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Emily Holmes Coleman was born in California in 1899. On graduating from Wellesley College in 1920 she married the psychologist Loyd Ring Coleman. After the birth of her son John in 1924, she contracted puerperal fever and spent two months in a mental hospital, inspiring her only published novel, The Shutter of Snow (1930). In 1926 the family arrived in Paris, where Coleman became society editor for the Paris Tribune and began writing articles, stories, diaries and poems, as well as working as a secretary to anarchist Emma Goldman. She first met Djuna Barnes through the city's expatriate literary circles, then again in 1932 while staying at socialite Peggy Guggenheim's Hayford Hall, where Barnes wrote much of her famous novel Nightwood; Coleman was later instrumental in its publication by T. S. Eliot at Faber. She lived in Europe for the next two decades and converted to Catholicism in 1944. For the rest of her life Coleman was devoted to her religion and died at the radical pacifist Catholic Worker community in New York in 1974. |
