Elena Mumm Thornton Wilson

Elena Mumm Thornton Wilson (27 August 1906 – 27 July 1979) was born into an unusual, wealthy, aristocratic European family and was the fourth wife of the famed American writer Edmund Wilson. Elena was a central figure in Wilson's life from the time they met until his death in 1972. She was the literary executrix of his estate and helped Leon Edel edit her husband's journals. She also edited a book of his literary correspondence.

Born Helene-Marthe Mumm von Schwarzenstein in Reims, France, Elena Mumm was the daughter of Peter Arnold Hermann Gottlieb Mumm von Schwarzenstein and Olga de Struve. On her father’s side, she was descended from a long line of ancient Prussian nobility, traceable to 1359 in Cleves, Prussia. On March 31, 1873, Kaiser Wilhelm I renewed the Mumm patent on nobility, conferring the “Mumm von Schwarzenstein.” Elena’s branch had been famed for its champagne and white wine production, with estates founded in Reims, France, in 1827 and in the famous terroir Johannisberg, Germany (where Riesling was produced) in 1822. Her father was head of the internationally famous champagne company "Mumm Co." until the French seized the family’s French properties and brand name after World War I as spoils of war. Her father continued making wine in Germany until his death in 1937. On her paternal side, Elena was related to the Barons von Radowitz and Barons von Rotenhan, as well as the Grunelius and Passavant families, powerful industrialists and bankers. One of the family banks was a founding member of a banking consortium that would grow to become the Swiss Bank Corporation, now merged into UBS AG, the world's largest manager of private wealth assets. Her uncle, Baron Walther von Mumm, was a sportsman, Don Juan and bon vivant who enjoyed racing hot air balloons and even filled in on the German bobsled team at the 1932 Olympic Games.

Her mother was a daughter of Karl de Struve, who served at different times as the Russian Ambassador to Japan, the United States, and the Netherlands. The de Struve family descended from a long line of famed astronomers, the first of whom moved to Russia during Czar Peter I the Great’s cultural and scientific revolution. By the fifth generation, they had married into prominent Russian imperial families and European aristocracy: most prominent of Elena's great-aunts and great-uncles were the Vicomte Eugene Melchior de Vogüé, philosopher and author; Victor, Prince Galitzine; and General Michael Nicolaivitch Annenkoff, Governor General of Trans-Caspia, 'conqueror' of Bokhara, and builder of the Transcaucasia railroad. Elena's second great-grandfather, General Nicholas Annenkov, was Comptroller General of the Russian Imperial Court. Her mother was born in Japan and with her four siblings grew up there, and in St Petersburg, The Hague, and Washington, D.C. . Her mother's siblings included Princess Vera Mestchersky, Countess Elena Orlov, and Boris de Struve, a Russian attaché to Washington who married an American, Maxine Slater. Her mother left Russia in 1904 to marry her father, whereas her aunts returned to Russia to marry. After the Russian Revolution, they ended up in Paris as part of the émigré community.

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