Background
French was born in 1881 in Aurora, New York to Edward French, a professor at Wells College and Mary Wells French, the sister of the founder of Wells Fargo Henry Wells.
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Nora French
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When she was seven years old, her wealthy family moved to a ranch outside of Los Angeles, but within a few years they lost that property as a result of a devastating house fire and a failed fruit crop. Her writing career began in her teens, when she was published in local newspapers and magazines. In her early twenties she became engaged, off and on again, to Alan Hiley, a prosperous timber farmer.
Her ambivalence about conventional marriage poured into The Spanish Girl, her best known lyrics, a twenty-two poem chronicle of doomed love.
After their final break-up, French joined the Charles Lummis Arroyo Seco, a group of Los Angeles writers and poets who encouraged her to publish in Lummis" Out West magazine. French became involved with Henry Anderson Lafler, an assistant editor on The Argonaut, and moved to San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake.
She quickly made her place within bohemian intellectual circles and endured several unhappy affairs French grew more depressed and on Monday November 11, tried to kill herself unsuccessfully with a gunshot to the head
The bullet took off a lock of her hair, but Nora missed her mark due to her shaky hand.
Two days later, during the night of November 13–14, Nora ended her life in Sterling"s home (he was absent in San Francisco) by ingesting cyanide while Mistress Sterling slept beside her. Nora was twenty-six years old.
Although many of her poems celebrate the serenity of coastal landscape, others are less sanguine: they offer glimpses into the mind of a young woman torn between pressure to submit to social roles and longing to live creatively.
“All sensible people will ultimately be damned,” she said, but lack of stability also plagued her.
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Quotations: “All sensible people will ultimately be damned,”.
