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  • The Magnificent Mrs Tennant: The Adventurous Life of Gertrude Tennant, Victorian Grande Dame
  • Ruth Robbins (bio)
The Magnificent Mrs Tennant: The Adventurous Life of Gertrude Tennant, Victorian Grande Dame, by David Waller; pp. ix + 304. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009, $35.00, £20.00.

Two ghosts haunt this Victorian life—the ghost of Victorian fiction (the three-volume, moralistic novel) and the ghost of that most waspish of commentators on the limitations and possibilities of biography, Virginia Woolf. Fiction provides much of the explanatory backdrop to the story of Gertrude Tennant, born Collier in 1819, from her early life as the daughter of a half-pay naval officer. Jane Austen's Persuasion (1818) helps to situate her social milieu, and Vanity Fair (1847-48) provides a slightly less salubrious explanation of her family's precarious financial position in the years after the defeat of Napoleon, when her father took his family to exile in France for reasons of economy, as well as a social setting for her first marital home in Russell Square. After her marriage to the much older solicitor, Charles Tennant, Charles Dickens's novels were the evening entertainment of the newlyweds; the tragic stories of Little Nell and Paul Dombey provided a structure of feeling when Tennant became a bereaved mother, and the story of Bleak House (1852-53), with its endless litigation, was a fictional counterpart to the various court cases in which Charles was embroiled. David Waller also speculates on Tennant's relationship with the ideological models of her period by reference to Coventry Patmore's Angel in the House (1854-62), to John Ruskin's Sesame and Lilies (1865) and to the strictures of Sarah Stickney Ellis on the role of women in The Wives of England (1843). The very story of Waller's original encounter with Tennant, in the dusty attic of an acquaintance, in the form not of a portrait but of a trunk of her letters, diaries, and other papers, touches lightly on the central trope of The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891). This set of imagined relationships with the fictions of the period, moreover, has real force when one understands that prior to this biography, Tennant was remembered, if at all, as a footnote to the lives of the two most famous French writers in the period: Victor Hugo, whom she met several times, first as a child and then as a respectable Victorian matron, and Gustave Flaubert, for whom she and her family represented something of a youthful infatuation that, after the scandal of Madame Bovary (1857) had died down, became a lasting and significant friendship. Tennant was also the mother-in-law of Henry Morton Stanley, the adventurer and explorer who found David Livingstone and had his own relationship with the period's fiction. In other words, she remained a relative creature in public memory, known for her associations with great men, an estimation in which she appears to have partially conspired. As a salonnière in the 1870s and 1880s—after the death of her husband—Tennant held soirées to which she invited the most famous of Victorian folk, who appeared to attend with pleasure, putting her in touch with politics (William Gladstone was a frequent guest), literature, and the arts (John Everett Millais was a family friend, Ruskin once came for tea in the company of a young Oscar Wilde, and there were many others). She also flouted convention, meeting George Eliot before she had become the more respectable Mrs. John Cross. It is even possible that her early life in genteel poverty in Paris, on the very margins of respectability, was the origin of the anonymously published Rita, an Autobiography (1856), which was written by her cousin, Hamilton Aidé, and enjoyed a succès de scandale in the 1850s and 1860s. [End Page 569]

Waller makes reference to that other ghost, Woolf, when he suggests that his biography focuses on the "rainbow" ("the transient and purely personal") rather than the "granite" ("the factual and objectively verifiable") of Tennant's life (264). Woolf argued elsewhere that fiction could be significant even if it focused on the primarily feminine sphere of...

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