Isobel Violet Hunt was a British author and literary hostess. Her father was the artist Alfred William Hunt

Alfred William Hunt

Alfred William Hunt, , was an English painter. He was son of Andrew Hunt, a landscape painter.-Biography:...

, her mother the novelist and translator Margaret Raine Hunt

Margaret Raine Hunt

Margaret Hunt was a British novelist and translator of the tales of the Brothers Grimm.-Life:Born Margaret Raine, she also wrote under the pseudonym Averil Beaumont. Her husband was the artist Alfred William Hunt...

. Her younger sister Venetia married the designer William Arthur Smith Benson (1854–1924).

Biography

Hunt was born in Durham

Durham

Durham is a city in north east England. It is within the County Durham local government district, and is the county town of the larger ceremonial county...

; the family moved to London in 1865. She was brought up in the Pre-Raphaelite group, knowing John Ruskin

John Ruskin

John Ruskin was the leading English art critic of the Victorian era, also an art patron, draughtsman, watercolourist, a prominent social thinker and philanthropist. He wrote on subjects ranging from geology to architecture, myth to ornithology, literature to education, and botany to political...

 and William Morris

William Morris

William Morris 24 March 18343 October 1896 was an English textile designer, artist, writer, and socialist associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the English Arts and Crafts Movement...

. There is a story that Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde

Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish writer and poet. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of London's most popular playwrights in the early 1890s...

, a friend and correspondent, proposed to her in Dublin in 1879; the significance of this event requires her to have been old enough to get engaged at that time, leading us to her correct birth date of 1862 (not 1866 as often given).

Hunt's writings ranged over a number of literary forms, including short stories, novels, memoir, and biography. An active feminist, her novels The Maiden's Progress and A Hard Woman were works of the New Woman

New Woman

The New Woman was a feminist ideal that emerged in the late 19th century. The New Woman pushed the limits set by male-dominated society, especially as modeled in the plays of Norwegian Henrik Ibsen . "The New Woman sprang fully armed from Ibsen's brain," according to a joke by Max Beerbohm...

 genre, while her short story collection Tales of the Uneasy is an example of supernatural fiction

Supernatural fiction

Supernatural fiction is a literary genre exploiting or requiring as plot devices or themes some contradictions of the commonplace natural world and materialist assumptions about it....

. Her novel White Rose of Weary Leaf is regarded as her best work, while biography of Elizabeth Siddall is considered unreliable, with animus against Siddall's husband, Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Dante Gabriel Rossetti was an English poet, illustrator, painter and translator. He founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848 with William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais, and was later to be the main inspiration for a second generation of artists and writers influenced by the movement,...

. She was also active in writers organisations, founding the Women Writers' Suffrage League

Women Writers' Suffrage League

The Women Writers' Suffrage League was an organization in the United Kingdom formed in 1908 by Cicely Hamilton and Bessie Hatton.The organization stated that it wanted "to obtain the vote for women on the same terms as it is or may be granted to men. Its methods are those proper to writers - the...

 in 1908 and participating in the founding of International PEN

International PEN

PEN International , the worldwide association of writers, was founded in London in 1921 to promote friendship and intellectual co-operation among writers everywhere....

 in 1921.

Despite her considerable literary output, Violet Hunt's reputation rests more with the literary salons

Salon (gathering)

A salon is a gathering of people under the roof of an inspiring host, held partly to amuse one another and partly to refine taste and increase their knowledge of the participants through conversation. These gatherings often consciously followed Horace's definition of the aims of poetry, "either to...

 she held at her home, South Lodge, in Campden Hill

Campden Hill

Campden Hill is an area of high ground in west London between Notting Hill, Kensington and Holland Park.The area is characterised by large Victorian houses. It is also the site of reservoirs established in the 19th century by the Grand Junction Waterworks Company and the West Middlesex Waterworks...

. Among her guests were Rebecca West

Rebecca West

Cicely Isabel Fairfield , known by her pen name Rebecca West, or Dame Rebecca West, DBE was an English author, journalist, literary critic and travel writer. A prolific, protean author who wrote in many genres, West was committed to feminist and liberal principles and was one of the foremost public...

, Ezra Pound

Ezra Pound

Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet and critic and a major figure in the early modernist movement in poetry...

, Joseph Conrad

Joseph Conrad

Joseph Conrad was a Polish-born English novelist.Conrad is regarded as one of the great novelists in English, although he did not speak the language fluently until he was in his twenties...

, Wyndham Lewis

Wyndham Lewis

Percy Wyndham Lewis was an English painter and author . He was a co-founder of the Vorticist movement in art, and edited the literary magazine of the Vorticists, BLAST...

, D. H. Lawrence

D. H. Lawrence

David Herbert Richards Lawrence was an English novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, literary critic and painter who published as D. H. Lawrence. His collected works represent an extended reflection upon the dehumanising effects of modernity and industrialisation...

