The Estate of Stephen Crane

THE ESTATE OF STEPHEN CRANE Joseph Katz* The standard account supplies a melodramatic sequel to Stephen Crane's sometimes melodramatic life. As the plot runs, Crane died abroad on June 5, 1900. His will left everything to his wife. But Cora Howarth Crane got nothing as heir to the estate—not a penny from royalties on The Red Badge of Courage or his other writings. She was hornswoggled out of them by William Howe Crane, one of Stephen's elder brothers, the American executor of the will, and a prominent lawyer in Port Jervis, New York. Although he knew that Cora desperately needed money, he used legal technicalities to force Stephen's literary agent and publishers in the United States to pay him. Then he accounted it all away as reimbursements for loans he claimed to have made Stephen. The motive was greed fed by knowledge or suspicion that Cora had not been legally married to Stephen. So just a few months after returning there from Stephen's funeral, Cora had to leave England in flight from her creditors. She built a brothel in Jacksonville , Florida, and supported herself as its Madam until she died in 1910.1 This is good classic melodrama. It is not, however, true. Many of the facts are right enough. What is wrong is the entire structure of suppositions and conjectures built upon them, for the standard melodrama wholly distorts what happened to Stephen Crane's estate. It is true that Stephen Crane had never been legally married to Cora. The impediment to their marriage of any kind was a previous husband from whom Cora had never been divorced and who seems simply to have ignored her existence after she left him. For three and a half years, most of them in England, she lived with Stephen in an adulterous relationship, holding themselves out to the world as man and wife. They kept their secret well enough to go unchallenged. There is not a shred of evidence that the secret kept so well in late Victorian England had been pierced in the little village of Port Jervis. William, another brother, Edmund, and their families in that village 'Joseph Katz is a Professor of English at the University of South Carolina. He has published extensively on American literature and is now preparing, in collaboration with Edwin H. Cady, a new biography of Stephen Crane. He is also working on a new edition of Crane's letters. 136Joseph Katz were conventional people of the kind Stephen portrayed in his Whilomville stories. When Stephen wrote them from England that he had married Cora, they believed him. All evidence points that way. William, for example, corresponded with Cora as Stephen's wife. He sent his daughter Helen to stay with her aunt and uncle at Brede Place during school vacations. And when he learned Stephen was seriously ill William urged Cora that they both live with him in Port Jervis until Stephen was well. When Stephen died Cora and Helen brought the body back to America for burial in the Crane family plot at William's suggestion. Cora stayed with him and his family in a New York hotel until the funeral on June 28, then returned with them to Port Jervis for a four-week visit until she was ready for England again. With her went family mementos of Stephen, gifts that included scrapbooks and manuscripts . Throughout all of the succeeding years William and the family knew Cora only as Stephen's widow—until biographers revealed the truth scores of years later. And it would have made no difference if William had known. Alfred T. Plant, the solicitor who drew Stephen's will, was careful to have it name her as "my wife Cora Howarth Crane."2 He evidently knew the truth because that style of reference made Cora's rights in the will unassailable, while a more casual reference to her only by category would have allowed the will to be overturned by proof that Stephen had no wife. There is no room for biographical conjecture here: it is a longstanding point of probate law, and William certainly knew that. He also came to know soon that...