The Other Laura Earle

More than likely you've met my sweet little cat Laura Earle. I named her after a very real person, an anarchist born to a wealthy Philadelphia clan in 1858. There were many very distinguished acivists in her family, both before and after her.

Laura was sent to Weimar, Germany as a teenager to learn piano from Franz Liszt himself. Other professional musicians of her time revered her playing --a world ahead of everyone else. She organized and performed at many a concert, sometimes to raise money for anarchist causes.

Laura wrote poems, and I have about a dozen of them. Here's one from 1898:

The Spider

Ceaseless, untiring, spin thy thread,
Grim spider Fate. We are not thine.
Though meshed by thee where'er we tread,
Though blessed by thee and hard bestead,
We are not thine.

Thou hast no art to snare the m ind,
O spider Fate. It must be free.
From cobweb chains that seek to bind,
From cobweb clouds that almost blind,
We must be free.

So when thy malice all is done,
Then, spider Fate, in spite of thee,
We know the battle will be won;
We know the peace at set of sun,
In spite of thee.

Laura once fell quite in love with Horace Traubel, whose wife was taking music lessons and who himself was a noteworthy socialist editor and the executor of Walt Whitman's estate. Her surviving letters tell of her heavy disappointment when Horace simply ignored Laura's many invitations.

An image of Laura's face has as yet escaped my research (the sketch above is a generic image of the "society woman"), but I did learn of her sad death. She never married, and around 1904 she moved to newly settled land on the Florida panhandle near Pensacola with her mother, who died a few years later. Finally Laura was found alone and dead by gunshot wounds in 1911. Attempts by her family to figure out what had happened in that then-remote place were fruitless. At first it was ruled a suicide but the authorities changed that to a murder and robbery.

This is the "society page" of The Philadelphia Inquirer, November 6, 1892 (page 12). I never knew of her injury (at age 34) before now! It's great to be back at this research.

Here and here are a few blips of the long dead anarchist's feline namesake. I hope to learn more about the human Laura some day.