Introduction
Introduction: “Poetical Reputations”
The traits of a current literary fashion are difficult to note, yet after ten, twenty, or one hundred years they become obvious to every fool. Young minds, as well as those ageing, are subject to this form of illusion. No man commerces with vital worth, freed from local or temporary irrelevancies, save by training himself to question generally accepted judgements.
Thomas Sturge Moore, “Michael Field,” Poetry and Drama 2, no. 5 (March 1914), 6.
Poetical reputations, of women especially, have a way of growing dowdy and going out of fashion, to return, it may be, like other fashions, to a day which shall find them new.
Katharine Tynan, “The Serious Muse,” The Observer (16 September 1917), 4.
In the aforementioned quotations, two prolific poet-critics, Thomas Sturge Moore and Katharine Tynan, reflect on the vicissitudes of literary history and the vagaries of “poetical reputations,” particularly for women. Both are writing in the early twentieth century, in the service of poets they deeply admired, whose work they felt worthy of enduring appreciation. Sturge Moore’s essay appeared in Harold Monro’s Poetry and Drama, in response to the death of Edith Cooper in December 1913. Cooper was one half of Michael Field, a pseudonymous collaborative partnership with Katharine Bradley, her aunt and romantic partner. Following this passage, Sturge Moore reminisces about the early success of Michael Field’s verse dramas, hailed as “the strikingly virile and mature work of some unknown young man” until the reality of their gender and collaboration was revealed.1 In spite of their subsequent critical neglect, Sturge Moore praises the richness of Michael Field’s plays, quoting passages from Fair Rosamund (1884)
as evidence. While noting the “minds of great distinction” with whom Michael Field conversed, including John Ruskin and Robert Browning, Sturge Moore brings these connections up-to-date, observing that Bradley and Cooper “kept pace with time” by corresponding with younger poets including Gordon Bottomley, Lascelles Abercrombie, and W. H. Davies.2 By name-checking these members of the Georgian movement, a group with whom Sturge Moore himself was connected, he signals Michael Field’s relevance to a younger generation of writers who were at that particular historical moment engaged in reviving poetic drama for the twentieth century.
Written three years later, Katharine Tynan’s words appear in a review of a volume by her friend Alice Meynell, titled A Father of Women and Other Poems (1917). Meynell established her reputation in the nineteenth century, finding fame with her debut volume Preludes (1875) and becoming renowned for her aesthetic prose essays during the 1890s. However, as a poet, Meynell was most productive in the twentieth century, publishing the majority of her poems during the 1910s and 1920s. While her previous volumes were largely reprints of her early poems with a few additions, A Father of Women contained sixteen new poems, some of them reflecting on the First World War. In her review, Tynan qualifies her statement about the vicissitudes of literary fashion by asserting that, unlike other women poets, Meynell’s work will endure, because “she does not belong to the day and the hour, but to Time and Eternity.”3 However, Tynan’s comparison of women’s poetry to shifting fashion lingers, hinting that Meynell’s reputation—and perhaps her own—may not be as secure as she hopes.
In championing their favoured poets, Tynan and Sturge Moore convey a mixture of assurance and anxiety concerning the durability of women’s literary reputations. Sturge Moore asserts his belief that “vital worth” will shine through the mists of “literary fashion,” but perhaps only with the clarity of hindsight. His essay expresses his eagerness that Michael Field should be remembered, and his anxiety lest they be forgotten. Tynan’s use of a sartorial metaphor betrays her fear, amidst her praise of Meynell, that such work is likely to fall out of favour, especially if the poet is a woman. Both writers are prescient in their concerns, as Michael Field and Meynell’s poetry was largely neglected by the mid-twentieth century, a fate that awaited the majority of women poets publishing across the turn of the century. However, Sturge Moore and Tynan are also defiant in their belief that these poets would be appreciated in the future, even if one had to wait a long time for that moment to come.
Form and Modernity in Women’s Poetry seeks to fulfil that hope. This book sets out an alternative poetic history for the period 1895–1922, focusing on the twentieth-century careers of women poets who continue to be primarily associated with the late nineteenth century: Alice Meynell (1847–1922), Michael Field (Katharine Bradley, 1846–1914, and Edith
Cooper, 1862–1913), Dollie Radford (1858–1920), and Katharine Tynan (1859–1931). Although the majority of existing scholarship on these poets concentrates on their 1890s verse and situates them primarily in the lateVictorian context in which their careers began, this book reveals that these poets continued to be productive in the early decades of the twentieth century. By bringing to light the post-1900 work of ‘fin-de-siècle’ women poets, the chapters in this book enhance our current understanding of modern poetry, by illuminating the complex relationship between form, modernity, and gender. To this end, my book addresses the following questions: what poetry did mature women poets produce during 1895–1922 and why has this work been overlooked in accounts of the period? How did these poets react to and help shape the poetic debates of the twentieth century, particularly those concerning the relationship between form and theme? How do these women poets contemplate modernity through their use of poetic form, and in what ways is their relationship to form inflected by gender? Finally, how does taking account of the poetry produced by mature women poets change and enrich our understanding of twentieth-century poetry more generally?
Form and Modernity in Women’s Poetry emphasises continuities in poetic practice across the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As each chapter in this book shows, paying attention to the mature work of women poets both extends and revises our grasp of fin-de-siècle verse, by revealing how the poetic forms, modes, and genres associated with the 1890s (including those aligned with aestheticism and decadence) adapted to respond to the conditions of modernity. Reassessing the work of mature poets also enables us to comprehend the diversity of early twentieth-century poetry, by setting the work of younger poets—including but not limited to those associated with modernism—in an enriched context. In this sense, this book aims to bridge the gulf between the ‘fin de siècle’ and ‘modernism’ by offering a richer, more complicated narrative; of young, up-and-coming writers occupying the same pages as older, established poets; of intersecting networks; and of poetic forms, modes, and aesthetics that cannot be easily housed on either side of the 1900 divide. To this end, my chapters attend to connections between poets of the older and younger generations in both their personal and professional networks, whether this means appearing in the same periodicals, reviewing one another’s work, adopting the same publishers, or corresponding with each other. Some instructive examples include the publication of Meynell’s poem “Maternity” in Harriet Monroe’s Poetry: A Magazine of Verse in 1913 alongside F. S. Flint’s “Imagisme” and Ezra Pound’s “A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste”; D. H. Lawrence’s correspondence praising Radford’s play The Ransom, following its publication in The English Review in 1915; and Tynan’s review of H.D.’s debut volume Sea Garden in The Bookman in 1917. This handful of instances
signals that mature women poets played a more active role in early twentieth-century literary culture than accounts of the period lead us to believe. Indeed, surveying the existing criticism, one would be forgiven for assuming that the majority of women poets writing during the fin de siècle died, or at least stopped producing poetry, shortly after 1900. While researchers specialising in the nineteenth century usually concentrate on their works of the 1890s, those interested in early twentieth-century poetry tend to focus on women poets of the younger generation associated with modernism, such as H.D., Mina Loy, and Marianne Moore.4 On the relatively rare occasions when women poets of the older and younger generations are considered together, as in Jane Dowson and Alice Entwistle’s A History of Twentieth-Century British Women’s Poetry (2005), the older generation tends to be positioned as ‘rear-guard’ in comparison to their younger peers, who supposedly developed their experiments into new, more progressive realms. For example, Dowson and Entwistle observe that while poets such as Meynell, Michael Field, Tynan, Mary E. Coleridge, and Eva Gore-Booth published poems in the twentieth century, their “conventional formalism . . . places them in a line of women’s poetry which evades gendered authorship.”5 In contrast, poets of the younger generation (including Vita Sackville-West, Frances Cornford and Elizabeth Daryush) “can be distinguished from the former group by their reliance on psychological insights and a more contemporary diction,” paving the way for more radical modernists such as Mina Loy and Edith Sitwell.6
This tendency to position the older generation as ‘rear-guard’ or less radical than their younger peers reflects the assumption (discussed in detail later in this introduction) that poetic innovation, especially free verse, aligns with progressive politics, while established poetic forms are aligned with conservative ideologies. The enduring critical neglect of mature women poets in accounts of modern poetry is therefore partly due to their continued use of traditional poetic forms in the twentieth century; forms which are assumed to be at odds with modernity. If readers turn to these poets looking for evidence of ‘making it new,’ they are likely to be sorely disappointed. The poets addressed in this book remained committed to established poetic forms, even as these forms were deemed outmoded by modernist commentators. Scholarship (including feminist revisionist criticism) struggles to know what to do with poetry that appears conservative or reactionary in its formal conventionality. But Form and Modernity in Women’s Poetry challenges the assumption that there is a straightforward relationship between poetic form and ideology; that the use of conventional forms aligns with conservative politics, whereas breaking form encodes a radical desire for liberation. For it is certainly the case that the women poets featured in this book had diverse political views, and yet they all favoured established poetic forms—including ballads, blank verse,
and rhymed lyrics—over free verse. Moreover, they often used these ‘oldfashioned’ poetic forms to tackle controversial subject matter with contemporary relevance, such as transgressive sexual desire, reproductive rights, pacifism, child loss, adultery, and the fight for suffrage.7 By suggesting that these poets respond to modernity in their poetry, though, I do not mean to imply a consistent attitude towards modernity or a particular ideological position. In other words, responding to modernity does not automatically mean they are progressive in their politics, or that they always respond to it in a positive way. Rather, these poets are all immersed in the changes of twentieth-century modernity, and they respond to these contexts in differing, complex, and shifting ways. Crucially, they all respond through poetic form. Poetic form provides them with a tool for processing modernity.
