Search >> Danforth, Jennie

Essayist, Journalist.

Little is known of Jenny Danforth despite the fact that she is mentioned frequently as one of the women who followed Ada Clare to Pfaff’s. She was rumored to have had an affair with Fitz-James O’Brien, but the true nature of their relationship is uncertain (Wolle 130). Junius Henri Brown identifies her as “a writer for the weekly journals” (157), and Rufus Rockwell Wilson claims that “Jenny Danforth was also a witty and beautiful woman, the estranged wife, it was said, of a naval officer of high rank, but whose name was not Danforth. A clever writer, she lived for a few years a precarious but not wholly unhappy life and then falling into misfortune and poverty, finally vanished without her old friends knowing precisely when or how it happened” (143). The author of Henry Clapp’s New York Times obituary called her "a wild, impulsive Western woman" (7).

References & Biographical Resources

Browne, Junius Henri. The Great Metropolis; A Mirror of New York. Hartford: American Publishing, 1869. 700 p. [more about this work]

She is mentioned as one of the Bohemians' "female companions" at Pfaff's. Danforth was "a writer for the weekly journals" (157). [pages: 157]

Hahn, Emily. Romantic Rebels; An Informal History of Bohemianism in America. Boston; Houghton Mifflin, 1967. 318 p. [more about this work]

[pages: 21]

Miller, Tice L. Bohemians and Critics: American Theatre Criticism in the Nineteenth Century. Metuchen, NJ: The Scarecrow Press, 1981. [more about this work]

One of several women who frequented Pfaff's. [pages: 16]

"Obituary: Henry Clapp." The New-York Times. 11 Apr. 1875: 7. [more about this work]

She is described as a regular at Pfaff's and "a wild, impulsive, Western woman." At the time of Clapp's death, she is also dead. [pages: 7]

Sentilles, Renee M. Performing Menken: Adah Isaacs Menken and the Birth of American Celebrity. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2003. [more about this work]

A regular at Pfaff's. [pages: 142]

Stansell, Christine. "Whitman at Pfaff's: Commercial Culture, Literary Life and New York Bohemia at Mid-Century." Walt Whitman Quarterly Review. 10.3 (1993): 107-126. [more about this work]

Stansell notes that Danforth is "unidentified." She is also mentioned as one of "the handful of women artists [who] figure in the accounts of New York Bohemia" (111). [pages: 111]

Stedman, Edmund Clarence. Life and Letters of Edmund Clarence Stedman. Eds. Laura Stedman and George M. Gould. New York: Moffat, Yard and Company, 1910. [more about this work]

[pages: 1:207]

Wilson, Rufus Rockwell. New York: Old & New; Its Story, Streets, and Landmarks. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott & Co., 1903. [more about this work]

[pages: 142-43]

Wolle, Francis. Fitz-James O'Brien: A Literary Bohemian of the Eighteen-Fifties. Boulder, Col.; University of Colorado, 1944. 309 p. [more about this work]

Rumored to have had an affair with O'Brien. Full letter from her to O'Brien is included by Wolle. The letter (circa 1861) is now part of the Charles Roman Collection. [pages: 130]