Frances Winwar
Frances Winwar, born Francesca Vinciguerra in 1900 in Taormina, Sicily, was an Italian-American writer and biographer who made significant contributions to literature in the 20th century. Immigrating to the United States at the age of seven, she quickly adapted to her new environment and developed a passion for writing, publishing her first work in literary magazines during her teenage years. Winwar co-founded the Leonardo DaVinci Art School in 1923 and published her first novel, *The Ardent Flame*, in 1927, which required her to adopt the surname Winwar as an English equivalent of her Italian ancestry.
She gained acclaim with her biography *Poor Splendid Wings: The Rossettis and Their Circle* in 1933, showcasing her ability to blend literary biography with diverse historical insights. Throughout her career, Winwar wrote several other biographies, covering notable figures such as Lord Byron and Oscar Wilde, though her style gradually fell out of favor in the face of more scholarly approaches. Apart from her biographical works, she authored fiction, including *Gallows Hill*, centered on the Salem witch trials, and worked as a translator. Winwar's academic engagement included teaching positions and lectures at various institutions, and she was married three times before her death in 1985. Her diverse body of work reflects her deep connection to literary history and her cultural heritage.
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Frances Winwar
Author
- Born: May 3, 1900
- Birthplace: Taormina, Sicily, Italy
- Died: July 24, 1985
- Place of death: Tampa, Florida
Biography
Frances Winwar was born Francesca Vinciguerra in 1900 in Taormina, Sicily, Italy, the daughter of Domenico and Giovanna Vinciguerra. The Vinciguerra family traced its ancestry back to the thirteenth century, and Winwar’s early years in Italy were steeped with the history and traditions of the Ionian Sea region. Her family immigrated to the United States when Winwar was seven years old and settled in New York City. Here, Winwar attended public schools, where she quickly picked up English. She developed an interest in writing after her work was published in a school magazine and she received the encouragement of teachers. After completing secondary school, Winwar attended Hunter College (later known as the City University of New York) and Columbia University.
By age eighteen, Winwar was sending her work to literary magazines. She was published in the Masses and the Freeman, and her work for the latter publication caught the attention of writer Laurence Stallings. He hired Winwar to regularly review books for his publication, the New York World. In 1923, Winwar cofounded the Leonardo DaVinci Art School, where she served as executive secretary for many years. Two years after the school’s founding, she married Bernard D. N. Grebanier, with whom she had a son, Francis.
Her first novel, The Ardent Flame, was published in 1927, two years before Winwar became a naturalized citizen of the United States. This novel was a fictionalized account of the life of Francesca da Rimini, a Florentine woman whom the poet Dante portrayed in his Divine Comedy (1307-1321). Its publication necessitated the change in her name from Vinciguerra to Winwar, the literal English translation of her Italian surname.
Her biography Poor Splendid Wings: The Rossettis and Their Circle, published in 1933, brought her acclaim and a $5,000 prize from the Atlantic Monthly, awarded primarily for her ability to imbue a literary biography with a vast and varied array of information. The success of this work spawned several other books in the same genre, including The Romantic Rebels, about the poets Lord Byron, John Keats, and Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Farewell the Banner: “Three Persons and One Soul”—Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Dorothy, about Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William and Dorothy Wordsworth. In between these two biographical accounts, she also published a work of fiction, Gallows Hill, about the Salem witch trials.
In the decades that followed, she continued to produce literary biographies, covering subjects such as Oscar Wilde, Walt Whitman, and Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. However, her sweeping historical style and tendency to fictionalize her material fell out of favor as more solid, academic biographies emerged in popularity. Winworth herself joined the ranks of academia when she became a visiting professor at the University of Kansas City in 1942, and also she lectured at various universities and societies. She divorced Grebanier to marry her second husband, Richard Wilson Webb, in 1943. She eventually divorced Webb as well, marrying her third husband, F. D. Lazenby, in 1949.
Winwar also worked as a translator, producing a version of Decameron (1349-1351) by Giovanni Boccaccio for The Modern Library and libretti for various operas. She died in 1985.