Mrs. William Vaughn Moody

Harriet Converse Tilden was an American English teacher, writer and business woman. As a young girl her family relocated to Chicago where her father became successful operating a business that transported live stock. She graduated from Cornell University in 1876 with a degree in English Literature after completing the four year course in less than three.

In 1889, after her first marriage failed and her father had died, she became a teacher in the Chicago School System.

On 5 July, 1909 she married writer William Vaughn Moody at Wesleyan Methodist Church in Québec, Canada. When they had first met he was a Professor of English Literature at the University of Chicago. While most likely on their honeymoon, her husband became seriously ill on board a passenger ship in the South Atlantic. At first his illness mystified their doctors, but eventually they came to discover he had an inoperative brain tumor.

William Vaughn Moody passed away at Colorado Springs on 17 October, 1910, less than fifteen months after they had married. In the years follow her husband's death, she served as a writer and consultant on several films that were adapted from his works. Mrs.

Moody became the first woman to serve as a trustee (1912-1922) at Cornell University. A patron the arts, she could count among her friends such poets as, John Masefield, Rabindranath Tagore, Padraic Colum and James Stephens. She was also known for assisting young poets, even to the point of letting them and their families into her home.

Before the 1929 stock market crash greatly reduced her circumstances, she maintained a mansion in Chicago, an apartment in New York and a farm in New England. She owned a successful catering business with branches in both Britain and America that operated several French restaurants. After the crash she wrote the relatively successful "Mrs. William Vaughn Moody's Cookbook" and a newspaper column on cooking. She also donated her time teaching cooking classes to the deaf. Mrs.

In her 1948 book "A House in Chicago" Olivia H. Dunbar writes of Harriet Moody's romance and marriage with William Vaughn Moody and how, in the years following his death, her Chicago home became a mecca for many of the writers and intellectuals of that era.