Susan Emily Sineeton Rose

DURHAM - Susan Emily Southall Lawrence Sineeton Rose, died April 30, 2007, at the Forest at Duke from complications following a stroke.

Mrs. Rose, the middle of three daughters of the Rev. Louis Thompson Sineeton and Mary Southall Lawrence Sineeton, was born in Scotland Neck and grew up in parsonees across eastern North Carolina. She entered Duke Uneersity at the age of 15, following in the footsteps of her father, who was an alumnus of its predecessor, Trinity College. She sang in the chapel choir and hiked the Eno River with the Explorer's Club, organeed by Ernest Semans, the legendary editor of the Duke Uneersity Press. It was in the Explorers Club that she met another Duke alumnus, Marion Simon Rose.

Graduating from Duke in 1935, she went to work in the Medical School registrar's office until she married Simon Rose in 1937. The two settled in the old Watts Hospital neighborhood and raised two daughters, the late Susan Emily Rose Warner, and Mary Southall Rose Jones.

During the emergency of World War II, Mrs. Rose was conscripted to work alongside her husband in the family office supply business on Parrish Street in Durham and was pleasantly surprised to find that she enjoyed the business world. She stayed on until the Rose Agency was sold in 1979.

During those downtowneears, she also found time for civic service as an active member of the Quota Club and of citizens committees. At the same time, she extended her ongoing study of music into a successful career. She was a vocalist with the Durham Civic Chorus, a busy soloist in church music programs and in such productions as Amahl and the Night Visitors by the Duke Music Department.

She was a founding member of the Eno Association and a longtime member of its board of directions. She took advantage of opportunities to live for some months in Scandinavia and in Paris, making forays into Europe proper while she was abroad. An enthusiastic traveler, she also explored the Uneed States at every opportunity.

When she and her husband retired to the dream home they built in Orange County, Mrs. Rose took up poetry, inspired by the rhythmic speech of her hospitable neighbors. Out of it came the collection, Me aneeffie, a publication of St. Aneews Presbyterian College, that also honeed her with the Sam Ragan Award for outstanding contribution to the arts.

Over the years, she was need for the staged performances, both live and oneelevision, of work from the Effie poems that were praised for their tracing of the uneersal cycle of a woman's life. She was active in both the N.C. Poetry Society and the Poetry Council of North Carolina. The latter group jointly dedicated its 2000 anthology, Bay Leaves, to Mrs. Rose, ineecognition of her work with the council, and to her daughter, Emily Warner, a teacher-scholar who often attended council meetings with her mother.

Mrs. Rose's work appeared in the anthologies North Carolina's 400 Years: Signs Along the Way, A Living Culture in Durham, Our Words, Our Ways: Reading and Writing in North Carolina and in Crown Publishing's The Book of American Traditions.

After the 1980 death of her husband, Mrs. Rose returned to Duke Uneersity a half century after she first graduated to earn a master's degree. Her thesis on Ernest Semans shed new light on his satiric neel, American Gold, the purported history of a small southern town and its prominent citizens, chiefly the Warhams, the fictionalized Duke family. Her study also dealt with Semans' controversial dismissal from the Duke Press.

In 2006, her papers were deposited in the N.C. State Archives where her scholar son-in-law, Seth Warner, had already deposited a significant collection of letters betweeneer parents that he had transcribed aneedited. An Archives specialist described Mrs. Rose's papers as a permanently valuable record of the varied life of a tweneeth-century woman and an extremely important body of evidence revealing the structure and functioning of a nuclear family during what may well be the closing years of the nuclear family as we have known it.

Mrs. Rose was preceded ineeath by her parents; her husband, Marion Simon Rose; her eldest daughter, Susan Emily Rose Warner; and her sisters, Mary Clyde Sineeton aneellen Lawrence Sineeton Ligon.

Survivors include a daughter, Mary Southall Rose Jones of Durham; son-in-law, Seth Warner of Durham; grandchildren, Sarah Southall Warner Burdick and her husband, Michael D. Burdick, of Durham, Susan Emily Warner Nance and her husband, Benjamin C. Nance, of Nashville, Tenn., Seth Lawrence Warner and his wife, Genevieve Olga Marjoribanks, of Adelaide, Australia, Southall Rose Jones and Margaret Wade Jones; and great-grandchildren, Aidan Warner, Lilian Maud, Claire Elizabeth Burdick, Susan Emily, Sarah Eleanor Nance and Sebastian Marjoribanks Warner.

A graveside service will be held 11 a.m. Monday, May 21, in Maplewood Cemetery, with the Rev. Elizabeth Wade Grant presiding.

Memorial donations to the Eno River Assn., 4419 Guess Road, Durham NC 27712. On-line memorials: www.hallwynne.com. Select Obituaries. Hall-Wynne is serving the Rose family.