It is my contention then that these poets engage with modernity through form, rather than in spite of form. Far from signalling their irrelevance to the twentieth century, Form and Modernity in Women’s Poetry proposes that these poets’ use of form—the reason they have been forgotten— provides the key to why their work should be remembered. Rather than dismissing their use of poetic form as old-fashioned, I draw on the concept of affordances to ask what such established forms enable them to do. As Caroline Levine has proposed, we can consider poetic forms in terms of their capabilities, identifying “the particular constraints and possibilities that different forms afford.”8 Following Levine’s approach, when analysing mature women’s poetry, I ask: how do the affordances of certain poetic forms help to facilitate their contemplation of modernity? In what ways do they adapt their favoured poetic forms, established in the late nineteenth century, to the conditions of twentieth-century modernity? Rather than squeezing these poets into a modernist-dominated set of values or regarding them as a belated extension of the fin de siècle, I use their work as a test case to consider how we might read twentieth-century poetry that is not modernist. Can we consider this poetry on its own terms and how might doing so alter the value systems that we apply to twentieth-century poetry? The need to place these poets back in the frame extends beyond the motivations of feminist revisionism. It is only by reassessing the work of these overlooked women poets that we can fully comprehend and appreciate developments in twentieth-century poetry more broadly.
Before further detailing the core arguments and the structure of this book, it is first necessary to outline the wider contexts for women’s poetry in the period 1895–1922. This will enable us to understand the historical factors that led mature women poets to be overlooked in later influential accounts of the era. In particular, the distorting narrative of decline in the years following Oscar Wilde’s imprisonment in 1895 played a major role in diminishing women’s later contributions. According to commentators such as Ford Madox Ford and C. K. Stead, the downfall of 1890s
decadence led to a period of backlash, in which poetry was characterised by jingoistic chauvinism, epitomised by the verse of Henry Newbolt, Alfred Noyes, and Rudyard Kipling. But while there is little space for women’s poetry in this overly generalised narrative of masculine retrenchment, the turn of the century was, we will see, a particularly rich period for women poets, in which they published in greater numbers than ever before. In fact, Edwardian commentators identified this era as a rich epoch of diverse poetries, written in a variety of styles and forms, singling out developments in women’s poetry for special praise. Among these writers were poets such as Meynell, Michael Field, Radford, and Tynan; those who had launched their careers in the 1890s and who continued to publish work in the 1900s and through the First World War. But when, in the 1910s and 1920s, memoirs of the ‘1890s generation’ began to appear, these women poets were overlooked in comparison to their male counterparts, in terms of both their previous achievements and their enduring presence. This neglect was worsened by ageism combined with misogyny which positioned mature women as the antithesis of youth and modernity, meaning their accomplished mature poetry was further undervalued. This made it easier for younger poets to dismiss their contributions to twentiethcentury poetry, resulting in the distorted narratives that continue to dominate today.
Women’s Poetry, 1895 and After
The fin de siècle has often been understood to end with Wilde’s imprisonment in 1895. As Ford Madox Ford recounts, after Wilde’s incarceration: “Poets died or fled to other climes, publishers also fled, prosateurs were fished out of the Seine or reformed and the great public said ‘Thank heavens, we need not read any more poetry.’ ”9 W. B. Yeats constructed his own version of this spurious narrative: “in 1900 everybody got down off his stilts; henceforth nobody drank absinthe with his black coffee; nobody went mad; nobody committed suicide; nobody joined the Catholic Church; or if they did I have forgotten.”10 Whether 1895 or 1900, the conclusion is the same; the spirit of the fin de siècle was irrevocably dead by the early twentieth century, as were many of its writers. In recent years, critics have re-examined these narratives, unmasking them as strategic mythologies rather than historical facts.11 The fin de siècle is now acknowledged as a time of vibrant creativity and new beginnings, rather than exhaustion and endings. While these narratives are clearly reductive for literature in general, they are patently untrue for women poets, many of whom continued publishing their work with sustained vigour in the early twentieth century. As we will see, the supposed decline of decadence following Wilde’s imprisonment actually precipitated a more active role
for women poets, contradicting Ford and Yeats’ narratives of failure and enervation.
In line with this broader reconsideration of the fin de siècle that gained traction in the late twentieth century, critics began to identify the 1890s as a rich decade for women’s poetry. For example, in a 2006 special issue, Marion Thain and Ana Parejo Vadillo argue that women poets were “active participants in the renewal of poetry, and the proliferation of poetries, at the fin de siècle.”12 The strength of women’s poetry was acknowledged during the period itself. In an 1888 review essay on “English Poetesses,” Wilde observed that:
[N]o country has ever had so many poetesses at once. Indeed, when one remembers that the Greeks had only nine muses, one is apt to fancy that we have too many. And yet the work done by women in the sphere of poetry is really of a very high standard of excellence.13
Wilde’s words betray his anxiety that women are threatening to dominate the market in poetry, but, despite these reservations, he concedes the quality of their work. Elizabeth Sharp expressed similar sentiments in her introduction to Women’s Voices: An Anthology of the Most Characteristic Poems by English, Scotch and Irish Women (1887), arguing that:
[T]here is a greater wealth of really fine poetic writing at present appearing in more or less obscure quarters than has ever appeared at any other period in literary history. [. . . A]mong the minor poets of this generation women have written more that is worthy to endure than men have done.14
The death of Tennyson in 1892 increased opportunities for women’s poetry. Thain notes that the loss of this “figure-head icon” was beneficial for women poets, who were publishing “with such vigour by the end of the century that there is no longer a polarity between a ‘woman’s tradition’ and a mainstream.”15 This explosion in production was facilitated by the periodical market, in which women could find multiple venues to place their work, including The Pall Mall Gazette, The English Illustrated Magazine , The Sketch , and The Savoy , to name just a few. Columns such as “The Wares of Autolycus” in The Pall Mall Gazette were shared between women, including Meynell, Tynan, Graham R. Tomson (Rosamund Marriott Watson), and E. Nesbit. Professional networks were cultivated through initiatives such as the Women Writer’s Dinner, established in 1889.16 The Yellow Book, published by John Lane and Elkin Mathews, played an important role in bringing women poets to the foreground in the period; according to Margaret D. Stetz and Mark
Samuels Lasner: “no other journal of the day devoted to ‘high’ or avantgarde culture allowed women so great a voice in defining themselves and one another.”17 Just as the Keynotes series (titled after George Egerton’s controversial collection of 1893) was crucial to promoting work by New Woman prose writers, the Bodley Head imprint played a vital part in publishing new poetry by women. Indeed, Linda H. Peterson notes that the Bodley Head promoted itself primarily through its women poets following Wilde’s imprisonment, with Lane boasting in an interview in December 1895: “I count myself fortunate . . . to have published the work of five great women poets of the day—Mrs. Meynell, Mrs. Marriott Watson, Miss E. Nesbit, Mrs. Tynan Hinkson, and Mrs. Dollie Radford.”18 Lane was not the only person to feel that women’s poetry deserved recognition. The previous year, Richard Le Gallienne had written an essay on “Woman-Poets of the Day” (1894), arguing that women poets appeared to be developing more rapidly than men. Le Gallienne, the main reader for the Bodley Head, highlights “the praiseworthy fact of women’s evolution,” arguing that: “Man, for the present, seems to be at a stand-still, if not actually retrograde: and the onward movement of the world to be embodied in woman.”19 Continuing the evolutionary metaphor, Le Gallienne considers the “chasm of growth dividing” the work of the poets he singles out— among them Meynell, Tynan, Radford, and Nesbit—from earlier celebrated women poets, such as Felicia Hemans and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The true “woman-poet” (as opposed to the “poetess”) is, for Le Gallienne, “an invention of the present century” and “still in process of formation.”20 In observing this, he echoes a point that Sharp made seven years earlier. In her introduction to Women’s Voices, Sharp observes that her collection signals a “steady development of intellectual power, certainly not unaccompanied by artistic faculty—a fact which gives further sanction to the belief that still finer work will be produced in the future by women-poets.”21
As we have seen, the year following Le Gallienne’s article, 1895, was pivotal for both The Yellow Book and its poets. Wilde’s downfall had dire implications for the journal, even though he never actually published in it. Reflecting on this period in 1931, Ford claims that Wilde’s ruin put an end to the dynamic literary culture of the 1890s:
The Bodley Head group did not survive. They succumbed in London’s Soho haunts—to absinthe, to tuberculosis, to starvation, to reformers or to suicide. But in their day they were brilliantly before the public and London was more of a literary centre then than it has ever been before or since. . . . But all that went with the trial of Wilde.22
Ford blames Wilde and his followers for “succumbing” to various decadent temptations, resulting in the fall of these halcyon days of letters.
