Graham R.: Rosamund Marriott Watson, Woman of Letters (review)

Linda K. Hughes's work on Graham R. Tomson began with a literary treasure hunt. Hughes spotted a tantalizing glimpse of an obscure poet in the pages of the Universal Review, but further enquiries revealed that this poet had since attracted no more than passing comments from literary critics. From these slender leads Hughes has built a compelling and readable biography of an intriguing woman and unfairly neglected writer.

Hughes traces her subject's life through four phases, each initiated by a change in name and a sloughing-off of a previous self. The protagonist was born Rose Ball in 1860, becoming Mrs G. F. Armytage at the age of 19 at the start of a short-lived marriage which culminated in (and according to Hughes, may have been terminated by) the publication of her first poetry collection, Tares, in 1884. On eloping with Arthur Tomson in 1886, she took on the name Graham R. Tomson, giving birth to her best-known literary persona and entering into a Bohemian literary society in London to begin a career as a poet, journalist, editor of Sylvia's Journal and Art Weekly, translator, critic, and story-writer. On leaving Tomson for H. B. Marriott Watson in 1894, she became Rosamund Marriott Watson, taking her partner's name though they never married. As Hughes shows, the move ended her career: her second elopement created a scandal and the reading public were confused by the change of name.

This story illuminates the roles of women in the nineteenth century and the tensions between work and family life, as well as public and private identities. The first elopement and divorce facilitated Graham R.'s career as she cast off the roles of wife and mother (exiting from the lives of her two daughters seemingly forever), and made her way in the literary world. Her life with Tomson was apparently a marriage of equals, where each was mutually supportive of the other's career. Her use of a male pseudonym, derived from that of her partner (like George Eliot) helped her establish herself in a masculine world—though Hughes narrates a telling anecdote about Graham R.'s first champion, Andrew Lang. Lang published her work, praised it to others, and paid her the dubious compliment of plagiarising her, but then shifted to a more paternalistic attitude when he found that "Graham" was a woman. While her career took off with her rejection of domesticity by fleeing with Tomson, its decline was marked by an era of "enforced conventionality" (241) in domesticity and happy motherhood with Dick, the only child she never left behind.

Hughes draws attention to the hypocrisy of the supposedly liberal bohemian set of the fin de siècle, as the newly-named Rosamund Marriott Watson was shunned by her former acquaintances, including J. M. Barrie and W. B. Yeats. This rejection also offers an insight to the fragility of literary posterity, as Barrie, Yeats, and her friend Elizabeth Sharp hid Graham R. from literary historians by editing her out of their memoirs. Such elimination of evidence makes the subject difficult to trace: as Hughes notes, no diaries or family papers survive, partly because her ex-lovers excised records of her after her departure.

Not surprisingly, the "Graham R." phase is the one best represented in this volume. Hughes draws on Graham R.'s journalism and letters (particularly her correspondence with her publishers), and the diaries, letters, and journalism of some of her friends and associates. She also analyses Graham R.'s literary output for clues to her life and, while making no claims that Graham R. was a great poet, Hughes shows why she should be rescued from literary obscurity.

There is thinner coverage of Watson's earlier phases as Rose Ball and Rosamond Armytage, and this lack of evidence leads to colourful speculation, such as the picturesque account of the young Rose greeting her father and brothers on their return from work, "brimming with...