15 Perhaps she didn’t have time to keep them during her suffrage years or perhaps they were lost as she lived a life on the road.
16 According to her niece, Mary Lutyens. Cited in Clayre Percy and Jane Ridley, The Letters of Edwin Lutyens to his wife, Lady Emily (Collins, 1985), p. 35.
17 Neville Lytton, The English Country Gentleman, p. 249.
18 Constance Lytton to Betty Balfour, 21 August 1892, in Betty Balfour (ed.), Letters of Constance Lytton, p. 29.
19 Emily Lutyens to the Reverend Whitwell Elwyn, 16 December 1890, in Emily Lutyens, A Blessed Girl, p. 37.
20 Neville Lytton, The English Country Gentleman, p. 249.
21 Neville Lytton, The English Country Gentleman, p. 251.
22 Emily Lutyens, A Blessed Girl, p. 122.
23 Neville Lytton, The English Country Gentleman, p. 257.
24 Emily Lutyens, A Blessed Girl, p. 8.
25 Constance Lytton to Adela Villiers, January 1897, in Betty Balfour (ed.), Letters of Constance Lytton, p. 71.
26 Neville Lytton, The English Country Gentleman, p. 250.
27 Constance Lytton to Teresa Earle, 16 August 1897, in Betty Balfour (ed.), Letters of Constance Lytton, p. 77.
28 Quoted in Mary Lutyens, The Lyttons in India, p. 185.
29 Constance Lytton to Teresa Earle, August 1888, in Betty Balfour (ed.), Letters of Constance Lytton, p. 11.
30 Victor Lytton, Set in Remembrance, p. 17.
31 Frances Balfour to Emily Faithfull, 26 July 1887, Women’s Library 7EFA/096.
32 Constance Lytton to Gerald Balfour, 31 July 1887, Balfour Papers, National Archives of Scotland GD433/2/280/8–9.
33 Constance Lytton to Betty Balfour, 9 January 1901, Balfour Papers, National Archives of Scotland, GD433/2/324/1/6–8.
34 Victor Lytton, Set in Remembrance, p. 15.
35 Constance Lytton to Teresa Earle, August 1888, in Betty Balfour (ed.), Letters of Constance Lytton, p. 16.
36 Victor Lytton, Set in Remembrance, p. 18.
37 Robert Lytton to Teresa Earle, 23 January 1888, quoted in E. Neill Raymond, Victorian Viceroy, p. 277. For this period in Robert’s life see E. Neill Raymond, Victorian Viceroy, pp. 234–77.
38 Constance Lytton to Teresa Earle, August 1888, in Betty Balfour (ed.), Letters of Constance Lytton, p. 14; the price she paid for Gerald’s life is on p. 16.
39 Emily Lutyens, A Blessed Girl, p. 19.
40 Neville Lytton, The English Country Gentleman, p. 253.
41 Constance Lytton to Teresa Earle, August 1888, in Betty Balfour (ed.), Letters of Constance Lytton, p. 13.
42 Betty Balfour (ed.), Letters of Constance Lytton, pp. 40–41.
43 Victor Lytton, Set in Remembrance, p. 19.
44 Neville Lytton, The English Country Gentleman, p. 256.
45 Betty Balfour to Frances Balfour, 25–26 November 1891, Balfour Papers, National Archives of Scotland, GD433/2/205.
46 Balfour Papers, National Archives of Scotland, GD433/2/305/36.
47 Emily Lutyens to the Reverend Whitwell Elwyn, 14 July and 17 July 1893, in Emily Lutyens, A Blessed Girl, p. 210 and Emily Lutyens to the Reverend Whitwell Elwyn, 3 March 1893, in Emily Lutyens, A Blessed Girl, p. 189.
48 Betty Balfour to Gerald Balfour, 17 November 1891, Balfour Papers, National Archives of Scotland, GD433/2/282.
49 Emily Lutyens to the Reverend Whitwell Elwyn, 4 July 1893, in Emily Lutyens, A Blessed Girl, p. 206 and Neville Lytton, The English Country Gentleman, p. 249.
