Dawn Langley Simmons
| Dawn Langley Simmons | |
|---|---|
| Born | Gordon Langley Hall probably 1922 Kent, England |
| Died | 18 September 2000 (aged 77) Charleston, South Carolina |
| Occupation | Biographer, essayist |
| Language | English |
| Spouse | John-Paul Simmons |
| Children | Natasha Simmons |
Dawn Langley Pepita Simmons (probably 1922 – 18 September 2000) was a prolific English author and biographer. Born as Gordon Langley Hall, Simmons lived her first decades as a male. As a young adult, she became close to British actress Dame Margaret Rutherford, whom she considered an adoptive mother and who was the subject of a biography Simmons wrote in later years. After sex reassignment surgery in 1968, Simmons wed in the first legal interracial marriage in South Carolina.
Simmons's parents were servants at Sissinghurst Castle, the English estate of biographer Harold Nicolson and his novelist wife, Vita Sackville-West. Simmons was born in Sussex as Gordon Langley Hall to Jack Copper, Vita Sackville-West's chauffeur, and another servant, Marjorie Hall Ticehurst, before they were married. Although she claimed to have been born with an unusual condition that resulted in the swelling of her genitals with the result that she was mistakenly identified as a boy, Charleston author Edward Ball's book Peninsula of Lies (2004) states that she was born male.
As a child, Simmons was raised by her grandmother and at one point visited the castle and met Virginia Woolf, Sackville-West's lover. Woolf made Sackville-West the subject of the novel Orlando: A Biography, which bears a striking resemblance to Simmons' own life story.
In 1946 Simmons emigrated to Canada. Still living as a man, she crewcut her hair and became a teacher on the Ojibway native reservation on Lake Nipigon, experiences from which were translated into the best-selling Me Papoose Sitter (1955)—the first of many published books.
After a stint as an editor for the Winnipeg Free Press, Simmons moved back to England in 1947, to teach theatre at the Gregg School in Croydon, Surrey. She moved to the United States in 1950, and became the society editor for the Nevada Daily Mail in Missouri before moving to New York and working as the society editor of the Port Chester Daily Item. Shortly after moving to New York, Simmons met artist Isabel Whitney, beginning a friendship that would last until Whitney's death in 1962.
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