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Linda K. Hughes, Graham R.: Rosamund Marriott Watson, Woman of Letters (Athens: Ohio Univ. Press, 2005). $46.95. Hardback.
In Graham R.: Rosamund Marriott Watson, Woman of Letters, Linda K. Hughes has given us a biography of one of the most intriguing people of the fin de siècle. Tomson was a deft and ambitious poet, who used her virtuosic command of language for an unusually moody, sensitive, and erudite range of subjects. She was also an innovative prose stylist and magazine editor, with a social circle including such notables as Oscar Wilde, W. E. Henley, Elizabeth Robins Pennell, H. G. Wells, }. M. Barrie, and Thomas Hardy. As one friend wrote, she was "beautiful, reminiscent of Rossetti in her tall willowy slimness, with her long neck like a column and her great halo of black hair and her big brown eyes, appealing, confinding [sic], beseeching" (p. 85). No wonder that influential critic Andrew Lang called her, "a new Muse, and more like a Muse than most" (pp. 63-64). Yet her poetic fame was rivaled by her personal scandal. She twice divorced and eloped, with four children by three different men, and lived with her last partner outside wedlock. Tomson's unconventional erotic life may fascinate modern readers but it destroyed her career, as Hughes shows in her account of this tragic and memorable story.
As Hughes comments, one reason Tomson "seems so modern is her unstable identity" (p. xiii). Born Rosamund Ball, she married George Francis Armytage in 1884 and respelled her first name, therefore publishing her first poems as Rosamond Armytage or R. Armytage. But as the marriage disintegrated, she eloped with artist Arthur Tomson in 1886 (leaving her two daughters as well as her husband) and renamed herself Graham R. Tomson. Divorcing Armytage and marrying Tomson, Graham R. Tomson enjoyed great success for several years. But in 1894 Tomson left her husband and son, eloping with journalist H. B. Marriott Watson, and- in a disastrous decision- she changed her pseudonym once again, becoming Rosamund Marriott Watson. Giving up the name-recognition and social credentials of Graham R. Tomson proved devastating, and for the last seventeen years...