Gabriela Cunninghame Graham: Deception and Achievement in the 1890s

The funeral of Gabriela, wife of Robert Bontine Cunninghame Graham, took place on 19 September 1906 in the chancel of the ruined church of the Priory of Inchmahome, where the remains of her husband's aristocratic ancestors lay, on the island of the Lake of Menteith, Perthshire. The dead woman had been one of the literary characters of the 1890s: a friend of Wilde, Yeats, Shaw and Keir Hardie, giving lectures on socialism and mysticism, writing a major biography of Saint Teresa and contributing to The Yellow Book. Newspaper reports said: "It was fitting that the gentle lady should sleep in the historic little island in the placid waters of the Lake of Menteith.… She was the daughter of Don Francisco José de la Balmondière, Chili [sic], and her sympathies were largely Spanish. Nevertheless she showed an abiding interest in all that appertained to the welfare of the district of Menteith, where she was greatly loved, and where she received many spontaneous tokens of admiration and regard." She was described as "a woman possessing the highest accomplishments and a keen and penetrating intellect which overcame every difficulty that a language foreign to her could present."¹

Figure 1.

Gabrielle de la Balmondière By Jacomb Hood

Cunninghame Graham, her husband, was a charismatic figure, the first openly socialist Member of Parliament, as a Liberal member for North-West Lanarckshire from 1886 to 1892. He opposed racism, imperialism and campaigned for universal suffrage, free secular education and the eight-hour day; and he fought on behalf of exploited workers in the docks and the chain-making industry. His wife witnessed him being clubbed to the ground by police during the "bloody Sunday" demonstration of 13 November 1887 for the right of free assembly. At his subsequent trial for illegal assembly she issued "At Home" cards giving their address as "Bow Street Police Court."² He was later a leading proponent of Home Rule for Scotland, president of the Scottish Home Rule Association, and eventually of the Scottish National Party.

The romantic first meeting of this celebrity couple was well known when they were alive and has been frequently retold in biographies of Cunninghame Graham and in such books about the nineties as Katherine Lyon Mix's A Study in Yellow. There she writes that "no Yellow Book contributor could boast a more romantic history than she" and describes a riding accident in which Cunninghame Graham nearly knocked over his future wife: "After dismounting to apologise, he fell in love with the beautiful dark-haired girl. His excuses merged into an impetuous courtship and after a few secret meetings, Gabriele [sic], unhappy in her convent school, eloped with him to England."³

Cunninghame Graham's friend A. F. Tschiffely gives what became the definitive account of this meeting in Paris, taken from Cunninghame Graham himself, who chose Tschiffely as his biographer: "One day he rode a horse which gave him a certain amount of trouble, and when the animal suddenly began to prance about wildly, it nearly knocked over a young lady who happened to be near. Don Roberto immediately dismounted to apologise, and, being somewhat embarrassed, he inadvertently spoke to her in Spanish. To his surprise and delight she answered in the same language, and then, for a while, the two chatted and arranged to meet again next day. As this was a case of love at first sight, things happened quickly." He notes that she was born in Chile of a French father and a Spanish mother who had come to Paris at twelve where her aunt had put her in a convent.⁴

Herbert Faulkner West, another friend and an earlier biographer, merely noted that at "the age of twenty-seven, in 1879, Cunninghame Graham married a Chilean lady, a Roman Catholic, Gabriela, the daughter of Don Francisco José de la Balmondière."⁵ What is verifiable is that they were married at the London registry office on 24 October 1878 with no relatives present. His profession was given as "gentleman." She was named as Gabrielle Marie de la Balmondière though she always used the name Gabriela.

The Deception

Recent research shows that though her literary achievements and her adventures were genuine, everything else about Gabriela was a fake. She was a doctor's daughter from Yorkshire called Carrie Horsfall, who as a teenager had run away to London to go on the stage. In a way she did go on the stage: a public performance of social action was running concurrently with a private narrative of deceit. Most obviously this was in everything she said: Gabriela spoke English with a "foreign accent" of her own construction. It was said to be "neither French nor Spanish, but most attractive and charming" accounted for by her early upbringing in Chile followed, at the age of twelve when she was supposedly orphaned, by schooling in Paris.⁶ Her "natural" accent would have been middle-class English with, one presumes, some trace of a regional Yorkshire accent.