50 Constance Lytton to Emily Lytton, 23 September 1891, in Betty Balfour (ed.), Letters of Constance Lytton, p. 6.
CHAPTER THREE
THE PONSONBYS
‘This is a different Con to any Con you have ever known.’ 1
Towards the end of 1892, Constance and Edith went to South Africa. They were to stay with Edith’s twin sister Elizabeth and her husband, Henry Loch, who was then the High Commissioner. In South Africa, Constance found herself liberated and almost giddy. Though it lasted only a few short months, her time here would be the most unconditionally happy period of her life. She wrote home to Adela that she was not only enjoying the company of men, she was actually flirting with them. ‘You wouldn’t know me if you could look on me here,’ she told Adela airily, ‘lazy beyond description, bumptious, forward, and self-asserting, gay to silliness, almost flirtatious, talkative to a fault, generally noisy and boisterous.’2 She enjoyed discovering and indulging this more liberated side of her personality.
In South Africa, Constance began two relationships which would have a profound influence on the rest of her life. The first was with the author Olive Schreiner.3 Olive was one of twelve children from a strict missionary family, named Olive Emilie Albertina after three dead elder brothers. As a governess in her late teens, she had the time and inspiration to write novels; later, she joined some of her brothers in England, and had one published. Story of an African Farm (1883) was an instant hit. Its arguments in favour of women’s rights meant it was required reading among progressive people, and it was controversial enough to attract a much wider audience: Robert Lytton read it during one of his convalescences.
Olive was naturally drawn to the literary circles in London and confident enough in herself to form unorthodox relationships. In 1884, she and her partner Havelock Ellis went on a joint ‘honeymoon’ with leading socialists Eleanor Marx and Edward Aveling, though neither of the couples were married. Eleanor and Olive enjoyed a very free and frank relationship in which no subject was off limits: Eleanor’s biographer Rachel Holmes tells us that they discussed ‘sexual desire, periods, premenstrual tension, the effects of their monthly cycle on their work and moods’.4 Olive’s relationship with Havelock Ellis did not last and settled into friendship. She continued to write but was often unsatisfied with the results and only published her next work, Dreams, in 1890. Olive travelled extensively around Europe but could not settle, always homesick and never feeling like she belonged anywhere. After eight years away, she returned to South Africa, still searching.
Constance and Olive were drawn to each other despite a fourteen-year age gap and vastly different backgrounds. It is impossible to imagine the two of them sharing the same discussions about their bodily functions as Olive had once held with Eleanor Marx, but Olive was now older, a little less hopeful and exuberant, soon to be married in a conventional, bourgeois way, to Samuel Cronwright. She did not want only bohemians for her friends and responded to Constance’s sincerity, generosity and earnest naivety. Constance thought Olive ugly and badly dressed, but articulate, dignified and incredibly impressive.5 Perhaps too, Constance admired Olive for her progressive thinking and unorthodox life as well as her writing. Like Constance, Olive was somewhat eccentric, and had been brought up in a way which was far removed from the stifling politeness of English drawing rooms.6 Olive may have represented a way of living that Constance lacked the courage to try herself, just as Robert had once lived vicariously through Wilfred Scawen Blunt.
Constance and Olive professed lifelong friendship and devotion to for one another and Olive regularly wrote to her correspondents about Constance’s exceptional qualities. Olive was also close to Constance’s cousin Adela and admired Edith. The feeling was mutual. After Edith saw Olive again in London the following year, she came home and told Constance how much she wished Constance could find a man just like Olive to marry.7 Edith’s love for Olive is another sign that she was not quite as stuffy, conventional and unimaginative as Robert’s biographers seem to have believed.
Meanwhile, Constance had already found a man to marry, and he was nothing like Olive. His name was John Ponsonby and he was working for her uncle Henry Loch. John came from a family of aristocrats and military generals. His great-grandparents were Frederick and Harriet Spencer, the sister of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, whose own love life was equally colourful. Frederick and Harriet had four children. (Harriet had two more with her lover.) One was Lady Caroline Lamb, who would give Byron the label ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’,
and was disastrously married to William Lamb, who as Lord Melbourne would become Prime Minister and tutor to the young Queen Victoria. Another was Henry’s father, Frederic (sometimes more conventionally Frederick), who had a distinguished career in the army and eventually became Governor of Malta.
