Fanny Ronalds

Mary Frances Ronalds RRC DStJ (née Carter; August 23, 1839 – July 28, 1916) was an American socialite and amateur singer who is best known for her long affair with the composer Arthur Sullivan in London in the last decades of the nineteenth century and for her musical salons.

At one magnificent ball that she gave in the early 1860s, Ronalds famously appeared dressed "as Music, in a white satin gown embroidered with bars from Verdi's Un ballo in maschera", wearing a harp-shaped, illuminated crown.

Her hair was a dark shade of brown – châtain foncé [deep chestnut] – and very abundant... a lovely woman, with the most generous smile one could possibly imagine, and the most beautiful teeth.

[6] She often visited their home in Newport, Rhode Island, and when Mrs. Jerome moved to Paris with her daughters, Ronalds followed, taking her younger children.

[1] There, noted for her beauty and social talents, she joined the court circles of the pleasure-loving Empress Eugénie and Napoleon III.

[1][5][10] With the faltering of the Second Empire as unrest grew in France, her opportunities there collapsed, and Ronalds moved with her children to Tunis in 1869.

There she became a partner in a farm near Sidi Thabet with Ferdinand Veillet-Devaux, the Count de Sancy; after some legal troubles, the venture ended in 1875.

[19] The 1999 biographical film Topsy-Turvy depicts Sullivan and Ronalds discussing an abortion at around the time of the production of The Mikado.

[20] Sullivan had a roving eye, and his diary records the occasional quarrel when one of his many other liaisons was discovered, but he always returned to Ronalds.

[23] Ronalds was an excellent and much admired singer, using her voice for good causes since her days in New York, when she gave concerts in aid of Civil War troops; later "in Paris she was known as the "Patti des Salons".

[30] In 1899 when the Boer War broke out, Ronalds was elected treasurer of an American ladies' effort to finance a hospital ship, the RFA Maine, to be sent to South Africa.