Carrie was second daughter and second child of thirteen of Henry Horsfall, surgeon, and his wife Elizabeth, née Stanfield. She was born on 22 January 1858 in Masham, Yorkshire. Carrie/Gabriela's niece, Marthe Stevenson, recounted the story of her aunt:

Carrie had a dynamic personality and would delight the other children with her stories. She was crazy to get on the stage and ran away twice from home, the first time she was brought back in disgrace but the second time she did not return.… One can imagine what a disgrace this must have been at that period. The other children suffered, were not allowed to mix with other young people or to speak about Carrie. Their poor mother was ill for nearly a year. There were rumours such as her being adopted by a wealthy Spanish don.⁷

Madge, another sister of Carrie/Gabriela, who was six when she ran away, wrote:

Still I see her now, holding forth mounted upon a chair behind a funny old book case door in the nursery, where she was supposed to be looking after Muriel who was about six months old then and I was sitting on the floor holding the big baby on my inadequate lap, but both quite content to stay as we were, as long as she would declaim and act for me.… She was a very fine looking girl, and though at that time she could only have been about fourteen or fifteen years old, she was quite grown up. She wanted to go on the stage, which at that time was simply anathema to papa and to most other people.⁸

Carrie/Gabriela's younger sister, Grace Horsfall, became a novelist under the name George Stevenson (her married name). She wrote a novel, Benjy, based on her family, partly telling the story of her sister, giving her the name "Adelaide Ainsworth," so she was writing a fictionalised version of her sister's life under an assumed name and gender—truly a process of revealing concealment.

She wrote that Adelaide "had the consciousness of a gift; and with it she cherished the determination that Adelaide Ainsworth should not die unknown and unsung."⁹ She described her heroine's "fantastic aptitude for transferring herself into some favourite heroine of romance

Figure 2.

Gabriela Cunninghame Graham "Early photograph"

or history—Héloïse writing to Abelard, perhaps, or Lady Hamilton."¹⁰ Adelaide runs away, as Carrie/Gabriela did, at the age of seventeen and goes to "the stage door of almost every theatre in London" asking to be an actress, charming doormen with her aristocratic air.¹¹ She progressively spends what little money she has gained as a governess in the quest for acting work and is eventually invited to an actor-manager's house in St. John's Wood. This man has an easy way with women, something known to his wife who listens at the keyhole while he speaks to Adelaide. The actor-manager knows his wife is there, so is restrained in his dealings with the young would-be actress, though he gives her the hope of seeing him again at some time when his wife is not around, but before this can happen she is killed in a road accident.

What is certain is that a young woman left Masham as Carrie Horsfall in 1875 and is recorded with a fictitious name and lineage after meeting Cunninghame Graham in Paris in 1878. Her easiest deception was simply to take years off her age; she was in fact born in January 1858, so she was twenty when she met Cunninghame Graham in June 1878. She therefore had three years to account for. She was frequently described as a "convent school girl" brought up since twelve in Paris. She was said to have been living with an aunt about whom no more has been said, so she is obviously a fiction. If she was seventeen when she met Cunninghame Graham, she could still be at school and did not have to account for the missing years. There may have been a progressive eliding of age—the couple's marriage certificate says she was nineteen when in fact she was twenty, the two biographies by people who knew Cunninghame Graham, published in 1932 and 1937, have her as eighteen at their meeting.¹² Other descriptions of her as a "school girl" when he met her suggest she was even younger.¹³ The deception went on to her death and beyond—her tombstone says she was forty-five (which would have made her seventeen at her first meeting with her future husband). In fact she was forty-eight at death.

Cunninghame Graham presented his marriage to his mother, Anne Bontine, as a fait accompli which is generally an unwelcome way to introduce a daughter-in-law to a family, and particularly so when the inheritance of land is involved. There were other difficulties: Mrs. Bontine (who was always addressed thus by Gabriela) did not warm to the new wife, finding her sullen. Gabriela could be animated enough with others. Her taciturnity with her mother-in-law was presumably because she was not interested in communicating with her. Cunninghame Graham felt compelled to ask her, "Do try & look mother properly in the face."¹⁴

With such a level of mistrust, Mrs. Bontine was the obvious person to expose Gabriela, something she could have done with a few enquiries as she knew the Spanish community in Paris well. However, even though she disliked Gabriela, it was hardly in her interest to attract scandal to the family. Moreover, she adored her son and would not wish to cause him pain. The couple went to America soon after their marriage, putting them out of sight, and Cunninghame Graham rarely mentioned his wife in his letters home.

