When it came to dealing with Edith, Rosamund believed that Hubert was “absolutely the only person who had any influence on her moods and who could control her tantrums and bring her round to reason.” She recalled regular outbursts when:
There would be a stormy scene at meals ending in a hysterical outburst, when she would rush from the table and retire into her study with a violent slam of the door, leaving a shattered family staring uncomfortably at their pudding plates. Daddy would say “Oh, God!” and make for his study, also slamming the door. But always after a short while one would hear him go up to her room and beg to be let in. She would open the door and one could hear a murmur of affectionate phrase—“Now Cat dearest, don’t go on like that. Your old Cat loves you and you love your poor old Cat, don’t you? There, kiss your old Cat and come and have your pudding.”35
Rosamund agreed with May Bowley that Edith must have known about the affair. She even suggested that it was Edith who had persuaded Alice to seduce Hubert “in order to get him to give up another lady whom E.N. loathed.” This, Rosamund insisted, was a pattern she witnessed throughout her childhood and adolescence.
In “The Prince, Two Mice and Some Kitchen-maids” from Nine Unlikely Tales (1901), Edith wrote about a prince who was in danger of falling in love with a witch who has taken the shape of a cat. When a timid little kitchen maid lures the cat away by changing into a mouse, the prince turns his attention to her; “My love and my Lady,” he declares, holding the mouse to his cheek.33 He plans to marry the mouse and turn her into a princess. When they discover she must remain a mouse, he agrees to become a mouse too. At that moment they are transformed into prince and princess, but they remain terrified of cats and banish them from their kingdom.
In “The Unfaithful Lover,” a story from The Literary Sense (1903), Ethel’s lover kisses another woman who then sends him a letter making it clear she believes he is now committed to her. When he confesses to Ethel, she forgives him and declares: “It was hateful of you, and I wish you hadn’t, but I know you’re sorry, and I’m sorry; but I forgive you, and we’ll forget it, and you’ll never do it again.” Yet she feels a “sharp, sickening pinch of jealousy and mortification” and is unable to move on: “How can I ever trust you?” she cries. “Even if we were married I could never be sure you weren’t kissing some horrid girl or other.” She ends their relationship but never marries and mourns her loss for the rest of her life.
Rosamund’s account is unreliable. She was inclined to side with her father, and she insisted he had told her he loved her more than his other children. When she was a very young woman, he wrote Letters to a Daughter, an oddly intimate collection of essays addressed to her. She was hard on Edith, who she described as “unreasonable and fiendish.” Yet she was no kinder to Alice, characterizing her as “a little unsophisticated mouse” who was in awe of her flamboyant friend, an observation supported by Alice’s insistence that she was happy to play “satellite” to Edith’s “comet.”36
Helen Macklin, who was a longstanding friend of Edith’s and dedicatee of Lays and Legends, contradicted Rosamund’s account. She suggested that Edith had fallen seriously ill shortly after Rosamund was born and that Alice had nursed her through this crisis. As her strength returned, Edith, who had her suspicions, had begged Alice to disclose the identity of Rosamund’s father, which she did. Although Macklin agreed that Edith was prone to “varying moods” and most likely resented the ménage she found herself in, she insisted that her kindhearted friend would never have contemplated turning Alice and Rosamund out of what had become their home. Macklin considered Hubert to be “very conceited.” If Edith ever wished to leave him a note or attract his attention to a letter, she claimed, she would “stick it in the frame of the looking glass where he would be sure to notice it.” She did admit that Hubert, although serially unfaithful, was always contrite and filled with “deep repentance and regret.”37
Although Edith may have been unhappy with their unconventional arrangement, it was Hubert who prevailed. Prolific popular novelist and raffish man-about-town Edgar Jepson,* who knew him well, described him as “a truly patriarchal figure and head of a patriarchal household.”38 In Letters to a Daughter, Hubert declared, “men do not love women. Or if they love them they love them as the hawk loves the pigeon, or you love chocolate almonds.”39 He had oddly transient notions of marriage; “Romance, in-loveness, cannot survive six weeks of the appalling intimacy of marriage,”he declared. “The thing that should follow is friendship, friendship of a peculiar, a unique sort; friendship touched with tenderness, mixed with memories, coloured by emotion.”40
Edith may have acquiesced, but she found an outlet for her marital frustration in her poetry. “Bridal Ballad,” which she included in the second edition of Lays and Legends (1892), tells the tale of a wife who poisons her husband on their wedding night as a punishment for his infidelity. His dying words reveal his sympathy for her murderous act:
And if God judge thee as I do,
Then art thou justified.
