I.A.R. Wylie

(1885 - 1959)

Born in Melbourne, Ida Alexa Ross Wylie moved to London in 1911 and became a suffragette. Six years later she moved to the United States with her partner Rachel Barrett, a newspaper editor, and the two went on a cross-country road trip from New York to San Francisco. She became a prolific writer, and more than thirty of her novels and short stories were made into movies, including a film adaptation of her 1942 novel Keeper of the Flame starring Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. She later moved to a farm near Princeton, New Jersey, with two doctors: her partner, S. Josephine Baker, and Louise Pearce.