Rose Cleveland

Rose Elizabeth Cleveland (June 13, 1846 – November 22, 1918) was the First Lady during the first of the two administrations of her brother, U.S. President Grover Cleveland. She was the 27th First Lady.

Biography

Rose Cleveland came to take up the job when her elder brother won the presidency and lived in the White House for two years.

When President Cleveland married Frances Folsom, Rose resigned and began a career in education. She 'became the principal of the Collegiate Institute of Lafayette, Indiana, a writer and lecturer, and the editor of the Chicago-based magazine "Literary Life".Lillian Faderman, "Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America", Penguin Books Ltd, 1991, page 32] '

At age 44, she started a lesbian relationship with a wealthy widow, Evangeline Simpson, with explicitly erotic correspondence. However things cooled off when Evangeline married an Episcopal Bishop of Minnesota, Henry Benjamin Whipple . By 1910, he died and the two women rekindled their relationship and eventually moved to Bagni di Lucca, Italy [to live there together with a third woman, the Anglo-Danish artist and illustrator Nelly Erichsen] . Rose and Nelly died in the same week in the 1918 Spanish influenza outbreak which swept Europe after WW1 when the 3 women were running a refuge school. The 2 were buried in the England cemetery there, and Evangeline was buried with them both 12 years later.

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