Ella Winter

Leonore (Ella) Sophie Winter Steffens Stewart (1888–1980) was an Australian-British journalist and activist.

Her parents were Freda Lust and Adolph Wertheimer from Nuremberg (Nürnberg) in Germany, who lived in London, Melbourne, Australia and again in London, when they changed their name to Winter (around 1910). Their children Rudolph, Rosa and Eleanora (Ella) were born in Melbourne. Frederick Wertham was a relative. She studied at the London School of Economics in England.

She met the U.S. journalist and 'muckraker' Lincoln Steffens at the Versailles Conference, where she was secretary to US Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter. Winter and Steffens married in 1924. They moved to Italy, where their son, Peter, was born in San Remo.

Two years later, they settled in Carmel, California, where their friends and neighbors included photographer Edward Weston, poet Robinson Jeffers, philosopher/mythologist Joseph Campbell, dancer/choreographer Jean Erdman, nutritionist/author Adelle Davis, poet George Sterling, short story writer/poet Clark Ashton Smith, marine biologist/ecologist Ed Ricketts and novelists John Steinbeck and Henry Miller.

She wrote her first book, Red Virtue, after visiting the Soviet Union. Her autobiography, And Not to Yield, was published in 1963. Lincoln Steffens died in Carmel in 1936. In 1939, Winter married the screenwriter and humorist Donald Ogden Stewart and became stepmother to his sons, Donald and Ames. They lived in California and then in Hampstead, London (which the New York Times obituary misspelled as 'Hamstead').[1]

Bibliography

Notes

  1. Cook, Joan (August 5, 1980). "Ella Winter Stewart, Journalist and Widow Of Donald O. Stewart; Was War Correspondent Back After 17 Years.". New York Times. Retrieved 2008-04-18. Ella Winter Stewart, a journalist and the widow of Donald Ogden Stewart, who died Saturday, died of a stroke early today at her home in Hamstead, London. She was 82 years old.

Further reading