Gertrude Bell by Georgina Howell Read Free Book Online

makegreat friends with actors in the course of her life, in particular Coquelin, a star of the French theatre, Sybil Thorndike, and the American actress Elizabeth Robins. Florence met Robins, who introduced the plays of Ibsen to the English stage, soon after her own arrival in London. Despite the fact that Robins was an active member of the suffrage movement, with which Florence could never agree, they became intimates. Robins brought Florence’s most famous play,
Alan’s Wife
, to the West End in 1893, taking the lead in this tragedy of working-class life. She became one of the Bells’ most frequent houseguests, adding much to the texture of the intellectual background in which Gertrude was to be raised. Liza, as they called her, would amuse the children by taking them into her bedroom and demonstrating a theatrical “pratfall,” flat onto her face on the carpet. Later, when Gertrude was older and after Florence had retired to bed, the two women would sit up late discussing the pros and cons of suffrage. Florence felt so strongly on this issue, and wrote so much in support of anti-suffrage, that she could not discuss it with Liza. Gertrude and Liza became lifelong correspondents, and the constant traveller was often to mention in the letters she wrote from her desert tents how much she missed their “fireside chats.”
    Florence told Gertrude and Maurice of her earliest acquaintance with Charles Dickens, whose daughter Kitty Perugine had been one of her first companions. Dickens was an intimate of her parents, Sir Joseph and Lady Olliffe, as was his contemporary Thackeray. Dickens often visited them in Paris. Once, when he was about to give a reading at the British Embassy in support of a charitable fund started by her father, Florence remembered Dickens entering the salon and asking, “And where is Miss Florence going to sit?” “Florence is not going,” said Lady Olliffe firmly. “She is too young.” “Very well then,” he replied cheerfully, “I shan’t go either.” In the event, Florence sat in the front row and wept copiously at the melancholy death of Paul Dombey. Dickens wrote in a subsequent letter: “Florence at the reading tremendously excited.”
    Florence’s educational ideas were advanced for her day and much influenced by her admiration for progressive new European theories. Long after her own children had grown up, in 1911 she went to Rome to study the work of the educational reformer Maria Montessori. Her preference, where a governess could be afforded, was for schooling girls at home.This was the education she chose for her own girls, Elsa and Molly. Molly wrote later:
    My mother’s idea of the equipment required for her two daughters was that we should be turned out as good wives and mothers and be able to take our part in the social life of our kind. We must speak French and German perfectly, and be on friendly if not intimate terms with Italian. We must be able to play the piano and sing a bit, we must learn to dance well and know how to make small talk. The more serious side of education did not take any part in the plans my mother made for us. Science, mathematics, political economy, Greek and Latin—there was no need for any of these.
    No girl they knew was trained for any profession, nor did “girls of our class” go to school. That this worked well enough for the two sisters in their day is evident in the impression they gave of being delightful company. Less formidable than Gertrude, but with her erect bearing and good clothes sense, they became an attractive and entertaining couple, and much in demand. Virginia Stephen, later Virginia Woolf, mentioned them in a discursive letter about her first May Ball at Cambridge: “It was the Trinity ball . . . Boo was there, and Alice Pollock and the Hugh Bells (If you know them—MAP calls them ‘the most brilliant girl conversationalists in