Ella Winter

Who was Ella Winter?

Leonore Sophie Winter Steffens Stewart was an Australian-British journalist and activist.

Her parents were Freda Lust and Adolph Wertheimer from Nuremberg in Germany, who lived in London, Melbourne, Australia and again in London, when they changed their name to Winter. Their children Rudolph, Rosa and Eleanora were born in Melbourne. Frederick Wertham was a relative. She studied at the London School of Economics in England.

She met the U.S. journalist and 'muckraker' Lincoln Steffens at the Versailles Conference, where she was secretary to US Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter. Winter and Steffens married in 1924. They moved to Italy, where their son, Peter, was born in San Remo.

Two years later, they settled in Carmel, California, where their friends and neighbors included photographer Edward Weston, poet Robinson Jeffers, philosopher/mythologist Joseph Campbell, dancer/choreographer Jean Erdman, nutritionist/author Adelle Davis, poet George Sterling, short story writer/poet Clark Ashton Smith, marine biologist/ecologist Ed Ricketts and novelists John Steinbeck and Henry Miller.

She wrote her first book, Red Virtue, after visiting the Soviet Union. Her autobiography, And Not to Yield, was published in 1963. Lincoln Steffens died in Carmel in 1936. In 1939, Winter married the screenwriter and humorist Donald Ogden Stewart and became stepmother to his sons, Donald and Ames. They lived in California and then in Hampstead, London.