Violet Hunt (1862-1942) had an affair with every man mentioned in this book’s subtitle, except one. Most readers can probably guess who the exception is. Suffice it to say that Hunt’s most noteworthy run-in with Henry James was that she was one of the theater critics who panned his 1895 play Guy Domville, the flop that finally convinced James he was no playwright. In her memoirs, Hunt described James being booed off the London stage on opening night during the curtain call: The audience’s derision ringing in his ears, James walked offstage “sadly and patiently, rather like an elephant who had had a stone put into his trunk instead of a bun.”
By quoting a remark like that every once in a while, Barbara Belford, a professor of journalism at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, illustrates her subject’s wit, sympathy, and humor. A good thing, too, otherwise we might wonder why we were reading this account of a life spent dining out, flirting, writing sloppy melodramatic novels, trading in vicious gossip, and husband-hunting among the already married.
Violet Hunt was the daughter of a novelist and a landscape painter who were friendly with the Pre-Raphaelite artists and writers of mid-nineteenth-century England. So friendly, in fact, that Margaret Hunt offered a willing Violet to John Ruskin as a prospective wife (Violet was thirteen at the time; fifty-three-year-old Ruskin decided against). So the taste for “inappropriate men,” as Belford puts it, was cultivated early. It left the