11/15/2025 Jewelry, General, Watches
Doyle is honored to auction property from The Jane Stanton Hitchcock Collection, a best-selling mystery novelist whose incisive wit and keen social insight were shaped by her life in the rarified circles of New York and Washington society.
Her collection of jewelry will be offered across three sales, beginning with Important Jewelry on Thursday, December 11, followed by Fine Jewelry and Jewelry Online in January 2026. Artwork, furniture, decorations, silver, books and more from her Manhattan duplex at 10 Gracie Square, originally decorated by Mark Hampton and later refreshed by Genevieve Faure, will be featured in a single-owner auction in Spring 2026.
Born Jane Johnston Crowley in Manhattan in 1946, she was the daughter of surgeon Robert Crowley and radio actress Louise Abrass Crowley, known professionally as Joan Alexander, the voice of Lois Lane on the radio version of The Adventures of Superman. Jane was later adopted by her mother’s second husband, Arthur Stanton, who made a fortune importing Volkswagens after World War II, and grew up amid the privileged world of 10 Gracie Square, where Leonard Bernstein might play piano at her parents’ parties and Neil Simon wrote a sketch for her 21st birthday.
Educated at Brearley, the Wheeler School, and Sarah Lawrence College, Hitchcock began her career as a playwright before eventually turning to fiction. In her mystery novels, she found her voice, blending mystery, social satire, and sly humor with psychological insight. Her debut, Trick of the Eye (1992), was followed by The Witches’ Hammer (1994), Social Crimes (2002), One Dangerous Lady (2005), and Mortal Friends (2009). Critics admired her ability to lampoon the manners and hypocrisies of the elite with elegance and humor—never betraying confidences, only murdering her characters on the page.
Her social world provided both backdrop and inspiration, but Hitchcock’s life was not without real-world drama. In the 2000s, she helped expose a major financial fraud when her mother’s accountant was convicted of embezzling tens of millions from celebrity clients. That real-life ordeal inspired her final novel, Bluff (2019), which follows a poker-playing socialite seeking revenge for her family’s financial ruin. The book won the Dashiell Hammett Prize for Literary Excellence.
Hitchcock herself was an accomplished poker player, known for her intuitive style and fearless bluffing. She competed in major tournaments in Atlantic City and Las Vegas, once taking second place for a $60,000 win. “Poker is like life,” she told The Washington Post in 2017. “You play the next hand as it comes.”
In 1975, Hitchcock married William Mellon Hitchcock, an heir to the Gulf Oil fortune, later divorcing in 1991. In 1995, she married Jim Hoagland, the Pulitzer Prize–winning Washington Post journalist. The couple divided their time between Georgetown and New York, where Hitchcock continued to write, play poker, and charm friends with her trademark irony and warmth. Diagnosed with cancer in 2022, she faced her illness with humor and grit, even arranging matching headstones for Hoagland and herself: his reading “Historical Optimist,” hers “Hysterical Pessimist.”
Jane Stanton Hitchcock lived a life as vivid and layered as her novels, blending high society, wry satire, and real-world intrigue with effortless style. Her remarkable collection reflects the same elegance, humor and confidence that defined her writing and her life. The upcoming auctions offer a glimpse into the world of a woman who observed, charmed and sometimes outwitted everyone around her—proof that, as she once wrote, “murder concentrates the mind.”
Jane Stanton Hitchcock’s jewelry collection reflects her sophisticated eye for quality, elegance, and a flair for drama. The first offering from the collection on December 11 includes 17 lots of exceptional jewelry by such makers as Bulgari, Cartier, Chaumet, David Webb, Graff, Oscar Heyman, Verdura, Van Cleef & Arpels, and Tiffany & Co., Schlumberger. Addtional jewelry will be offered in January 2026.
Auction Thursday, December 11, 2025 at 11am
Exhibition December 6 – 8
View Lots
