Harriet Converse Moody

Harriet Converse Moody (March 18, 1857 – February 22, 1932) was an American businesswoman and arts patron. Moody began her career in Chicago in 1889, working as a teacher and then forming a successful restaurant and catering business that operated for almost 40 years. After her brief marriage to the poet William Vaughn Moody, which ended upon his death of brain cancer, she became a patron to artists, particularly poets.

Born in Parkman, Ohio, on March 18, 1857, she moved with her father, a livestock broker, and mother to Chicago c. 1867. She attended the Howland School in Union Springs, New York, and graduated with an English literature degree from Cornell University in 1876. After attending the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania for one year, she made her society debut in Chicago and married the lawyer Edward Brainard; they divorced in the 1880s.^[1]

Following the death of her father, Moody became the primary caregiver for her mother. In 1889, she began working as a schoolteacher; Alice Corbin Henderson was one of her students. That same year, after "a series of culinary experiments with chicken salad and gingerbread", she founded a catering and restaurant company, Home Delicacies Association.^[1] Impressed with her food, Harry Gordon Selfridge, then the manager of the Marshall Field's department store, gave her the contract for the store's restaurant space.^[2] Her company served food in the food spaces of several other local institutions, such as the Field Museum of Natural History and the Chicago Little Theatre; on Pullman dining cars; and at the London branch of Selfridges. Moody also operated restaurants, such as Le Petit Gourmet, that were positively received. The company failed in 1929;^[1] upon Moody's death, the poet Harriet Monroe wrote: "Lavish to the last, it was no wonder that Mrs. Moody's fortune faded out two or three years ago."^[3]

In 1892, Moody studied as a graduate student in the English department of the University of Chicago. In 1899, she met the poet William Vaughn Moody, who was an English professor at the university. They became friends over their mutual interests in poetry and spirituality, and "[e]ach found an idealization of gender in the other". They married in 1909, and remained together until William's death of brain cancer in 1910.^[1]

After William's death, Harriet became an arts patron, with a focus on poetry and modern art, during the first "renaissance" in Chicago literature. She was a founding sponsor of the magazine Poetry and contributed her late husband's poem "I Am the Woman" for its first issue. She hosted poets and artists at her home in the South Side of Chicago, sending her chauffeur to pick them up at Union Station. Her biographer Susan Albertine wrote: "Dinner parties and late-night poetry readings in her drawing room became legendary."^[1]

Moody befriended and advanced the profiles of dozens of notable artists through arranging poetry readings—including at her restaurant Le Petit Gourmet and universities—and providing career and business advice. In addition to her home in Chicago, she hosted artists as guests at "[h]er apartment in Greenwich Village, her farm in West Cummington, Massachusetts, and her summer retreat at Mackinac Island". Albertine wrote: "Her salon, in effect an art colony, moved with her, offering material means for creative work before public and foundation grants were generally available."^[1]

Her clients included:^[1]

After the failure of her catering and restaurant company in 1929, Moody turned to teaching and writing to support herself. She died on February 22, 1932, in Chicago.^[1]