“The Priestess, the Medium, the Prophetess”: Identity in British Modernist Literary Patronage

1 Introduction

In his seminal study of modernist relationship with the literary market – The Institutions of Modernism – Lawrence Rainey corrects the assumption that modernism is as hostile towards mass production, the audience, and consumerism as it is understood to be. Instead, Rainey describes modernist authors appropriating many of the practices of commodification to create “a commodity of a special sort” (1998, 3). In the altered economic circuit which enables such exchanges, individual patronage still plays a considerable role, which is, however, often slighted or misrecognised due to many stereotypical assumptions surrounding the practice. Much of the limited understanding of patronage stems from various narrative strategies employed by modernist writers – in the case of this article mainly Lytton Strachey and D. H. Lawrence – to protect their own reputation and autonomy from the encroaching literary market or an association with a patron. This article, therefore, seeks to introduce the narrative strategies employed by the writers associated chiefly with the patron Lady Ottoline Morrell, and show how they contribute to the stereotypical image of a “dark patron” – “the benefactor who does not know his place, who corrupts and threatens the very art he seeks to support” (Van den Braber 2021, 40) – which, in turn, leads to the ignorance of the role patronage played in modernist literary production.

Virginia Woolf, who assumes the role of a keen observer in this article, explored how one’s reputation can have a life of its own in her essay “The Duchess of Newcastle,” published originally in 1925 in The Common Reader. Woolf does so through a portrayal of Margaret Cavendish, a seventeenth-century writer and philosopher, remembered until relatively recent attempts at revaluation as “Mad Madge” for her refusal to adhere to societal standards (Whitaker 2003). In the essay, Cavendish disappoints a sensation-seeking onlooker wanting to catch a glimpse of the lady described as having “the freakishness of an elf, the irresponsibility of some non-human creature, its heartlessness, and its charm” (Woolf 1929, 108) by being, in fact, “a very comely woman” (Woolf 1929, 109), far from the eccentric fantasy dominating the imagination of the onlooker.

Several centuries later, Ottoline Morrell, Woolf’s friend and a modernist patron, commented on the story, claiming that it was “superlatively good” (Seymour 1993, 393). Morrell herself, better connectible to the essay’s protagonist under her own maiden name Cavendish-Bentinck, could do nothing but sympathise with the unjust fate that befell her most favourite ancestress (Seymour 1993, 220). After all, they both shared a quixotic disregard for the path that social expectations had carved out for them (Woolf 1929; Holroyd 1971, 447).

Despite having largely alienated her aristocratic family by surrounding herself with the like-minded bohemians of London (Seymour 1993, 239–40), for most of her life Morrell held strongly to her intention to do anything in her power to champion art and those creating it. She supplemented her relative lack of wealth needed for such venture with social activity in her Bedford Square salon (1906–1919) and her Garsington Manor (1915–1928), where she strove to create an environment in which the artists could go about their work, free from everyday worries. These included D. H. Lawrence, Lytton Strachey, and Siegfried Sassoon, to name only the few writers mentioned in this article.

2 Morrell’s Reputation

Even though as a patron she was mostly relegated to the background, the descriptions of Morrell “brilliantly painted, as garish as a strumpet” (Woolf qtd. in Seymour 1993, 302), made her very difficult to overlook otherwise. Not being a writer herself and thus not having such a pervasive literary voice as her contemporaries, Morrell’s reputation was largely formed by similar accounts. Easy to write off as a mere malice, though, they are in fact manifestations of narrative strategies often unconsciously employed by those Morrell supported as a patron. The following paragraphs will find common strands in the most bombastic descriptions of Morrell, with a focus on those by Lawrence and Strachey, and attempt to link the motivation behind them to either positive narrative strategies, used to justify one’s participation in a patronage relationship, or negative narratives strategies meant to signal one’s independence.

