Daphne Iris Willis

Daphne Iris Willis

Daphne Iris Willis was born January 16th, 1910 to Martha and Jonathan Willis, a prominent doctor in Louisville Kentucky. Her tragic death shortly after her eighteenth birthday is rumored to have been the inspiration of Zelda Fitzgerald's unfinished novel, Floating Amongst the Trees.

Biography
Early Life
Daphne Willis was the only child of the prominent Louisvillan doctor, Jonathan Willis and his wife Martha. Marha Willis became pregnant many times after the birth of her first child, but all the pregnancies terminated in miscarriages, except for one still-born son in the summer of 1914. As a result, both Jonathan and Martha Willis were very protective of their daughter.
By all acounts, Willis was a happy child, living in her parent's palacial estate just east of the city proper. Martha Willis enrolled her daughter into ballet lessons at age 5, and dancing became Daphne's passion.

Rebellious Adolescence
Daphne, starting in 1924, became increasingly agrumentative with her ballet teacher, Elizabeth Byrant, according her diary, about her direction in dance. Having been inspired by Isadora Duncan, Daphne began to find ballet moves restrictive and unnatural, instead opting for more free-flowing forms inspired by classical Greek dance.
Daphne was not only rebelling on-stage but in her personal life too. She was often seen cruising in the car of Jason Brown, an heir to The Brown Hotel fortune, despite the fact she was engaged to Marcus Alexander Doyle, a man of Irish and Italian descent nearly thirteen years her senior. It is rumored that Jonathan Willis arranged the engagement against his daughter's will, wanting her to marry a stable man as oppose to the wild, and often drunk, Jason Brown.

A Tragic and Mysterious End
Shortly, after her eighteenth birthday, on January 20th, 1928, Daphne Willis was racing down a state route that connected Louisville with Newport, Kentucky, across the river from Cinncinati, Ohio. At this time Jason Brown was staying with his cousins in the area, thus many conclude she was driving up to see him. Like her idol, Isadora Duncan, Daphne had a pension for long, flowing scarfs. The police report concludes that Daphne stop for a moment on her trip, for a reason unknown, at which time her scarf became tangled on a branch due to the intense winds that night. She then proceeded to press down on the accelerator, the scarf still around her neck, and was thus yanked out the vehicle and hung. The ruling that this occurence was an accident has aroused much suspicion. Some conclude that Daphne Willis actually hung herself, due to her unhappy engagement, and Jonathan Willis, not wanting the world to know, paid the police to call it an accidentally death. This seems to be the most likely scenario but others argue that foul play was involved, and that a jealous Marcus Doyle killed his unfaithful fiancee for humiliating him by her affair with Jason Brown. Zelda Fitzgerald's unfinished novel seems to have been inspired by this theory, even included that Iris Kraft, the character inspired by Daphne, haunted the woods she was hung in, searching our her revenge on any man with her murderer's initals.

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