According to Ford, the backlash caused by Wilde’s sexual transgressions and eventual imprisonment caused the “political pendulum . . . to swing violently towards the right.”23 In terms of poetry, according to Ford, this resulted in the popularity of the “physical force schools of Henley or Mr. Rudyard Kipling”—poetry representing a strident masculine energy and jingoism that was, for Ford, the disastrous antithesis of the “delicacy and refinement” of decadence.24
Although Wilde’s downfall impacted differently on different constituencies (having, for example, less impact on poets distant from Yellow Book decadence, such as Thomas Hardy, compared to, say, a poet like Lionel Johnson), Ford’s account is frequently invoked as evidence that early twentieth-century poetry was barren until modernism came along. For example, in his influential study The New Poetic (1964), C. K. Stead concurs with Ford’s narrative, arguing that the experimental poets of the fin de siècle who valued “art for art’s sake” were replaced during the 1900s by “a poetry of political retrenchment, committed to conserve political and social ideas and institutions doomed to collapse.”25 Stead cites Kipling, W. E. Henley, Noyes, Newbolt, William Watson, and Alfred Austin as the dominant poets of the Edwardian period, roundly dismissing them as “not those who offered the complex qualities usually associated with good poetry, but those whose minds ran at the level of public expectation.”26 To make matters worse, as Kenneth Millard notes (in one of the few existing studies devoted to Edwardian poetry), the Edwardian era is seldom associated with poetry at all, but rather with prose works directly engaged in addressing social problems, such as the novels of Arnold Bennett, H. G. Wells, and John Galsworthy.27
But what of the work of women poets, so highly praised for their rapid development in Le Gallienne’s essay of 1894? Ford, Stead, and Millard are silent about the work produced by women in the post-1895 climate.28 How might considering women’s poetry of this period complicate the male-dominated narrative of the collapse of aesthetic values, and the rise of a macho, conservative poetics? If we bring women into the picture, Ford’s assertion that “all that went with the trial of Wilde” begins to look even more questionable. In fact, far from aesthetic and decadent poetics dying off in this period, Linda K. Hughes argues that women poets sustained The Yellow Book’s “links to decadence in the wake of the trial.”29 While male poets writing homoerotic verse risked increased censorship in a hostile literary climate, Hughes claims that “women, already marginal, could more safely articulate thoughts that had become dangerous for men.”30 Thus, as Hughes shows through her bibliographic study of poems in The Yellow Book, more women poets were published in the journal after Wilde’s trials than before, and several of their poems expressed sexually transgressive themes.31 While the possibilities for
men’s poetry may have narrowed during this period, women’s poems published between 1895 and 1897 sustained The Yellow Book’s “ties to the avant-garde,” providing, according to Hughes, “an outlet by which women writers could challenge social convention or misogynist contributions by men.”32
As with Tennyson’s demise in 1892, Wilde’s downfall in 1895 therefore provided more space and opportunity for women’s poetry to flourish. The supposedly declining years described in Ford and Yeats’s influential accounts witnessed further significant developments in women’s poetry. While the Bodley Head had published important works by women poets before the split of Mathews and Lane in September 1894, including Radford’s A Light Load (1891), Michael Field’s Sight and Song (1892), and Meynell’s Poems (1892), the years following their split confirmed their commitment to supporting women’s poetry, with Mathews publishing around three volumes by women poets a year, including Michael Field’s Attila, My Attila! (1895), Tynan’s A Lover’s Breast-Knot (1896), Margaret L. Woods’ Aeromancy and Other Poems (1896), and Mary E. Coleridge’s Fancy’s Guerdon (1897, under the pseudonym ‘Anodos’). As we have seen, Lane also continued to promote the women poets on his list, publishing volumes by Radford and Nesbit (Songs and Other Verses and A Pomander of Verse, both 1895) and Opals by Olive Custance (1897)—an especially risqué, decadent-inflected volume to be published in a post-Wildean climate. As a perusal of these volumes makes clear, aestheticism, decadence, and the poetry of “delicacy and refinement” did not die off in 1895, as Ford asserts.33 Rather, women poets carried such work forward into the Edwardian era. Thus, a truly representative history tracing British poetry after 1895 should include women poets, as a corrective to the influential yet highly distorted narratives of masculine retrenchment associated with the Edwardian period.
The 1900s: A Barren Period?
Along with individual poetic volumes, anthologies published in the 1900s attest to the continuing prominence of women’s poetry in the Edwardian era. For instance, in 1902, William Archer published Poets of the Younger Generation , featuring extracts from thirty-three poets alongside critical commentaries and woodcut portraits.34 Archer includes nine women poets in his volume: Meynell, Tynan, and Radford, along with Alice Brown, Nora Hopper, E. Nesbit, Dora Sigerson Shorter, Graham R. Tomson, and Margaret L. Woods. Although there is evidently still a lack of gender parity across the volume as a whole, Archer clearly saw women poets as making a significant contribution to the poetry of the day. He emphasises that his chosen poets (from Britain, North America,
and Canada) reflect the diversity and vitality of poetry at the turn of the century:
If the reader will bear in mind that by far the greater number of the poems here quoted have been written within the past ten years, I think he will admit that the last decade of the nineteenth century has been anything but a barren period.35
The volume thus reflects the nineteenth-century’s considerable achievements and raises questions about the status of poetry in the new century, with Archer aiming to “enhance the reader’s estimate of the value of contemporary poetry as a whole.”36
Several of the poets in Archer’s anthology continued to publish in the twentieth century, exerting an important influence on the younger generation. For example, Laurence Binyon coined the phrase ‘make it new’ long before Pound; Madison Cawein’s “Waste Land” (1913) provided inspiration for Eliot’s more famous poem, and Yeats continued to be an influential poet within both the Symbolist and modernist movements.37 The women poets included in Archer’s anthology also produced significant works as the new century dawned. For example, the notoriously reticent Meynell published three poetic volumes before 1900 and five volumes after; the more prolific Tynan published six volumes in the late nineteenth century and seventeen volumes in the twentieth century, so both significantly enlarged their output in the twentieth century. Women poets became increasingly conspicuous in publishers’ lists during the decade 1901–1911; for example, their presence in Mathews’ lists increases to around five volumes a year, from approximately three prior to this. 1911 was a particularly rich year, in which Mathews published twelve volumes by women poets.38 This reflects a general trend towards publishing more women’s poetry in this period. By 1910, Margaret Sackville could confidently state in her introduction to A Book of Verse by Living Women (an anthology itself indicative of the interest in women’s poetry at this time) that women’s poetry had experienced a sea change:
[S]ince the crumbling of so many false ideals and the infinitely truer attitude of human beings towards life and towards each other, women’s poetry of late years has reflected the change—has become a far firmer, more individual, more valuable thing.39
Sackville’s anthology comprises twenty-five poets, including all the focal poets of this book.40
The first decade of the twentieth century is often characterised as an era of ‘minor’ poetry, wedged between the Victorian and modernist greats.
However, far from being a barren period, this diverse, democratic aspect enabled women poets to flourish, fostered by an encouraging environment dominated by no single poetic voice or style. This enabling multiplicity was observed by contemporary anthologists. Naomi Gwladys Royde-Smith, for instance, in the introduction to her anthology Poets of Our Day (1908) emphasises the diversity of contemporary poetry:
For there is a great deal of modern poetry. The poems included, therefore, are sufficiently various in character to illustrate the history of poetry during the period, showing how it has been frivolous, sensuous, patriotic, simple; and, quite lately, very serious, which is by some people taken for a sign that a great poet is at hand. But we have no need to long over much for a great poet with so many real poets among us, nor to sigh for a new one when we remember how young some of those poets are.41
One can sense the nostalgia for an equivalent figure to Tennyson, who will speak to this “serious” age. But instead, according to Royde-Smith, the era has several young “real poets” producing different kinds of verse. In this respect, the Edwardian era continued the trends of the fin de siècle, producing numerous, expansive poetries—a dispersion that, while it provoked anxiety in some readers and critics, also fostered a sense of opportunity that was particularly empowering for women poets.
