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

"Graham R. Tomson," the professional signature by which Rosamund Armytage-Tomson-Marriott Watson established her career and achieved literary fame, was a fin de siècle woman of letters. Graham R.'s first and last love was poetry. Indeed, she published seven volumes of verse and edited three collections; during her life and after her death, her poems appeared in prestigious venues such as the Yellow Book, her lyrics were set to music and performed by soloists and by the London Symphony Orchestra, and she was singled out for praise in "Women Poets of the Day" (1894) for her "careful sense of form" and in Poets of the Younger Generation (1902) for her "perfection of technique." Yet Graham R.'s career required the flexible, multi-genre approach to literary production that characterized the late Victorian literary career: book reviews for periodicals; regular columns for newspapers and magazines; poems published in American as well as British periodicals; and assembled collections such as the Art of the House or Heart of the Garden to make money and, perhaps also, keep her name before the public.

The life Linda Hughes narrates in this critical biography is a fascinating one. Rose Ball was born on October 6, 1860, into a family of accountants, ironmongers, and bankers. Like her father and brother "Wilf," who became a painter, Rose had artistic aspirations. She married young (at age 19) to a Cambridge-educated Australian, George Francis Armytage, by whom she had two children and through whose financial resources she was able to publish anonymously a volume of poetry, Tares, in 1884. Then she separated from her husband, and in 1885, perhaps through her brother, she met the painter Arthur Tomson, with whom she eloped in 1886. For the next seven or so years, Rosamund and Arthur Tomson were a beautiful couple in London aesthetic circles – Arthur displaying pictures at the Royal Academy and reviewing art; "Graham R." contributing poetry to periodicals, reviewing literature for the Academy, writing fiction for Macmillan's, and editing Sylvia's Magazine; and both together holding fashionable Sunday at-homes and starting their own periodical, the Art Weekly (1890). But for better or worse, H. B. Marriott Watson came onto the scene, "standing over six feet tall" (155) and exuding physical and sexual vitality – and Rosamund Tomson became The Woman Who Did (except that Marriott Watson didn't actually die of typhoid, though he came close in 1894 just after their elopement to Cornwall).

What strikes the reader of Graham R. is how modern this literary life seems – not the sequence of husbands so much as the literary production in multiple forms. One thinks of Joan Didion alternating fiction (her first love) with nonfiction (her financial bulwark), or of Adrienne Rich writing prize-winning poetry but also producing stunning feminist essays, or of Jamaica Kincaid beginning with fiction but turning to garden writing in middle age, as Rosamund Marriott Watson did also. As Hughes notes in the Preface, "this book combines three biographies into one: a literary biography of a talented poet, the story of a fascinating fin-de-siècle woman, and a study of how literary careers are formed and manages" (xiii).

All three life stories are beautifully told within a four-part structure that marks Rosamund's changing identities from Rose Ball, to Mrs. G. F. Armytage, to Graham R. Tomson, to Rosamund Marriott Watson. Most readers of VPR will concentrate on the professional aspect of Hughes's study, reading for the ways in which periodicals enabled Graham R. to launch a career, but also noting the strain that periodical writing and editing put on her health, its drain on her creative energy. When Rosamund Armytage became "Graham R.," she launched herself into a poetic career by means of publication in key American journals (Scribner's, Harper's, the Atlantic) as well as British (the Academy, Longman's, Cosmopolitan). After Graham R. Tomson eloped with H. B. Marriott...