To begin with and to illustrate Morrell’s reputation, one can look at the common strands in the way her contemporaries tended to describe her, which were later taken up by various commentators, such as biographers and scholars. The first strand regards the attempts to situate Morrell and the impressions she made in space and time. Morrell’s biographer, Miranda Seymour, notes instances of her being called “die komische Engländerin”^[1] (Seymour 1993, 334) in Germany, “French lady” (Seymour 1993, 310) in Ireland, or a “Persian princess, grand and cruel” (Seymour 1993, 248) in England. Similar incongruity can be perceived in the attempts to assign her to a given period; David Cecil, a writer who spent his Oxford undergraduate days at Garsington, called her “a princess of the Renaissance risen to shame our drab age” (Cecil qtd. in Seymour 1993, 2) and further commented elsewhere:

[like her clothes], she did not seem to belong to the twentieth century. I find myself frequently using the word ‘Elizabethan’ to describe her; for she seemed built on the Elizabethan scale with Elizabethan grandeur, imagination and passion. (Cecil 1976, 11)

Michael Holroyd, Lytton Strachey’s biographer, built upon this image, describing her similarly as a “character of Elizabethan extravagance and force” (1971, 447) and of “medieval strength” (1971, 447), whereas another Morrell biographer, Sandra Darroch, described her “appearance [as] both baroque and gothic” (2017, 6). In a way, this plethora of often contradictory descriptions can be ascribed to her eccentricity and noteworthy sartorial experiments. Still, it not only shows that observers were prone to succumb to impressions of Morrell but also to describe the patron in a way that this larger-than-life image of her came into existence.

Definitely contributing to Morrell’s legendary image was another strand of descriptions, this time less easily explicable – those accentuating her aristocratic background. Besides the two aforementioned instances of being described as a princess, Strachey also titled her “the daughter of a thousand earls” (qtd. in Darroch 2017, 225) and Seymour notes that she was known as the “Gipsy Queen” (1993 235) in Garsington, despite having no Romani origin. Descriptions of her superiority were, however, not limited to aristocratic associations. John Cramb called her a “stern demi-goddess” (qtd. in Darroch 2017, 62) and D. H. Lawrence described her, notably for this essay, as a “priestess,” “medium,” and a “prophetess” (qtd. in Darroch 2017, 207).

Of similar nature is also the last and most negative element uniting the way Morrell was spoken and written about. While Holroyd, impressed by accounts he studied while compiling the biography of Strachey as well as Augustus John, Morrell’s lover, discusses her “force” and “strength” and points out that she was “possessive” and “tempestuous” (1971 447), Seymour notes examples of her being viewed as “cruel” (1993 248), “daemonic,” and “formidable” (1993 1). These echo the sentiment voiced by Woolf, for example, who described being close to Morrell in the following manner:

I succumb, I lie, I flatter, I accept flattery, I stretch and sleek, and all the time she is watchful and vengeful and mendacious and unhappy and ready to break every rib in my body if it were worth her while. (Woolf 1978, 108)

Seymour also identifies instances in which Strachey’s sister, Pippa, claimed Morrell was “as wicked as she was cruel,” and Roger Fry told people she was “venomous” and “dangerous” (1993 338). Where the two previously described strands might be merely amusing, the negative descriptions in this paragraph are detrimental in their effect on Morrell’s reputation, since in their force and unusualness they often dominate the discourse and the imagination of observers. The accounts of biographers, which should offer more impartial and understanding accounts, attest to this. Rather than offering objective descriptions of Morrell, the descriptions of her cruelty or superiority are either examples of various narrative strategies employed by participants in patronage to justify their decisions and behaviour in patronage, or the results of these strategies. In order to understand how such narrative strategies might be effective, one needs to recognise that in patronage dynamics, besides the patron as the person supporting the artist and the artist themselves, there is also the element of the public observing this exchange (Van den Braber 2021, 26–7). Who exactly is denoted by this largely depends on the sector of the field of cultural production that is being taken into consideration, as described by Bourdieu (1993). In the case of avant-garde groups, such as the modernists whom Morrell was supporting, the public in fact consists of a small, interconnected community of people with similar values and goals shared throughout the field rather than of a general public (Bourdieu 1993, 37–9). Aware of being observed and the importance of preserving their reputation (Van den Braber 2021, 26–8), both the patrons and artists then tried to signal their opinion on patronage and being part of it to the public by various means described in what follows.

