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Elizabeth Seelman Kingsley was born Hannah Elizabeth Seelman, on October 09, 1871 in New York City, New York, United States, the daughter of Maurice Seelman and Elizabeth Paris. At a young age she displayed an aptitude for solving scrambled-word puzzles in children's magazines.
Elizabeth graduated from Girls High School in Brooklyn. Thereafter she attended Wellesley College, where she earned the degree of Bachelor of Arts in English literature in 1898. In 1905 she received the Master of Arts degree from New York University.
Elizabeth Kingsley taught English at Girls High School from 1900 to 1914. Later she moved to Boston, Massachusetts, where she started to work for the Boston publishing house of Houghton Mifflin and serve as a faculty member of the Babson Institute at Wellesley Hills. In 1926, Kingsley returned to Brooklyn, where she held secretarial and clerical jobs for the next eight years. Not long after her return to Brooklyn, she was introduced to the crossword puzzle, which was then at the height of its popularity, by a niece. After completing the puzzle, Kingsley remarked, "How futile. It's fun, but what's the good?" Although she was not caught up in the crossword puzzle craze, an idea had been planted that would germinate years later.
In the early 1930's Kingsley, who remained active in Wellesley alumnae affairs throughout her life, attended a class reunion and was appalled to find the undergraduates reading James Joyce and Gertrude Stein in preference to the more traditional masters of English and American literature. To counter this trend, she conceived the idea of creating a puzzle with a goal, one that, she said, "stimulated the imagination and heightened an appreciation by reviewing classical English and American poet and prose masters. " The result was the invention of the Double-Crostic.
The Double-Crostic is part crossword puzzle, part acrostic, and part anagram. The reader begins by figuring out word definitions that are to be written out over numbered dashes--there is a numbered dash for each letter of the defined word. The letters of the defined words are then transferred to the corresponding numbered squares in a pattern resembling the crossword puzzle. If all the words in the puzzle are correctly defined by the reader, the crossword puzzle pattern will give a quotation from an author's work. The first letter of each properly defined word forms an acrostic giving the author's name and the title of the work from which the quotation was taken. Within six months Kingsley had constructed 100 Double-Crostics.
Early in 1934, at the suggestion of a friend, she submitted a portfolio of her puzzles to Amy Loveman of the Saturday Review. Four days later the magazine contracted with her for a series of Double-Crostics. The first puzzle appeared in the issue for March 31, 1934, and the Double-Crostic quickly became one of the most popular weekly features in the magazine. Besides appearing each week in the Saturday Review, Kingsley's Double-Crostics were run every second week in the New York Times magazine, and beginning in 1934 two volumes of Double-Crostics were published each year in paperback by Simon and Schuster. The popularity of the Double-Crostic permitted Kingsley to give up other work and to devote herself to producing puzzles.
She began by selecting a quotation. This was broken down into its component letters, which were put on standard anagram blocks and placed in a box compartmentalized for each letter of the alphabet. Selecting the first letters of her acrostic, she would arrange them in a column. Then she would use the remaining letters to form the words to be guessed by the reader. It was estimated that Kingsley used more than 50, 000 words for her definitions, but the only references she consulted were the Oxford Companion to English Literature, the Oxford Companion to American Literature, Shakespeare, Charles Gayley's Classic Myths, a Bible with concordance, Webster's New International Dictionary, and dictionaries of synonyms and of American slang. After illness forced Kingsley to give up her column in 1951, her longtime associate, Doris Nash Wortman, then took over construction of the puzzles.
Kingsley was a member of the Boston Ethical Culture Society and of the Brooklyn Ethical Culture Society.
Kingsley married Clarence Darwin Kingsley, a teacher, in 1914. They had no children. Her husband died in 1926.
