Divorcees of History

 Hilda Edith Frances Margaret Quarry and Francis John Quarry: 1918 divorce and Petition for Protection of Earnings Case.         This is an enormous file of documents, letters, receipts, affidavits, and lawyers' letters collected by both Hilda E.F.M. Quarry and Francis in the course of their long and bitter separation and divorce. Some highlights are below. We are finally up to the age of typewritten documents, which makes my life vastly easier, but also leads to the occasional unexpected horrors of documentary evidence like the item below, presented by the wonderfully multi-named Hilda Edith Frances Margaret Quarry. CW for domestic violence and abuse. One of her last letters in this trove of evidence reads: "You would have been a better man to have gone to fight in 1914 and I am sorry now I stopped you, but in those days I hoped against hope for some happiness with you." In a later response that feels like it belongs in a "How to Gaslight Someone" manual, Franc...

Jeanne Marie is one of the rare women in my dataset to identify herself in the introduction of her affidavit by her profession: "I, Jeanne Marie Socleu Fayhay of Mark Lane in the City of London Hotelkeeper make oath and say as follows." Her story is one of a badly treated woman who managed nevertheless to maintain her agency and economic independence; it is also the tale of the increasingly cosmopolitan and citizenship-fluid world of 19th century Western Europe. In 1849 she married Michael Joseph Fayhay, a baker at Antwerp, in a Roman Catholic ceremony. They lived together for 4 years, till his baking business failed in Antwerp, at which point Michael "made me accompany him to [the island of] Jersey and from Jersey to London and from London to Belgium."  When they arrived in Belgium by steamship, Michael told her to wait aboard while he went to find lodgings. He never returned. The destitute Jeanne Marie, who "had nowhere to sleep," appealed to help fro...

Readers who are familiar with 19th century British novels or early 20th century mysteries probably recognize the figure of the "companion," the well-educated gentlewoman in impoverished circumstances who serves as a friend/chaperone/glorified servant to a wealthier woman. Companions in such novels are often mistreated or actively abused by their patrons but sometimes manage to use their social connections to find happy marriages. These fictional companions were based on very real women who had few other professional respectable opportunities to make a living. What is striking about the case of Caroline and John Hurd is that we see historical evidence that this was not a strictly gendered profession, despite the lack of any literary evidence I can find. Caroline and John Hurd were married in 1839; she was a Middlesex widow from an apparently mildly prosperous family. He was a "lazy, dissolute fellow" who made no effort to seek employment after their marriage. Afte...

Sophia Smallman's case from 1880 begins with many familiar notes of desertion, exile, and disappointment.* Sophia and Joseph Harris Smallman were married in England in 1862; he was a mining agent and engineer. In 1864, he left for New Zealand, promising to come back and bring her and their baby son Herbert out to join him as soon as his business was established. Joseph wrote to Sophia "by every mail" dutifully for six years, always postponing the date of their arrival. In December 1870, he wrote to say he was extremely ill and sent her his will, including his interest in a gold mine. However, then the letters stopped entirely. Sophia was understandably concerned about the fate of her husband, and wrote to the Agent General in New Zealand in 1875, asking for an investigation, only to discover that, according to the government, her husband was indeed alive and well and simply not communicating with her. In January 1878, he wrote her suddenly to tell her he was coming home...

If you check the Wikipedia article for the Victorian pre-Raphaelite painter Jane Benham Hay, you read this about her personal life: "Jane married artist William Hay in 1851 and they had a son the following year. However, their marriage did not last long as Jane left London for Florence in the mid-1850s. Around the same time, she met Francesco Saverio Altamura...They married and had a son together, Bernardo Hay (1864–1934)." If you ask art historian experts, such as Dr. Jan Marsh , you learn that "she left her husband William Hay, said to have been a rather middle- of-the-road artist, and their child, to run away to Italy where she lived with an artist called Francesco Altamura and had more children. But really much of this is guesswork." In other words, there simply hasn't been much information available about her personal life, so people made assumptions about a romantic scandal. But what happens if we look at the words of Jane Hay herself in her affidavit fo...

The case of Mary Ann Gray, from 1876, is mostly intriguing because of one specific aspect of her identity: Mrs. Gray identifies both herself and her husband as "deaf and dumb." She is careful to specify that both parties are literate, and that she herself was educated at the Doncaster School for the Deaf, an institution founded in 1829 that is still going strong today. Her daughter from her first marriage, Mary Peel, is not identified as either hearing or Deaf. The official court record, intriguingly, makes no mention of Mary Ann's lack of hearing; it's an entirely standard grant of divorce and protection of earnings based on her husband's cruelty and abandonment. We only learn about it from Mary Ann's own words in her sworn affidavit. Mary Ann's description of the physical abuse she suffered at the hands of her husband also reflects their deafness: "He threatened to kill me and told me by signs that if I did not leave him he would kill me....

Sometimes my British Victorian ladies have more in common with my Roman women than they might imagine. Take Hannah Gidney. Hannah and her husband Henry, a timber dealer married in August of 1874. In June of 1875, they welcomed a baby daughter. Hannah's husband sent her and the baby for a few weeks to the countryside in July to recover from the birth and "get some fresh air." By late July, she had received news from her mother-in-law that her husband had left for Australia. In August, a few weeks later, she took up a position as wet nurse to the new baby of the Earl and Countess of Eldon.   Wet nursing was reasonably common if somewhat controversial among the Victorian upper classes of the time, and generally involved impoverished lower-class mothers caring for the babies of the elite, sometimes at the expense of the health and nurture of their own children.   Hannah was able to parlay this position into serving as a nurse and eventually the head nurse of the seven Eldon...