3 Positive Narrative Strategies

Early stages of patronage, which are marked by the artists’ complacency and need of support, are usually tied to positive narrative strategies. These can be viewed as efforts to justify their choice of a patron and the decision to enter the relationship of patronage and remain in it. The reason why the need to comment on these emerges at all is closely tied to the nature of modernist literary production and the accumulation of narrative capital, both of which will be described in detail later.

One example of a positive narrative strategy then is the emphasising of Morrell’s superiority, mostly through reminders of her aristocratic ancestry. D. H. Lawrence, with his working-class background and interest in it, wrote:

It is rather splendid that you are a great lady. Don’t abrogate one jot or tittle of your high birth: it is too valuable in this commercially mean world…I really do honour your birth. Let us do justice to its nobility: it is not mere accident. I would have given a great deal to have been an aristocrat. (Lawrence qtd. in Darroch 2017, 205)

Insisting that Morrell embraces her background, despite the fact that she was, in fact, a voluntary outcast from aristocratic society (Seymour 1993, 239–40), helped Lawrence free himself from questioning his association with her. After all, there would still be many in the early twentieth century who would perceive working-class obeisance of aristocracy and fascination with it as the natural order of things. By contrasting her aristocratic background with the “commercially mean world,” Lawrence also signals the way he associates Morrell in his mind with an alternative to the ruthless marketplace he sought to escape, however momentarily. Woolf’s account also shows that Morrell, with her background and eccentricity, was generally well-received, especially in Garsington:

[T]he dazzling appearance of Ott & her pearls [seemed] to strike the agricultural labourer neither as wrong nor ridiculous, but as a part of the aristocratic show that he’d paid for. No one laughed […] They all seemed all a little excited & very anxious to please. (Woolf qtd. in Seymour 1993, 295; second square brackets are in the original)

In another interesting instance, Lytton Strachey, another of Morrell’s beneficiaries who was of considerably higher birth than Lawrence, chose to focus on Morrell’s blue blood as well. Nicknaming himself “Monsieur Le Comte” to Morrell’s “plus chère de Marquises” (Seymour 1993, 138) allowed him to play out an aristocratic fantasy in which he was a writer in Morrell’s court. “I imagine wonders,” he wrote to her about Garsington, “[…] ponds, statues, yew hedges, gold paint […] you needn’t be afraid of my Critical Eye – for the simple reason that it won’t be able to find anything to criticise!” (Strachey qtd. in Seymour 1993, 227). Interestingly, he did find things to criticise. According to Seymour’s research, he complained, for example, that the breakfast was not big enough (1993 234), and of having to endure “detestable fellow guests, brainless hosts, squirming pug dogs, hateful games and […] ragtime dancing” (1993 241). Even a person of Strachey’s mercurialness must have been aware of the hypocrisy of his behaviour when he, despite all these complaints, continued profiting from Morrell’s hospitality and showering her with praises (Seymour 1993, 241). It is clear how the “aristocratic roleplay” that he imagined for himself and his patron helped him cope with the glaring inconsistencies in his behaviour.

Taken a bit further are the mythological descriptions of Morrell. In part, they were inspired again by her looks and personality, as when it comes to Henry James, who said: “She is like some gorgeous heraldic creature – a Gryphon perhaps or a Dragon Volant!” (qtd. in Cecil 1976, 7), or Morrell’s lover, Bertrand Russell, who wrote to her: “You wouldn’t believe how hard it is for me not to be mythological about you” (qtd. in Seymour 1993, 149). D. H. Lawrence, however, went even further than that. In a letter, similar in tone to the previous one, he implored her:

Why don’t you have the pride in your own intrinsic self? Why must you tamper with the idea of being an ordinary physical woman – wife, mother, mistress? Primarily you belong to a special type, a special race of women: like Cassandra, and some of the great women saints. They were the great media of truth, of the deepest truth: through them…the truth came – as through a fissure from the depths and the burning darkness that lies out of the depth of the time. It is necessary for this great type to re-assert itself on the face of the earth. It is not the salon lady and the bluestocking…but the priestess, the medium, the prophetess. (Lawrence qtd. in Darroch 2017, 206–7)

This imploration can, in a way, be perceived as an extension of his previous plea to embrace her aristocratic background. Using similar logic, if she is portrayed as a medium of truth, a direct link to god and his word, disregarding her or not taking inspiration from her would be viewed as blasphemy. Moreover, if she is “not the salon lady […] but the priestess, the medium, the prophetess,” Lawrence is not a mere writer trying to earn a living, but a religious follower, not in a position to question the status quo. In other words, when patronage is still a necessary evil.

