On the night of April 15, 1912, just after one in the morning, a lifeboat hung level with the deck of the largest ship in the world and would not move. It had been waiting, loaded and ready, for more than an hour. A woman climbed over the rail into it. Her husband held her arm as she went; her son said nothing.
When she was seated, both men stepped back and remained on the ship. The boat began to lower. The ship was the Titanic, and the two men who stayed behind, George Dunton Widener and his son Harry, went down with it. Eleanor Elkins Widener, the woman in the lifeboat, survived.
Eleanor was fifty years old, the product of a marriage that had joined two of Philadelphia’s largest fortunes. Her father, William Lukens Elkins, and her father-in-law, Peter Widener, had built their wealth together in the city’s streetcar lines. It was a new fortune, barely two decades old, but large enough that no one questioned what love had to do with the wedding. Eleanor and George had three children: a daughter, also named Eleanor, a younger son, George, and their firstborn, Harry.
Harry was not interested in streetcars. He cared about books—their binding, their paper, who had owned them before, and where they had traveled. By the time he graduated from Harvard in 1907, he was regarded in London and New York less as a wealthy heir than as a serious collector. According to an account written after his death, he once said plainly: “I do not want to be remembered merely as the collector of a few books, no matter how fine they may be.
I want to be remembered in connection with a great library. ”
In the spring of 1912, Harry made a final buying trip to London, where he secured a rare 1598 edition of Francis Bacon’s Essays. He planned to keep it in his coat pocket rather than risk it with the rest of his shipment. He booked passage home with his parents aboard the new ship, the largest ever built.
Just before midnight on the fourth night of the crossing, something scraped along the hull. For nearly forty minutes, little happened. By half past midnight, stewards knocked on cabin doors and asked passengers to dress warmly and come on deck as a precaution. Eleanor put a coat over her nightclothes.
On the boat deck, the night was clear and moonless, the sea unusually flat. Lifeboat four hung at the davits, and when her turn came, George helped her over the rail. Harry stood just behind him, his coat buttoned against the cold. Neither man tried to get in.
Eleanor’s maid, Amalie Giga, climbed in after her; George’s valet stayed aboard. None of the three men would be seen alive again. The boat pulled away a little after two in the morning. From two hundred yards off, the ship did not look like it was sinking—only tilted, lights still burning.
Then the lights failed all at once, the stern rose clear of the water, and the ship went under. Neither George’s nor Harry’s body was ever recovered. More than fifteen hundred people died that night. Of the men traveling in first class, nearly all went down with the ship.
Eleanor never gave an interview about that night, and no diary has ever surfaced. Three days later, the Carpathia reached New York in the rain. Eleanor and her maid came down the gangway and were met by a private train arranged to carry them home to Philadelphia without a single public stop. Somewhere in the wreck went a rope of pearls George had given her three years earlier; she had a second rope, and she kept it.
The funeral was held for an empty coffin. In June, six weeks after the Carpathia docked, Eleanor’s daughter married Fitz Eugene Dixon at Lynwood Hall, a quiet ceremony in a house still in mourning. Eleanor gave her daughter away herself. Then came the will.
Harry’s will had been drawn up before he left for London, an ordinary young man’s precaution. But what it said surprised everyone. His three thousand books—one of the finest private collections of English literature in the country—had not been left to Harvard. They had been left to his mother, with the authority to decide when and whether to hand the collection over, “whenever in her judgement Harvard University will make arrangements for properly caring for my collection of books.
” She could have kept every volume locked away for the rest of her life. Nothing compelled her to build anything at all. She did not wait. By August, four months after the funeral, her lawyers had drawn up a deed of gift.
It offered Harvard the whole collection and a library building to house it, paid for entirely at her own expense—two million dollars by the time it was finished. The deed attached conditions: how the collection could be shelved, how it could never be dispersed or renamed, and what would happen to the entire gift if the university broke any of them. Harvard accepted. The new library would rise on the ground where Gore Hall, the university’s existing library, stood—which meant Gore Hall had to come down first.
Construction began in early 1913. The ground was frozen too hard to dig, so workmen built a bonfire directly on the site and let it burn until the earth softened. That February, Eleanor’s younger son George lifted the first spadeful of soil. Four months later, Eleanor herself, in mourning black with a silver trowel, laid the building’s cornerstone.
Over the next two years, she corresponded with the university’s building committee about everything from the placement of a portrait to the wording of a bronze plaque. Boston newspapers took to calling the rising limestone building simply “the Widener. ”
When the library opened in June of 1915, Harry’s books occupied a memorial room at the building’s center, paneled in carved English oak and arranged on the shelves in exactly the order he had left them. Nothing could be added, nothing moved; if the university broke that condition, the entire gift could be revoked.
The same June, on the same stretch of ground, Harvard awarded an honorary degree to Alexander Hamilton Rice, a Harvard-trained physician turned explorer who had just returned from his fourth expedition into the unmapped rivers of the Brazilian Amazon. He was thirty-nine, unmarried, and celebrated across two continents. Nobody involved in planning either event gave the other a second thought. They met that day.
By mid-August, the New York Times reported that Mrs. George D. Widener had made “an emphatic denial” of her reported engagement to Dr. Rice—and, in the same article, that he had been her house guest for several weeks.
On October 6, 1915, they married. She was fifty-four; he was thirty-nine. It was a quiet affair, almost the opposite of her first wedding thirty-two years before. She gave up the house in Philadelphia and with it the last fixed address that had belonged to the woman newspapers called the Titanic Widow.
In November 1916, she sailed out of Newport aboard a steam yacht bound for the tributaries of the Amazon her new husband intended to chart. She was fifty-five. Her maid, Amalie Giga, went with her. A second expedition followed in 1920, which turned back early on the advice of local guides.
A third, in 1924, went silent for weeks—long enough that newspapers speculated about whether she had finally been claimed by a different set of waters. She came home as she always did. On July 13, 1937, a seventy-five-year-old woman was shopping in a store in Paris when she collapsed. She did not get up again.
The New York Times reported her death the following day, along with nearly every fact anyone thought to check—including her age, which the paper printed as sixty-nine. She left behind one of the largest personal fortunes in America. She was buried with an actual body to bury, a mercy neither her first husband nor her eldest son had ever been granted. At Harvard, the room at the center of the building she paid for remains exactly as specified.
The three thousand books still stand in the order Harry left them, because the deed required it and because, long after everyone who knew him was gone, the deed remained the only voice left arguing on his behalf. Visitors walk past the portrait without registering whose son it depicts or why the flowers beside it never wilt. Every week, without exception, someone still carries fresh flowers into that room. The letter requesting them is well over a century old now.
The woman who wrote it has been dead almost as long. The flowers keep arriving anyway.
