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On Laura Clifford Barney...

Wikipedia has a good summary:

Laura Clifford Barney (1879-1974), married name Laura Dreyfus-Barney (b. Cincinnati, O., 30 November 1879, d. Paris, 18 August 1974) became a leading American Bahá'í teacher and philanthropist. The daughter of Albert and Alice Pike Barney. Albert Clifford Barney was the son of a manufacturer of railway cars and was of English descent. Alice, of French Dutch and German ancestry and was a socially prominent artist from Washington, D.C., she and her elder sister Natalie Clifford Barney were educated by private tutors. Laura became a leading American Bahá'í teacher and philanthropist. She is best known for having compiled the Bahá'í text Some Answered Questions from her interviews with `Abdu'l-Bahá during her visit to Acca between 1904 and 1906.

Her accomplishemnts.. Sometimes I think we overlook them or don't stress them:

Laura was active in social causes including world peace, women’s rights, education. She was a member of different committees with the League of Nations and latter UNESCO.

During World War I Laura Dreyfus-Barney served in the American Ambulance Corps (1914-15) and the American Red Cross (1916-18) in France and helped to establish the first children’s hospital in Avignon (1918).

The remainder of her life was devoted to international humanitarian and philanthropic activities, most connected with the League of Nations and the United Nations. For her services she was named chevalier (1925) and officer (1937) of the French Légion d’Honneur

My favorite portrait of her:



The above is a pastel by Laura's mother..Alice Park Barney

Title of the drawing: Laura Attentive 1912

Alice Pike Barney
Born: Cincinnati, Ohio 1857
Died: Los Angeles, California 1931
pastel on paperboard

19 5/8 x 18 3/8 in. (49.8 x 46.7 cm)

Smithsonian American Art Museum

Gift of Laura Dreyfus Barney and Natalie Clifford Barney in memory of their mother, Alice Pike Barney

1972.181.4

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Laura Clifford Barney lived quite a long time ..marrying Hippolyte in 1911 and passing to the Abha kingdom in 1974.

I think we Baha'is in the West owe her and her husbund Hippolyte Drefus a good deal..

Here's a brief biography of her husband:

The following is a brief excerpt of the article at iranica.com.

Classified in Biographies and Encyclopedia articles.




Dreyfus-Barney, Hippolyte and Laura Clifford

by Shapour Rassekh
published in Encyclopaedia Iranica, Volume 7
New York: Columbia University, 1996

i. HIPPOLYTE DREYFUS-BARNEY

Hippolyte Dreyfus (b. Paris, 12 April 1873, d. Paris, 20 December 1928), son of a prominent French Jewish family, became a leading Bahai scholar, translator, and religious teacher. He received a degree in law from the Institut des Sciences Politiques in Paris and practiced before the Paris court of appeals.

He was converted to the Bahai faith in about 1900 by May Ellis Bolles (later Maxwell), a Canadian living in Paris.

In 1903 he was able to visit the Bahai leader ʿAbd-al-Bahāʾ in ʿAkkāʾ in Palestine.

At about the same time he gave up his legal career to devote himself to oriental studies, enrolling in the religious-studies section of the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris, where he studied Arabic and Persian with Hartwig Derenbourg and Clément Huart, intending to translate Bahai scripture into French. He was the only Western Bahai of his generation who received such formal training.

Dreyfus-Barney, Hippolyte and Laura Clifford

Consider the literary output of Hippolyte:

Dreyfus’ first major translation was Bahāʾ-Allāh’s Ketāb-e īqān (Book of certitude; Paris, 1904).

He also published Le babisme et le béhaïsme (Paris, 1904), a lecture that he had delivered on 1 March 1904 at the École des Hautes Études Sociales.

More influential was his later publication Essai sur le béhaïsme (Paris, 1909; 3rd ed. published as Bahaïsme), the first “handbook” on the faith, in which he dealt with the the history of the Babi and Bahai religions and such questions as religion and the state, universal peace, Bahaism and society, the house of justice, Bahaism and the individual, and the Bahai faith and patriotism.

In 1905-06 he and Ḥabīb-Allāh Šīrāzī published a collection of Bahāʾ-Allāh’s writings entitled Les préceptes du Béhaïsme (2 vols., Paris, 1905-06), which included Haft wādī (The seven valleys), Kalemat-e maknūna (The hidden words), Lawḥ-e ḥekmat (Tablet of wisdom), Lawḥ-e aqdas (The most holy tablet), and several other works.

In 1907-09 Dreyfus collaborated with the American Bahai Laura Clifford Barney (see ii, below) on the publication of Persian, French, and English editions of the answers of ʿAbd-al-Bahāʾ to philosophical and theological questions that she had put to him (published as Mofāważāt-e mobāraka, Les leçons de Saint Jean d’Acre, and Some Answered Questions respectively).

In later years he translated several more of Bahāʾ-Allāh’s books: al-Ketāb al-aqdas and Soʾāl o jawāb (both unpublished), Lawḥ-e Šayḵ (Paris, 1913), and a three-volume collection of Bahāʾ-Allāh’s works containing his own earlier translations and some new ones (Paris, 1923-28).

He also published a number of books and scholarly articles on Bahai topics.

Dreyfus-Barney, Hippolyte and Laura Clifford

Here's a lovely portrait of Hippolyte by his mother-in-law Alice Pike Barney:



And who was May Ellis Bolles (later Maxwell) who converted Hippolyte to the Faith in 1900? In 1902 she married Sutherland Maxwell an architect..their child was Mary Sutherland Maxwell born in 1910.

See:

http://bahai-library.com/bramson_abc...uhiyyih_khanum

Oh Mary Sutherland Maxwell was known later as Mary Sutherland Maxwell Rabbani or Ruhiyyih Khanum .. After she married the Beloved Guardian of the Cause of God Shoghi Effendi Rabbani in 1937...!!