Early Life
Born in Qingdao, China, she was a daughter of Hugo Reiss (1879-), a German-born Jewish diplomat who served as Brazil's consul in Shanghai, China. Her mother, a Roman Catholic, was Ignatia Mary Murphy (1891-), a native of San Francisco, California.
She had two sisters, Barry J. Reiss-Brian (died 1970, unmarried) and Huguette Reiss Gerard Hoguet (died 1994, married twice). By her mother's second marriage to Guy L. A. Brian, she had two half-sisters: Marie-Brigitte (1928-, Countess Bernard de La Rochefoucauld) and Patricia (1930-, Madame Jacques Bemberg).
All five daughters were raised as Catholics, with the three Reiss girls spending their infancy and early childhood in Shanghai, China. After Mary Reiss's marriage to Guy Brian, the family lived in Paris, and Jane graduated from the Convent des Oiseaux, a fashionable Catholic school in Neuilly, France; its alumni included the future Vietnamese empress Nam Phuong.
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Famous quotes related to early life:
“Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians ...”
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)