Henry Ponsonby was the eldest son, and followed his father into the army, serving in Ireland and the Crimea before becoming a private equerry to Prince Albert. While at court, he met Mary Bulteel, where she was a maid of honour to the Queen.8 Mary was deeply religious but also clever, artistic, progressive and liberal. She later helped to found Girton College, Cambridge, and was interested in a variety of women’s issues, including employment for married women, and the controversial Contagious Diseases Act. Mary was a great patron of writers and, like Edith, she was a friend of George Eliot’s. Unlike Edith, though, Mary was inclined to passionate relationships with women, most notably Ethel Smyth. Ethel and Mary first met in the early 1890s. Mary was much older (and married), and Ethel continued to have other affairs, but theirs was an intense and passionate relationship which, even if it may not have been wholly sexual, defined Ethel’s life for over a decade.9 She called it ‘the happiest, the most satisfying, and for that reason, the most restful of all my many friendships with women’.10 Constance first met Ethel Smyth at Lady Ponsonby’s house: fifteen years later they would come together again under very different circumstances.
Henry and Mary’s relationship did not suffer from her involvement with other women: on the contrary, it seems to have been fulfilling and affectionate throughout their lives. Henry was appointed private secretary to the Queen in 1870 and the family moved to the Norman Tower in Windsor Castle. He was an out-and-out Liberal while the Queen became increasingly Conservative, and this often caused difficulties, but he nevertheless held this post for a quarter of a century.
Born in 1866, John was the third of five children, with two older sisters and two younger brothers. He had chosen the military for his career. One brother, another Frederick, served at court like their father. The other, Arthur, went into the diplomatic service and then politics. John, though, was hampered by a slight disability: he was born without a palate and with a hare lip. He grew a moustache to disguise the physical impairment, but his speech was always rather difficult to follow for those who did not know him well.11
This made no difference to Constance. There was an attraction, and an understanding was reached – or at least that’s what Constance believed. They were not formally engaged when she sailed for home, but she thought she only need wait until John had risen in the ranks and was earning enough money to make them a comfortable home.
In the meantime, she relied on letters from South Africa to keep their relationship alive. There were never enough – perhaps one every several months – and she was thrilled when she received one unexpectedly. ‘Cape Mail in’ is sometimes noted in her journal and marked with a cross. Aside from her correspondence with John, Constance also began to develop a relationship with his sister, Maggy. Five years older than Constance, Maggy was outgoing, vivacious and fun and, like her brother Frederick, moved easily in royal circles: she was friends with Victoria’s daughter Princess Louise.12 Maggy was ‘an absolute angel and a delightful companion’, Constance told Aunt T enthusiastically, and Lady Ponsonby (who was soon just ‘Lady P’) ‘an unusually clever and cultivated woman’.13
To Constance, John seemed ideal in every way. ‘I have never yet told you of any of his good qualities, or of any of those characteristics which make him to my mind adorable,’ she told Adela, with all the exuberance of first love. Sometimes she called him by his own family nickname of Swift, as in Jonathan Swift. More obscurely, she sometimes referred to him as Shelley Plain. There is a Browning poem which reads in part:
Ah, did you once see Shelley plain,
And did he stop and speak to you?
And did you speak to him again?
How strange it seems, and new!
But you were living before that,
And you are living after,
And the memory I started at –
My starting moves your laughter.
In the summer of 1893, Maggy and Betty talked the situation over. Maggy’s ‘eyes often filled with tears, and she kicked her legs in the most ungainly but delightful way’, Betty reported back to Constance.
The hopelessness of the situation lies in the absence of money … money is the sole impediment and objection. I feel sure in my own mind that he did love you that he would love you still if there was the smallest ground for hoping he could ever tell you so … For God’s sake therefore don’t torture yourself by thinking that you are not worthy of him.14
For the moment, this was enough to give Constance hope.
