Grace Zaring Stone

Grace Zaring Stone (January 9, 1891 – September 29, 1991) was an American novelist and short story writer. She is perhaps best known for having three of her novels made into films: The Bitter Tea of General Yen, Winter Meeting, and Escape. She also used the pseudonym of Ethel Vance.

Biography

Stone was the great-great-granddaughter of Robert Owen. Her mother died in her childhood. She started writing in St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands, where she lived with her husband, Ellis Spencer Stone, later a Commodore in the U.S. Navy (where he commanded all of the aircraft carriers at the time of the Pearl Harbor attack on December 7, 1941 [none were lost as they were not at Pearl Harbor that day]). Later, she moved to Stonington, Connecticut. They had one child, Eleanor (later Baroness Zgismond Perényi).

Stone used the pseudonym of Ethel Vance to write her 1939 novel Escape, to avoid jeopardising her daughter, who was living in occupied Europe during the Second World War. Editions of her books after WWII credited her as "Grace Zaring Stone (Ethel Vance)", as Escape was her best-known book at the time of the war.