Elisabeth Marbury (June 19, 1856 – January 22, 1933)[1] was a pioneering American theatrical and literary agent and producer who helped shape business methods of the modern commercial theater, and encouraged women to enter that industry.

Since 1892, Marbury had been living openly in a lesbian relationship with Elsie de Wolfe (later known as Lady Mendl), a prominent socialite and famous interior decorator.

She was reputedly a descendant of Calvinist Anne Hutchinson (née Marbury), who co-founded Rhode Island after her banishment from Massachusetts Bay Colony.

Marbury never married, but lived openly for more than 20 years with Elsie de Wolfe in what many observers accepted as a lesbian relationship,[2][3][4] first at Irving House and then at 13 Sutton Place.

Marbury's clients ranged from the French Academy of Letters to playwrights Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw; to the dance team of Vernon and Irene Castle.

Marbury and de Wolfe discovered their careers amid the amateur theatrical performances in high society in late Victorian New York.

In 1888 she persuaded Frances Hodgson Burnett, who had written a dramatic version of her best-selling Little Lord Fauntleroy, to hire her as business manager and agent.

[citation needed] In 1891, Marbury traveled to France, and for 15 years she was the representative in the English-speaking market for playwright Victorien Sardou and the other members of the Société des Gens de Lettres, including Georges Feydeau, Edmond Rostand, Ludovic Halévy, and Jean Richepin.

Marbury's other successes include bringing Vernon and Irene Castle, whom she had seen on one of her innumerable trips to Paris, to New York in 1913 and setting them up in a fashionable dancing school that was the springboard for their brief but spectacularly popular career.

Elizabeth convinced Miss Morgan to purchase the Villa Trianon in the town of Versailles, where the trio held court with Europe's elite and entertained with George Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde, two clients she represented theatrically in New York and London.

On the domestic front, Marbury was instrumental in assisting her romantic partner, Elsie de Wolfe, in creating a career in interior decoration and in 1903 restoring Villa Trianon in Versailles, France, where she, de Wolfe, and Anne Tracy Morgan (youngest child of the powerful financier, J.P. Morgan) held court and became noted hostesses, affectionately referred to as "The Versailles Triumvirate".

This same coterie would go on to create the exclusive neighborhood of Sutton Place, along Manhattan's East River, which prompted gossip papers of the 1920s to loudly whisper of an "Amazon Enclave".