Janet Ashbee: Love, Marriage, and the Arts and Crafts Movement (review)

The British designer Charles Robert Ashbee (1863-1942; usually known as C.R. Ashbee or, among his contemporaries, CRA) was an inheritor of the Arts and Crafts tradition of William Morris. He was a literal inheritor in the sense that, after Morris' death, it was Ashbee and his newly formed Essex House Press that purchased the equipment from Kelmscott Press. In 1888, inspired by Morris, he had founded the Guild of Handicraft and School of Handicraft (for woodwork, metalwork and decorative painting) at London's Toynbee Hall, a colony admired by Chicago social worker Jane Addams, who returned from a visit to Europe to start Hull House. Lecturing in the U.S. in 1900, Ashbee was a guest at Hull House, where he met and was befriended by Frank Lloyd Wright (for whom he wrote the foreword in 1911 for an important German portfolio of Wright's architecture).

As this book explains, traveling with him on that trip were the two Mrs. Ashbees: his youngish, bitchy mother (called "Little Mother"), to whom he was abnormally tied, and his "comrade-wife," as he called her (14 years younger), Janet (née Forbes) Ashbee, whom he had wed in 1898 but with whom he had yet to consummate the marriage. As this book explains, at times in honest, bleak detail, Ashbee was a prominent homosexual, as everyone seems to have known but his bride. In fact, it was only 9 years later, a dozen years after their wedding, having returned from their second visit to the U.S., that they began sleeping together, which eventually led to four daughters.

All this is new—sort of. It has been there for all to find, since, throughout their marriage, CRA and Janet kept a collaborative journal, in which each wrote entries in the same daily diary; they exchanged letters between themselves and with a number of close friends; Janet kept a private diary, the ninth and last volume of which records the events that eventually led to her breakdown and recovery; and last, but most revealing, Janet wrote a thinly disguised autobiographical novel (in which only the names are fictional), portions of which are printed here for the first time. Researched and skillfully written by the second of the Ashbees' four daughters (now 88 years old), this is a candid, backstage look at the challenges faced and surmounted by her heroic Victorian mother, as she grew to accept the reality of a Jolly Art "practical" marriage.

(Reprinted by permission from Ballast Quarterly Review, Vol. 17, No. 3, Spring 2002.)