The Achievement

While in the Americas Gabriela began writing for publication. "The Wagon-Train," her first story, tells of the perilous fifty-day journey on horseback from San Antonio de Bexar, Texas, to Mexico City; it was later published in a collection, The Christ of Toro. A later adventure was inspired when Gabriela read Pliny the Elder's Historia Naturalis and she found a passage describing an old Roman gold mine in Lusitania that seemed to refer to a locality in Spain that she knew well, so she travelled to Carraceido and found the mine, and Robert joined her. The mine was exhausted but the tale contributed to Conrad's novel Nostromo, in which that character of Charles Gould was based on Cunninghame Graham.

The couple returned from America and lived in Spain until the death of Cunninghame Graham's father made him Laird of Gartmore in 1883. Unfortunately for them, the father had left debts of £100,000 which the couple strove to pay off. From 1884 Gabriela struggled as lady of the manor to make the estate yield a profit, an endeavour that softened her mother-in-law's attitude towards her, though they never became friends. Gabriela had some success but finally in 1900 the couple had to sell Gartmore, thus enabling them at last to pay off the family debt and live comfortably for the rest of their lives. Gabriela wrote to her mother in law:

Dear Mrs Bontine, We are alone in the "house desolate." The rooms in all their desolation strangely preserve their old habitableness.… I ran into the garden this afternoon. The birds were twittering (I never saw so many birds as at Gartmore).… Tomorrow night we shall be in London and then comes the awful unpacking. I am glad we have a flat, as servants there seem most difficult to get. I have secured one, but I am never optimistic now, where servants are concerned, it is a sea of troubles.… This is my last letter from Gartmore, the dear old Gart. It may be better so, but it is ill to bear.¹⁵

Mrs. Bontine would have had a reason to expose Gabriela had she been squandering the family fortune. As the opposite was true, she kept her counsel.

Gabriela's love of the esoteric, of mysticism and of travel combined when she spent six years researching and writing a life of Saint Teresa of Avila. As her husband described it, she "spent all the summers of six years, wandering about the sweet thyme-scented wastes of Spain, sleeping in rough pasadas, rising at daybreak and jogging on a mule through the hot sun, to find in upland world-forgotten villages a trace of the saint's footsteps, and happy, after a long day's ride, if she came on a house where once the saint had slept."¹⁶ Santa Teresa: Her Life and Times was published in 1894 to good reviews. Her passion for esoteric religion was also apparent in her translation of The Dark Night of the Soul by St. John of the Cross, accompanied by her preface which she used to trace the tradition of mysticism through the Kabbala and the alchemists. "The Christ of Toro," a story about a Spanish village icon, was published in The Yellow Book in April 1897. Her poetry was collected in a volume by her husband after her death under the title Rhymes from a World Unknown.

Her religious interests were supplemented by those of politics. Both Robert and Gabriela were active socialists; on May Day 1891 he was taking part in a May Day demonstration in Paris while she was addressing a meeting in Madrid on the need for an eight-hour working day. Gabriela, however, was more committed to mysticism than politics; she saw the Christianity in socialism rather than pure economics or a Marxist dialectic. A letter from Oscar Wilde discussed her ideas in relation to a Bloomsbury Socialist Club meeting she was addressing on 2 July 1889 on the topic "The Ideals of Socialism": "I wish so much I could come and hear you on Tuesday, but I am dining out. I think your subject most interesting, but what is to become of an indolent hedonist like myself if socialism and the church join forces against me?" Wilde adds, presumably in reference to another topic covered in her talk: "what I want to see is a reconciliation of socialism with science. Ritchie, in his Darwinism in Politics, has tried to do this, but his book, which I suppose you have seen, is very slight and amateurish."¹⁷

Gabriela was exploratory in her attempts to render mysticism accessible to a materialistic age. A published transcript of a lecture shows her trying to reconcile the unseen forces of ancient mysticism with the infant science of nuclear physics and its radium, Röntgen and Becquerel rays: "We have denied, scouted the possibility of any other plane than that in which we live and breathe and have our being, although these planes press on us from every side, and for all our physical senses can tell us, we may be moving at every step through invisible streets, passing invisible ships—be surrounded by a stream of life as keen, as ardent as our own."¹⁸

Gabriela was drawn to the paradoxical as well as the mystical. She would applaud the ascetic lifestyle but spend days with her Paris dressmaker; she was both a mystic and a practical manager who smoked fifty or more cigarettes a day as she wrote or handled the estate accounts. She was described as having become "a slave to this normally harmless vice. As time went on, she became so heavy a smoker that she could never be without a cigarette in her mouth. She was in the habit of doing her work, sitting on the floor, with the books and papers placed around her in a circle, and after she had sat thus for a while, burnt-out or smouldering cigarette ends lay all round the room. Even during the nights, whenever she woke up, she smoked two or three cigarettes in rapid succession."¹⁹ Smoking was, of course, a characteristic of New Women, a demonstration of their difference and independence, their willingness to defy convention. It was typical of Gabriela to take it to extremes. Tschiffely says she could smoke a hundred cigarettes in a twenty-four hour period, and sometimes reached two hundred.

