Glynne Hiller Woolfenden Of Sag Harbor Dies January 6

Writer Glynne Hiller Woolfenden died peacefully in her Sag Harbor home on January 6, 2022. She was 98.

She was an adored mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother, as well as a treasured friend to many, according to her family. Born on September 24, 1923, she was given the name Gladys Mishan, but she didn’t like her first name and at 13 invented the name “Glynne” for herself. She was the youngest of five and spent her early life in Manchester, England, excelling at hockey, lacrosse, cricket and tennis. She remained athletic throughout her life.

Her family moved to New York during World War II, and at the age of 17, she married Joseph Nahem just before he went to war. She took classes at NYU, from which she later got a BA in literature. She and her beloved sister, Sally Weinraub, wrote a newspaper for the soldiers at war, providing news from the Syrian Jewish community of Brooklyn. Nahem returned from the war, and the couple had a daughter, Catherine.

Then they all went to Paris so he could study the French philosopher Diderot under the G.I. Bill. She took classes at the Sorbonne and fell in love with Paris. It was a bittersweet time, for she soon separated from her husband and lived independently with her daughter. She writes of this exhilarating period in her recent (2018) memoir, “Passport to Paris” (Heliotrope Books), a surprisingly racy narrative, given that the author was then 95. She always took pleasure in the senses: hot tea, cool swims, lemony soups, soft sweaters, and the blue waters she gazed at from her Sag Harbor home.

In the early ’50s, she returned to New York, where she lived in Greenwich Village for several years. A Francophile for life, she met her second husband, Antoine Hiller, at the Alliance Francaise, and in 1957, they moved to Park Slope, Brooklyn, and had a daughter, Colette. During this time, she worked as the beauty editor for American Girl magazine. She also wrote other features and the good grooming book for teens, “Put Your Best Look Forward.”

In 1957, she began spending summers in Noyac, where she soon bought a cottage. She married her third husband, Brian Woolfenden, in 1969. They lived in Larchmont, New York, for some 35 years. She earned a master’s degree at Manhattanville College and began giving courses on the French writer Colette at the New School in Manhattan. She was a lifelong devotee of Colette and wrote articles about her for the New York Times Magazine and the Washington Post, as well as a script for a Colette series for CBS Cable, which she worked on at the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center in Italy.

Woolfenden was also a champion for the environment. In Larchmont, in 1985, she mobilized her neighbors into passing the nation’s first legislation limiting noise from gardening equipment. The New York Times article about the effort (June 10, 1985) begins, “For Glynne Woolfenden, a writer, the neighborhood hasn’t been the same since those ‘snarling monsters’ moved in. ‘You’ll be walking down these lovely, tree-lined streets and all of a sudden the leaf blowers shatter the serenity of the area.’”

After she moved full-time to Sag Harbor in 1995, Woolfenden became an active member of the Ashawagh Hall writers’ group and began publishing pieces in the East Hampton Star. She was cherished for her vitality, originality, curiosity, humor, and beauty. Above all, she was the embodiment of charm, winning people over by the quality of her attention and response. And how she loved a good laugh.

She is survived by daughters Catherine and Colette Hiller, also writers; her grandchildren, Alex Warnow, Zachary (Amanda) Warnow, and Jonathan (Shadia Wood) Warnow, and Corin (Sam) Lane and Jordan Ryda; and great-grandchildren Zadie Warnow and Shafiqa Wood.

Services were held on January 9 at the Independent Jewish Cemetery in Sag Harbor.