Reviewing Royde-Smith’s volume in the Times Literary Supplement, Percy Lubbock also acknowledged the lively state of poetry in 1908:
[W]e may say boldly that poetry is being cultivated at the present day with an energy, a varied range of emotion, and a technical skill of which we may be proud. Year after year new writers come forward with new verse. Year after year there are new aims, new developments, or (what may be just as original) new reactions. No one can move exactly on old lines. No one finds that what he wishes has been said in exactly the way he wishes to say it. There is no universal model, no acclaimed or accredited school. Everyone is free to use the manner that suits him, with nothing to fear from academic criticism. And in this favouring atmosphere fresh experiments succeed one another so rapidly that it is hardly possible at one moment to say what the dominant note of the moment will be.42
Observe the upbeat tone and enabling vision of freedom proffered in this review. This is far from the portrait of the era found in modernist accounts. This optimistic assessment could not be more different, for example, from the picture later painted by T. S. Eliot: “The situation of poetry in 1909 or 1910 was stagnant to a degree difficult for any young poet today to imagine.”43
T. E. Hulme expressed a similar view in his “Lecture on Modern Poetry” delivered in 1908 (the same year as Royde-Smith’s anthology and Lubbock’s review):
The carcass is dead, and the flies are upon it. Imitative poetry springs up like weeds and women whimper and whine of you and I alas, and roses, roses all the way. It becomes an expression of sentimentality rather than virile thought.44
While Vincent Sherry interprets this statement as a homophobic rejection of “the effeminacy routinely attributed to decadence in the attitudinized case of Wilde,” we can also read it as an expression of misogyny, conveying Hulme’s condemnation of the dominance of women poets in the postWildean period.45 If viewed in this way, Hulme’s statement can be seen as a denunciation not only of a decadent past but of women’s poetry in the present, both in terms of its continued proliferation (springing up ‘like weeds’), its ‘Victorian’ and feminine sentimentalism (symbolised as cloying ‘roses’), and its enduring adherence to aesthetic and decadent modes (the rotting ‘carcass’). Hulme’s condemnation taps into long-held pejorative beliefs regarding women’s poetry, frequently charged with being sentimental, derivative, and technically unskilled. These traits intersect with the faults that modernists identified in Victorian verse; Pound, for example, described the nineteenth century as a “blurry, messy . . . rather sentimentalistic, mannerish sort of a period,” producing poetry full of “perdamnable rhetoric” and “emotional slither.”46 In contrast, the new poetry he champions will be “harder and saner, . . . as much like granite as it can be.”47 As several critics have observed, Pound, Eliot, and Hulme’s preference for the ‘dry and hard’ aesthetic is clearly gendered, rejecting the soft, wet, floppiness they associated with femininity in favour of a granite-hard, paredback modernist masculinity.48
“A Live
Tradition”: Decadent Reverberations and Intergenerational Gatherings
In his lecture, Hulme condemns traits associated with Victorianism, decadence, and femininity; all elements that certain modernists desired to purge from their poetry. It is therefore little surprise that women poets of the older generation, still going strong in 1908, were foremost among those that Hulme, Pound, and Eliot denigrated, as they forged the tenets of poetic modernism. But this does not mean that younger poets entirely rejected the work of the older generation. As Cassandra Laity, Ronald Bush, and Vincent Sherry have shown, modernist poets were highly conscious of their
predecessors, even as they sought to conceal their influence.49 For example, on arriving in London in 1908, Pound actively pursued poets associated with the 1890s, writing in 1913 that he regarded such contact as a “sort of Apostolic Succession . . . for people whose minds have been enriched by contact with men of genius retain the effects of it.”50 As part of his mission to connect with ‘men of the nineties,’ particularly members of the Rhymers’ Club, Pound published his first volumes with Elkin Mathews and befriended Yeats in 1909.51 The two grew close, staying together at Stone Cottage, Sussex during 1913–1916.52 During one of these trips, Pound and Yeats attended the Peacock dinner in January 1914, arranged in honour of the poet Wilfrid Scanwen Blunt. Other attendees included Victor Plarr and Thomas Sturge Moore, poets of the older generation, and Richard Aldington and F. S. Flint, members of the fledgling Imagist movement.53 As Lucy McDiarmid observes in her account of the meal, the gathering was symbolic, representing the “transmission of poetic culture” across generations.54 Pound certainly regarded the event in these terms, reflecting later in his Canto LXXXI that by meeting with Blunt, he “gathered from the air a live tradition.”55
The Peacock dinner signals the intimate connections forged between young modernist poets and members of the older generation. However, such bonds did not deter them from disparaging these writers elsewhere. For example, in his preface to The Poetical Works of Lionel Johnson (published a year after the Peacock dinner), Pound roundly condemned both Johnson and the “nineties” as irrelevant to “younger poets who scoff at most things of his time”: “The ‘nineties’ have chiefly gone out because of their muzziness. . . . They riot with half decayed fruit.”56 Eliot dismissed decadence in similar terms, describing Walter Pater’s The Renaissance as having “impressed itself upon a number of writers in the ’nineties, and propagated some confusion between life and art which is not wholly irresponsible for some untidy lives.”57 Pound depicted these “untidy lives” in darkly comic terms in his autobiographical poem Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920), in which “Monsieur Verog,” based on Plarr, recounts stories of his contemporaries:
For two hours he talked of Gallifet; Of Dowson; of the Rhymers’ Club; Told me how Johnson (Lionel) died By falling from a high stool in a pub . . .58
Pound portrays the older generation as both doomed and ridiculous, anticipating Yeats’s portrait of the “tragic generation” in his autobiography.59 As we have seen, this distorted narrative had damaging implications for writers associated with the fin de siècle, lasting until the critical reassessment
of the era in the late twentieth century. But it would be inaccurate to characterise Pound and Eliot’s relationship with the older generation as one of outright dismissal. As Sherry’s work reveals, for all their disavowal, traces of fin-de-siècle influence continued to haunt their work, although these allusions are often repackaged as ‘Symbolism’ in order to expunge the taint of decadence.60 Thain suggests that rather than a hostile denunciation, we should regard such allusions as a form of ambivalent “homage,” in which modernist authors acknowledge past achievements but “in a way that is tinged with irony or some other indication of the threat these writers pose.”61
While these portraits of the older generation are undoubtedly distorted, the ‘men of the nineties’ live on through this ambivalent practice of modernist homage. But where, if anywhere, do the ‘women of the nineties’ fit into this picture? As the chapters in this book reveal, male modernists had a comparably complex relationship with the women poets of the older generation—but these women have been erased in accounts of twentiethcentury literature. Older women poets provided much-needed support for these young writers launching their careers. For example, in 1909, the same year that Pound met Yeats, he also befriended Meynell, who subsequently introduced him to Tynan. As Meynell wrote to Tynan in July 1909:
Among those who do know that you are a poet, is the American, Ezra Pound, who is creating an interest which he has not yet quite justified. . . . He greatly admires you and I should like to bring him to see you, when a day can be found to suit you and him.62
Though the meeting did not go smoothly—with Meynell apologising to Tynan: “Ezra Pound was horrid that day I have rebuked him since”— this evidently did not prevent Pound from using Tynan’s writings as the basis for his unflattering description of Johnson’s death in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley. 63 While Meynell’s letters suggest that she felt Pound was overhyped, she helped him gain access to influential circles at a crucial moment in his career. Her family home at Greatham, situated near Scanwen Blunt’s house (the location of the peacock dinner), functioned as an equivalent space for intergenerational gatherings.64 As well as hosting Pound, D. H. Lawrence was a regular visitor, staying for six months during 1915.65 During his sojourn, Lawrence corresponded with Dollie Radford, visiting her in nearby Littlehampton. Lawrence’s letters, from 1915 until Radford’s death in 1920, praise her work and detail their mutual acquaintances, including the Imagist poet H.D., who met Radford in 1916.66 H.D. also met Meynell shortly after her arrival in London in 1911, and her volume Sea Garden (1916) was later reviewed by Tynan in The Bookman. 67 Meynell encountered H.D.’s husband, Richard Aldington, another peacock
dinner participant, while both were holidaying in Italy in 1913.68 Meanwhile, at their home in Richmond, Michael Field hosted their own intergenerational gatherings, dining with the likes of Yeats, Sturge Moore, and Gordon Bottomley. As this series of anecdotes illustrates, the women of the older generation were well connected to younger poets in the early twentieth century. Even the peacock dinner itself is haunted by their absent presence.69 But despite this, these women writers are still missing in accounts of twentieth-century literature; a strategic forgetting abetted by the memoirs of the fin de siècle published in the early decades of the century.
“Men of the Nineties”: Forgetting Women Poets in the Twentieth Century
The neglect of mature women poets was facilitated by those who recounted the fin de siècle in the early twentieth century. The 1910s–1930s witnessed a boom in studies reflecting on the ‘nineties’ era. The phrase ‘Men of the Nineties’ resounds through these volumes, in titles such as Bernard Muddiman’s The Men of the Nineties (1920) or Joseph Pennell’s Aubrey Beardsley and the Other Men of the Nineties (1924). Like Pennell’s, many of these volumes are organised around a central male figure who represents the age. These works seldom devote space to the contributions of women poets, even when considerable room is made for individual male poets. For example, Holbrook Jackson’s The Eighteen-Nineties (1913) briefly mentions women poets in a chapter on “The Minor Poet,” clustering their names into a single paragraph, while whole chapters are dedicated to poets Francis Thompson, John Davidson, and Rudyard Kipling.70 Following a similar pattern, in John Lane and the Nineties (1936), James Lewis May expends several paragraphs on individual critiques of William Watson, John Davidson, Norman Gale, Arthur Symons, Stephen Phillips, and Francis Thompson, among mentions of other male poets. Towards the end of his chapter, he states:
Merely to enumerate all the poets—men and women—would be a long task—long, tedious and a little sad, for many of them are now forgotten. Yet some sang prettily enough in their day. There was Dollie Radford, for example, whom as a girl—Dollie Maitland was her maiden name—I used to meet at a friend’s house in Devonshire. She married a schoolmaster called Ernest Radford, himself a poet and a member of “The Rhymers’ Club.” Mrs. Rosamund Marriott-Watson, who used to write under the name “Graham R. Tomson,” was a true poet and tuned a sweet, if slender, reed.71
This passage epitomises the manner in which women poets were remembered, when they were mentioned at all: as an after-thought, with patronising faint praise, often with reference to their marriages (or the men with whom they associated) and to their physical appearance. Even Le Gallienne, a vocal supporter of women’s poetry, falls into this habit in The Romantic Nineties (1925) when recalling Lane’s tea parties: “I particularly recall the Rossetti-like head of Mrs. Graham R. Tomson, the boyish, bird-like charm of ‘E. Nesbit,’ the flower-like girlish loveliness of Olive Custance.” 72 The poetry they produced receives little discussion.
May and Le Gallienne’s emphasis on these poets’ youthful beauty obscures the reality of their mature presence in the twentieth century. If women poets of the older generation were neglected by their peers, including men like Le Gallienne who lived through the 1890s with them, how could they expect the younger generation to acknowledge them? The neglect of women poets in accounts of the ‘nineties’ made it easier for younger poets to overlook them when launching their own careers in the twentieth century, even when—or perhaps especially when—they were aware of their presence and benefited personally from their support. As we have seen, the likes of Symons, Dowson, and Johnson are name-checked by modernist poets, even if they are misrepresented in satirical ways. In contrast, older women poets are barely acknowledged at all, either in recollections of the 1890s or in ambivalent ‘modernist homages’ to the period. As a result, even recent reassessments of twentieth-century literature that aspire to undo divisions between the ‘Victorians’ and the ‘moderns’ find little space for these women poets, instead focusing on relations between male writers of the older generation, such as Yeats and Symons, and their modernist interlocutors.73
The modernist rejection of the older generation of women writers is intensified by the cultural obsession with youth that characterised the early twentieth century. As Glen Clifton notes, in an era “driven by a belief in progress,” older people are “symbolically cast aside by the cultural energies that demand everything be up-to-date.”74 This ageism was exacerbated by gender, with women more likely to be considered ‘out of date’ before men.75 As Margaret Morganroth Gullette argues, the devaluation of the “postmaternal” woman in the twentieth century was fuelled by falling birth rates combined with the “feminist idealization of the advanced young woman of the era.”76 While the “advanced young woman” served as a modernist icon in this period, older women came to symbolise the antithesis of progress. As Alex Goody has shown, modernist discourses feminised the past itself, with the grandmother figure “used to indicate the difference between conventional culture and the innovations of modernism.”77
Modernism’s hostility to the figure of the older woman is epitomised in Pound’s Hugh Selwyn Mauberley. As Pound recalls his friends who died in the Great War, he personifies the past through the figure of the ageing Queen Victoria:
There died a myriad, And of the best, among them, For an old bitch gone in the teeth, For a botched civilisation78
Whether embodied as a geriatric monarch, suffocating mother, or repressed maiden aunt, older women came to represent everything that modernism rejected.