A daily diary for a brief period has been preserved, showing her life as an active lady of the estate, and of the London literary world. The entry for 28 June 1888 reads: "Arrived [at Gartmore] and took them all by surprise. Counted the silver and sent Jessie off. Had a row with Peregrina [her maid] and beat her. So ill and tired. My courses came on. Went to bed early." An expenses list in the back shows her spending in London: a bonnet £1 10s 6d, stockings 3s 7d; shoes 3s 6d, a dress £4 6s 2½d, stays 5s 10d; a cab to Oscar Wilde's 1s 6d; telegram Hardy 6½d. Fares to Dover (to go to Paris) 12s 5d.²⁰

Gabriela died of dysentery in a hotel in Hendaye, France, on 8 September 1906 on her way back from another adventure in Spain. Her husband of twenty-eight years was summoned and he was present at her death. He brought her body back to Britain to be buried with his ancestors in a grave which, as a last service to her, he dug himself with the help of a tenant. On the anniversary of her death he would, in accordance with a promise he had made to her, row to the island and smoke a cigarette on her grave in her memory. He described one such

Figure 3.

Gabriela Cunninghame Graham Frontispiece Rhymes from a World Unknown 1908

Figure 4.

Don Roberto Cunninghame Graham 1876

visit, in 1932, in a letter to her sister: "An overclouded and windy day here, and I can hardly write owing to a hard pull in the boat. Everything as usual and I stood long and smoked a cigarette at her grave. Rooks flew past cawing and it was very quiet. Now the wind has gone down and the lake is like the back of a looking glass."²¹ He outlived Gabriela by thirty years of political engagement, horsemanship and romance, in a career in which he wrote more than thirty books. He died in 1936 and was buried beside her.

The Secret

The Cunninghame Grahams could claim descent from two ancient families, the Cunninghams (sic), earls of Glencairn, and the Grahams, earls of Menteith, through whom Robert could claim descent from King Robert II. A case could reasonably be made that he was Robert IV of Scotland and Robert I of Great Britain and Ireland.²² Had the Cunninghame Grahams wished to make something of their claim to aristocracy, Gabriela's secret would have been exposed by people probing the lineage. However, as she was a socialist, disdaining birth and inherited titles, she was not mixing with those who wished to question her pedigree, but rather with those who hated the class system and enjoyed being with a couple who might have had aristocratic pretensions but disdained them.

Gabriela's own family also feared scandal. She maintained contact with her mother, at least after her marriage. Carrie/Gabriela's sister Madge wrote: "Somehow Mama got to know that she had been adopted by a wealthy old Spanish Don and was somewhere in the Americas and later it leaked out that she was married to RBCG [Richard Bontine Cunninghame Graham]. She used to write to Mama and send her little gifts occasionally, but we were not allowed to mention her name, nor let anyone know where she was nor anything."²³ Carrie/Gabriela's niece Marthe confirmed this, saying her mother, Grace, "told me that when she was growing up her Mama used to go on mysterious journeys and that marvellous parcels used to arrive in which there was a present for every child."²⁴

There seemed a real fear that the secret would be found out. Another sister, Mary Horsfall, wrote at the time of Carrie/Gabriela's death: "of course her burial is very different to anyone else's—I shall watch the papers for I am certain in spite of all the story will come out—but we need not mind him—what I want to find out is what name he registered her death in for then—if other than Papa's and Mama's he can be charged with Perjury."²⁵ She was clearly not eager herself to betray Cunninghame Graham who had, indeed, ensured that almost very single piece of information on the death certificate was false, even down to Carrie/Gabriela's age. She was described as Gabrielle Marie de la Balmondière, aged 44 born, in Chile, the daughter of Joseph de la Balmondière and of Carmen Suarez de Arecco.²⁶

Any of the brilliant people the couple knew might have had suspicions about the deception, but they were clearly entranced by Gabriela, who was described as having a haunting beauty, with black hair and grey-blue eyes. Engels called her "la Española"; W. B. Yeats called her the "bright little American."²⁷ Cunninghame Graham had a charisma, too. Shaw used him as the basis for the heroes in Captain Brassbound's Conversion and Arms and the Man; Wells fictionalised his character as that of Graham in The Inheritors; Galsworthy used him as a model for Mr. Courtier in The Patrician. They wanted their untarnished hero and his romantic first meeting with his exotic wife.