I loved thee and I was not true,
And that was why I died.
More revealing are her companion poems “The Husband of Today” and “The Wife of All Ages,” which she composed during the early years of their marriage. In “The Husband of Today,” written when she was pregnant with Iris, a straying husband assures his wife that the fleeting passions he enjoys can never undermine the “love that lights life,” since only his fancy is fired and not his soul.
THE HUSBAND OF TODAY
Eyes caught by beauty, fancy by eyes caught;
Sweet possibilities, question, and wonder—
What did her smile say? What has her brain thought?
Her standard, what? Am I o’er it or under?
Flutter in meeting—in absence dreaming;
Tremor in greeting—for meeting scheming;
Caught by the senses, and yet all through
True with the heart of me, sweetheart, to you.
Only the brute in me yields to the pressure
Of longings inherent—of vices acquired;
All this, my darling, is folly—not pleasure,
Only my fancy—not soul—has been fired.
Sense thrills exalted, thrills to love-madness;
Fancy grown sad becomes almost love-sadness;
And yet love has with it nothing to do,
Love is fast fettered, sweetheart, to you.
Lacking fresh fancies, time flags—grows wingless;
Life without folly would fail—fall flat;
But the love that lights life, and makes death’s self stingless
You, and you only, have wakened that.
Sweet are all women, you are the best of them;
After each fancy has sprung, grown, and died,
Back I come ever, dear, to your side.
The strongest of passions—in joy—seeks the new,
But in grief I turn ever, sweetheart, to you.
In “The Wife of All Ages,” his disillusioned wife gives her answer. She dismisses his entreaties and insists that his “meeting, scheming, longing, trembling, dreaming” is born of love and nothing less. Were their roles reversed, she suggests, he too would have little patience for such fine distinctions. Although she accepts that she will never be “the only one” and realizes she should withdraw, she believes she is bound to him for all time:
THE WIFE OF ALL AGES
I do not catch these subtle shades of feeling,
Your fine distinctions are too fine for me;
This meeting, scheming, longing, trembling, dreaming,
To me mean love, and only love, you see;
In me at least ’tis love, you will admit,
And you the only man who wakens it.
Suppose I yearned, and longed, and dreamed, and fluttered,
What would you say or think, or further, do?
Why should one rule be fit for me to follow,
While there exists a different law for you?
If all these fires and fancies came my way,
Would you believe love was so far away?
On all these other women—never doubt it—
’Tis love you lavish, love you promised me!
What do I care to be the first, or fiftieth?
It is the only one I care to be.
Dear, I would be your sun, as mine you are,
Not the most radiant wonder of a star.
And so, good-bye! Among such sheaves of roses
You will not miss the flower I take from you;
Amid the music of so many voices
You will forget the little songs I knew—
The foolish tender words I used to say,
The little common sweets of every day.
The world, no doubt, has fairest fruits and blossoms
To give to you; but what, ah! what for me?
Nay, after all I am your slave and bondmaid,
And all my world is in my slavery.
So, as before, I welcome any part
Which you may choose to give me of your heart.
