Elinor Wylie, narcissists, silver & wants

The season for glamour (and better questions)

Elinor Wylie favored silver. Arms and neck draped in silver jewelry, homes decorated with silver candelabras and furnishings. The silver choices were to effect: Acquaintances spoke of her “frosty brilliance” and Wylie herself wrote of her poems as “brittle and bright and metallic.” She called her favorite silver dress by designer Paul Poiret her armor against the world. When she died on December 16, 1928, Wylie, an international literary celebrity, was buried in that silver dress.

In seven years of serious writing, Elinor Wylie produced four volumes of poetry and four novels. Her work was both popular and acclaimed, praised by Yeats and Faulkner, championed by Edna St. Vincent Millay and discussed in literary journals. She won important prizes, gave readings, lectured students. But as her contemporaries died, Wylie’s reputation waned.

“Why had Elinor Wylie been neglected?” Judith Farr asked in her 1983 biography, The Life and Art of Elinor Wylie:

“This desire to create beauty and to embody it was both praised and held against her; at its worst it resulted in paranoid tantrums when her efforts fell short of expectation, and at its best it emerged, transfigured, in her art.”