She was the eldest of two daughters born to Etelka Bertha (née Surtees) Bell (1891–1974) and American diplomat Edward J.
[2] Her younger sister Virginia,[3][4] married (and later divorced) Sir Henry Ashley Clarke, the British Ambassador to Italy.
[8] From her mother's second marriage, she had a younger half-sister, Josephine Leishman Dodds,[9] who married Squadron Leader Hugh Glyn Laurence Arthur Brooking, the King's Messenger, in 1949.
[12] On her father's side, she was a grand-niece of the publisher James Gordon Bennett Jr. By the time she began attending Radcliffe College in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1937 to study Chinese history and French literature, she had lived in a dozen countries and spoke Italian, German, French, Japanese and Chinese.
Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis once sent her a note praising "the bright path you cut through an age where so few people have grace and imagination and the virtues of another time.
[13] Evangeline was referred to as "one of the best-dressed women in the world" and when she was pregnant in France, Christian Dior created a special set of maternity clothes for her.
"[13] On April 23, 1945, three days after his divorce from his first wife, Evangeline was married to David K. E. Bruce at the Lindsey Memorial Chapel in Boston.