This disparagement of older women influenced modernist women writers too, tainting their reaction to writers of the preceding generation. As Gullette notes, the postmaternal woman was regarded by many young feminist writers as an “obstacle” to a new life that needed to be “exorcised by those who identified as her ‘daughters.’ ”79 Following Woolf’s dictum, the modernist woman writer must not only kill the angel in the house but also exorcise her immediate literary foremothers too.80 When forging a female literary lineage, modernist women writers therefore tend to gesture to foremothers of a more comfortably distant past, rather than the generation preceding their own. This is apparent, for example, in Amy Lowell’s poem “The Sisters” (1925), which mentions Sappho, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Emily Dickinson, but laments “[h]ow few of us there’ve been.”81 In fact, Lowell was familiar with many women poets of a slightly older generation, including Louise Imogen Guiney, Ella Wheeler Wilcox, and Meynell.82 Employing a similar strategy, Woolf famously suggests in A Room of One’s Own that we “think back through our mothers if we are women” but mentions only long-dead women—Aphra Behn, Jane Austen, Christina Rossetti—rather than living writers of the older generation, such as Meynell, Sarah Grand, and Olive Schreiner, whom she in fact met, read, and reviewed. As Mary Jean Corbett has recently shown, when Woolf did acknowledge her direct female precursors, it was often in a highly ambivalent manner.83 For example, as I will discuss in Chapter 1, on encountering Meynell in 1909, Woolf described her as “a lean, attenuated woman . . . who somehow, made one dislike the notion of women who write.”84 As Corbett reveals, the twenty-seven-year-old Virginia Stephen’s dismissive reaction to the sixty-one-year-old Meynell is representative of her generally disparaging attitude towards the “maternal generation.” However, Woolf’s perspective later changed as she faced her own ageing and moved towards identification with women of the older generation. For example, on reading a memoir of Meynell in 1929, Woolf reflects: “When one reads a life
one often compares one’s own life with it,” noting that Meynell “had a line of her own”—the description, echoing Woolf’s famous essay, that provides the subtitle for this book.85 As she herself grew older, Woolf gradually came to a modified understanding of the mature women writers that preceded her, one in which she was finally able to discern continuities between generations.
As Devoney Looser has argued in Women Writers and Old Age in Great Britain, 1750–1850 (2008), longevity itself could lead an author into obscurity, or at least have a damaging effect on a woman writer’s reputation:
The best an older woman author could hope for was to become a “classic” and it was difficult to dwindle into a classic if you were still in the public eye or, worse still, had hopes of continuing to contribute to your stock of ideas. For a celebrated female author to continue to publish into old age was to risk lowering a once-high reputation, but ceasing publication was not necessarily a winning scenario, either. Where women writers did not (or could not) continue to publish into old age, gradual neglect or devaluation of their earlier contributions seems to have made post-humous notice that much less likely. A number of aged women writers saw their reputations and fame diminishing before their eyes, and few fought to reverse the process.86
As Looser suggests, women’s mature literary productions tend to be received less positively compared to their earlier work, in line with the pejorative decline narratives of women’s ageing in culture in general. As this book will show, these factors of ageism and misogyny are intensified by the fact that my focal poets stuck to the same poetic forms that they developed during fin de siècle, even as these forms were considered increasing outmoded. Why did they remain so committed to these forms? As I will now suggest, this was partly because these established poetic forms offered a way of comprehending and articulating their experience of modernity.
“The Bonds of Verse”: Poetic Form and Ideology
For modernist women writers, as for their male peers, the older generation of women poets were associated with the overly decorous Victorian past and its attendant constructions of femininity, which they defined themselves against. For modernist women poets, the limitations of the older generation are epitomised by their use of traditional poetic forms. Lowell, for example, describes Barrett Browning’s heart as “squeezed in stiff conventions,” aligning her metrical habits with physical constraint.87 In keeping with this, established poetic forms were frequently likened to the corset. For example, Archer describes Meynell’s work in 1902 in the
following terms: “The strict form is far more of a support than a burden. It serves as stays to a flaccid thought.”88 A similar metaphor serves as an indictment in Maxwell Bodenheim’s 1914 essay, “The Decorative StraightJacket: Rhymed Verse,” in which he deplores the “clamping of the inevitable strait-jacket, rhymed verse, upon the shrinking form of poetry,” urging poets to “free poetry from the outworn metal bands and let her stretch her cramped limbs.”89 In aligning fixed formal verse with the corset, modernists linked ‘outdated’ poetic modes with restrictive female fashions associated with the oppressive ‘Victorianism’ of the older generation—in contrast to the New Woman, or modern girl, who broke form in every sense.
In drawing links between a restricted body, emotional repression, and the use of constrained poetic form, poets and critics subtly (or not-so-subtly) aligned free verse with feminist liberation. Such analogies shape arguments found in later twentieth-century criticism, in which established poetic forms are associated with conservative ideologies, while free verse is aligned with progressive politics. This view has problematic implications for the older women poets who remained committed to conventional poetic forms in the twentieth century. Along with the historical and cultural factors already discussed, it is largely due to their ‘old-fashioned’ use of poetic form, assumed to be at odds with modernity, that mature women poets have been consigned to the “dustbin of superannuated song” (to use Le Gallienne’s phrase).90 The women poets in this book employed established forms, including blank verse, ballads, and rhyming lyrics, with sustained enthusiasm in the twentieth century. However, rather than viewing their use of traditional forms as disqualifying them from consideration among modern poets, I aim to show that these women poets were engaging with modernity through their use of such forms. The predominant emphasis on free verse in existing accounts of twentieth-century poetry means that the complexity of these poets’ engagements with form has been overlooked. When such poetry is addressed at all, it is positioned as backward-looking in the modern age. But just because these poets favoured traditional forms does not mean that they were unable or unwilling to respond to modernity. As Thain has shown in her discussion of the mechanised rhythms of Parnassian poetry, the repetitive nature of fixed poetic forms can itself function as a complex reaction to modernity.91 We see such forms responding to the urban environment, for example, in Radford’s lyrics “From the Suburbs” (1895) and “Spring in the Tube” (1911); poems which capture the experience of rail travel through the use of rhyme and metre. Meanwhile, for Tynan, as we will see, the repetitive ballad stanza provides a means of processing grief, a therapeutic quality that became particularly vital during the First World War, resulting in the popularity of her wartime volumes. As these two brief examples suggest, free verse was not the only poetic response to modernity. Established forms offer their own affordances, capable of capturing modern experience.
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During the war he preferred non-alcoholic drinks and omitted strong drinks when prohibition was established, making no exception for himself. However, some wine and other drinks were served to high foreign military officers in Mogilev. Father disliked and often neglected taking medicine even though it was necessary for his weak stomach. He believed, as did his Romanov ancestors, that nature is the best medicine.
Father had the best possible education and training. One of his favorite teachers was the famous Konstantin Pobedonostsev. This man was an outstanding theologian and lawyer. He taught Father both law and religion, so that his faith remained strong to the very end. Another favorite was General Danilov who taught military tactics. He was carefully selected for this most important assignment. Father had a Swiss tutor who taught him the French language and literature, and an English tutor, named Charles Heath, who acquainted him with the English language and literature.
Father had the most extraordinary memory. He was able to recite many Russian, French and English poems, including passages from Shakespeare. He was a fast reader and writer, his sentences being short and concise and always written in ink. He enjoyed the classics. His reading also included the works of Gogol; Gorbunov’s stories of Russia; and Feodor Dostoevsky, many of whose autographed novels were on the shelves of our library; likewise the works of Longfellow, Dickens, Wordsworth and many others. He was familiar with international law and often remarked that many diplomats complicated matters to such an extent that it took a great deal of time to unravel a simple problem.
On the “Standard,” the Imperial yacht, he had in his cabin the complete works of Shakespeare and other English contemporary authors, and books carefully selected by our tutors for us to read during our cruise.
The strict training demanded of my Father, the future Tsar, was due to the discipline of his austere father, Alexander III. Had Father not felt restrained by his oath of office, I feel sure he would have lifted some of the restrictions he had inherited from his predecessor. His
love for his people and his gentle nature were often shown when he lessened the punishment of soldiers by their officers. He believed in a close family relationship and on one occasion, after receiving a request, he granted permission to a Jewish woman to see her sick son in their prison hospital as often as she pleased.
Father was very loyal to his friends, many of whom he had known from his childhood. He disliked the waste of time on petty talk.
Many requests were withheld from him, and occasionally actions were taken without his knowledge or approval.
