The Land of that Inner Life

In August 1900, Henry Head's sister, Hester, married Reginald Pinney (1863–1943), an officer in the Royal Fusiliers. Her brother's reaction to the match was remarkable. In an angry letter to Ruth Mayhew he declared:

In a later letter to Ruth Mayhew, Head chose to describe his sister as ‘Major Pinney's wife’. He insisted that he had no interest in listening to this woman's increasingly strident and foolish opinions. For: ‘it was Hester I loved & Hester is dead’.

Mayhew – usually so sympathetic to her correspondent – confessed that she was appalled by the vehemence of these remarks. When Head sneered at ‘the gross ineptitude of [Hester's] Anglo Indian life’, Ruth admitted that: ‘Your last letter made me miserable’. Head's mother, who was also aware of the extraordinary nature of Henry's reaction to his sister's marriage, had alleged that her son was: ‘jealous of her husband and you loved Hester more as a lover than a brother’. Mayhew found this suggestion of some form of incestuous attraction: ‘monstrous and you may think how it hurts me. I cannot believe it …’ Nonetheless, she was left bewildered. ‘Why’, she demanded, ‘are you so cruelly bitter about it all?’

This incident deserves study because it reveals important aspects of Head's worldview. He categorized the world and the people that inhabited it according to an interrelated set of binary opposites. He attached immense importance to certain values and attributes, and greatly esteemed those individuals who manifested these traits. Those who were indifferent or even inimical to these ideals were worthy only of contempt and derision.