It was in the mid-1880s that Hunt commenced the first of several flagrant love affairs, becoming involved with George Boughton, an artist and writer who was only three years younger than Hunt’s father.
Lover: Ford Madox Ford
In 1909, according to Ledbetter, Hunt began the most important relationship of her life - with author Ford Madox Ford.
Violet Hunt was a British writer, whose writings ranged over a number of literary forms, including short stories, novels, memoir, and biography. She was an active feminist, and her novels The Maiden's Progress and A Hard Woman were works of the New Woman genre, while her short story collection Tales of the Uneasy is an example of supernatural fiction.
Background
Hunt was born on September 28, 1862, in Durham, England, United Kingdom. She was the daughter of Alfred William (a landscape artist) and Margaret (a writer; maiden name, Peacock) Hunt.
The Hunt home in Durham hosted local artists and intellectuals. Likewise, after the family moved to London when Hunt was still a child, their residence again served as a gathering place for prominent artistic and literary figures, including the poets Robert Browning and Alfred Tennyson and the critic John Ruskin.
Career
By 1879 Hunt published poems in Century, and though she had earlier intended a career as an actress, she soon began writing further poetry under the tutelage of a family friend, Andrew Lang, a prominent editor of fairy-tale collections. It was in the mid-1880s that Hunt commenced the first of several flagrant love affairs, becoming involved with George Boughton, an artist and writer who was only three years younger than Hunt’s father. This relationship was followed by several more, mostly with older men, gaining Hunt notoriety during her time.
Continuing to write for magazines in the early 1890s, Hunt also began a relationship with Oswald Crawfurd at this time, an older writer and editor who included her work in his periodical Black and White. Hunt’s contributions to this publication included various dialogues that she eventually collected as Maiden’s Progress, which won praise in Bookman as one of “the three or four best novels of the season.”
During the remainder of the 1890s Hunt published such novels as A Hard Woman, Unkist, Unkind!, and The Human Interest, all of which center on the sexual relationships between strong, independent women and weak-willed men. She explored the same theme in Affairs of the Heart, which Ledbetter described as “thirteen short stories and two brief skits ... featuring independent women involved with inconstant men.” According to Ledbetter, although the collection did not gain critical attention, “Affairs of the Heart... is important as a representation of the types of short fiction accepted in the magazines of (Hunt’s) generation.”
In the early 1900s, Hunt initiated a brief relationship with author W. Somerset Maugham, a novelist more than ten years her junior. Hunt’s novels from this period include White Rose of Weary Leaf, the story of a governess who becomes the lover of her pupil’s father. A Saturday Review critic lamented the novel’s “lack of reticence,” while Bookman reviewer. Frederic Taber Cooper decried the novel as “melodramatic, often crude.” Cooper added, though, that the novel is readable and even memorable, and he declared, “It is astonishing that a book so faulty should ... show streaks of such undeniable merit.”
In 1909, according to Ledbetter, Hunt began the most important relationship of her life - with author Ford Madox Ford. The relationship lasted more than a decade and brought along with it a series of scandals and a dose of notoriety because Ford was already married.
Despite the tempestuous times, Hunt managed to maintain her prolific rate, finishing her late mother’s novel The Governess, collaborating with Ford on Zeppelin Nights and The Desirable Alien at Home and in Germany, and publishing such novels as The Celebrity’s Daughter, The House of Many Mirrors, and Their Lives. May Sinclair, writing in English Review, affirmed that these novels “will appeal by their sincerity, their unhesitating courage, their incorruptible reality.”
During the 1910s Hunt also produced another short-story collection. Tales of the Uneasy, in which she demonstrated her affinity for Gothic horror. Notable among the stories in this volume are “The Telegram,” wherein a woman subjects a long-standing suitor to decades of cruelty; “The Operation,” in which the ghost of a divorced woman exerts considerable control over her re-married ex-spouse; and “The Memoir,” wherein an independent woman learns of her overpowering effect on a married lover. “These stories,” says Ledbetter, “play out Hunt’s relationships with weak men who fear commitment - men such as Boughton, Crawfurd, and Ford.”
In 1919 Hunt parted from Ford, and in the ensuing years, her rate of production diminished. In 1925 she completed More Tales of the Uneasy, another volume of gothic stories. The next year she published The Flurried Years (reprinted as I Have This to Say: The Story of My Flurried Years), a memoir. Her subsequent writings include The Wife of Rossetti: Her Life and Death, which details the life of Elizabeth Siddall, wife of poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Geoffrey Rossetti, writing in Bookman, concluded, “in so far as (Hunt) set out to write a Victorian biographical melodrama she has produced a work which is a very' considerable achievement.” Spectator's Evelyn Waugh, meanwhile, called The Wife of Rossetti “an absolutely necessary book.”
Violet Hunt was a prolific Edwardian short story writer and novelist who is now mostly remembered for her autobiographical fiction, with its focus on strong women characters and their roles in society. Her novel White Rose of Weary Leaf is regarded as her best work. During her lifetime, Hunt was equally notorious for her numerous love affairs and other tumultuous personal relationships. Besides, she founded the Women Writers' Suffrage League and participating in the founding of International PEN.
