Eliot Bliss

Eliot Bliss (12 June 1903 – 10 December 1990) was a Jamaican-born English novelist and poet of Anglo-Irish descent, whose literary friendships encompassed Anna Wickham, Dorothy Richardson, Jean Rhys, Romer Wilson and Vita Sackville-West.

Life Eliot Bliss was born as Eileen Norah Lees Bliss in Kingston, Jamaica on June 12, 1903 to Eva Lees and Captain John Plomer Bliss, an officer in the West Indian Regiment of the British Army. Her first novel, Saraband, was published in 1931 with the help of Patience Ross, a poet and literary agent who would become Bliss' friend and lover. She lived as a companion for over half a century with Patricia Allan-Burns, an artist, in Bishop's Stortford, Hertfordshire, where she died in 1990. Allan-Burns disposed of her literary estate, the Bliss Collections, in three stages to the McFarlin Library at the University of Tulsa.

The papers of Eliot Bliss (diaries 1959–1980) are held at the McFarlin Library at the University of Tulsa. They consist of "19 volumes of daily diaries dating from January 1959 to December 1960, and January 1963 to August 1980. Additional notes, correspondence, poems, photographs and sales receipts are laid into many of the diaries, all of which have been noted in the inventory and... in 'Notes on my Diaries', written by Bliss."