Was Cunninghame Graham himself deceived? The most recent biographer of Cunninghame Graham, his great-niece Jean Cunninghame Graham (Lady Polwarth), used a great deal of family material for her book Gaucho Laird and she fictionalised events for which there was no record. She has Robert and Gabriela simply meeting in a park in Paris. She is working as an actress and uses the stage name Gabrielle de la Balmondière. Within their first conversation she tells him her real name and provenance.²⁸ This is believable, but if there was no reason for the deception, why did he allow it to persist through twenty-eight years of marriage and the following thirty years—for he was telling the tale of the runaway horse to his biographer Tschiffely in the last years of his life?

One of his biographers, Alexander Maitland, notes that on two other occasions Cunninghame Graham used a spirited horse as a device to account for sudden meetings.²⁹ One of these equine stories accounts for his meeting with Gabriela's replacement after her death, a widow called Elizabeth Dummet whose runway horse Cunninghame Graham is said to have stopped in Hyde Park, a tale so close to the Gabriela story that one or both are obviously an invention, merely a way of creating a narrative of excitement. This was doubtless an invention of Cunninghame Graham's, as a devoted horseman a riding mishap would be the first fabrication that would come to mind. He certainly told the runaway horse story to the biographers who knew him, Faulkener West and Tschiffely, and it has an enduring appeal—most recently repeated in the Times in 2006.³⁰

The spirited horse and the startled convent girl story brings other questions to mind: what was a young woman doing unchaparoned in a Paris park where she might meet men? Cunninghame Graham supposedly addressed her in Spanish—not the first language of either of them nor the language of the country they were in. She was not in a convent. She was not even a Roman Catholic. As Cunninghame Graham was complicit in retelling this story it indicates that the real facts of their meeting had to be concealed.

Carrie/Gabriela's grandniece Marthe explained that her mother, Grace, and her grandmother, Carrie's mother, used to visit Cunninghame Graham when they were in London. She described the lack of secrecy between them: "He used to call his wife Carrie, and talked freely about her to Grace, but I don't think that even she knew why the couple made up this story about Gabriela de la Balmondière. There is a possibility that she deceived him over the name, and when he knew the truth he may have decided to leave it as it was. Another suggestion that has been made is that it was a bigamous marriage."³¹

There is another reason to be suspicious that the secret the Cunninghame Grahams kept was a shocking one. Between the time Grace Horsfall left boarding school and the time she married, she was in contact with her sister, who was fifteen years older than her, so she was able to learn the details she was later to use in her novel Benjy. Her daughter Marthe said: "they somehow got together, largely I suppose because of their mutual interest in writing. Grace visited Carrie at Heyènes, South of France.… Something happened there to shock the young Grace profoundly—she was so frightened that she ran back to Yorkshire.… Grace never talked about the incident and I foolishly never questioned her."³²

The shocking fact had to be something that would continue to disturb, and could cause enduring damage to the Cunninghame Grahams in the eyes of society generally. Marthe suspected bigamy but the absence of any supporting evidence (or the first spouse reappearing in the lives of this very public couple) means there is no justification for this suspicion.

What was actually happening in the period between 1875 when Carrie/Gabriela ran away from Masham and 1878 when she met Cunninghame Graham in Paris? Some attempt to find acting work is certain as it had long been a childhood dream, but there is no evidence of any success in this endeavour. She must have been somewhere and it is reasonable to think it was with a Spaniard, or Latin American (perhaps in South America), as she emerges from this period speaking fluent Spanish and able convincingly to claim former Chilean residency, with a French father and Spanish mother. The family story that she had been adopted by a rich Spaniard has the ring of euphemism about it. It is a reasonable assumption that on the lookout for acting work she met one of the older men who hung around the stage door of theatres and he made her an offer which, in her impoverished state, was her best option.

