Theodora Keogh

Theodora Roosevelt Keogh O'Toole Rauchfuss (June 30, 1919 – January 5, 2008) was an American novelist writing under her first married name, Theodora Keogh, in the 1950s and 1960s. She was the eldest of three daughters born to Grace Lockwood and Archibald Bulloch Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt's third son. Archie Roosevelt served in the Army in World War II and received the Silver Star. He later was chairman of Roosevelt & Cross, a Wall Street investment firm. Theodora's mother was Grace Lockwood, daughter of Thomas Lockwood and Emmeline Stackpole of Boston. Theodora was the eldest of three siblings.

Theodora was brought up on the Upper East Side of New York, near the East River, and in the country at Cold Spring Harbor near Oyster Bay. She attended Chapin School and Radcliffe College, In 1945, she gave up dancing when she married Tom Keogh, a costumer, and moved to Paris. In France, Tom Keogh designed for the theater and the ballet and worked as an illustrator for Vogue magazine. He designed costumes for such films as The Pirate (1948) with Judy Garland and Daddy Long Legs (1955) with Leslie Caron. Through the couple's friendships in Paris, Theodora became connected with writers and editors for the Paris Review, including George Plimpton and Peter Matthiessen, co-founders of the Review; Scottish novelist Alexander Trocchi; the poet Christopher Logue; and Alabama poet and screenwriter Eugene Walter. In her later life, Theodora played down her Roosevelt connections as she wanted her writings and her talents to be judged on their own merits. Her novels tend to focus on characters with psychological conflicts, and often with dark sides to their personalities. In this regard, her themes are similar to those of novelist Patricia Highsmith, most noted for Strangers on a Train and The Talented Mr. Ripley. Like Highsmith, she created characters who seemed quite normal on the surface and in relation to the social conventions of their day, but who had another side to their lives and their identities. Her novels were largely neglected after the 1960s but were rediscovered and reissued by Olympia Press during 2002–2007. The attention to her work after about thirty to forty years of dormancy brought both surprise and delight to Theodora in the final years of her life.

Theodora moved to Caldwell County, in the western mountains of North Carolina where she became friends with the wife of Arthur Alfred Rauchfuss (1921–1989), owner of a chemical plant. The Rauchfusses eventually divorced, and then in 1979, Arthur Rauchfuss and Keogh were married.

Ten years later, Arthur Rauchfuss died. After his death, Keogh spent the last years of her life in North Carolina, in a house in the woods with cats and chickens. Mass Market Paperback version published in 1956 was titled "Meg: The Secret Life of an Awakening Girl". The Double Door (1952) Street Music (1952) The Tattooed Heart (1953) The Fascinator (1954) My Name Is Rose (1956) The Fetish (1959); published in America under the title of The Mistress Gemini (1961) The Other Girl (1962)