- Born
- 13 June 1846Fayetteville, New York, USA
- Died
- 22 November 1918Bagni di Lucca, Italy · aged 72
Rose Cleveland
The President’s sister served as First Lady – and her love letters to Evangeline Simpson are among the best-documented lesbian romances of the 19th century.
Rose Elizabeth Cleveland was the youngest sister of Grover Cleveland. She received an advanced education, worked as a teacher and lecturer and wrote essays and books, including a study of the novelist George Eliot.
When her unmarried brother became president in 1885, she took over the role of First Lady and hostess at the White House. She was considered intellectual and unconventional and showed little interest in traditional duties, preferring to support women’s suffrage. After her brother married in 1886, she left the White House and edited a literary magazine for a time.
In 1889 she met the wealthy widow Evangeline Marrs Simpson. Their surviving letters, full of passion and tenderness, show a romantic love between the two women. Simpson married a bishop in 1896, but after his death the two women reunited, and in 1910 they moved to Bagni di Lucca in Tuscany.
During the First World War they cared for refugees and the wounded, and Rose Cleveland died in 1918 of the Spanish flu, which she had contracted while caring for patients, aged 72. Evangeline Simpson was buried beside her.