Early Life
Harriet Lane's family was from Franklin County, Pennsylvania. She was the youngest child of Elliott Tole Lane, a merchant, and Jane Ann Buchanan Lane. An orphan after the death of her father when she was 11 years old (her mother had died two years earlier), she requested that her favorite uncle, James Buchanan, be appointed her legal guardian. Buchanan, an unmarried Democratic senator from Pennsylvania, indulged his niece and her sister, enrolling them in boarding schools in Charles Town, Virginia (later for two years at the Academy of the Visitation Convent in the Georgetown section of Washington, D.C. By this time, Buchanan was Secretary of State, and he introduced her to fashionable circles as he had promised.
In 1854 she joined him in London, where he was minister to the Court of St. James's. Queen Victoria gave "dear Miss Lane" the rank of ambassador's wife; admiring suitors gave her the fame of a beauty. In appearance "Hal" Lane was of medium height, with masses of light, almost golden-colored hair.
Read more about this topic: Harriet Lane
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“Love is the hardest thing in the world to write about. So simple. You’ve got to catch it through details, like the early morning sunlight hitting the gray tin of the rain spout in front of her house. The ringing of a telephone that sounds like Beethoven’s “Pastoral.” A letter scribbled on her office stationery that you carry around in your pocket because it smells of all the lilacs in Ohio.”
—Billy Wilder (b. 1906)
“There was a heavy power in her eyes which laid hold of his whole being, as if he had drunk some powerful drug. He had been feeling weak and done before. Now the life came back into him, he felt delivered from his own fretted, daily self.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)