Grace does give a strong hint that this is what happened to Carrie/Gabriela in London. Remember, she makes her fictional character Adelaide Ainsworth die in a traffic accident before succumbing to the seduction of the actor-manager—for fictional death was better than the fictional prostitution of the heroine. Perhaps the secret that Gabriela was trying to contain was teenage prostitution, or having been a rich man's mistress.

It is perfectly possible that she was working as a prostitute, perhaps in a brothel, when Cunninghame Graham met her. Early biographers are silent about his sexual life, but Watts and Davies's 1979 biography includes a comment made by Herbert Faulkener West in conversation with them in 1963 that Cunninghame Graham "was probably as knowledgeable a connoisseur of courtesans as of horses."³³

He certainly knew brothels, writing of them "with revealing affection," as Watts and Davies remark.³⁴ One of his editors, Paul Bloomfield, notes that he "wrote a good deal, on the whole too sentimentally, about prostitutes."³⁵ His work shows a genuine affection and practical concern for prostitutes, including "Signalled" in His People (1906), "Dutch Smith" in Faith (1909), "Buta" and "Un Monsieur" in Hope (1910), and the "Preface," "Un Autre Monsieur" and "Christie Christison" in Charity (1912).

In "Preface," for example, an Englishman, Scudamore, meets La Jerezana, a prostitute, who falls in love with him and takes to keeping him when his money runs out; but he abandons her when he comes into an inheritance, when she expects him to take her with him as his wife.

In "Christie Christison," a Scottish sailor and his wife, Jean, have had a colourful life, some of which he recounts in a bar in South America. A schooner he owned was shipwrecked on the American coast, and the couple were helped by an Indian, Yanquetruz, who took a liking to Jean, offering to buy her for fifty dollars, a horse, a mare and a foal and some skins: "I told him Christians didna sell their wives." This is seen to be an exquisite irony for Christie did meet his wife in a brothel, where men paid for her, and did "settle up" with the madam to take her back.³⁶ He goes on to tell a story of this adventure: how he called in to a brothel at Peterhead after seven months at sea; a prostitute was sent to him but as he impatiently dragged her to the bed he discovered it was his own wife Jean who had run off after he had mistreated her. He paid the brothel to take her out and married her again. Christie finishes the story and goes home to Jean.

Elise in "Un Monsieur" and "Un Autre Monsieur" is a particularly high-minded prostitute who in the first story refuses a large sum of money to betray a man's assignations to his wife, and then is promised a good deal from him in gratitude, a promise he does not keep. In "Un Autre Monsieur" Elise tells the narrator of her affection for a client, a junior cavalry officer she has met in a brothel, and his professed love for her. He has asked her to marry him. She goes to France to consider his proposition and recover her health (she has TB). The curiously unfinished nature of this story is found in the factual material from which it was wrought. The piece was going in to Hope but Graham asked his publisher to withhold it, writing on 1 June 1910: "The lady about whom "Un Autre Monsieur" was written is going to marry the man of the story & has asked me not to publish the sketch. Of course I cannot do so under the circumstances, and therefore please have it struck out."³⁷

While it is otiose to analyse every detail of a creative artist's work in terms of his life, it is clear that Cunninghame Graham lived in a milieu in which marriage between clients and prostitutes could take place, and one in which as a narrator he is entirely sympathetic. With no further information, the question of whether Gabriela's missing three years were spent in prostitution has to be open, but it remains the most probable explanation for the couple's dissimulation. Cunninghame Graham was not a hypocrite, and if it was through such work that he met his future wife, he would not have thought less of her. However, he had made his name as a man of the highest integrity in public life. He did not want his wife to be shown up as a liar and imposter, so he kept up the pretence even after her death. Cunninghame Graham suggested he had such secrets in one of his last works, Writ in Sand: "It is a natural desire in the majority of men to keep a secret garden in their souls, a something that they do not care to talk about, still less to set down, for the other members of the herd to trample on."³⁸

Gabriela's secret thus stayed as such so long because everyone who had the means to expose her hidden narrative had a vested interest in keeping it quiet: her husband, her family and his family; and their friends found the deception so satisfying they were not inclined to look further. Gabriela was the prototype of the adventurous 1890s woman whose ambition was to go to London, change her name, become famous, promote outrageous beliefs, find a soul-mate, consort with the famous and die loved by all. She achieved her ambition, and her life may have been in a literal sense a lie, but her achievements were genuine. The inscription on the plaque beside her grave is "Los muertos abren los ojos a los que viven" (The dead open the eyes of the living).