Select Who’s Who

Abstract

Anderson, Jane (Foster) (1893–1972), an attractive Georgia-born journalist and wife of the composer Deems Taylor arrived in Europe in 1915 to work as a war correspondent for the press baron Lord Northcliffe and was introduced to the Conrads in April 1916. Her animated contacts with the family produced contrasting reactions. While Conrad relished her presence and pronounced her ‘quite yum-yum’ (CL, V, 637), Jessie came to feel that ‘our fair American friend had been amusing herself at my expense’ (JCC, p. 207). In Paris in 1917, Borys was smitten by the charms of ‘the American flying girl’, as was Retinger in a more serious way. Divorced in 1918, she married a Spanish nobleman and, as a supporter of the Fascist cause during the 1930s, was imprisoned by the loyalists on a charge of espionage. Her later wartime activities in broadcasting propaganda for the Third Reich in Germany led to her being charged with treason in 1943 in an American indictment that also named Ezra Pound and six other expatriates. For a fuller account of her life, see John Halverson and Ian Watt, ‘Notes on Jane Anderson, 1955–1990’, Conradiana, 23 (1991), 59–87.