Marie Stuart Boyd, of the same set, the wife of the well-known Punch and Graphic artist, did not begin to publish her delightful books till nearly ten years later, though she was a regular contributor to important Reviews.
Mrs. Frankau (“Frank Danby”), who came with her sister, Mrs. Aria, had at that time dropped writing for engraving, and did not resume it till some years later. Pigs in Clover, and her other successes in fiction, belong to a much later date.
One of the most daring and witty of women writers, Violet Hunt, was constantly at our at-homes. With a father who was a well-known artist, a Fellow of Corpus Christi, Oxford, and a friend of Gladstone’s, and a mother who wrote novels of repute; and brought up in the brilliant set which gathered round Burne-Jones and Ford Madox Brown, it was no wonder that she should be extraordinarily clever, and no one was surprised when she produced scintillating books like The Maiden’s Progress and A Hard Woman. South Lodge, their house on Campden Hill, was a Mecca for distinguished literary people. It was there that I first met Andrew Lang, Robert Hichens, Somerset Maugham, Katherine Cecil Thurston in a crowd of writers of high calibre. It was one of the few houses where Lang was natural without being rude.
I now come to a group of able women writers whom I met at clubs like the Pioneers and the Writers’, though they mostly came often to our at-homes afterwards. First among them I may place that brilliant and delightful writer, Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick, who published her early novels under the pseudonym of “Mrs. Andrew Dean.” Her husband, Mr. Alfred Sidgwick, is the author of well-known works on logic, and one of the earliest of the modern school of philosophers, known as the Pragmatists. He is a cousin of Mr. Henry Sidgwick (d. 1900), the distinguished Professor of Moral Philosophy at Cambridge, who married Mr. A. J. Balfour’s sister, the guardian spirit of Newnham.
Mrs. Sidgwick’s novels have always been full of verve. She has steeped herself in the literature of three countries, and until she married knew the world better from the Continental point of view than from the English. But her marriage took her amongst English people, so that she has had unusual opportunities of understanding two nationalities intimately. In those days we saw a good deal of her because she lived at Surbiton, but for many years past she has lived in Cornwall.
At the same club I met Miss Montrésor, whose delicate health has prevented her seeing much of London literary society, though she lives in South Kensington. With her Into the Highways and Hedges she leapt into fame at a single bound. Miss Montrésor is a genius. Her intuition enables her to describe with fidelity phases of life with which she cannot have had any acquaintance. When she wrote Into the Highways and Hedges, my friend Sheldon, who was the London manager of D. Appleton & Co., gave me five pounds to write a careful opinion of it, to see whether his firm, to whom it had been offered, should publish it or not. I gave them a long opinion, in which I told them that they could not possibly refuse such a book. But they did refuse it, because almost any American publisher will refuse any novel which is not by a novelist who has already made a great name. Some other New York firm took it, and it was the book of the year in America.
At a club, too, I met Annie Swan (whose husband, Dr. Burnett Smith, was last year Mayor of Hertford), twenty years and more ago, a woman completely unspoiled by success, which came to her early and without stint, and remained. She stands at the very head of the writers of the wholesome school of fiction. In those days she lived at Hampstead, in a house called “Aldersyde,” after the novel which gave her her fame. She is one of those people whose obvious sincerity charms you the moment you meet them. I don’t know whether she is interested in spiritualism, but I did on one occasion meet Florence Marryat and Dora Russell together at her table.
Of Florence Marryat (Mrs. Francis Lean), the daughter of the immortal Captain Marryat, I saw a good deal at one time. She was a very regular attendant at a dining club called the Argonauts, which Frankfort Moore and I got up because the Vagabonds would not then admit ladies to their banquets. Spiritualism played an immense part in her life. She was also a very voluminous writer. I remember her telling me that she had written more than seventy novels. She was a tall, striking-looking woman, whose eyes suggested intimacy with the occult.
The Leightons, who are among my most valued friends, I certainly met at some club—Marie Leighton is the best newspaper serial writer of the day—a story-teller born, and, like her husband, a great authority on dogs. One at any rate of her thrilling stories has been dramatised and others are sure to follow, as the managers of the melodrama theatres recognise how immensely dramatic her stories are.
“Lucas Cleeve,” another frequent visitor at our house, wife of Colonel Kingscote, and daughter of Sir Henry Drummond Wolff, M.P., who made with Mr. Balfour, Lord Randolph Churchill, and Sir John Gorst the celebrated Fourth Party, had an extraordinary facility for writing novels of a certain merit, and, like her father, was a great linguist and traveller. Sir John Gorst introduced me to her. I met him at Castle Combe, which now belongs to him, and then belonged to his brother, the late Edward Chadwick Lowndes. I was staying with my brother-in-law, Robert Watkins, the agent of the estate, which is one of historical interest, for its archives prove it to have been irretrievably wasted by Sir John Fastolfe, Knt., Shakespeare’s Falstaff, who had married the widow of the last of its Scroop owners, and managed the estate for her. He built the chancel arches in the church, fine and early Perpendicular. The Scroop and Falstaff house has long since disappeared, while the Cromlech of a British Chief, and a Roman Camp, continue almost perfect. I was often the guest of Sir John’s eldest son, Sir Eldon, when I was in Egypt, and his younger son, Harold, and his charming wife, have been our intimate friends for many years. Mrs. Harold Gorst, who was a Miss Kennedy of the famous Shrewsbury School family of scholars, has an extraordinary knowledge of the life of the poor in London, and her novels reflect it with a fidelity which should have won them ten times their circulation.