Discussion
RBCG’s wife, Gabriela de la Balmondière, was equally exotic & romantic. Born in Chile, her father – French nobleman Francisco Jose de la Balmondière – & his elegant Spanish wife were both killed when Gabriela was 12. She grew up with an aunt in Paris.
📷 Gabriela de la Balmondière
9/18
#Scottish #literature #19thcentury #20thcentury #Victorian #Edwardian
“An impenitent & unashamed dandy” – from Joseph Conrad’s Letters to R.B. Cunninghame Graham, ed. C.T. Watts (Cambridge University Press, 2011), quoting George Bernard Shaw
7/18
#Scottish #literature #19thcentury #20thcentury #Victorian #Edwardian #Conrad #JosephConrad #Shaw
“You ought, Mr Graham, to be the first president of a British Republic.” “I ought, madam, if I had my rights,” he answered sardonically, “to be the king of this country. And what a three weeks that would be!”
—Ford Madox Ford, Return to Yesterday
🎨 “Robert Bontine Cunninghame Graham”, Sir John Lavery (1893)
8/18
#Scottish #literature #19thcentury #20thcentury #Victorian #Edwardian #FordMadoxFord
RBCG’s wife, Gabriela de la Balmondière, was equally exotic & romantic. Born in Chile, her father – French nobleman Francisco Jose de la Balmondière – & his elegant Spanish wife were both killed when Gabriela was 12. She grew up with an aunt in Paris.
📷 Gabriela de la Balmondière
9/18
#Scottish #literature #19thcentury #20thcentury #Victorian #Edwardian
RBCG & Gabriela met in Paris when he was 26 & she was only 17. They were married just 6 weeks later. They travelled to the USA & settled into a Bohemian life in Mexico, where RBCG taught fencing & Gabriela taught French & guitar.
10/18
#Scottish #literature #19thcentury #20thcentury #Victorian #Edwardian #Mexico
They returned to Scotland where Gabriela won the admiration of her husband’s society friends – Wilde, Yeats, Engels, & others – with her “slight accent, neither French nor Spanish, but most attractive and charming, as foreign accents sometimes can be, especially with ladies.”
11/18
#Scottish #literature #19thcentury #20thcentury #Victorian #Edwardian #OscarWilde #Yeats #WBYeats #Engels #FredrichEngels
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