Conversely, invoking these roles can be understood as putting distance between the patron and the artist, which protects the latter and their work from too strong an association. This is especially helpful when the patronage relationship begins to crumble and negative narrative strategies are preferable. Such a downward turn was quite common – the disillusionment and misaligned expectations led to rifts between Morrell and almost all of her closest beneficiaries. Furthermore, rarely are the feelings and motivations of an aristocrat, let alone those of a god, considered by people subservient to them. If the distance is too great to establish an empathetic relationship with the other, they tend not to worry about the ethical implications of their actions. Therefore, the refusal to see Morrell as a woman, a wife, a mother, and a mistress is a depersonalisation which allows for the descriptions that this essay is based on.

Interestingly enough, though, it is when their relationship moves beyond the mundane by invoking Cassandra, that Morrell’s official view of patronage meets the artists’. She herself wrote what could be seen as a manifesto of her Garsington project, where she paints quite a utopian vision of patronage:

Come then, gather here – all who have passion and who desire to create new conditions of life – new visions of art and literature and new magic worlds of poetry and music. If I could but feel that days at Garsington had strengthened your efforts to live the noble life: to live freely, recklessly, with clear Reason released from convention – no longer absorbed in small personal events but valuing personal affairs as part of a great whole – above all to live with passionate desire for Truth and Love and Understanding and Imagination. (Morrell qtd. in Sassoon 1920, 23)

In this case, the mythologisation of the patron is much more subtle, even though between the lines one can still feel that the patron has, in their own eyes at least, the god-like power to dismiss any care about practical aspects of life and creative work. Truth, with its difficult relationship to imagination, as Morrell would later find out through her depictions in various novels and artworks,^[2] is again hailed as one of the ultimate, irrefutable goals. In a way, both the writers’ and Morrell’s accounts stem from the deeply rooted Romanticist notion of creativity and authorship which holds that there is Truth, in its metaphysical sense, to be discovered by a perceptive artist (Coleridge 1834). If ideal conditions are what is needed, they shall be provided.

The modern publishing culture, as well as modernist demands for autonomy, were, however, quickly making such notions obsolete. On the one hand, the increasing opportunities to publish offered anyone willing to make concessions to their vision a place to do so and, possibly more than ever, earn a living that way. On the other hand, not everyone was willing to accommodate public tastes and thus a more private mode of production was needed (Wexler 1997, xiii-v). Modernist authors were largely looking for autonomy and defiance of existing structures, which Morrell or any individual patron could provide only to a limited degree. This is why mass culture was eventually appropriated, as Rainey has shown (1998, 170). Despite being of importance as an inspiration, a place of conception, and a respite from everyday worries, at a great cost to their owners, patronage projects such as Garsington often did not offer publishing opportunities, such as those available to people associated with little magazines or, for example, the Woolfs’ Hogarth Press. Moreover, even if they were given creative freedom, the artists were still bound by social convention as guests in the patrons’ house which contributed to the friction between them and the patrons.^[3] This is one of the reasons why Morrell’s patronage projects, such as her Garsington Manor, and the patronage relationships they facilitated, often ended in disillusionment.

