Jeanne Robert Foster

 

Born: 10 March 1879 in Johnsburg, New York.

Died: 22 September 1970.

 

 

Jeanne Robert Foster née Olivier was an American poet from the Adirondack Mountains. She was born Julia Elizabeth Oliver in Johnsburg, New York.

 

In 1896 she married Matlack Foster, and lived in Rochester, New York. She studied drama at the Stanhope-Wheatcroft Dramatic School, and worked in magazine journalism. She became a leading fashion model. The couple then moved to Boston where she continued to work as a journalist there and in New York, becoming literary editor of the American Review of Reviews.

 

On 10 June 1915, Aleister Crowley met Jeanne in the company of her friend Helen Westley; Jeanne was thirty-six when they met. Crowley would have affairs with both women, dubbing them with the theriomorphic names of The Cat and The Snake, drawn from the Egyptian gods Pasht and Apophis.

 

When she and Crowley met it was love at first sight. He asked if she might critique his recent writings and help him improve his prose. Jeanne suggested they meet for tea at her club the next afternoon. By the end of tea time, Crowley felt he new her intimately. Bidding her farewell Crowley said "So, you are tied to this old satyr who snatched you from the cradle. And where does that leave me?"  "I loved you at first sight" she replied, "As a spiritual brother." Then she kissed him and tea ended.

 

Jeanne was one of Crowley's great loves. Crowley wrote that "I saw my ideal incarnate . . . I really loved her with a love more exalted than aught in all my experience." She kept him waiting a month before consummating the liaison, probably something of a record for Crowley, who wrote in his Confessions; "I endured the torture of absence, of doubt, of despair, with all the might of my manhood."

 

It was indeed a serious relationship; they wrote love poetry to one another, and she considered divorcing her husband to marry Crowley. Crowley's plan was to have a his first male offspring with Jeanne. Jeanne assumed the office of Scarlet Woman in his magical workings, choosing Hilarion as her mystic name. I late September Crowley tried to beget a child by her and—as evidenced in the final poems of The Golden Rose (the unpublished sonnet cycle chronicling their affair)—he believed he had succeeded, but, she did not get pregnant.

 

In early October Crowley set out for a tour of the West Coast, followed by Jeanne, who had 'decided to spice the romance and adventure by taking her husband in tow.' They took a side trip to Vancouver, where Crowley visited Charles Stansfeld Jones, a member of the AA and the Ordo Templi Orientis.

 

They parted in California; on Crowley's return to New York he learned that she had dropped him. He felt the loss acutely. He had been certain she had conceived his child, later writing that 'I did not know that I was attempting a physical impossibility.'

 

Crowley regained his emotional equilibrium, dismissing the affair as an illusion, and Jeanne Foster as deceitful. Five years later he wrote: "I have not been in love since 1915. . . Did she really 'break my heart'?"

 

In 1916 she began to publish narrative verse about the Adirondacks. From this period she traveled in Europe, met important figures of modernism, and co-operated with the collector John Quinn in building up his contemporary art collection. After Quinn's death in 1924 Jeanne helped prepare the collection of his letters that became the John Quinn Memorial Collection at the New York Public Library. The collection includes an extensive correspondence with Joseph Conrad.

 

In 1932 she moved to Schenectady, where she worked as a social worker.

 

She is buried near her friend John Butler Yeats, the painter and father of William Butler Yeats, in the Chestertown Rural Cemetery in the Adirondacks. Her own papers can be found in the Jeanne R. Foster-William M. Murphy Collection at the New York Public Library and at Harvard University's Houghton Library, which holds her correspondence with poet and author Ezra Pound.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jeanne Foster - "Nude on

Couch" - J.J. Henner

 

 

Portrait by John Butler

Yeats - 1917

 

 

 

 

 

 

Portrait by John Butler

Yeats - 1919

 

"A Winter Promenade"

Illustration from The

Harrison Fischer Book

1907-08