1884 — 1893
Our biographical journey follows Gertrude to Oxford and an academic family home, Lady Margaret Hall, where the seventeen year old first arrives in May 1886.
Gertrude grasps this higher education opportunity and amazes the sisterhood of students with her sharp intellect, studious application and charismatic certainty. A ‘free-thinker’ who already carried an ‘excessively insubordinate’ label she bursts in on this staid world being both intimidating and endearing to the older, middling class of women and earnest daughters of the clergy who are her contemporaries. Excavated to a depth of intimacy never before reached, the reader experiences the everyday lives of these women and their surprising encounters with such people as voyeuristic John Ruskin and logic lecturer Charles Dodgson (‘Lewis Carroll’), who is still hankering after his young female child-friends.
As in Bezique, the card game she plays when en route to exotic Tehran, she has to decide what to discard and what to hold onto with a view to winning the game – winning future happiness. The skill of the card game lies in judging what to hold in one’s hand for future play, what to declare as achieved, and what to discard. The predominance of court cards means that there is an overabundance of riches. Well, destiny had dealt her a fabulous hand – too good in many ways. She holds all the best cards: intelligence, wealth, privilege, status and is an Englishwoman at the apogee of the British Empire. Along life’s way she discards the Muse of lyric poetry and the sisterhood of women, benevolent charity, and ambition in politics and academia. She dutifully chooses to hold close her father and stepmother (especially her father); she chooses to hold tight to history, literature and art, and, later, archaeology; and, again later, again dutifully, she never drops her complete, sometimes blind, loyalty to the British state and its overseas interests.
The months in exotic Persia are her own ‘eager days’ and her new found love in that delicious spring of 1892 was ‘an unusual type of Englishman’, Henry Cadogan. But the cards fall badly; Gertrude returns to England and a veil of silence descends over the affair. She is staying at her Cumbrian ancestral homeland near Penrith when she hears of tragedy in paradise.
BUY PART 2 KINDLE E-BOOK