Even though Morrell embraces Lawrence’s simplistic depersonalised notion of a patron in her manifesto of ideal creative life at Garsington, in hindsight she claimed that she was, in fact, simply a mother: “I who never wished for children find I am just one universal mother […] to all the young men and women that I know” (qtd. in Seymour 1993, 327). Though pathetically formulated, when one considers the nature of motherhood and the sacrifices it entails, it is perhaps a more faithful description of the kind of patronage that Morrell sought to offer than any mythologisation mentioned.^[4] Quite interestingly also, when Lawrence found out about Morrell’s cancer and perhaps became aware of her humanness, he soberly reverted to claiming that she “has moved men’s imagination deeply, and that’s perhaps the most a woman can do” (qtd. in Seymour 1993, 281). This was, however, in 1928, when Lawrence had tuberculosis in Italy (Seymour 1993, 281) and no longer had to create narratives explaining his association with Morrell, not to mention that the misogynistic note dismisses the indirect influence patrons had on their beneficiaries, described in detail elsewhere (Melišová 2022).

In the past, when pre-Romantic forms of patronage, which offer the basis for the stereotypical understanding of patronage, reigned strong, it was common to declare one’s association with the patron publicly. This could be done by their inclusion in the artwork, in the form of depiction or coats of arms (Nelson and Zeckhauser 2008), or by soliciting an association openly by addressing a specific or a potential patron (Shea 2003). With the gradual backgrounding of the practice, such displays were falling out of use, though dedications of books, previously also widely used to signal and shape one’s relationship with a patron (Clayton 2019), still occasionally appeared in modernist writing.^[5] Mostly, however, the authors chose to refrain from excessive public displays of the relationship and restrain their dedications to inscriptions within the already printed books. These are among the only material manifestations of their attempts to get closer to the patron. However lovely and thoughtful they are – as for example Siegfried Sassoon gifting Morrell back a manuscript book, with his hand-written and beautifully illuminated poems in it (Seymour 1993, 273) – they are only private gifts and public display of them would be viewed negatively. Instead, the artists preferred to show their affection and solidify the relationship with the much more intangible kind words or flattery.

It is apparent that the examples of positive narrative strategies serve two functions in patronage: firstly to flatter the patron to strengthen the relationship and protect oneself from appearing ungrateful (as the rules of politeness are clearer and more urgently felt than those of patronage), and secondly to create a plausible rationale, which justifies one’s decision to choose patronage over a regular cultural production and the selection of the particular patron. Due to the nature of post-Romantic patronage, convincing the patron of one’s worthiness is no longer as urgent as when the artisan had to compete with others for the patron’s favour in the past, especially since post-Romantic patrons are often the first to establish contact and are not the sole source of support for the artist. The positive narrative strategies are thus targeted inwards and are meant to assure both the patron and the artist of the meaningfulness of the relationship. Over time, however, once the artists’ social networks and renown grows and outlives the usefulness of the patron, different behaviour ensues.

4 Negative Narrative Strategies

Negative narrative strategies are employed once the patronage relationship seems superfluous and the artist feels the need to secure creative independence, or at least the illusion of it. Unlike their positive counterparts, negative strategies are aimed outwards at the ever-widening (potential) audience which might view any help that the author received in the process of their career as an unfair advantage or a limit to one’s independence – simply, a crack in the image of an autonomous author working against all odds to deliver their unique vision. To a varying degree of intensity, these strategies are often behind the negative depictions identified earlier as the third common strand in the accounts of Morrell.

The most straightforward way of controlling one’s image and signalling one’s stance is also the most direct one: word of mouth. It can be understood as a public strategy since, first of all, the British modernist scene was comprised of a relatively small, well-connected network of people where word travelled quickly and, second of all, “the public” element of patronage can be as limited as a circle of friends – in fact, it is helpful to keep in mind that “the public” as an audience is observing the exchange at all times.