In spite of previous attempts on his life, he had resumed the ancient custom of the “Blessing of the Waters” on the river Neva in St. Petersburg. When a little girl, I was told that at one of these ceremonies an explosion occurred on the river, injuring several persons including my Father’s physician. Part of the canopy and the windows of the Winter Palace were shattered. Father, therefore, ordered the discontinuance of this tradition. When an epidemic broke out soon after, the peasants attributed it to the decree. So the order was rescinded and the Epiphany ceremony was resumed. Once I was present at this picturesque ceremony which was one of the great national and religious traditions of Russia.
At this ceremony the dignitaries of the Church and State gathered at the Winter Palace. The procession formed there and proceeded to the river, followed by the church dignitaries. Father took his position in front of a crimson and gold canopy. A hole had already been cut in the ice. At the end of the ceremony the priest handed Father the cross which he dipped in the water and then raised high and made the sign of the cross in the air. This was repeated three times. It was so cold that the drops of water froze as they fell on the ice. After the ceremony the procession returned to the Palace, where luncheon was served to hundreds of guests, who formed a brilliant array in their court regalia.
I remember how beautiful the ladies looked at the luncheon in the Palace following the ceremony. They wore long court dresses of various pastel colors and jeweled filets (kokoshniki) from which soft veils hung down. There were glittering diamonds, rubies, emeralds,
sapphires and alexandrites, the latter a rare stone found in the Urals in 1833 and named after the future Alexander II, my greatgrandfather.
Many officers wore the dress uniform of their regiment: the Horse Guards were in white and gold; the Cossacks in deep blue or crimson; and the Hussars in white and gold with scarlet dolmans over their shoulders. The “Blessing of the Waters” ceremony was conducted the last time in January 1916. It did not stir the same feelings as before. This time there were many dignitaries present and the foreign High Command, including our friend, Sir John Hanbury-Williams, and, of course, Sir George Buchanan, the British Ambassador.
Grandeur surrounded us in the Winter Palace where I spent the first years of my life. But during the Russo-Japanese war in 1905 we moved to Tsarskoe Selo, when my childhood recollections began to take root.
The Alexander Palace at Tsarskoe Selo was our permanent home. Many members of the Imperial family had their residences in this suburb and nearby; it was only fourteen miles south of St. Petersburg. Our Palace stood in the middle of a vast park of about six hundred acres, in which were located stables, barracks, greenhouses and several churches, including the Feodorovsky Sobor (Church) and Our Lady of Znamenie which was my Mother’s favorite. There were islands nearby. On the “Children’s Island”, Alexei had a small house; the four rooms were left as they had been at the time of Alexander II. In a book case were some books by the poet Zhukovsky and there were also books by Byron, Schiller and other poets which he had translated into Russian. Zhukovsky who was the tutor to Alexander II spent a great deal of time with him before he came to the throne.
There were some tiny ports for landing, bridges, dog kennels and an elephant house, a concert hall and a Chinese village, a theatre and so on. In the palace grounds was also a white tower, a photographic building and an arsenal. The barracks for the regiments were located in the vicinity.
Before the war the cabinet ministers came to Tsarskoe Selo with their reports in the morning and were ushered into Father’s study by an aide-de-camp. Occasionally however, Father met various officials in St. Petersburg. In order to save time and money the private audiences once a week were held in the Winter Palace in the General Chamber. Because of several hundred audiences that were held during the day, Father could give only a few minutes to each of these audiences and they were held standing. The reports of the high officials were received from 10:00-10:30 after his walk.
Several hundred attendants took care of the grounds and buildings; many of them lived outside. The personnel included the Grand Marshals of the Court, Masters of the Hunt, Masters of Ceremonies, Equerries, Chamberlains, coachmen, valets, butlers, chauffeurs, gardeners, cooks, maids, etc.
In Tsarskoe Selo the Palace of Catherine the Great was surrounded by a tall fence featuring a finely wrought iron gate. This building was like a museum, with its matchless rooms of amber and malachite and its mosaic and gold decorations. Two rooms I especially recall: one an anteroom in which Catherine kept her famous collections of snuffboxes, and the other a drawing room with a ceiling of ivory silk satin, in the center of which a tremendous double eagle was embroidered. In a third room, the walls were of satin, with exquisitely embroidered golden wheat and pastel blue cornflowers. There was another room with a double eagle inlaid in its mosaic wooden floor.
The private chapel had a large balcony for the choir. This awesome Palace was in great contrast to Alexander Palace, which we thought had a homelike atmosphere.
While I was a little girl, during our absence the public had permission to go through the Palace, but it was reported that the men conducting the tours allowed their relatives to enter our private chambers. Mother resented this abuse and the tours were forbidden. Later even the park could not be visited and everyone had to have a special permit from the Household Minister to enter even the Tsarskoe Selo grounds; this rule applied also to those employed in our service.
III CRUISES
D we vacationed on the yacht, but, since Tsarskoe Selo was inland, we went beforehand to Peterhof on the Gulf of Finland. There was a splendid feeling of anticipation of a trip ahead. The great palace of Peterhof was too formal with its many groups of fountains and Peter the Great grandeur. We preferred to stay in the little Alexandria Cottage, while we waited for Father to get away. It was exciting for us children. I remember how often I packed and unpacked my little suitcase, with scraps of papers, which I called my secret records. Among my prized possessions was an old bedroom slipper on which our dogs loved to chew These things in the little suitcase were my precious childish treasures.
Alexandria Cottage stood to the east of Peterhof Palace; it consisted of two simple buildings joined to each other by an enclosed passageway. We had a glassed-in winter garden where palms and other tropical plants abounded and flowers flourished. Also, there were garden chairs and a doll house for us children to play in during the rainy days. Occasionally we had our luncheon here.
This estate had originally been purchased by my great-greatgrandfather, Nicholas I, and he was the first to occupy it. There was a saying that Peterhof started with Nicholas and would end with Nicholas. The park was beautifully landscaped, with winding paths, ravines, and magnificent white birches against the green spruce trees. Its natural rustic beauty had been preserved since the time of Nicholas I.
The entrance to the grounds of Peterhof presented a breathtaking view. Tall, graceful trees on both sides arched the roadway, while between them were fountains, bronze statues representing various historical events and enormous urns filled with flowers. A short distance away was a pavilion, a tall tower which we often climbed to get a view of the activities on the Island of Kronstadt. We walked to worship at the nearby Alexander Nevsky Church, named after a
national hero who defeated the enemies of Russia in the thirteenth century. From Peterhof we took a tender to Kronstadt, the naval base on the island bearing the same name. There we boarded the yacht, the “Standard”, which was too large to come in to the wharf of Peterhof. We youngsters were each assigned a sailor to watch over us. My poor sailor had his hands full since disappearing was almost an obsession with me. Once he caught me just in time as I climbed the ship’s rail and nearly fell overboard.
Our cabins were large and airy; they were upholstered in light chintzes and each had a washstand, cold and hot water, dresser and desk. Olga and Tatiana occupied one cabin; Marie and I, another. Dinners were held in the big dining salon on the upper deck. There was a chapel where services were held regularly by the ship’s chaplain. Mother as at home stood behind the screen. The “Standard” was painted black with gold decorations at the bow and the stern. It was a two-decker and had two smoke stacks.
I was often frightened on the “Standard” when at sunset a gun salute was fired from the deck. It hurt my ears. When it was time for the firing of guns I would run through the corridor down to the other side of the boat and hold my hands over my ears. The hoisting of the flag took place at 9:00 . . and the lowering at sunset.
Charles Dehn, captain of the “Standard,” was a person whose companionship Father enjoyed, and my brother was Captain Dehn’s shadow. Alexei never questioned anything “Pekin Dehn” said. Dehn’s wife, Lili, was a dear friend of my Mother’s, as well as of us children. Mother was the godmother of their infant son, Titi, who occasionally came to visit us. When he was about seven years old, he could already speak several languages. We loved to see this handsome boy. At tea time he sat next to Mother. When she poured tea, he asked, “Sugar, Madame, and how many?”
Another officer of the yacht, Drenteln, was one of Father’s aides-decamp and a devoted friend; he accompanied us on our trips. He knew Father from his young years and went with him to the Preobrazhensky regiment. Father found him interesting and they often talked all evening and well into the morning.
Father enjoyed all kinds of sports: tennis, boxing, swimming, diving; and he could stay under water some minutes. He was an expert rider and an excellent dancer, but was not especially fond of hunting. He was devoted to the Navy and when we were on our cruises he spent a great deal of time studying navigation. He was particularly proud of the “Standard” which was built at the Bay of Odense in Denmark at the time of his marriage. During one of our cruises we visited the yard where the boat was built. Each cruise brought fond memories to my parents of their honeymoon. Mother once said that the happiest years in her life were on board the “Standard”.
For us a cruise meant spending a part of each day on shore, tramping in the Finnish forests. On the yacht our attendants turned a rope for us girls to jump. Then there was the tug of war with an admiral or a captain and other officers joining in. Sometimes we roller-skated on the deck. Everyone participated in the fun, except Mother and Alexei. They could not enjoy activities, but they joined in the laughter.
Occasionally we received word that the Dowager Empress Marie, my Father’s mother, was cruising on the “Polar Star” in the neighborhood and would pay us a visit. On board was Admiral Prince Viazemsky. Immediately the holiday atmosphere changed to serious work. We children had to stay on board, practicing our music, because Grandmother always liked to see our musical progress and a concert was invariably planned. Grandmother was a gifted musician herself and was brought up in a musical atmosphere with her whole family constituting an orchestra. I was told that on one occasion the public was invited to a concert in which her whole family took part, including her father (Apapa), who later became King Christian IX of Denmark, and her mother (Amama), subsequently Queen Louise.
