Violet Hunt

Isobel Violet Hunt (September 28 1862 – January 16 1942) was a British writer, now best known for her supernatural fiction. Her father was the artist Alfred William Hunt. Her younger sister Venetia married the designer William Arthur Smith Benson (1854-1924).

She was born in Durham; the family moved to London in 1865. She was brought up in the Pre-Raphaelite group, knowing John Ruskin and William Morris. There is a story that Oscar Wilde, a friend and correspondent, proposed to her in Dublin in 1879; its significance requires naturally her age at the time, and the correct birth date 1862 (not 1866 as often given).

She wrote many novels. Her biography of Elizabeth Siddall is considered unreliable, with animus against Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

She lived with the married Ford Madox Hueffer from about 1910 to 1918 as his mistress, at South Lodge on Campden Hill (a period including his brief 1911 imprisonment). Other relationships were with H. G. Wells and Somerset Maugham; Maugham portrayed her as Nora Nesbit in Of Human Bondage.

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
• 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, US 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)

References

• Douglas Goldring (1943) South Lodge. Reminiscences of Violet Hunt, Ford Madox Ford and the English Review Circle
• Barbara Belford (1990) Violet: The Story of the Irrepressible Violet Hunt and Her Circle of Lovers and Friends - Ford Madox Ford, H.G. Wells, Somerset Maugham, and Henry James
• Joan Hardwick (1990) An Immodest Violet. The Life of Violet Hunt