The Telegram: 'Her Mother was dead. Her life stood altered''

By Violet Hunt

Isobel Violet Hunt was born on 28th September 1862 in Durham. As a young child her family moved to London and Hunt was brought up amongst the Pre-Raphaelite circle of artists.

As a writer she was comfortable and talented enough to write across several forms including short stories, novels, memoir, and biography. Her novels are excellent examples of New Woman fiction and help illustrate her activities fighting for and promoting better rights for women.

Although she remained unmarried she had lovers as notable as Somerset Maugham, H G Wells and Ford Maddox Ford, the latter whom she lived with for a number of years.

Her collections of supernatural short stories contain much of her best work and despite her considerable talents and literary output her reputation rests both on the literary salons she held at her home in Campden Hill, where the very best of literary society attended, and for her founding of the Women Writers' Suffrage League in 1908 and her participation in the founding of International PEN in 1921.

Violet Hunt died of pneumonia at her home in Campden Hill on 16th January 1942. She was 79 and is buried at Brookwood Cemetery.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Miniature Masterpieces
• Release date: Jan 1, 2023
• ISBN: 9781803547688

Book preview

The Telegram by Violet Hunt

The Author, An Introduction

Isobel Violet Hunt was born on 28th September 1862 in Durham. As a young child her family moved to London and Hunt was brought up amongst the Pre-Raphaelite circle of artists. 

As a writer she was comfortable and talented enough to write across several forms including short stories, novels, memoir, and biography. Her novels are excellent examples of New Woman fiction and help illustrate her activities fighting for and promoting better rights for women.

Although she remained unmarried she had lovers as notable as Somerset Maugham, H G Wells and Ford Maddox Ford, the latter whom she lived with for a number of years.

Her collections of supernatural short stories contain much of her best work and despite her considerable talents and literary output her reputation rests both on the literary salons she held at her home in Campden Hill, where the very best of literary society attended, and for her founding of the Women Writers' Suffrage League in 1908 and her participation in the founding of International PEN in 1921.

Violet Hunt died of pneumonia at her home in Campden Hill on 16th January 1942. She was 79 and is buried at Brookwood Cemetery.

The Telegram

Her Mother was dead. Her life stood altered.

She would be no poorer, it was not that. She was an orphan, and all her mother had had came to her. That meant seventy thousand pounds, plate, linen and the freehold of a fine old house in Lower Seymour Street, that they had moved into a year before the old lady died.

Things were no more altered socially than they were altered pecuniarily, for the Damers’ set naturally corresponded, as sets do, with their postal district, and Miss Alice Damer could therefore continue to command an entrance into the best circles. Only she realised that she must henceforth enjoy all these good things to the tune of a paid companion, having no poor and amenable relations handy whom she could draft into the household economy, and afterwards snub into a colourless, bare existence.

She was thirty-five, and her years did not weigh on her, except mentally. The first faint physical signs of the debacle were, so far, evident to herself alone, and then only in moods of unusual depression. She was still young enough to need a companion. Her pretty red-gold hair was as red as gold, as pretty as ever, her visits to her dentist as few, her eyes as deep, and her step as elastic, although she had given up dancing. She had made this sacrifice more from a sense of fitness, as a concession to the needs of the young girls coming up all round her, and who deserved their turn on the floor, than of social necessity. As a matter of fact, she had never been really fond of that over-energetic,