, and Henry James

Henry James

Henry James, OM was an American-born writer, regarded as one of the key figures of 19th-century literary realism. He was the son of Henry James, Sr., a clergyman, and the brother of philosopher and psychologist William James and diarist Alice James....

. She helped Ford Madox Hueffer

Ford Madox Ford

Ford Madox Ford was an English novelist, poet, critic and editor whose journals, The English Review and The Transatlantic Review, were instrumental in the development of early 20th-century English literature...

 establish The English Review in 1908. Many of these people were subsequently characterised in her novels, most notably Their Lives and Their Hearts.

Though never married, Violet Hunt carried on a number of relationships, mostly with older men. Among her lovers was Somerset Maugham and H. G. Wells

H. G. Wells

Herbert George Wells was an English author, now best known for his work in the science fiction genre. He was also a prolific writer in many other genres, including contemporary novels, history, politics and social commentary, even writing text books and rules for war games...

, though her most notable affair was with the married Ford Madox Hueffer, who lived with her from about 1910 to 1918 at her home South Lodge (a period including his brief 1911 imprisonment). She was fictionalised by Ford in two novels: as the scheming Florence Dowell in The Good Soldier

The Good Soldier

The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion is a 1915 novel by English novelist Ford Madox Ford. It is set just before World War I and chronicles the tragedy of Edward Ashburnham, the soldier to whom the title refers, and his own seemingly perfect marriage and that of two American friends...

and as the shrewish Sylvia Tietjens in Ford's tetralogy Parade's End

Parade's End

Parade's End is a tetralogy by Ford Madox Ford published between 1924 and 1928. It is set mainly in England and on the Western Front in World War I, where Ford served as an officer in the Welch Regiment, a life vividly depicted in the novels.In 1998, the Modern Library ranked Parade's End 57th on...

. She was also the inspiration for the character Rose Waterfield in W. Somerset Maugham

W. Somerset Maugham

William Somerset Maugham , CH was an English playwright, novelist and short story writer. He was among the most popular writers of his era and, reputedly, the highest paid author during the 1930s.-Childhood and education:...

's novel The Moon and Sixpence

The Moon and Sixpence

The Moon and Sixpence is a novel by W. Somerset Maugham, told in episodic form by the first-person narrator as a series of glimpses into the mind and soul of the central character, Charles Strickland, a middle-aged English stockbroker who abandons his wife and children abruptly to pursue his desire...

and Nora Nesbit in Of Human Bondage

Of Human Bondage

Of Human Bondage is a novel by W. Somerset Maugham. It is generally agreed to be his masterpiece and to be strongly autobiographical in nature, although Maugham stated, "This is a novel, not an autobiography, though much in it is autobiographical, more is pure invention." Maugham, who had...

.

Violet Hunt died of pneumonia

Pneumonia

Pneumonia is an inflammatory condition of the lung—especially affecting the microscopic air sacs —associated with fever, chest symptoms, and a lack of air space on a chest X-ray. Pneumonia is typically caused by an infection but there are a number of other causes...

 in her home in 1942. Her grave and those of her parents are in the Glades of Remembrance at Brookwood Cemetery

Brookwood Cemetery

Brookwood Cemetery is a burial ground in Brookwood, Surrey, England. It is the largest cemetery in the United Kingdom and one of the largest in western Europe.-History:...

.

Works

• The Maiden's Progress (1894)
• A Hard Woman, a Story in Scenes (1895)
• The Way of Marriage (1896)
• Unkist, Unkind! (1897)
• The Human Interest – A Study in Incompatibilities (1899)
• Affairs of the Heart (1900) stories
• The Celebrity at Home (1904)
• Sooner Or Later (1904)
• The Cat (1905)
• The Workaday Woman (1906)
• White Rose Of Weary Leaf (1908)
• The Wife of Altamont (1910)
• The Life Story Of A Cat (1910)
• Tales of the Uneasy (1911) stories
• The Doll (1911)
• The Governess (1912) with Margaret Raine Hunt
  Margaret Raine Hunt
  Margaret Hunt was a British novelist and translator of the tales of the Brothers Grimm.-Life:Born Margaret Raine, she also wrote under the pseudonym Averil Beaumont. Her husband was the artist Alfred William Hunt...
  
  
• The Celebrity's Daughter (1913)
• The Desirable Alien (1913) (with Ford Madox Hueffer)
• The House of Many Mirrors (1915)
• Zeppelin Nights: A London Entertainment (1916) with Ford Madox Hueffer
• Their Lives (1916)
• The Last Ditch (1918)
• Their Hearts (1921)
• Tiger Skin (1924) stories
• More Tales of The Uneasy (1925) stories
• The Flurried Years (1926) autobiography, (U.S., I Have This To Say)
• The Wife of Rossetti – Her Life and Death (1932)
• Return of the Good Soldier: Ford Madox Ford and Violet Hunt's 1917 Diary (1983) (with Ford Madox Ford)

Further reading