Renshaw survive, but the Letters to Elizabeth Toldridge & Anne Tillery Renshaw include three previously-unpublished letters dating from 1936, so it appears they had a long correspondence as well as a business relationship (I have actually just this morning finished putting up the last letter summaries from that volume: http://www.wikithulhu.com/book:h-p-lovecraft-letters-to-elizabeth-toldridge-anne-tille ).
On the matter of women sizing Lovecraft up for marriage and the 1921 amateur convention in Boston… I would be inclined to think that Winifred Virginia Jackson’s relation to William Stanley Braithwaite (a poet and publisher of the Harlem Renaissance) could have led to the end of that potential relationship; there are letters where Lovecraft says some very negative things about Braithwaite. And at the same convention HPL met Sonia Haft Greene, and according to R. Alain Everts claimed “I stole HPL away from Winifred Jackson.”
Pingback: Arkham Insiders – Folge 38 1921 bis 1924 Grabenkämpfe – Arkham Insiders