Gertrude Bell Read Online Free PDF Page A

interested in sociology and the education of children. Everything she did remained within the limits of the roles she considered the most important for a woman, those of wife and mother. She gave herself unstintingly to her family while achieving a body of work in the community that would earn her public recognition, and eventually make her a Dame of the British Empire. The drawing-room dramas and comedies she liked to write were initially for the children to perform at Christmas and other family gatherings. In time, through the intervention of theatrical friends, she would have three plays put on in the West End. Characteristically, she chose to remain anonymous.
    Florence was nonplussed at first by northern manners. As soon as she met her neighbours, she began to institute an “at home” on Tuesdays, when she hoped couples would drop in for light refreshments (nonalcoholic). She was mystified to discover that Yorkshiremen did not accompany their wives on this sort of occasion. Her biographer Kirsten Wang writes that when one lady turned up at the Bells’ with her husband she disconcerted Florence by whispering: “I managed to bring Mr. T with me. I had
such
a work to make him come!” Apparently believing there was safety in numbers, the women would arrive together, then seat themselves as far apart as possible, after which a silence would fall. A desperate Florence, offering them chairs closer to the fire, would meet with the response: “Thank you, I am very well where I am.” In one of her booksFlorence writes of her heroine, a teacher who had newly come north: “The girl was ill at ease with the downright Yorkshire women who surrounded her . . . In that class of life when people have nothing to say they say nothing; their rough blunt manner, when they did speak, alarmed her still more. Nevertheless, the women after their fashion, were not unkind to her.” The new Mrs. Bell persevered, and before long her “entertainments” were obligatory events in the life of the town.
    But Florence was far more interested in cementing her relationship with Hugh’s children. The eight-year-old observed her in speculative fashion. This stranger who had burst into their family life had something about her that the child would not have recognized: a Parisian polish in both her manner and her dress. Although Florence was essentially serious and inclined to the moralistic, she never criticized an individual’s interest in her appearance or derided a love of clothes as frivolous. Her carefully considered opinions on this and other subjects were often expressed obliquely. She was an intensely private person and preferred to give her views in the form of stories or essays. In one, she wrote of the heroine:
    Ursula had what the French call “genre” . . . The nearest English equivalent to the expression is “style,” but that . . . suggests being dashing and assertive; “genre” is a grace inherent in the wearer, and does not depend upon clothes, but upon the way they are put on. And the reason there is no word for it in English, is that the thing is so rarely found that it is unnecessary to have a term on purpose.
    From Florence’s example, Gertrude, in turn, would acquire
genre
, so that people meeting her for the first time would comment on her “Mayfair manners and Paris frocks.” But Florence never followed fashion. She continued to wear Edwardian clothes all her life because she felt they suited her, even in the 1920s when every other woman was in a short skirt. Her granddaughter remembers being with Florence when she slipped and fell one day on a London pavement. The child was amazed to see that under Florence’s skirts was a pair of normal legs. Tending to primness, Florence wore grey silk gloves most of the time, indoors and outdoors, and even to play the piano.

    Gertrude was growing up fast, a wilful child used to competing with her aunt Ada, her