Desk Notes No.29

Bloomsbury Women Outdoors, Lady Audley’s Secret, and Pre-Raphaelite Femme Fatales

Sep 01, 2024

Dear friends,

As August draws to a close my hard work in the garden is finally paying off. Green tomatoes are blushing red, courgettes are swelling into marrows and golf ball sized kohlrabi are almost ready to harvest. There have been failures of course — the winter squash went in too late to produce more than a handful of fruits and, after a short flush, the peas caught mildew — but enough has worked to make it all worthwhile. As the garden takes up less of my time each day, it seems like time for a new project.

Over the next few months I plan to begin reading and annotating Virginia Woolf’s diaries — a project that will take me through autumn, winter and into spring 2025. After investing in a couple of beautiful journals designed for Charleston House (where Woolf’s sister, artist Vanessa Bell, lived with her lover Duncan Grant) I have begun planning how the annotation might work. It’s an evolving process, with an abundance of lists, stickers and quotations.

By happy chance, in mid-August I arrived at the Cotswolds home of collector Charles Wade to find I was following in Woolf’s footsteps once again. Wade purchased Snowshill in 1919, meticulously planning each room to best display his objects — everything from Chinese cabinets and penny-farthings to a mummy’s hand. With no space left in the house, Wade set up home in the nearby brewhouse, a very humble abode. Woolf visited in July 1935, writing to Vanessa of the house and its owner:

“Not, I thought, very interesting, and I think rather a fraud, as he pretended to have no watch, and so I lost my train, and only got back at 8:30.”

Woolf visited Snowshill with writer Elizabeth Bowen and Lady Susan Tweedmuir, who was rather more forgiving of Wade’s eccentricities, describing Snowshill as a, “lovely and mysterious house.” Recalling the outing many years later, Tweedmuir writes:

“Anyone who went to Snowshill in those days knew what it was to taste deeply of romance with a sort of frisson in it. Mr. Wade was reputed to have many magic secrets and was called The Necromancer; certainly when you drove through the gate and saw the beautiful house standing on a shelf from which the ground sloped down into a wide valley you held your breath. It looked beautiful, but also shut up and formidable…
“Mr. Wade wore his hair long and had a moleskin waist-coat. He is a collector of eighteenth-century clothes and some of his collections are famous. He led us to his laboratory and I saw Virginia's eyes gleam when she looked at the stuffed crocodile and the glass retorts. Here was alchemy and something out of the everyday world. We visited the mysterious bedrooms, so full of dark corners and queer curios, and I felt that we had stepped outside the ordinary world and outside time.”

Standing on the lawned terrace overlooking the undulating hills, I thought about the time separating us and recalled a line from Woolf’s final novel, Between the Acts. Before it was published, Woolf took her own life.

“‘That’s what makes a view so sad,’ said Mrs Swithin, lowering herself into the deckchair which Giles had brought her. ‘And so beautiful. It’ll be there,’ she nodded at the strip of gauze laid upon the distant fields, ‘when we’re not.’”

Places— Gardening Bohemia: Bloomsbury Women Outdoors at the Garden Museum until 29 September 2024

Print — Lady Audley’s Secret by Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1862); Armadale by Wilkie Collins (1866)

Places

Gardening Bohemia: Bloomsbury Women Outdoors at the Garden Museum until 29 September 2024

“It was September after all, the middle of September, and past six in the evening. So off they strolled down the garden in the usual direction, past the tennis lawn, past the pampas grass, to that break in the thick hedge, guarded by red hot pokers like brasiers of clear burning coal, between which the blue waters of the bay looked bluer than ever.”

When Virginia Woolf began her most autobiographical novel To The Lighthouse in 1925 she re-imagined the garden of her childhood at Talland House in St Ives. She transplanted the action to the Isle of Skye and in 1927 told Vita Sackville-West:

“An old creature writes to say that all my flora and fauna of the Hebrides is totally inaccurate.”

“My horticulture is in every sense wrong: there are no rooks, elms or dahlias in the Hebrides; my sparrows are wrong, so are my carnations….”

It hardly mattered; the dislocated flora seems only to heighten the ghostly aspect of the novel. Now a new exhibition at the Garden Museum in Lambeth, explores the connection between gardening and the imagination in the lives of Bloomsbury’s women: artist Vanessa Bell, poet Vita Sackville-West, arts patron Lady Ottoline Morrell, and Virgina Woolf herself; exploring their respective gardens at Charleston, Sissinghurst, Garsington and Monk’s House.

