Clare Benedict

She spent much of her life in Europe, travelling with her aunt, the writer Constance Fenimore Woolson (1840–1894), later with her mother Clara (1844–1923), visiting places, attending festivals, concerts and theatrical performances.

[1] Clare Benedict was a gifted writer, who published collections of tales, A Resemblance: And Other Stories (1909), XII (1921), and other books like European Backgrounds (1912), The little lost Prince (1912), The Divine Spark (1913) on Wagner, Six Months, March to August, 1914 (1914), a personal account of the months leading up to the war, and, Five Generations: 1785–1923 (1930), consisting of the three volumes Voices Out of the Past, Constance Fenimore Woolson, and The Benedicts Abroad.

After World War I, she started to support the Schillerstiftung in Weimar with generous gifts of food for needy writers (and was made an honorary member in 1923).

She helped to create the "James Fenimore Cooper Stipendien-Fonds" in 1952, to support the study of Anglo-Saxon language, literature and culture, by giving the sum of US$20'000, equivalent to about US$164'000 in 2010; and on her death in 1961 she bequeathed part of her library to the department.

Among the 1154 items, which cover a wide range of topics, there are first editions of works by Fenimore Cooper and Henry James, collections of newspaper clippings on Henry Irving and George Meredith, playbills of the performances Clare Benedict had seen all over Europe, musical scores, editions of Anglophone classics, guides to (mainly) Italian towns and churches, biographies, and publications that had been given to Clare Benedict.