Stone, Grace Zaring (1896–1991)

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Stone, Grace Zaring (1896–1991)

American novelist. Name variations: (pseudonym) Ethel Vance. Born on January 9, 1896, in New York City; died on September 29, 1991, in Mystic, Connecticut; daughter of Charles Wesley Zaring (a lawyer) and Grace (Owen) Zaring; great-granddaughter of Socialist reformer Robert Owen; educated at Catholic schools and the Isadora Duncan School of Dancing in Paris, France; married Ellis S. Stone (a naval officer), in 1917; children: daughter Eleanor Stone Perényi, later Baroness Perényi.

Selected writings:

Letters to a Djinn (1922); The Heaven and Earth of Doña Elena (1929); The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1930); The Almond Tree (1931); The Cold Journey (1934); Escape (1939); Reprisal (1942); Winter Meeting (1946); The Secret Thread (1949); The Grotto (1951); Althea (1962); Dear Deadly Cara (1968).

Grace Zaring Stone was born in 1896 in New York City to Charles Wesley Zaring and Grace Owen Zaring , who died giving birth to her. Stone originally sought a career in music and was a student of dance at the Isadora Duncan School of Dancing in Paris. However, her service with the British Red Cross during World War I and her 1917 marriage to a naval officer permanently halted those ambitions. Her husband's postings took them all over the world, including Europe, Asia, and the South Seas, and she began writing in the course of their travels.

Stone wrote her first book, Letters to a Djinn, in 1922, although later she rarely acknowledged this effort and credited The Heaven and Earth of Doña Elena (1929) as her first novel. This historical romance about a Spanish nun was written after two years in the West Indies. Her third novel, The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1930), was written following a trip to China. A bestseller about an American missionary who is captured by a seductive Chinese war-lord in Shanghai, it was made into a movie starring Barbara Stanwyck in 1932 and had the distinction of being the first film shown in the famed Radio City Music Hall in New York City.

Two of Stone's other novels also became movies, including a 1940 cinematic version of her most famous work, Escape (1939), starring Norma Shearer and Robert Taylor, and Winter Meeting (1946), which became a star vehicle for Bette Davis in 1948. The former was one of two anti-Nazi novels she wrote under the pseudonym "Ethel Vance" to protect both her husband, who was a military attaché in France during World War II, and her daughter, Eleanor (Perényi) , who was living in occupied Czechoslovakia as Baroness Perényi. Escape was a mystery thriller about a German actress who receives a death sentence from the Nazis. Three years later Stone published her second anti-Nazi work, Reprisal, about a Nazi-occupied village in Brittany. Although Ethel Vance's true identity was revealed in 1942, Stone also used the pseudonym for two of her later novels, the aforementioned Winter Meeting and The Secret Thread.

After her husband's retirement, Stone continued traveling, hosting impressive literary salons in Rome and New York that boasted such notables as Robert Lowell, Gore Vidal, and Mary McCarthy . She was named a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in Great Britain and was elected to the Council of the Authors League in 1956. A longtime resident of Stonington, Connecticut, she died in a nursing home in nearby Mystic on September 29, 1991.