Standing out in every crowd, both literally, being six foot tall and always in heels (Seymour 1993, 3), and figuratively for her sartorial experiments and refusal to conform to societal expectations, Morrell was always an inexhaustible source of things to gossip about. Be it in London when she dramatically intervened in the burning of Lawrence’s paintings (Seymour 1993, 363) or bicycling in the countryside (Seymour 1993, 235), every appearance was an occasion. Woolf reported sightings of her looking like “a foundered cab horse” (qtd. in Seymour 1993, 302), or “hawking the streets again after having befouled the twigs of a few homes” (qtd. in Seymour 1993, 391), waiters are described to have been climbing on tables to get a better view (Seymour 1993, 403). Even more mundane things, however, sufficed; as when Woolf wrote to Strachey: “I wonder where you are. I want oceans of gossip. Ottoline’s teeth for instance – has she got new ones?” (2008, 84). It seems that gossip and Morrell were inextricably linked and gave fuel to the descriptions which form much of how the patron is remembered today. The reason why these are preserved is that “Bloomsbury thrived on correspondence. The things that were written about Ottoline were affected by a love of language and gossip; sincerity was sacrificed to a lively turn of phrase” (Seymour 1993, 2). If there was a widely known woman, such as Morrell, who “pestered” almost everyone in the Bloomsbury Group’s circle of members and acquaintances, it was only convenient to capitalise on the interactions with her as much as possible.

Although the risk of losing the patron’s good favour is a small price to pay for the solidification of relationships with more respected peers active in the creative process, there were attempts to stay in the patron’s good graces, lest it be needed in the future. To Morrell, Strachey wrote: “What a lucky person I am to have such a refuge to fly to. It was a delightful oasis of a time […] How kind you are to us all, you and Philip, almost too kind sometimes I think!” (qtd. in Seymour 1993, 232), while to Woolf he claimed that “Poor ‘Lady Omega Muddle’ had become ill, bad-tempered and infinitely old” (qtd. in Seymour 1993, 278). In the end, he gave up on the court fantasy mentioned earlier and their relationship waned considerably after he achieved phenomenal success with his Eminent Victorians (1918), not even visiting Garsington in 1918 when passing by (Seymour 1993, 298). Later, while excusing himself by claiming that he could not leave for London, Morrell frequently heard of him visiting friends there nonetheless (Seymour 1993, 378). Strachey’s biographer also understood the awkwardness of his lack of integrity and came to very much the same conclusion as Seymour’s quoted before: “By ridiculing Ottoline as a hostess, he would avert ridicule from himself as an inexplicably persistent guest” (Holroyd 1971, 600–1). Woolf was self-aware of her own duality as well, when she wrote in her diary:

What puts me on edge is that I’m writing like this here, & spoke so differently to Ott. I’m over peevish in private, partly in order to assert myself. I am a great deal interested suddenly in my book. I want to bring in the despicableness of people like Ott: I want to give the slipperiness of the soul. (Woolf 1981, 243–4)

Again, the incongruity of modernist patronage – the need to resort to it in the face of less-pleasing alternatives – is laid bare by the actions of its participants.

Even more effective were strategies of a performative nature. Just as manifestoes and pamphlets were used to strengthen modernist groups’ bonds around a common investment and position the artists within a “rhetorical ‘us versus them’ dichotomy” (Hannah 2015, 193–202), performative actions or narratives regarding patrons were employed with a similar goal. Woolf writes of a “sentence of banishment” (2008, 100) over Morrell which was proposed to be pronounced at Osbert Sitwell’s party to a mixed result. It would come as no surprise if such a proposition had come from Sitwell himself, who mocked Morrell in his Triple Fugue (1924). The only thing that kept him from appearing on the list of traitors, which was Morrell’s way of dealing with the disappointments of patronage, was that he was never considered a friend in the first place (Seymour 1993, 354).

Quite parallel, yet more closely felt, is an occasion described by another Morrell protégé, Dorothy Brett, in her open letter to D. H. Lawrence, originally published in Lawrence and Brett: A Friendship (1933):

We sit drinking tea, tearing O. to pieces. We pull her feathers out in handfuls until I stop, aghast, and try to be merciful, saying, ‘we shall leave her just one draggled feather in her tail, the poor plucked hen!’ (Brett qtd. in Seymour 1993, 210)

Quite interestingly, Brett precedes this quote by claiming that, since she had a relatively good relationship with the patron, she initially refused to participate in the derision. However, “to defend Ottoline was to risk being mocked with her,” as Seymour observes (1993 207). The curiously performative nature of these examples shows that, beyond being merely a way to vent one’s frustrations with the person and patronage, it was a manifestation of a need to ensure that the distancing of oneself from the patron would be clearly understood by the modernist public.

