This fascinates me (and might interest you too, if you know children’s literature)

Courtney Love is Paula Fox’s granddaughter..

(A page on Paula Fox, in case you don’t know who she is)

Not that Courtney Love knew this – her mother only discovered it as an adult, since Fox had birthed her out of wedlock and placed her for adoption. And Fox herself had a troubled childhood:

Fox’s mother Elsie, determined not to have children, had already had three or four abortions, but did not realise she was pregnant with Paula until too late, so the baby was instead deposited at a foundling home in New York. From there she was rescued by Elsie’s mother, Candelaria de Sola, once the beautiful Spanish child-wife of a Cuban plantation owner, now sad and passive, "the paid companion of an ancient cuckoo woman" on another Cuban plantation, and temporarily visiting the States. The baby was passed from friend to friend. When she was five months old, a Congregational minister, the Reverend Elwood Corning, doing the rounds of his parishioners in Orange County, New York, noticed her. "I struck him in some way – so he took me and he kept me with him until I was almost six years old." Fox laughs. "Mr Corning was my first conquest. Alas, my mother and father were not."

and Love’s mother, Nancy Carroll, who discusses all this in her new memoirs, had a troubled adulthood, and Courtney Love, well…

More from Beliefnet and our partners
Close Ad