When Grandmother Minnie arrived everyone became tense. I especially felt rebellious at the endless warnings to be on my good behavior. We three younger children had our own early supper, because we could not sit quietly through the dinner in her honor. Try as I might, I was bound to do the wrong thing and disappoint everyone when Grandmother was around. Fortunately her visits
were not long and the minute she left we resumed our former manners.
When our yacht anchored in a sheltered cove, we went mushroom hunting. Mother and Alexei seldom joined us in this. But when Alexei came, together we darted this way and that way, dodging the tall trees, and trying to catch the scent of mushrooms. The ground was all springy with pine needles and moss so that we fairly hopped along. It was fun to hear the twigs crunch beneath our feet.
Father was a fast walker; to keep up with him, I had to run. On one of these walks we came to a little stream, partly covered with twigs and moss. Father jumped over it and stretched out his hand to me. “Jump,” he said. The ground was slippery and uneven and I failed to get a firm enough grip on Father’s hand so I fell into the middle of the brook, with its bed of yellow mud and clay. My face, hair and dress were plastered with mud and so were my canvas shoes. The long, wet walk sent me to bed for a while.
Before the war we used to take a trip every other year to Fredensborg Palace near Copenhagen. It was great fun for us children to visit the white villa at Hvidore, which stood majestically amidst the flowering trees and bushes, with its terraces offering a magnificent view of the sea, each level rising smaller and smaller to the top.
From the terraces the sight of sailboats and yachts in the bay gave us a feeling of tranquility and relaxation. Beyond the marshes were the Danish farms with their charming thatched-roof houses, tall poplar trees, golden wheat fields and millions of scarlet poppies which added grandeur to this natural landscape. It was this that impressed my young mind during our first visit. This villa belonged to my little Grandmother and her sisters, Queen Alexandra of England and Thyra, Duchess of Cumberland. It was at this quiet place at Fredensborg where the happy family reunion took place during the summer months.
We were especially excited on one occasion when Queen Alexandra and Uncle Bertie (King Edward VII of England) joined us at Reval on their yacht, the “Victoria and Albert”. I recollect that King Edward
came dressed in Scottish kilts. Grandmother Marie and Aunt Olga arrived on their yacht, the “Polar Star”. Later we were joined by Uncle George, who subsequently became King George V of England, with his wife May (Queen Mary) and their children, including the eldest son David, later Edward, Prince of Wales. In addition, there were many other boys and girls belonging to other relatives. We had a great family reunion and a full schedule of activities. Fishing, bathing, rowing, wading in the shallow waters in the bay and various games were the order of the day. We youngsters enjoyed the high swings which were put up especially for us. Alexei, though only four or five years of age, had been well versed in geography and could name all the various ports in the Baltic. The Russian Ambassador to London, Count Alexander Benckendorff, regarded Alexei as being an unusually bright child. Soon we were off again in the fiords for a glimpse of Norway. When we were in sight of Christiania (Oslo), so many yachts and other vessels surrounded the “Standard” that we were forced to turn back. Apparently the news of our visit had preceded us.
On our return we brought with us a number of Royal Copenhagen pieces which were adorned with capricious scenes of winter or summer meadows, all interpreted so realistically, and also numerous figurines of animals and fowl, all executed in those soft blue and white colors, some with a touch of brown. Only the hands of Danish artisans could create those heavenly colors.
Once I remember Kaiser Wilhelm II was cruising on his yacht in our vicinity and our ship fired a salute to him. The salute was returned and when the Kaiser came on board our ship, he greeted Father with a kiss and exclaimed, “My most valued friend.” The German band played the Russian national anthem; then the Russian band played the German anthem. During the ensuing visits, the Kaiser took quite a liking to me, calling me “The Little Joker”. I also remember how he danced in a way that Mother thought was undignified and unbecoming to an Emperor. He was one cousin who drove us to despair.
Grandmother Marie joined us in Reval. She brought with her her sister-in-law, Queen Olga of Greece. Queen Olga was the consort of
King George I, Grandmother’s brother who was later assassinated. This deed made a fearful impression on us. I remember when Granny cried, “Why do they want to kill an innocent man?” I remember King George as being quite bald, so much so that the Kaiser remarked one time that King George had his own exclusive moon. Extreme baldness seemed to be a feature of the Danish royal family. Kaiser Wilhelm referred to the Danish branch as the “deaf, bald-headed Danes”. King Gustavus V and Queen Victoria of Sweden also paid us a visit. They came on their yacht. We later returned their visit by going to Stockholm.
Quite often our trips were marred by unpleasant incidents, such as the time when, while cruising in Finnish waters, an English freighter persisted in coming too close to our yacht. When our repeated warnings were ignored, we were forced to fire a shot which unfortunately wounded a member of the English freighter’s crew. On this trip we were invited to visit Prince Henry of Prussia (Mother’s brother-in-law) at a beautiful villa on the shore overlooking the sea at Jagernsfeld, so that the Kaiser could show us his fleet at Kiel. Unfortunately the weather prevented us from doing this and after a brief stop we proceeded to England.
A twenty-one gun salute greeted the “Standard” as we entered the English harbor of Cowes on the Isle of Wight. This was returned by the Russian warships and we passed through a cortege of yachts lined up on each side as we sailed down the middle. Soon the “Victoria and Albert” and the “Standard” were alongside each other. Cheers filled the air and salutes were exchanged. Not until the next morning did the real entertainment begin, when King Edward VII appeared on the bridge dressed in the uniform of a Russian admiral. Father stood next to him in the uniform of a British admiral. The Russian and the British flags were flying, as bands played both national anthems. Amidst the greetings and cheers we proceeded aboard the “Victoria and Albert” to the royal pier. We exchanged pleasant visits and many pictures were taken for our albums.
At luncheon on the yacht, we sat at a long table. King Edward sat in the middle, Mother, dressed in white, looking beautiful and radiant sitting beside him. Queen Alexandra was opposite the King with
Father next to her Alexei kept trying to get King Edward’s attention; until finally the King said: “All right, Alexei, what do you want?” Alexei replied gloomily, “It’s too late now, Uncle Bertie; you ate a caterpillar with your salad.” We were served from gold plates and the table decorations were in pink roses.
The other guests at dinner were the Crown Prince of Sweden, the Prince of Wales (later George V), Princess Beatrice, and Princess Irene, wife of Prince Henry of Prussia. Mother gave a dinner on the “Standard” for the ladies in honor of Queen Alexandra. At the many dinners on our yacht, I remember there were many elegant and beautiful ladies, several hundred of them: friends, relatives, English, Swedish, German and Russian. On one occasion King Edward gave a talk thanking us for the visit and turning to my Mother called her his “dear niece”.
There were several excursions, and in the afternoon tea was served on the lawn of the Royal Yacht Club. Several hundred guests were present, mostly relatives and friends. Mother knew them all.
Alexei was accompanied by a playmate. One day we were all whisked to Osborne House, where Princess Henry, Mother’s sister, and Princess Beatrice played with us on the lawn. This included Marie, Alexei, his companion and myself. Alexei was all slicked up from head to toe in a white sailor suit. Both boys behaved disgracefully. In the afternoon before tea, this brother of mine crawled over a new car belonging to one of our relatives and by teatime his white sailor suit was completely wrinkled and disreputable. He refused to leave the car and added, “You girls can go to the tea; I am happy at what I am doing.” All of us were disgusted with our brother. Finally his sailor servant, Derevenko, took him off the car. At tea we frowned at him and motioned with our hands to keep at a distance from us, pretending that he did not belong to our family. Tearfully he added to our embarrassment by saying aloud; “What is the matter with you girls? I do not like your attitude. If I were not ashamed, I would cry.”
At another time Olga and Tatiana had quite an experience. Dressed in their gray suits they walked about the town of Cowes, unattended.
They paused in their sightseeing before a window display and entered the shop to purchase postcards and photographs for our albums. As they came out of the shop a carriage bearing Count Benckendorff and a friend stopped on the other side of the street. The girls ran across to surprise them, and surprised they were—to find my sisters unescorted. My sisters became frightened when a large crowd, having heard about our visit, recognized my sisters and gathered around them. Finally the girls made their escape through a store as a constable blocked the door against the pressing crowd. Two carriages were summoned, one for the constable, the other for the girls. At the suggestion of the constable, they finally avoided the crowd by taking refuge in a church. This was their first experience of an unescorted adventure, and their last. When they returned to us, we youngsters kept asking them about it a dozen times, especially when we saw the pictures of the incident in our albums. What a great and priceless triumph it was: that young girls of our position were allowed to show themselves unescorted in public.
Prince David, who was to become King Edward VIII, came by torpedo boat to Osborne House from Dartmouth where he was attending the Royal Naval College. And before we left, he took Father through his college. Father was so impressed with Dartmouth, he talked of sending Alexei there. This was the end of our visit. King Edward, Queen Alexandra, Prince George, then Prince of Wales, and Princess Mary with all their children came to bid us good-bye as we sailed away from Cowes after a most memorable visit.
As usual our party included Princess Obolensky, Mlle. Butsova, a lady-in-waiting, of whom Mother was very fond, as were we all; also Mlle. Tutcheva, our governess, with whom I was continually at swords’ points, because she could not hide her jealousy of Mlle. Butsova, and also because of her derogatory remarks about our English relatives. Present too, were Count Fredericks, Father’s chamberlain, Ambassador Izvolsky, Prince Beloselsky-Belozersky, Dr. Botkin, Dr. Derevenko, Captain Drenteln and many other Russians from our escort ships.
