FLEXNER, Anne Crawford

Born 27 June 1874, Georgetown, Kentucky; died 11 January 1955, New York, New York

Daughter of Louis G. and Susan Farnum Crawford; married Abraham Flexner, 1898; children: two daughters

After her graduation from Vassar College in 1895, Anne Crawford Flexner supported herself by tutoring for two years in Louisville, Kentucky, until she had saved enough money to go to New York City. There, she attended the theater regularly and began writing plays. After a two-year engagement, she married Abraham Flexner, a prominent educator. In his 1940 autobiography, he wrote of their union: "We agreed at the outset of our married life that her interest and work were as sacred as mine; and for over 40 years we have tried to respect each other's individuality and that of our two daughters." Encouraged by Flexner, her younger daughter Eleanor Flexner also became a writer and published books on American drama and the woman suffrage movement in America.

In 1901, Harrison Grey Fiske opened his Manhattan Theater with Flexner's first professionally produced play, Miranda of the Balcony, which featured Minnie Maddern Fiske in the title role. The New York Times review stated "Mrs. Flexner has written a strong emotional drama of modern style and the audience of last night was quick to recognize its value." This success enabled Flexner to obtain the rights to dramatize Alice Hegan Rice's Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch in 1904. Flexner took a number of liberties with the original plot in order to sustain a narrative line throughout the three-act play structure, but she preserved all the flavor of the novel in her sprightly, humorous dialogue and characterizations. It became Flexner's most frequently performed play.

The Marriage Game (1913) was set on a yacht during a three-day cruise, for which Flexner brought together three married couples and a charming "other woman," Mrs. Oliver, invited by one of the husbands who didn't realize the wives would be aboard. Flexner's flair for writing good dialogue and her unhackneyed treatment of a standard farcical situation lifted the play out of the ordinary. It is, however, rather heavy-handed in the manner in which Mrs. Oliver teaches the three wives all about marriage, about how they should work at their marriages as if they were jobs.

Aged 26, Flexner's last play, was produced in 1936. In the 17 years since her latest produced play, Flexner had traveled extensively in Europe with her husband. Her abiding interest in British literature is reflected in this interpretation of the romance of John Keats and Fanny Brawne. The action spans the year between the publication of Keats' Endymion and his departure for Italy, where he was to die six months later at age twenty-six. There is an artificial quality to the opening scene in which Keats, Byron, Shelley, Gifford, Lockhart, and Fanny's mother are all brought into the reception room of Keats' publisher. The audience is won over in subsequent scenes, however, by Flexner's deft characterization, and by dialogue in which even the incorporation of familiar lines from Keats's poetry is made to sound natural. Flexner departed from the traditional view of Fanny Brawne by treating her as sensitive and sincere in her love for Keats, even to the point that she spends the night with him on the eve of their separation. The sympathetic interpretation of her character was vindicated by the publication a few months later of Fanny Brawne's letters to Keats' sister.

Flexner's plays included comedy, mystery, and biographical drama. All Soul's Eve (1920), a sentimental drama about spiritualism, was enlivened by the device of having one actress play both the role of the young mother who dies and that of the Irish maid into whom the mother's soul passes. Flexner's plays were audience-pleasers and might be summed up, in the words of one reviewer, as "crisp, clean, wholesome, and refreshing fun." Seven of Flexner's plays were produced in New York over a 35-year period. They reveal a variety of interests and a better-than-average talent as a dramatist for the pre-World War I period.

Other Works:

A Man's Woman (1899). A Lucky Star (dramatization of the novel, The Motor Chaperone, by C. N. and A. N. Williams, 1909). Wanted—An Alibi (1917). The Blue Pearl (1918).

Bibliography:

Flexner, A., I Remember: An Autobiography (1940).

Other references:

Nation (2 Jan. 1937). Theatre Arts Monthly (Feb. 1937, June 1937).

—FELICIA HARDISON LONDRÉ