Throughout these years, Constance became more closely entwined with John Ponsonby’s family. Though the letters no longer exist, if her diaries are anything to go by, in the mid-1890s she was writing to ‘Lady P’ and ‘Maggy’ almost as often as she wrote to Aunt T and Adela. It seems rather unfair that, by taking her into their midst, the Ponsonbys encouraged her, unconsciously or otherwise, to cling onto her hopes and believe that she might one day become a Ponsonby herself, even while telling her that it was impossible. In October, she went to stay with them at Windsor, and was so paralysed with fear whenever she caught a glimpse of the Queen that she could barely remember what Victoria looked like. She was forced into an amateur theatrical performance with Princess Beatrice, Maggy and Frederick Ponsonby. The experience was excruciating, and Constance tried to escape by sneaking away. Some of the guests thought she was ill, others that she was sulking, so she screwed up her courage and participated, until the last night when she could take no more and ran away to hide in a bedroom.15
In the meantime, Constance was in the difficult, though fairly common, predicament of struggling upper-class women: she had no money, but society – and, more particularly, her immediate family – frowned on women of her class working. It was not done, no matter how desperate the situation. The need to keep up appearances was greater than the need to bring in money. Her illnesses and shyness made being a maid of honour out of the question. But towards the end of 1893, she made an unusually bold decision and began writing and reviewing for the National Review, run by Leo Maxse.16
This new venture went down extremely badly at home. When Edith made a fuss, Emily felt bound to stick up for Constance out of sheer perversity, though she was just as horrified.
To think she has come to this! … I think I should prefer the workhouse … I don’t think that even were I starving, and certainly not before, that I could descend so low as to write articles for a miserable paper. I cannot myself understand how she can bring herself down to such a level.
‘I wish’, Emily continued in disgust, ‘she would remember that our name is the same, and that we are in a measure dragged after her.’17 Emily could be just as much of a snob as Edith. But she was overreacting. Among Constance’s fellow reviewers in January 1894 were Frances Balfour and Margot Tennant (later, Asquith): she was in impeccable company. She was also characteristically modest and dry in her debut review:
If we have braced ourselves to read a review of a book, it is generally with one of three objects: to find out whether the book be worth reading; to agree with the reviewer at the expense of the author; or, it may be, for the purpose of ridiculing the review. In this instance, the name of the author … suffices to dispose of the two first, and there remains but the last reason, if there be any, for scanning this notice.18
Despite this self-deprecating tone, Constance took her work extremely seriously and profoundly enjoyed it. Her journal for 2 January 1894 notes her payment for this review twice: £3.3s. Her journal entries till this point are often sparse, with days and weeks left empty. Now they suddenly spring to life, and are full of business-like entries. She was prolific. She would generally receive a book one day, read it the following day, and then write on it.19 This outpouring of creative energy and prod
uctivity suggests that her illnesses were at least in part psychological. When she had fulfilling work, she was happy and her pain was forgotten, or at least no longer seemed important. All the money she earned was spent on presents for Edith or treats for Emily.20 Perhaps this way she could pretend she was doing it for them, not for herself.
Constance’s new career caused all sorts of ripples in the family dynamics. While Constance was working, she ‘neglected’ Edith – at least, Edith saw it that way – and Emily had to fill the gap. Emily did not have Constance’s unselfish nature and didn’t take kindly to Edith’s constant demands. Edith made it very clear that Emily wasn’t up to scratch. Emily, in turn, took her feelings out on Constance. ‘She has grown perfectly unbearable, there is no other word for it, since she took to reviewing … she reads on average one volume a day and sometimes more. Is life worth living on these terms?’ Emily complained. Constance’s only supporter in her new profession was Betty, who thought it was a better use of her time than darning socks.21 Betty herself was an aspiring writer and was currently compiling a new edition of Robert’s poetry; Constance helped her with the proofs.22 Olive was also in England during this period, and Constance must have enjoyed the sense that they were both professional writers.
In 1894, John came back to England from the Cape and, at the end of May, came to the Danes for lunch. ‘We didn’t have a moment alone,’ she told Aunt T. ‘I was very shy and hardly dared look at him for fear of living up to my reputation concerning him.’23 Soon afterwards, there were more talks about money. ‘Swift, Maggy and the parents have plainly stated that there is no money and no hope of money in the way either of allowance, or inheriting from them. That being the case they feel S., (and he feels) is not in a position to ask, much less claim anything,’ she told Betty.24 She and Edith reached a compromise: nothing would be ‘done’, but she would be able to see him when the opportunities arose, and she could write to him. Edith was being cautious in guarding Constance’s reputation. Her feelings for John were obviously clear to both their families, but it was important that any alternative suitors should not be put off.
Lady Constance Lytton Page 7