Little wonder the critic at The Graphic declared: “There is a note of quiet sadness in all her verses.”41
As the Dictionary of National Biography confirms, the publication of Edith’s poetry “brought recognition and friendship, but not affluence.”42 She continued churning out less fulfilling work to pay the bills run up by a growing household. New opportunities arose in 1888, when Robert Ellice Mack was appointed London editor for innovative German printer-turned-publisher Ernest Nister, with responsibility for sourcing authors and illustrators for the books Nister printed in Nuremburg. A distribution agreement with American publisher E. P. Dutton meant Edith’s books reached a huge new readership. Yet, as her reputation was not yet fully established, her stories and verses were often published anonymously.
Alice continued to help Edith with her various projects. It was she who wrote as “Uncle Harry” for S. W. Partridge & Co., producing books with mawkish titles such as Childhood’s Happy Days and Holiday Hours in Animal Land. Her Playtime Pictures and Stories was praised in the Primitive Methodist Magazine as “just the thing to send boys and girls into raptures.”43 With her rival so firmly inserted into the household, Edith sought romance elsewhere.
* Mack haggled with Beatrix Potter over the purchase of illustrations of Mr. Jeremy Fisher, writing “we certainly cannot make a booklet of it as people do not want frogs now.” When Potter held firm, Mack agreed to the price she asked.
* It was demolished in the 1970s.
* Edith encouraged him to publish his first book, Sibyl Falcon, in 1895.
CHAPTER 9
“HOW WAS HER FANCY CAUGHT?”
As Edgar Jepson observed, the Bland home was “a house of youth.” Both Edith and Hubert “seemed to have no use for the old” he explained, adding “they seldom encouraged the middle-aged and never the dull.”1 When Cecil Chesterton, who was more than two decades younger than Hubert, recalled their first meeting, he remarked:
I was very young, but he, who was interested in almost everything, was especially interested in youth. “The respect due to youth” was a favourite phrase of his used quite seriously. He was fond of maintaining that the young were almost certain to be more in the right than the old, that the freshness of their point of view was more important than experience. He preached this view continually, and with something of exaggeration, I think; but it was a generous exaggeration, and it helped to keep the man himself perpetually young.2
Naturally, Hubert proclaimed: “I adore youth, especially youth in frilled petticoats.”3
Although far less predatory, Edith too surrounded herself with handsome young men and enjoyed intensely romantic friendships with several of them. Whether these developed into full-blown love affairs is a matter of speculation. Friends described her as prudish. Berta Ruck, her close confidante for many years, insisted she was “naturally chaste.” Novelist and fellow Fabian H. G. Wells remarked on her “anti-sexual feeling,” but they had fallen out by then.4 Whatever her inclination, it seems unlikely that Hubert would have tolerated such dalliances since he held women to a high moral standard.
Just as Edith’s relationship with Shaw was reaching its unsatisfactory conclusion, she became involved with poet Richard le Gallienne, who was almost eight years her junior. The earliest recorded reference he made to her is in May 1888, in a letter he wrote from his native “Darkest Liverpool” to his friend and close collaborator John Lane. Noting their shared admiration for the late Philip Bourke Marston, Le Gallienne wondered if “Miss Nesbit of the Lays and Legends” was related to Mary Nesbit.5
Richard was the eldest of ten children born to brewery worker John Gallienne—the “Le” was a later addition—and his wife, Jane, née Smith. He inherited his love of poetry from his mother, who read verse to him throughout his childhood. In adolescence he was articled to a firm of accountants, but the profession held little attraction for him, and he was far more interested in literature. One colleague remembered him as “a great reader.”6 With encouragement from the poet Oliver Wendell Holmes, he arranged for My Ladies’ Sonnets, his first literary work, to be printed privately in 1887. When Lane got hold of a copy, he declared it the work of a genius and sent a postcard to “Richard Le Gallienne Esq., Poet, Birkenhead,” but the post office returned it marked “unknown.” In September 1887, when Le Gallienne came to London in search of literary work, he sought Lane out.
