Background
After the death of her father, she left home and married her childhood sweetheart Oliver Filley.
After the death of her father, she left home and married her childhood sweetheart Oliver Filley.
Sarah Wilkinson came from a middle-class family and attended the Emma Willard School in Troy, New New York
They returned to New York in 1908, where she started work as a theatre critic with the New York Tribune and as a freelance contributor to the National Geographic Society. At this time she changed her name to Solita Solano. In 1919, Solano got to know the journalist Janet Flanner in Greenwich Village with whom she started a relationship.
In 1921 they travelled to Greece, where Janet was to work on a report for the "National Geographic" on Constantinople.
Solano had three books published, and as they were not very successful, returned to journalism. In 1922, they travelled to France, and in Paris they joined the intellectuel-lesbian circle of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Natalie Clifford Barney, Romaine Brooks and Djuna Barnes.
The affair lasted several years, though Anderson remained living with Leblanc. While in Paris, Janet Flanner started writing, under the Pseudonym Genêt, the Letter from Paris, for The New Yorker.
After the outbreak of World World War II Solano and Flanner returned to New New York
A few years later Solano left Flanner after Flanner started an affair with Natalia Danesi Murray. Meanwhile Solano fell in love with Elizabeth Jenks Clark. Margaret Anderson got to know Clark through Solano after Clark returned to the United States. During the 1930s and 40s, Solano studied with G. I. Gurdjieff, and for a while acted as his secretary.
Her notes of Gurdjieff’s meetings with The Rope are a remarkable record of his personality and method.
After the war Solano returned to France, where she died at the age of 87.
She was a member of a key Gurdjieff group known as “The Rope,” to which Jane Heap, Margaret Anderson, and Kathryn Hulme also belonged. After Gurdjieff’s death in 1949, Solano became the focal point for members of The Rope until her own death.
