1 SEPTEMBER 1984, Page 25

Something wild

Peter Quennell

The Ludovisi Goddess: The Life of Louisa Lady Ashburton Virginia Surtees (Michael Russell £9.95)

Not many years ago, Bath House, the last private house in Piccadilly, was demolished to make room for a huge Commercial structure, glittering with glass and steel. At the time, no one, I think, very much regretted it. But, although not Particularly distinguished from an architectural point of view — it was a plain, early 19th-century, bow-fronted, yellow brick building — it possessed considerable literary interest, since it had been the home df Harriet Lady Ashburton, the puissant Victorian hostess for whom Thomas Car- lyle, during his disconsolate middle years, conceived a strong romantic passion, and ,W110, between 1839 and 1857, to Jane 'artyle's intense chagrin, remained the Pivot of his emotional and social life.

Lady Ashburton was clearly a fascinat- ing personage — 'not very beautiful,' Carlyle had originally observed, but 'one Of the cleverest creatures' he had yet encountered, and replete with 'mirth and sPirit'; and even Jane, before she grew bitterly jealous, described her as 'a very lovable spoilt child of Fortune', whom, With a little whipping, judiciously admin- stered, would have made into a first-rate woman'. In 1857, however, Carlyle's 'Queen', his `Gloriana', his 'Daughter of th,e Harmonies', had died suddenly abroad; and, when her ageing husband, the millionaire head of a famous bank, decided that he must re-marry, and chose 'a bright vivacious damsel' named Louisa Stewart- ,ltackenzie, both the Carlyles, after some "esitation — Carlyle had heard that she Was a well-known coquette, 'fond of doing a stroke of "artful dodging" ' — enthusias- l.icallY accepted her; while Jane, always apt td develop a sentimental affection for Women younger than herself, quoted the IW°.rds of a visiting Italian sculptor. The :adY, he had said, was 'beautiful, amazing- beautiful — and her eyes, there is in them such goodness and a something wild'. The second Lady Ashburton is the sub- ject of Virginia Surtees' new book, which she has entitled The Ludovisi Goddess because Anna Jameson, 'the celebrated author of Sacred and Legendary Art, and The Diary of an Ennuyee', compared her imposing head to that of a statue of Juno she had seen in Rome. Louisa Ashburton — called `Loo' or Too-Loo' by her de- voted women friends — had indeed a statuesque appearance; and, as a lively, flirtatious debutante, a brilliant femme du monde, mistress of Bath House and her husband's numerous country houses, and, last, as a rich, extravagant widow, she was generally acclaimed. Among her admirers and guests, besides the affectionate Car- Lyles, were Browning, Ruskin, Rossetti, 'Thackeray, Henry James, Edward Lear and Florence Nightingale.

For Browning she had a particularly keen regard, until ideas of love and mar- riage began to trouble their relationship. A desperate quarrel then followed: she was a 'black beetle', Browning announced, an insect he was prepared to tolerate `so long as it don't crawl up my sleeve'. But just what grievances underlay their clash — whether the poet had proposed, tactlessly adding that his heart was still buried in Italy, and that now his main concern was to provide his wayward son Pen with a sym- pathetic step-mother, or whether it was Louisa who had taken the initiative and had been gently brushed off — is a problem that Virginia Surtees does her conscientious best to solve. On the whole, she thinks that Louisa's frustrated egotism and wounded vanity may have provoked this horrid row.

During her later life, her impulsiveness and increasing excitability often discon- certed her companions. Henry James, for example, wrote, in his stateliest manner that her 'striking and interesting' personal- ity 'seemed always to fill the foreground with colour, with picture, with fine mellow sound'; but he, on another occasion, spoke of her 'liberal oddity' and her 'genial incoherence'. Carlyle, too, whom she loved and befriended after Jane's death,

complained she was `so full of impulses' and 'sudden resolutions' and lived so much in an element of "float" 'that he found it somewhat difficult to enjoy her persever- ing hospitality.

These defects did not diminish with age; and on her endless travels around Europe, accompanied by a retinue of English ser- vants and her only child, Maysie, she became the type of eccentric foreign grande dame, and .would order her coach- man to drive up to the door of a restaurant, refuse to cross the threshold and eat her dinner sitting there. About the same period, she acquired a host of besotted female adorers, the most conspicuous being an American artist, a Miss Hatty Hosmer, said, with her masculine neck- cloth and sporting forage-cap, to have resembled a rather wrinkled little boy, who asserted that she was Louisa's legitimate 'hubby', and engaged in a fierce struggle for her consort's affections against her British rival Miss Trotter.

Virginia Suttees does not, of course, pretend that her heroine was an entirely estimable woman. There is no doubt that she had many excellent qualities — gener- ous instincts, natural kindliness and, Car- lyle asserted, 'a great deal of sense and substantial veracity of mind'; but the 'something wild' that the Italian sculptor had detected, once brought out by great wealth and unlimited personal freedom, gradually destroyed her balance. The Ludovisi Goddess is an entertaining por- trait of an extremely odd woman, and a book I can warmly recommend to every student of the Victorian literary and social scene.

The text is stocked with curious contem- porary details, that illustrate, among much else, the degree of pomp and circumstance with which, during Lady Ashburton's life- time, a rich English family was sur- rounded. When she and her husband left one day for the North, they were part of a long and cumbrous procession — a waggon that contained the baby's bath and crib, and a butler to arrange and swing the cot in the private railway carriage; a hired vehicle holding a maid and a nursery maid; Maysie herself and her nurse jn the Ashburton's state chariot, driven by their coachman, attended by the tallest footman; and, at the end of the line, Maysie's parents in a carefully selected and elaborately cushioned hansom cab.

Virginia Surtees has a workmanlike prose-style, and seldom misses a trick or overstates her case. She appears to have few illusions about her heroine. In her closing paragraph, nevertheless, she strikes a romantic note that seems completely out of tune with the remainder of her narra- tive. A Scotswoman by birth, Louisa was buried in the Highlands, and `so ardent a spirit', her biographer suggests, would not long have lingered in her 'massive tomb', but have set forth on 'some new adventure . . . or to make a haven of her lost inheritance' amid 'the sea-girt Western Isles'.