Herbert Faulkner (born in Stamford, Connecticut) and Mary John (born in Cornwall, England) met and decided to marry in most unusual circumstances.
Mary had helped her sister, Edith, to elope when Edith had decided to marry an American, ( Frederick) Winthrop Ramsdell, a painter and a “hunchback”-- and a thoroughly charming man. The John sisters’ father, a harsh, gloomy widower, had been strongly opposed to the match, and when he learned what Mary had done, “turned (her) out of the house”, as she put it angrily sixty years later.
After the marriage, Mary wrote to Winthrop’s Art Students’ League friend in New York, Herbert Faulkner, to tell him about the wedding, and so began a correspondence that went
on for several months until he wrote her saying that he was in England and planning to come to St. Ives to ask her to marry him. Two weeks after they met, they were married in
the local Anglican church. Later they moved to Paris, where Herbert had a success-
ful career as a painter.