Although Hannah considers group dynamics in relation to modernist groups, namely Tuckman’s “developmental sequence” consisting of “forming, norming, storming, and performing” (Hannah 2015, 194), his approach works when describing specific artistic movements, such as the Vorticists in his case. Although a number of Morrell’s beneficiaries belonged to the Bloomsbury Group, they were not limited to it. Thus, the various writers and painters, some with Cambridge, some Oxford, some Slade in common, found Morrell as a common denominator around which they established temporary circles which, due to the nature of mutual influence and inspiration, can be seen as collaborative circles. Therefore, it is interesting to consider their performative behaviour as part of an identity-building strategy of collaborative circles. In the words of Michael P. Farrell, the period when negative strategies are used can be viewed as a rebellion stage:

One of the most common group activities in the rebellion stage is the ritual of sharing anecdotes about the ‘outrageous’ work of those in positions of authority. When they are apart, members gather gossip about these authorities, then, when they come together, they share their stories. The stories serve as legends in the group: by repeating the themes in the stories the members come to understand more clearly who they are and what they reject in the field. (Farrell 2001, 21)

Farrell goes on to describe “tyrants” standing outside the group who are felt to be “constraining or threatening authority” of the group members and are often the target of their scorn (2001 21). Important are also “conflicted members,” such as Dorothy Brett in the example above, for whom group interaction serves “as a stage on which their internal conflicts are externalized and dramatized” (Farrell 2001, 22); Dora Carrington, who called the Bloomsbury Group traitors for their two-face treatment of Morrell, yet changed her tone to match Strachey’s in mocking, lest she should fall out of his favour (Seymour 1993, 267); or Stephen Spender, who wrote to Seymour many years after Morrell’s death that he regretted participating in the gossip later, but at the time he felt that it was fashionable to do so (Seymour 1993, 408).

The Bloomsbury Group, a collaborative circle in its own right and connected by far more than their mutual acquaintance Morrell, also invoked her image in curiously performative displays. Although Woolf described an instance of her, Desmond MacCarthy, Strachey, and Roger Fry telling stories together about Morrell (Woolf 1981, 91), the derision came mainly from the Bells. While Vanessa Bell’s children were encouraged to parody Morrell (Seymour 1993, 178), Clive Bell, remembering the days he spent as a conscientious objector at Garsington during the Great War, recalled Morrell as a

haggard old wreck in her dirty finery, plastered with badly-applied make-up, stumbling on her high-heels, weighed down with gimcrack jewels as she tottered away in search of young love with a rampant homosexual. (Seymour 1993, 291–2)

Curiously, rather than a part of another gossipy letter, it is a paraphrased speech prepared for The Memoir Club, which Seymour was shown by the couple’s son, Quentin Bell. The Memoir Club was established in 1920 by Molly MacCarthy for the group to have a chance and reminisce after the war (Lee 1997, 436). Since it featured readings from the various Bloomsbury Group members, and their recollections of the earlier years were shared with the rest of the group, it also had a performative element in it.

Finally, the second and third negative narrative strategies, so potent that they deserved a treatment of their own (Melišová 2022), may be more unconsciously used but are all the more pervasive in the long run. The second one, the employment of the lion-hunting terminology, is another attempt at reducing the complex role of patron, this time negatively and more successfully, into an easily navigable stereotype. The third one, the re-emergence of romans à clef in the creative oeuvre of modernists, is perhaps the most important for literary studies, since such works are deeply influenced by the patronage under which they were created and as published works hold more gravity as reflections of the writers on the topic.^[6]

5 Mechanisms of Narrative Strategies

It was already mentioned that understanding how post-Romantic patronage works allows us to identify the role the public plays in it. Since it was only hinted at so far, it needs to be fully explained why the artists’ stance towards patronage needs to be signalled to the public in the first place.

