Introduction

IN her desire to fulfil her promise to her father as fully as possible, it was natural that Alice should look back on the letters and diaries with which she had been so closely involved for so long, and find within herself the need for a final summing up. She had lived with her parents’ lives and work for many years by then, and it was as if Joanna, who died so young and whom she had never really known except through her father's eyes, had taken on flesh for her – as if the letters themselves had given to ‘airy nothing, a local habitation and a name’. Whatever the reason, Alice was compelled to say more.

In two remarkable essays she sums up her mother's character from all that she had read and heard, and her appearance from the portraits and memorials that survived.

In Joanna's Character we are reminded of her generosity of spirit – a selfless quality that she had evidently inherited from her own father. She also had a gift for friendship which was evidenced very early on during her schooldays, and was later perhaps most apparent in her support – emotional and practical – for her less robust friend Hennie Moore. Her care both for her brother George throughout his trouble with his hip, and for her youngest brother Bob, an invalid, was extraordinary by any standards. Lest we are tempted to think of her as some kind of saint, Alice also reminds us that she had a wicked sense of humour and enjoyed nothing more than a good tease. Given her fears about the effect on her art of being a wife and a mother, it is also touching to discover just how much she revelled in her babies and just how idyllic her short marriage proved to be.

Alice also collected together the Obituaries of her mother that appeared following her untimely death. These speak for themselves, but Alexander Gilchrist summed up the general mood in the Critic on 27 July 1861, when he said: ‘Seldom have the tidings of the premature loss of a gifted artist had so painful a significance for us as those … of the unexpected death … of Mrs H. T. Wells.