Partner Alice Mary Longfellow
Queer Places:
Oak Hill Cemetery, 4 Brown St, Newburyport, MA 01950, United States
Frances "Fanny" Coolidge Stone (July 27, 1851 – December 26, 1931) was born on July 28, 1851, in Newburyport, Massachusetts, to Harriet and Eben Francis Stone. Her father
was a prominent Massachusetts politician, lawyer, and Civil War veteran who served as a Republican state senator and later represented Massachusetts's 7th district in the
U.S. House of Representatives from 1881 to 1887.
During the 1880s, while her father was in Congress, Fanny moved to Washington, D.C., where she served as his personal secretary. Throughout her life, she maintained a strong interest in American politics and social events, as evidenced by her extensive correspondence with close contacts in Massachusetts.
Fanny Stone spent several decades of her life in an intimate romantic friendship with Alice Mary Longfellow, a preservationist, philanthropist, co-founder/administrator of Radcliffe College, and the eldest daughter of renowned poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
Beginning around 1875, Fanny joined Alice and the Longfellow family at their summer home in Nahant, Massachusetts. Over the decades, the two women took camping trips together, vacationed at places like Squam Lake, and traveled together to Europe well into the 1910s.
Dozens of intimate letters—particularly from the 1880s while Fanny was living in Washington, D.C.—are preserved at the Longfellow House–Washington's Headquarters National Historic Site in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In her letters, Fanny expressed deep affection and longing, writing phrases such as: "You have been in my thoughts all day and I have a real longing to be with you... I am afraid I am getting to care for you almost too much."
Neither Fanny Stone nor Alice Longfellow ever married. When Alice passed away in 1928, Fanny was the only person outside of the immediate Longfellow family to whom Alice left a financial bequest in her will.
Historiography and archival studies by public historians and the National Park Service interpret the relationship between Fanny Stone and Alice Longfellow as a prime example of late 19th- and early 20th-century same-sex partnerships (often historically referred to as "Boston marriages"):
The Alice Mary Longfellow Papers at the Longfellow House–Washington's Headquarters National Historic Site document how Alice and Fanny carved out independence, emotional fulfillment, and lifelong companionship within the social networks of gilded-age New England and Washington, D.C.
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