The “Standard” then sailed to Cherbourg, where President Fallières was to meet us in his yacht, the “Marseilles”. During this cruise, as on others, we ran into a great deal of fog and storm and our speed was greatly reduced. We arrived late in Cherbourg. Father reviewed the French fleet with the French President, and we children were allowed to take pictures of submarines which were important exhibits in our albums. These albums and Olga’s description in her diary were a source of great pleasure to us later during the war when we could relive each moment of this pleasurable trip. During our arrest in 1917, these pictures were confiscated.
President Fallières gave a dinner on the deck of a battleship, in honor of my family. It was a beautiful affair. The table was in the shape of a horseshoe. In the center of the table, roses were arranged to form the Russian coat of arms. During the dinner bands played popular compositions of French and Russian composers. Afterwards there were floats on the water, lighting up scenes from the opera Lohengrin and others. Someone must have informed them that Mother loved this opera by Richard Wagner. Launches were made to look like dolphins, sea serpents, Lohengrin’s swan, a huge egg (on top of which was a rooster pulling a gondola with a man inside playing a mandolin), a huge grasshopper and many other fantastic shapes. A float carrying a band of musicians drawn by many make-believe swans ended the procession. There were also beautiful fireworks lasting late into the night. Later a complete movie of the entire display was sent to us; when Alexei was ill, he amused himself by operating the projector with interest.
The next day we all went to the yacht’s chapel for a divine service, and to give thanks for the wonderful trip and our new friends. Later the President brought us gifts. To Alexei he presented miniature rifles, guns and drums, as well as a military tent completely equipped with a miniature cot, table and folding chairs. Alexei was overwhelmed. Afterwards he derived many happy hours in the park playing with his field equipment. It was this little gun that the Bolsheviks seized while he was playing with it in the garden during our arrest in Tsarskoe Selo. Olga received a writing desk set of dark blue enamel, beautifully initialed. Tatiana received a travel clock
which she took with her later to Tobolsk. Marie received a dollhouse, two stories high, completely furnished, including a bath tub and electric lighting. I received a beautiful doll with a complete trousseau, even a veil for a bride. A twenty-one-gun salute was fired at our departure from Cherbourg, as at Cowes.
This cruise made me appreciate Olga and Tatiana; they impressed me highly with their graceful manners. I did so wish I could be like them when I grew up. They were so tall and each looked to be every inch a Princess, while it did not seem that I had grown at all during these years. Even Alexei was an inch or more taller than I. Marie too was tall. People said I would be short like my Grandmother. I was tall enough when I sat down, but my limbs were not long enough to suit me. Our Captain had a suggestion, that I hop on one foot, then on the other, three times a day, saying that would produce the desired results. I followed his instructions, even doubled and tripled his recipe, but without success. On a cruise, when I confided to him that his suggestions bore no fruit, he nearly died laughing. I never forgave the Captain for making me feel so ridiculous.
In spite of these several cruises during that summer of 1909, Mother’s health did not improve sufficiently to satisfy the doctors. She suffered from neuralgia. Karlsruhe was recommended, so the family went to Mannheim, to Uncle Ernest’s castle at Friedberg. Princess Louis of Battenberg and her two sons were there too. Then we went to Wolfsgarten near Darmstadt. Darmstadt was Mother’s old home, where as a young lady she lived with her brother Ernest when he became the reigning Grand Duke on the death of his father. Mother was fond of him because he replaced her late parents, and so we were irresistibly drawn to him. Uncle Ernest was handsome, kind, musical and artistic. Mother had the same talents as her brother. His second wife Eleonor (Onor) was a delightful person. She had known Mother since childhood, and their friendship grew stronger each year. This trip therefore was meaningful to our family. I recall little of our stay. There was a constant flow of Mother’s relatives and hordes of royal children. We four sisters had only one bedroom to ourselves and Father had one small room where he could receive people. I remember Mother’s sister Irene (Amity) and
her husband Prince Henry, the Kaiser’s brother She completely won us over with her tender affection, and referred to us as “the dear children.” She was closer to Mother than were any of Mother’s other sisters. It seemed that we were always being summoned to meet a new cousin, aunt, uncle or a friend. One of the relatives had a homely nose, but fortunately I do not remember who she was.
Father went to Potsdam as guest of the Kaiser and Kaiserin. It gave me a queer feeling when I first realized the Kaiser’s deformity. I remember seeing him ride his horse in his Hussar uniform. He stuck his reins into his belt; with fingers resting partly on his hip he cleverly manipulated the reins. He seemed to lean his weight heavily to one side. Aunt Irene explained to us about his left arm. She said: “When Prince Wilhelm was born, the doctors and his father rejoiced because the child was a boy. But the little infant had not yet shown signs of life. They did everything to get him to breathe. They slapped him, tossed him into the air, swung him by his feet,—there was a full hour of working over him. At last he gave a feeble cry. His mother, ill at the time, did not know of the overly rough treatment of her baby. Later when she found out, she was in despair, she blamed the doctors and the nurses for the injury her child had received. For his left arm, which had been pulled out of the socket, became paralyzed and later shrivelled.”
Many of our relatives were in deep mourning for King Edward VII of England (Uncle Bertie), who had passed away in the spring of 1910. Kaiser Wilhelm had been hunting with Father in the Oranienburg forest near Berlin, and upon their return, in the presence of the widow, Queen Alexandra, and of the new King George V and Queen Mary, he looked at all the ladies in black dresses and white collars and remarked: “Everyone is dressed in black because the old rooster has died.” He knew Queen Alexandra was partly deaf and could not hear his remark; but there were many others who did, including the beautiful Princess Alice and her husband, Prince Andrew of Greece, who had come with Cousin George from England. We all bore disapproving expressions at his remark, and one relative whispered, “Wilhelm must be mad.”
All of the family knew that the Kaiser was tactless. During the time when he was only heir apparent, he never hesitated to express his impatience at having to wait so long to inherit the throne. Long before his grandfather and father died, he wrote the Proclamation, so as to be ready when the occasion should present itself. Aunt Irene and Mother cried when they heard that the young Emperor, Wilhelm II, the day he ascended the throne, ordered everyone in the palace placed under surveillance, including his own mother, the Empress Victoria; this in spite of his having sworn to his father that he would always uphold the honor of the royal house. He despised his courtiers, calling them parasites—the same men who during the war wrested his power and then held him practically under arrest. He hated the sight of his Mother’s friends and ladies-in-waiting and without hesitation he once said that the only joy in his life was being at the Yacht Club. Now he was obviously pleased that Uncle Bertie was no longer in his way. His dislike had begun when Uncle Bertie had called him “the boss of Cowes” and, whenever possible, had avoided holding the regatta when Wilhelm was present. One would not have believed that he had the use of only one arm and with it skillfully steered the sailboat.
Kaiserin Augusta Victoria always looked beautiful with a clear, almost transparent complexion, and was most friendly but quiet. I was intrigued by the black ribbon which she wore around her throat. She and the Kaiser showed us pictures of the palace at Potsdam. It was beautiful except for one room which I thought was in bad taste. This room had ornate pillars encrusted with all kinds of precious and semiprecious stones and odd-shaped shells. I understand that Father had contributed a large uncut diamond to this conglomeration, which also included geological specimens, together with petrified snakes wrapped around the pillars, turtles and crocodiles in creeping or crawling positions.
One day Father went with the Kaiser to the mausoleum and placed a wreath on the tomb of the Emperor Frederick III, the Kaiser’s father. Photographs were taken on this occasion; later, in the bitterness of war, while looking at these pictures, Mother said; “Papa would rather lay a wreath on Wilhelm’s tomb.” We children cut the pictures of the
Kaiser out of all our photographs. Alexei tore up his pictures of Germany completely, remarking that he (the Kaiser) did not deserve to be called a godfather, and indignantly tramped the old photographs with his feet. I did the same. After our arrest and imprisonment in Tsarskoe Selo, I purposely broke several gifts from the Kaiser pretending that it was an accident in every case.
Before we departed for home, Father gave the Kaiserin a pendant of pearls and sapphires, which we had previously proudly displayed to our friends for their approval. We liked the Empress and often felt sorry for her because she had to put up with such an intemperate husband. The Kaiserin gave each of us girls a sewing basket complete with all necessary equipment. We used these until 1914, when we gave them away not wanting to see them again. Some of the Kaiser’s sons, resplendent in immaculate uniforms and eaglecrested helmets, escorted us to the station, frequently clicked their heels as they saluted us, making our departure a gala affair. The Kaiserin was forbidden to accompany us to the station. At the time Mother considered this an insult, but a letter from Aunt Eleonor revealed that the Kaiser in a fit of anger had slapped her face that morning before our departure, and each of his five fingers had left an impression on her face.
As we boarded the train, Father was dressed in his civilian overcoat and Alexei wore his customary dark-blue sailor suit, while we sisters wore our traveling suits as it was already cold. On the train, Alexei said: “I was scared of those cousins.” Upon the occasion of that visit to Germany, Father, out of courtesy, appointed the Kaiserin Augusta Victoria honorary colonel-in-chief of the Grodno Hussars. This aroused terrible consternation, especially on the part of Grandmother who was so furious that she cried and carried on bitterly, saying that she hoped she would never see the Kaiserin wearing that uniform. I am sure she never did. En route home Father received word from Aunt Ella that two Russian millionaires whom he knew had committed suicide. This made a sad impression on us children. Later, after we arrived home, Mother received a Christmas gift from the Kaiser, two enormous red enamelled vases. I presume they were
made by the royal manufacturers. These vases were placed in a room in our home, one on each side of a console table.
Each member of our family settled into his usual routine of activities. The problem of finding playmates for my brother loomed large again. Derevenko, the sailor, had two sons, both younger than Alexei; they became my brother’s playmates, for which my Mother was bitterly criticized.
