Early life Sarah Wilkinson came from a middle-class family and attended the
Emma Willard School in
Troy, New York. After the death of her father, she left home and married her childhood sweetheart Oliver Filley. They spent the next four years in the Philippines, China and Japan, where her husband worked as an engineer. They returned to New York in 1908, where she started work as a theatre critic and drama editor with the
New-York Tribune and as a freelance contributor to the
National Geographic Society. At this time she changed her name to
Solita Solano.
Career and relationships In
Greenwich Village in 1919, Solano got to know the journalist
Janet Flanner, with whom she started a relationship. In 1921 they travelled to
Greece, where Janet was to work on a report for
National Geographic on
Constantinople. Solano had three books published, and as they were not very successful, returned to journalism. In 1922, they travelled to France, and in Paris joined the intellectual-lesbian circle of
Gertrude Stein and
Alice B. Toklas,
Natalie Clifford Barney,
Romaine Brooks and
Djuna Barnes. In 1929, Solano had an affair with
Margaret Anderson, founder of
The Little Review, who had come to Paris with her lover, French singer
Georgette Leblanc. The affair lasted several years, though Anderson remained living with Leblanc. While in Paris, Janet Flanner started writing, under the pseudonym
Genêt, the
Letter from Paris, for
The New Yorker. After the outbreak of World War II Solano and Flanner returned to New York.
Later life and death After the war Solano returned to France, where she died at the age of 87. ==References==