Background
Boulton was born in 1893 in London, England, the daughter of Cecil Maud (Williams) and Edward William Boulton, an artist. She grew up in Philadelphia and later in West Point Pleasant, New Jersey.
Boulton was born in 1893 in London, England, the daughter of Cecil Maud (Williams) and Edward William Boulton, an artist. She grew up in Philadelphia and later in West Point Pleasant, New Jersey.
Boulton met O"Neill in the fall of 1917 in the Golden Swan Saloon, better known as The Hell Hole, in Greenwich Village. O"Neill, at the time, was considered a promising author of one-act plays. She gave birth to Shane O"Neill in 1919 and Oona O"Neill in 1925.
The Boulton/O"Neill marriage has been studied and written about by William Davies King, professor of theater at University of California Santa Barbara, in "Another Participant of a Long Story: Literary Traces of Eugene O"Neill and Agnes Boulton" (Michigan 2010).
Her daughter, Oona O"Neill, married Charlie Chaplin in 1943 at the age of 18 (he was 54), and moved to Switzerland with him nine years later, renouncing her American citizenship. The memoir gives a portrayal of an odd literary marriage at its inception.
A new and annotated version of that book was published by McFarland in 2011. A selection of her stories can be found on eOneill.com.
Contrary to the terms of the 1929 divorce settlement, Boulton had saved most of her letters to and from O"Neill, as well as some O"Neill manuscripts, including "Exorcism," a one-act play by O"Neill, which was thought to have been destroyed but had been given by Boulton to a friend, screenwriter-producer Philip Yordan.
lieutenant was published in the October 17, 2011 issue of The New Yorker. The O"Neill/Boulton correspondence was published in 2000 by Fairleigh Dickinson University Press in a volume called A Wind Is Rising. Boulton died on November 25, 1968 in West Point Pleasant, New Jersey.