The indoor museum setting might seem incompatible with the garden’s freedom of open sky. Yet the curators do a wonderful job evoking the collaborative, creative, imaginative atmosphere of lawns, flower beds and pools with personal ephemera, photo albums, handwritten notebooks, and sketches. It’s wonderfully intimate. Pasted into Ottoline Morrell’s original album, Virginia Woolf sits in a garden chair in ‘six positions.’ As she lifts her hand from her face, leans into a conversation, turns to look past the picture taker, it’s the closest thing to a spontaneous moving picture. Light shimmers through the trees, her floral dress shifts, other people’s feet encroach upon the frame, she smiles. It’s extraordinarily moving.

Transitioning from Ottoline’s Garsington gatherings (which include DH Lawrence and Katherine Mansfield, whose own writing beautifully evokes the flora and fauna of her native New Zealand), the exhibition turns to the private gardens of Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West. Here the boundaries between indoors and outdoors blur. Vanessa’s still-life paintings bring flowers inside, framed by windows and views. Meanwhile, Monk’s House provides Woolf with opportunities for the close observation that drives her sensory short stories Kew Gardens and In The Orchard. The garden presents not only as a place of inspiration and creative nurturing but also a place of pleasure. “Did you feel as I often did,” writes Ottoline Morrell, “that this is too beautiful, it cannot last?”

Print

Lady Audley’s Secret by Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1862)

Armadale by Wilkie Collins (1866)

Marriage law was so complex in the mid-nineteenth century that often it wasn’t fully understood by the public. Bigamy, adultery and sham marriages made rich pickings for Victorian novelists hoping to surprise and shock their readers with elaborate plots. A trained lawyer, Wilkie Collins, writes a fascinating chapter titled Love and Law in his 1866 sensation novel Armadale — a novel about inherited curses, impersonation, murder and bigamy. Seeking to wed clandestinely, naive lovers Allan and Neelie pore over a law book, Blackstone’s Commentaries, “with a grave resolution to understand it, which, in two such students, was nothing less than a burlesque in itself!”

Neelie pulls out a pocket book, making columns for ‘good’ and ‘bad,’ hoping to find a way to elope and marry legally. Blackstone’s is a weighty volume and Allan asks for a kiss first, “to clear my head.”

“‘I must clear your head, of course, at any sacrifice. Only one, mind,’ she whispered coquettishly; ‘and pray be careful of Blackstone, or you’ll lose the place.’ There was a pause in the conversation. Blackstone and the pocket book both rolled onto the ground together. ‘If this happens again, said Neelie, picking up the pocket-book, with her eyes and complexion at their brightest and best, ‘I shall sit with my back to you for the rest of the morning. Will you go on?’”

Neelie is surprised to find Blackstone writes, “nothing about love,” but plenty about age, reason and parental consent. Clandestine or sham marriages made for sensational reading in the press; sham marriages, in particular, could lead to a woman’s ruin. But hasty marriages were almost impossible to escape from. Divorce was only made available to ordinary people a decade earlier, with the 1857 Matrimonial Causes Act, and it remained cruelly biased. Men could sue for divorce based on adultery alone, but for women, adultery must be combined with another matrimonial offence such as cruelty or desertion. Given the difficulty of obtaining a divorce, many couples separated. But desertion could have devastating effects on women and mothers whose economic opportunities were limited. Deserted spouses could sue for the restitution of conjugal rights, but bigamy remained a focus of moral panic.

Here enters Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s startling novel, Lady Audley’s Secret. Deserted by her husband, Lucy Graham is presented with an unprecedented opportunity to marry the wealthy Sir Michael Audley who knows nothing of her first marriage. “Do not ask too much of me… I have been selfish from my babyhood,” she pleads, unable to resist the financial benefits of his infatuation. Once married (again) Lucy’s suppressed magpie tendencies take flight. Sable furs, precious jewels, and fine porcelain fill her apartments. She is the ultimate Victorian consumer. Beautiful and childlike, Lady Audley hoodwinks the novel’s men, but a mysterious disappearance threatens to unmask a darker truth. Might she also be a murderer?

In what feels like a mark of genius, Braddon never presents her villainess from the inside. Instead we observe a series of identities — Lucy Graham, Lucy Talbot, Lady Audley, Madame Taylor — and myriad reflections, as her character is seen through the lens of others. In doing so Braddon exposes the male gaze; exposes how Victorian society reduces women to stereotypes. The idea is condensed in the novel’s fictional painting of Lady Audley, which Braddon attributes to a member of the controversial Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.

