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25 VIOLET HUNT, NOVELIST ι A REINTRODUCTION By Marie Secor (Pennsylvania State University) If Violet Hunt is remembered at all today, it is as Ford Madox Ford's seIf-proclaimed wife and only vaguely as a novelist in her own right. Parts of the story of the Ford relationship, which encompassed the years 1908-I9I8, are told by Violet herself in a Book of memoirs, The Flurried Years (I926), published in America under the title I Have This to Say. Douglas Goldring, a sub-editor of Ford's English Review and long time friend of both Ford and Hunt, talks about her warmly in his memoir, South Lodge (London, 1943), and Arthur Mizener devotes several chapters to the FordHunt relationship in The Saddest Story (New York, 1971). Whet emerges from these sources is a portrait of a well known literary and social figure of her day, whose reputation (both literary and social) declines precipitously following Elsie Martindale Hueffer's 1912 suit over Violet's illegal use of Ford's name.1 The embarrassment of Elsie's legal victory, followed by the slow, painful disintegration of the affair with Ford,¿ as Stella Bowen replaced Violet, left Violet alone at fifty-five years of age in 1917, with social, professional, and personal wounds from which she never recovered . Nevertheless, her literary career was long and prolific. She wrote seventeen novels, three collections of stories, two books of autobiographical memoirs, a once popular biography of Elizabeth Siddall, in addition to translations, collaborations, and articles in journals . She was also recognized as an important link with the PreRaphaelites , whom she knew through her parents, Alfred Hunt, a painter (no relation of Holmen Hunt), and Margaret Raine Hunt, a popular novelist. Her parents knew Browning and Tennyson, and Ruskin was godfather to Violet's sister Venice. Her own circle included most of the major literary figures of the early twentieth century: Ford, Wilde (who,„in an 1880 letter, calls her "the sweetest Violet in England"-'), Maugham, Bennett, Wells, James (who called her "Purple Patch"), Conrad, Pound, Wyndham Lewis, Lawrence, and W. H. Hudson. By the time she met Ford in 1908, her best novel, White Rose of Weary Leaf, had already been published, and with it, Mizener claims, "she became widely recognized as one of the leading women novelists of her time."* Although contemporary reviews of her work were mixed, she was respected by the discerning (Maugham, Lawrence, Bennett, Goldring, Ford, May Sinclair, and Rebecca West) for the very qualities which disturbed the popular reviewers. Reviews of White Rose, for instance , praise its cleverness and its dialogue, but find it "disagreeable ," "squalidly dreary," and "depressing."5 Goldring, on the other hand, compares Violet Hunt's work to Colette's (which she knew and admired) and finds it appealing precisely because it introduces "a note of Nastiness in English fiction."6 By"Nastiness" he seems to mean a frank concern with the sexual psychology of what May Sinclair calls the "English demi-vierge,"? and her refusal to 26 cooperate in the fictional idealization of romantic love and domesticity. Hunt seems to have suffered by her reputation for wit, both personally and professionally. She was known as a non-stop, brilliant chatterer, apparently inconsequential, but shrewd and humane in her judgments of character. In a 1922 article in the English Review. May Sinclair attempts to assess her career and rescue her from the limiting charge of mere cleverness, which she sees as having inhibited recognition of Hunt's major achievement as a "tragic realist"0 in White Rose and her powerful presentation of "the naked thoughts, the naked lives of people we have known"? in Their Lives and Their Hearts. But even this judicious appraisal by a fellow novelist seems to have had little effect on Hunt's reputation. In spite of a 1932 plea by Godfrey Childe for some reprints of her fiction,10 her novels have almost completely disappeared from circulation. By 1942, the year of her death, the entry in Twentieth Century Authors speaks of her work as "very nearly forgotten though it was at once robust and subtle." In the 1955 supplement, Goldring (who wrote the Hunt entry) speculates that if future students of...

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