Letters of Floretta Elmore Greeley, 1906-1922

Floretta (Elmore) Greeley was born 25 September 1884, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the daughter of Eltinge and Harriet Lavinia (Cooke) Elmore. She attended Milwaukee Downer College and entered Radcliffe in 1906 as a sophomore, and was graduated, cum laude in 1909. While at Radcliffe Greeley was a member of the Dramatic Committee, 1907-1908, Assistant Editor, 1907-1908, and then Editor-in-Chief of the Radcliffe Magazine, 1908-1909. She was elected to the intellectually exclusive English Club, was designated class poet, and wrote the Radcliffe Hymn, "Radcliffe, now we rise to greet thee," in 1909.

After graduation, Greeley taught in Miss Mary Haskell's school for girls in Boston until her marriage in April 1911, to Dr. Hugh Payne Greeley. They spent a year at Grenfell's mission hospital on Pilley's Island, Newfoundland and then spent 1912-1913 in Munich and Vienna where Hugh Payne Greeley studied medicine. They returned to Boston, later moved to Waukesha and ultimately settled in Madison, Wisconsin. With her husband, Greeley wrote Work and Play in the Grenfell Mission, (1922) about their year in Newfoundland, and wrote and published poetry. She was an active member of her local Congregational church and choir and during World War I was active in war work and the Municipal league. The Greeleys had five children: David McLean (1912), Hannah (1913), Priscilla Elmore (1915), Hugh McLean (1920) and Roger Eltinge (1923). Greeley died, tragically, in September 1923 of puerperal fever. After her death, her husband, Hugh Payne Greeley, wrote in her entry for the Class of 1909 25th reunion report (1934) that she had been busy with her growing family and civic activities and had found little time for writing. Until the children were grown was a "period of interregnum," and that afterwards she had been intending "to do the writing that she had in her mind."