Modernism can be viewed, by and large, as an autonomous subfield of cultural production alternative to the mainstream, where the value of a work is measured much more by reputation than financial success, with special emphasis on quality, rather than quantity, of creative output (Bourdieu 1993). The modernist sphere of production is small enough and relies on personal relationships so that most of the participants know (of) each other and the line between personal and professional relationships becomes blurred. An effective network of connections needs to be established and maintained especially since the sources of employment and publication are scarce and, again, governed by exclusivity (Bourdieu 1996, 48–54). If the artists then feel that associations with certain people might damage their reputation, they can rest assured that a carefully dropped word or a “private” letter is sure to circulate among the gossip-thirsty public and “set the record straight.” The sum of one’s work, public and private behaviour, and perceptions of others can be viewed as comprising a narrative capital that helps the artists make sense of who they are as creators and can be employed where other capitals might be missing (Van den Braber 2021, 23).

The concepts of economic, social, and cultural capital, as described by Bourdieu in “The Forms of Capital,” are very useful for understanding the complexity of exchanges inherent to patronage (1986). Therefore, they still inform the discourse and are employed by patronage scholars such as Helleke van den Braber, who voices the fundamental concepts this article is based upon in her work (2021). Economic capital (money) being straightforwardly exchanged for cultural capital (works of art or creative “know-how”) is not just the basis of cultural commerce but also pre-Romantic patronage, the practices of which are largely abandoned in the modernist field of cultural production. Instead, Morrell and other patrons similar to her additionally operate with social capital – by facilitating meetings of emerging artists with established ones and offering access to one’s social network. However, Van den Braber complements these with the fourth, narrative capital:

From the moment patrons offer their support, creators can perceive and present themselves as ‘being of value’, as ‘supported’ – their work approved of, selected, or chosen. In this narrative, the gift can serve as an alternative form of applause, the patron acting to legitimatise the work of the artist. (Van den Braber 2021, 20–1)

This is especially useful for emerging artists seeking validation of their efforts which they cannot find in publication or public renown yet. When, however, one’s reputation, work, and respect in the field are enough to create a plausible narrative on their own or become a part of a collaborative circle offering alternative structures of support, an association with a patron can shift from an advantage to a burden.

It needs to be emphasised, however, that these exchanges work both ways and explain the perhaps less easily understandable motivation of patrons to possibly subject themselves to the treatment described here. Vera Zolberg recognises that collecting art (or in this case patronage), can be used as a means of solidifying one’s position (especially when it comes to pre-Romantic patronage) or changing one’s social position (post-Romantic patronage), such as in the case of Morrell, who wished to escape her constraining aristocratic background (1982, 15–7). She sought to exchange her social and economic capital, markers of her original status, for the cultural capital offered by the artists.

Bourdieu’s differentiation between embodied and objectified cultural capitals (1993 17) allows for an understanding of how previously unpublished authors, lacking any objectified capital, can be of interest to the patron. Since post-Romantic patronage no longer relies on the direct commissioning of artworks – objectified cultural capital – the “aura” of the author – their presence, knowledge, skill, and reputation, or, in other words, their embodied cultural capital – is enough to interest the patron and draw in other like-minded figures, thus establishing a community. Being a facilitator to this in turn generates narrative capital for the patrons which attests to their sense of belonging to a field in which they would not be accepted otherwise. Naturally, as could be seen in Morrell’s pronouncements, the understanding of these mechanisms is not usually voiced by the patrons. Rather than an attempt to consciously hide their motivation, it is another example of the misunderstandings arising from the covert nature of post-Romantic patronage.

The impact of the narrative strategies identified here is strengthened all the more by the fact that, since Morrell was not an author herself, others usually learn of her through these descriptions, which have a tendency to stand out. Even if there is an interest to find out more about Morrell and her activities, there is an already existent, unconsciously formed notion of her as an eccentric exploiter of others. Her negative image also reflects on patronage, which, instead of being viewed as an element supporting the alternative modernist economy described by Rainey, is dismissed and thus not studied in depth. If one, however, takes the pains to look closer, like the curious observer in “The Duchess of Newcastle,” rather than finding a vampiric monster feeding on the creative energies of others, one might discover an unconventional woman seeking to use the means available to establish a place in the world for herself. Much of modernist cultural productions is about the artists’ struggle to reach autonomy from the mainstream literary marketplace; the patrons’ attempts at escaping their rigid backgrounds should be viewed as a similar kind of effort.