Identical twins, Dorothea Katherine and Gladys Louise Husted Cromwell were born in Brooklyn in 1886, the fourth and fifth children of middle-aged parents. Reared in the opulent wealth of upper-class society during the Gilded Age, a certain sort of cloistered existence as “society women” was expected of them. Their father was himself a scion, involved in business ventures and investments ranging from transportation to insurance and trust companies. The twins grew up sheltered in a four-story Beaux-Arts mansion in the elegant Brooklyn Heights section of the borough and, as Dorothea put it in an unpublished roman à clef, “There was a tragic possibility that they would end by counting only decoratively in the human scheme.”
Against the expectations of their family, both sisters wanted to be poets, or writers of some sort. Their interests lay amidst the world of music and the arts, and they were interested in whatever was most modern and challenging—not in the society functions and respectable marriages their parents wanted for them. Dorothea exposed precisely this dynamic in her roman à clef. In the passage below, “Mrs. Godwin” stands in for her mother, Mrs. Cromwell:
Mrs. Godwin was an imposing woman. Providence had given her wealth and a devoted husband. These luxuries lifted her above the contingencies of life, so that being free, she could afford to play with the problems of every day that to you and me are real. […]
Was it that sense, I wonder that achieved the Godwin twins? […]
She reared them not as human beings but as “ornaments,”—like a pair of polychrome candle-holders on either side of her bedroom clock. She ordered them to be frail dainty things. While they were young, Mrs. Godwin dressed then quaintly in long smocks, so that they were different from other children; they seemed to toddle more. They had straight little figures, identical profiles and wore bangs.
They were “guarded like princesses, knowing little of the world and somewhat fearful of it,” wrote Mary “Molly” Colum, a poet and literary critic who met the twins in their early adulthood.