Page:Woman of the Century.djvu/411

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HUNTINGTON.
HUNTLEY.

and educated mainly in New York City. Her musical talents were shown early. In 1880 her family decided that she should follow a career of her own choosing. She hesitated to choose between AGNES HUNTINGTON. music and art, for both were attractive to her, and she finally decided to become an operatic singer. She went to Dresden in 1880, where she studied four years with Lamperti. She made her debut as a singer in one of the Gewandhaus concerts in Leipzig. While in Dresden she sang in concerts, and during her vacations she sang in other German cities and in Paris and London. In 1885 she returned to the United States and sang in concert, opera and oratorio. After making a tour of the principal cities, she joined the Boston Ideal Opera Company, and with that company she sang successfully for several seasons. Many offers of engagements were made to her by English and German managers. In 1889 she went to London, England, under the management of the late Carl Rosa, having signed for a season of concert, oratorio and light opera. There she created the role of Paul Jones in Planquette's opera of that name, and in it she made a great hit Originally put on for a short run, "Paul Jones" remained on the boards during three-hundred-forty-six nights in the Prince of Wales Theater, and at every performance the house was crowded. A dispute with her managers led her to leave the company, and she returned to the United States. Here she repeated her triumphs. Miss Huntington is tall, fair and of commanding presence. Her voice is a pure, clear, strong and thoroughly cultivated contralto. In London her social successes are quite as great as her professional ones. Among her intimate friends there are the Baroness Burdett-Coutts, the Duchess of Westminster and other prominent personages. She makes her home in New York, but is arranging to manage a theater in London. A series of new operas, written for her. will be produced there.


FLORENCE HUNTLEY. HUNTLEY, Mrs. Florence, journalist, author and humorist, was born in Alliance, Ohio, and was graduated in the Methodist Female College, Delaware, Ohio. She became known to the public as the wife of the late Stanley Huntley, of New York, the author of a series of remarkably humorous sketches in which Mr. and Mrs. Spoopendyke are the characters. She met Mr. Huntley, and they were married in Bismarck, Dak., in 1879, at which time he was editor of the Bismarck "Tribune." They returned East in 1880. She suggested to her talented husband, who was a special writer on the Brooklyn "Eagle," the sketches which made him famous. They were used, at her suggestion, in his special department under the title of "Salad." This department was always written by Mr. Huntley on Pnday. Mrs. Huntley was often said to be the author of the "Spoopendyke" sketches, but she disposes of the assertion by her acknowledgment that she wrote but one of them. She adopted the style employed by her husband, who was too ill to write or even to read a sketch, and the production went over the country as her husband s. While suggesting subjects to him, the work was done by him. Her husband was an invalid for two years before his death. Mrs. Huntley tells the story of her own entrance into the literary field as follows: "The people who laughed over the humorous things he continued to write would have felt tears burning in their hearts, if they could have seen this frail, delicate, nervous man, racked with pain and burning with fever, sitting bravely at his desk writing jokes to pay our board bills. Now and then, when I could not bear to see him working thus. I prevailed on him to let me do it for him. In this way I wrote considerable for the 'Salad’ column. but it was always supposed at the office that I had acted as his amanuensis. Once, when driven by necessity, he agreed, against his inclination, to write a serial story for a New York young folks'