Ruth Moore and Eleanor Mayo
Unlike many of the women who found their way to the peace and beauty of Mt. Desert Island, Ruth Moore (1903-1989) and Eleanor Mayo (1920-1981) both grew up and spent most their lives in coastal Maine. Even though they both left to start their careers in the more liberal and urban atmospheres of New York and California, their hearts were firmly rooted Down East, and they returned to spend their most productive years in a home they built together on Mt. Desert Island.
Ruth was a multi-generational Mainer, born and raised on Gotts Island, just south of MDI. Like many islanders, her parents cobbled together a living from fishing, lobstering, and farming, as well as running the local general store and post office. Ruth’s first real off-island experience was going away to high school in the mainland town of Ellsworth, where she experienced bullying from other students who considered her island roots to be ignorant and countrified.
After graduating from high school in 1921, Ruth headed south to New York State College for Teachers in Albany, graduating in 1925. She moved to New York City for a teaching job, but soon found that her real love was writing. She honed her skills while working as a secretary, most notably for Mary White Ovington (1865-1951), a white journalist and suffragist who helped to found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Ruth and Mary had met when the Ovington family began summering on Gotts Island, and Mary, a woman with a strong social conscience who never married, may have had an early impact both on Ruth’s career ambitions and her lesbian identity.
Under Mary’s influence, Ruth took a job with the NAACP, first as a campaign manager, then, in 1930, as a special investigator, travelling through the South seeking justice for black people wrongly accused of crimes and facing hostile opposition from many southern whites. She went back to Maine the next year to attend graduate classes at the university in Orono, but returned to New York after only a semester, moving into an apartment in Greenwich Village, already a center of gay and lesbian activity. In 1936 she took a job as personal secretary to novelist Alice Tisdale Hobart (1882-1967), and soon moved with her to the San Francisco Bay Area. She still had ambitions to be a writer and during the late 1930s and early 1940s published stories in such journals as Harpers Bazaar and The New Yorker.
Eleanor was only 19 when Ruth met her on a summer trip home to Mt. Desert Island in 1940. They were introduced by Ruth’s sister Esther, who had been Eleanor’s teacher in high school. Eleanor had been born in Massachusetts but her family had moved to Southwest Harbor when she was a young child. Despite their age difference, Ruth and Eleanor quickly became close. When Eleanor confided that her parents could not afford to send her to college, Ruth suggested she come with her to California, where the university system was free to residents. This proposal began a forty-year partnership, grounded in common roots, a love of writing, and deep affection. In a private interview quoted in the 2012 edition of The Magazine of the Mount Desert Island Historical Society, Ruth described Eleanor as “a wonderful companion, a wonderful friend.”
The couple left California after a year and returned to Maine for a year-long retreat at Ruth’s family cabin on Gotts Island. They then moved back to New York, possibly to for the stimulation of artistic and political community. Ruth went to work for Reader’s Digest magazine, where she continued to develop her literary skills by writing condensed versions of books. In 1943, she published her first novel, The Weir, which drew on her deep love and familiarity with the lives of subsistence fisherfolk and the insularity of coastal Maine communities. Two years later, Eleanor published her first book, Turn Home, about an ex-con who returns to his hometown in rural Maine, perhaps reflecting Eleanor’s own feeling of displacement after leaving Southwest Harbor.
Both of their novels received positive reviews, but it was Ruth’s second novel that guaranteed the pair financial independence. Spoonhandle, published in 1946, was a complex analysis of class and race divisions, limited options, and unlikely triumphs in a small Maine community. It remained on the New York Times bestseller list for 14 weeks and, in 1947, Hollywood production company Twentieth Century Fox bought the rights to make it into the 1948 film, Deep Waters, directed by Henry King (1886-1982).
Ruth ultimately felt betrayed by King’s version of her book, which romanticized her nuanced story and removed much of its pungent examination of class and gender in favor of stereotyped melodrama, but the money she received for the film rights did provide Ruth and Eleanor with the opportunity to return to Mt. Desert Island permanently. The home they built in the Tremont village of Bass Harbor, on the island’s “quiet side,” overlooked Ruth’s childhood home on Gotts Island. Built with the help of Eleanor’s father Fred, who was a cabinetmaker, the house was constructed of locally-accessed materials, many of them scavenged from demolished buildings and beach flotsam.
Living in warm domesticity with two coon cats and frequent visits from extended family, Ruth and Eleanor both continued to write, Ruth producing more than a dozen novels, three books of poetry and numerous short stories, and Eleanor publishing four more novels. Although Eleanor’s Turn Home was made into the 1950 film, Tarnished (directed by Harry Keller, 1913-1987), none of Ruth’s later books made it to Hollywood, possibly because she was labeled as “difficult” after her disagreements with King about his interpretation of Spoonhandle.
Moving back to MDI, Ruth and Eleanor faced negative attitudes similar but opposite to those Ruth had faced during her high school years on the mainland—residents were mistrustful of those who had gone away and returned, suspicious that they might think themselves above their roots. Wary of this perception, Ruth and Eleanor shunned the spotlight, but over the years they became an active part of the MDI community. Ruth served several terms on the school board, and Eleanor was the first woman elected as a selectman in Tremont’s local government, as well as serving as tax assessor for a number of years. They maintained an active social life with other same-sex couples, both within the MDI community and beyond. Among their close friends and frequent visitors were modernist landscape painter Chenoweth Hall (1908-1999) and her partner, novelist Miriam Colwell (1917-2014). In 2004, Ruth and Eleanor’s Tremont home was listed in the National Register of Historic Places.
During the late 1970s, Eleanor was diagnosed with brain cancer. Ruth lovingly cared for her at home for several years, and Eleanor’s death at the age of only 61 left Ruth feeling lost and alone. She felt unable to write for several years, when a revival and republication of her works by Maine bookstore owner and publisher Gary Lawless (1951-) spurred a renewal of her creative energies. After Ruth’s death in 1989, his Blackberry Press released a volume of her last poems, The Tired Apple Tree.
In 2004, Blackberry Press published When Foley Craddock Tore off My Grandfather's Thumb, a posthumous collection of Ruth and Eleanor’s short stories. The same year, their Tremont home was listed in the National Register of Historic Places.
More Reading about Ruth and Eleanor:
Islandport Press has created a web site about the life and work of Ruth Moore: https://www.ruthmooremaine.com
Conforti, Joseph A. Hidden Places: Maine Writers on Coastal Villages, Mill Towns, and the North Country. “Island
Villages and the Struggle for Survival: Ruth Moore.” Lanham, MD: Down East Books, 2020.
Davisson, Sven. “A Literary Refuge: Ruth Moore and Eleanor Mayo.” Chebacco: The Magazine of the Mount
Desert Island Historical Society, Volume XIII 2012.
Davvison, Sven. A Biography of Ruth Moore of Gott’s Island, Maine, From the Introduction to "When Foley
Craddock Tore Off My Grandfather’s Thumb" in The Collected Stories of Ruth Moore and Eleanor Mayo,
Blackberry Press, Nobleboro, ME 2004
Gratwick, Harry. “Ruth Moore Remembered.” The Working Waterfront Archives.
Pixley, Jennifer Craig. “Homesick For That Place: Ruth Moore Writes About Maine.” University of Maine.