FAY FAMILY

The Fay family papers consist mainly of the personal correspondence of Amy Fay, a pianist and the first president of the Women's Philharmonic Society of New York, and of her two nieces, the actress Amy Fay Stone and her sister, Margaret Stone Wright.

Born in 1844 in Bayou Goula, Louisiana, Amy Fay was the third of six daughters and the fifth of nine children of the Rev. Charles Fay and Emily (Hopkins) Fay of Louisiana and St. Albans, Vermont. She studied piano under Professor John Knowles Paine of Harvard and at the New England Conservatory of Music. From 1869 to 1875, she continued her lessons in Germany, where she studied with the most prominent teachers of Europe: pianists Tausig, Kullak, Liszt, and Deppe. Deppe's technique for piano study revolutionized AF's playing and served as the method she herself was to use for her students in the years to come. On returning to Boston, AF became well known for her piano "conversations" (recitals preceded by short lectures). She moved to Chicago and New York, where she was associated with the Women's Philharmonic Society of New York. She died in 1928.

Amy (Amie) Fay Stone, daughter of Amy Fay's sister, Katherine Maria (Fay), and of William Eben Stone, was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on July 13, 1888. She was a special student at Radcliffe College in 1908-1911. AFS began her career as an actress at the Castle Square Stock Company in Cambridge, using the stage name of Anne Faystone. She travelled with Minnie Maddern Fiske's company and later with John Drew and other contemporary stars. Although her father did not consider the stage respectable, her earnings from the theatre were supplemented with an allowance from her family throughout the early years and on and off throughout her life.

In 1915, she met John D. Williams, a producer and director; her friend and lover for years, he introduced her to the literary and fashionable society of New York. Her efforts to establish herself as an actress were interrupted by bouts of tuberculosis in 1916 and again in 1925. Amy Fay Stone died at Fisher's Island, New York, on July 13, 1953.

Margaret ("Margot") Stone, mother of Sylvia (Wright) Mitarachi, was born on July 19, 1886. She attended the Buckingham School in Cambridge, took courses at Radcliffe College, studied French in Paris and Brussels, and was trained as a pianist. On November 14, 1912, she married a neighbor, Austin Tappan Wright, a Harvard Law School graduate who later taught at the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Pennsylvania. After ATW's death in an automobile accident in 1931, MSW returned to Cambridge with her four children and worked as a secretary at the Browne and Nichols Lower School; during this time she typed the manuscript of ATW's novel, Islandia (New York and Toronto, 1942). She died in England on September 1, 1937.

From the guide to the Papers, 1800-1953, (Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute)