Elizabeth Wade White

Elizabeth Wade White (June 8, 1906 – December 11, 1994) was an American writer, poet, and activist. She was a lover of Valentine Ackland and wrote The Life of Anne Bradstreet: The Tenth Muse, about the early American poet and first American writer to be published in the Thirteen Colonies.

Early life Elsie Rowland Chase (1863–1937). Mary Wade White in the 1920s

Elizabeth Wade White was born at 107 Prospect Street, Waterbury, Connecticut, the first child of William Henry White (1876–1952) and Mary Elizabeth Wade (1878–1949). She had one brother, Henry Wade White (1909–1995). Her paternal grandfather was George Luther White (1852–1914), one of the leading American paper box manufacturers and a stockholder of White & Wells and L.C. White Co. His estate amounted to half a million dollars which, at the time of his wife's death, Julia Phelps Haring (1852–1928), became $1.67 million ($ in dollars). Her maternal grandfather was Henry Lawton Wade (1842–1912), a stockholder of the Waterbury Clock Company who left $1.75 million ($ in dollars) to his two daughters, Lucy and Mary, Elizabeth's mother. The Wade and White families descended from the Puritans who migrated to New England in the 1630s.

William Henry White (1876–1952)'s house, Breakneck Hill, Middlebury, Connecticut. The house was sold at Will White's death and razed down.

The Whites were well-off and in addition to the Prospect Street house they owned a country house at Breakneck Hill, Middlebury, Connecticut (overlooking Waterbury, only 6 miles from Prospect Street),

Between 1937 and 1938, White traveled many times to Spain, while her parents urged her to return to the United States.

White was a supporter of John Craske, a painter friend of Ackland. For this reason she was in contact with Peter Pears, who was collecting Craske's works, and she donated her papers about the artists to the Aldeburgh Festival Archive (now part of the Britten-Pears Library).

In 1939 White met Evelyn Virginia Holahan (August 28, 1905 – May 27, 1985) and they later shared an apartment in Greenwich Village. Holahan was originally from Rochester, New York, and moved to New York City to work at Benton & Bowles, an advertising agency. Holahan's older sister was Elizabeth Holahan, a famous interior decorator with several historical restorations in New York State to her credit; her younger sister was aspiring actress Annie Holahan. She met Ackland in Dorset, where Holahan arrived to retrieve her sister, who had followed Llewelyn Powys, British novelist and essayist, and Ackland's neighbor, to England. From the correspondence between Holahan and Ackland, it appears that they were having an affair at the time. In May 1939 White accompanied Ackland to the New York pier after a visit, and there White met Holahan. At the end of 1945, White moved back to Middlebury, living at "The Patch", the house her grandmother, Martha Starkweather Wade, left her. Holahan, who would become her life partner, moved in with her. At the end of the 1940s, Holahan and White founded "White & Holahan, Books", a rare and used book business they ran from their home. In 1985 her companion Holahan died and White continued to live at "The Patch" till her own death. White graduated in 1953; her thesis, "The Life of Anne Bradstreet: The Tenth Muse", was published in 1971.

White died on December 11, 1994, and is buried at Middlebury Cemetery, Middlebury, together with Evelyn Holahan.