Cora Crane

Cora Crane, born Cora Ethel Eaton Howarth (July 12, 1868 – September 5, 1910) was an American businesswoman, nightclub and bordello owner, writer and journalist. She is best known as the common-law wife of writer Stephen Crane from 1896 to his death in 1900, and took his name although they never married. She was still legally married to her second husband, Captain Donald William Stewart, a British military officer who had served in India and then as British Resident of the Gold Coast, where he was a key figure in the War of the Golden Stool (1900) between the British and the Ashanti Empire in present-day Ghana.

Crane accompanied Stephen Crane to Greece during the Greco-Turkish War (1897), where she was a war correspondent. She is sometimes reported as the first recognized woman war correspondent, but Jane Cazneau covered the Mexican–American War fifty years earlier.^[1] After Crane's death, she returned to Jacksonville, Florida, in 1901, where she developed several properties as bordellos, including the luxurious Palmetto Lodge at Pablo Beach; she had financial interests in bars and related venues. In this same period, she regularly contributed articles to such national magazines as Smart Set and Harper's Weekly.