Elizabeth Kingsley

Who was Elizabeth Kingsley?

Elizabeth S. Kingsley was an American puzzle constructor, famous as the inventor of the double-crostic.

Kingsley was born in Brooklyn and attended Wellesley College. While she was working as a teacher in Brooklyn in 1933, she created the double-crostic, a form of acrostic puzzle that includes features of a crossword puzzle, and eventually sold it to the Saturday Review. Michelle Arnot describes how she invented it, after a Wellesley reunion at which she "despaired that students embraced twentieth-century scribblers like James Joyce":

Tailoring a crossword grid, she stretched its boundaries to create a rectangle. Taking an excerpt from a favorite author, she filled in the grid reading left to right only; words were separated by black squares and continued below and to the left when necessary. Each blank square was assigned a number from 1, at the top left, to 178, at the bottom right corner. Her first selection was six lines from the poem “Ulysses” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson... Spelling out the poem in anagram tiles, she threw all 178 letters into a pot. From this alphabet soup she pulled out eighteen letters for the poet's name and seven for his work, which she set down in a column.