“I am afraid the young man belonged to the pre-Raphaelite brotherhood, for he had spent a most unconscionable time upon the accessories of this picture—upon my lady’s crispy ringlets and the heavy folds of her crimson velvet dress…
“Yes, the painter must have been a pre-Raphaelite. No one but a pre-Raphaelite would have painted, hair by hair, those feathery masses of ringlets, with every glimmer of gold, and every shadow of pale brown. No one but a pre-Raphaelite would have so exaggerated every attribute of that delicate face as to give a lurid brightness to the blonde complexion, and a strange, sinister light to the deep blue eyes. No one but a pre-Raphaelite could have given to that pretty pouting mouth the hard and almost wicked look it had in the portrait.
“It was so like, and yet so unlike. It was as if you had burned strange-coloured fires before my lady’s face, and by their influence brought out new lines and new expressions never seen in it before. The perfection of feature, the brilliancy of colouring, were there; but I suppose the painter had copied quaint mediaeval monstrosities until his brain had grown bewildered, for my lady, in his portrait of her, had something of the aspect of a beautiful fiend.
Her crimson dress, exaggerated like all the rest in this strange picture, hung about her in folds that looked like flames, her fair head peeping out of the lurid mass of colour as if out of a raging furnace. Indeed the crimson dress, the sunshine on the face, the red gold gleaming in the yellow hair, the ripe scarlet of the pouting lips, the glowing colours of each accessory of the minutely painted background, all combined to render the first effect of the painting by no means an agreeable one.”

Braddon plays on the sensational reputation of Pre-Raphaelite painters and their art at the time. There is a suggestion in the novel that the painter might be William Holman Hunt, famed for the morally loaded picture, The Awakening Conscience (1853). For me, it most vividly evokes Rossetti’s aesthetic portraits, anticipating that of Lady Lilith begun just four years after the novel. In Rossetti’s picture, the table next to Lilith holds a foxglove, which the 1857 book Language of Flowers decodes as ‘insincerity’, and a scarlet poppy as ‘fantastic extravagance’. Rossetti paints Lilith, the original femme fatale, combing her long golden tresses before a handheld looking-glass, lost in her own reflection.

Lilith and Lady Audley’s golden hair was chosen carefully. As Elisabeth Gitter1 describes, it held powerful meaning for Victorian audiences:

“While women’s hair, particularly when it is golden, has always been a Western preoccupation, for the Victorians it became an obsession… Golden hair, through which wealth and female sexuality are inevitably linked, was the obvious and ideal vehicle for expressing their notorious — and ambivalent — fascination both with money and with female sexual power.”

Indeed, red hair, like that of Armadale’s famous villainess Lydia Gwilt, carried equally distasteful meanings. Red hair was often associated with “moral ugliness,” writes Richard Altick,2 its connection with female seduction being underpinned by the pre-Raphaelite paintings of artists like Rossetti.

Lady Audley, like Rossetti’s Lilith, is surrounded by mirrors. What she sees when she looks there, we hardly know. Does she take comfort in that glimpse of her seductive power; her only leverage in society? For the rest of us, the mirrors serve only to further fracture and fragment her identity:

“The looking-glasses, cunningly placed at angles and opposite corners by an artistic upholsterer, multiplied my lady’s image, and in that image reflected the most beautiful object in the enchanted chamber.”

As the novel draws to a close Braddon becomes more concerned with the question of the self — who are we? And how can we know each other? What is madness? And could any of us descend into its abyss? Lady Audley’s step daughter, Alicia, hints at the parts of ourselves kept hidden beneath the public mask.

“I think that sometimes a painter is in a manner inspired, and is able to see, through the normal expression of the face, another expression that is equally a part of it, though not to be perceived by common eyes. We have never seen my lady look as she does in that picture; but I think that she could look so.”

For Lynette Felber in Literary Portrait as Centrefold,3 Braddon reveals how a “woman’s significance is constructed in the process of reflection or being looked upon.” When she finally speaks for herself, Lady Audley presents with an air of entitlement; as a woman refusing to accept the impoverished position society has handed to her; a woman determined to claim what she deserves; utilising her beauty to turn the male gaze against itself. I can only imagine the impact this must have made on Braddon’s female readers, accustomed to novels in which women, like Elizabeth Gaskell’s Ruth, were disempowered and exploited for the beauty they possessed.

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