Lane was said to have had “an almost romantic affection for le Gallienne.”7 He described him as “a young man of undoubted genius, who was bound to set the Thames on fire, and whose face was the face of a Greek god.”8 In December 1888, Le Gallienne failed his final accountancy exams and headed for London, where Lane took him on as a reader and adviser. When Lane established the Bodley Head imprint with Elkin Mathews the following year, the first book they published was Le Gallienne’s Volumes in Folio. It established his reputation as a poet of note.
In the characteristically florid account he gave Doris Langley Moore, Le Gallienne insisted that his first memory of Edith was meeting her in 1889, in Hampstead, where he had lodgings. This was possibly at the home of Charlotte Wilson. He remembered that she was sitting in an armchair with two of her children at her side. He was attracted by her vaguely androgynous appearance, which suggested comradeship and independence to him. “I fell head-over-heels in love with her in fact,” he recalled. “I was hers from that moment, and have been ever since.” He left a lovely, although undoubtedly highly embellished description:
She was quite unlike any other woman I had ever seen, with her tall lithe boyish-girl figure admirably set off by her plain “socialist” gown, with her short hair, and her large, vivid eyes, curiously bird-like, and so full of intelligence and a certain half-mocking, yet friendly humour. She had, too, a comradely frankness of manner, which made me at once feel that I had known her all my life; like a tomboyish sister slightly older than myself. She suggested adventure, playing truant, robbing orchards and such-like boyish pranks, or even running away to sea.9
Edith and Richard moved in similar circles. In The Romantic ’90s, he recalled how Lane’s “charming ‘teas’” were graced by the “boyish, birdlike charm of ‘E. Nesbit.’”10 It seems certain she would have noticed this striking young man whom journalist Frederick Rogers described as “handsome, fragile in appearance, affected, refined, and with flashes of fine manliness now and again.” Rogers insisted that “it was impossible to know him and not to like him.”11 Another friend, J. Lewis May, wrote of “his chiseled Grecian features, his raven hair” and portrayed him as something of a Romantic:
Le Gallienne, I think, was the only one of the poets who sported a velvet jacket in public. He wore, like the scholar gipsy, a hat of antique shape and a “soft, abstracted air.” His coat was of sage-green velvet, his shirt and collar a la Byron, of some soft grey material; his tie, the hue of willow leaves in the wind, was loosely flowing.12
It is clear from the opening paragraph of his essay, “Woman as a Supernatural Being,” that Richard had oddly idealized notions of women:
The boy’s first hushed enchantment, blent with a sort of religious awe, as in his earliest love affair he awakens to the delicious mystery we call woman, a being half fairy and half flower, made out of moonlight and water lilies, of elfin music and thrilling fragrance, of divine whiteness and softness and rustle as of dewy rose gardens, a being of unearthly eyes and terribly sweet marvel of hair.
His flowery declarations contain echoes of Hubert’s essentialism too:
Though she may work at his side, the comrade of his sublunary occupations, he never, deep down, thinks of her as quite real. Though his wife, she remains an apparition, a being of another element, an Undine. She is never quite credible, never quite loses that first nimbus of the supernatural.13
Yet for all his ethereal notions, Richard’s good opinion of Edith owed much to her status as an acclaimed poet. He was keen to court her good opinion and presented her with a copy of Volumes in Folio, inscribed “To E. Nesbit Esq.,” which was a jibe at her ambiguous name. In her note of thanks, she gave him advice born of bitter experience:
If I were a mentor giving advice to young poets—I think I should say: “do not publish too many slight books—but wait a year or two and then chose the best of your work—and give the world something worthy of your highest dreams.”14
She offered to introduce him to Shaw, a literary hero of his, and she suggested they persuade him to feature an opera Le Gallienne was working on in his music column for the Star.
It is widely believed that Edith fell passionately in love with Richard Le Gallienne. Doris Langley Moore described how she threatened to leave with him after one particularly intense row with Hubert and ended up grappling on the stairs with Alice.15
The Life and Loves of E. Nesbit Page 13
