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Mary Barnes Hutchinson was a fascinating and complex woman, to whom the British artist Henry Tonks once said, "What an unusual power you have, you are no ordinary person " (qtd. in Hone), a sentiment echoed by many, though certainly not all, of her contemporaries. Although she was a consistent figure in Eliot's life from 1916 until his last months, their remarkable relationship has not been explored to any great extent. This essay will shed some light on the woman herself and on that relationship.
Hutchinson was born in India in March 1889 (six months after Eliot's birth) to Sir Hugh Barnes and Winifred Strachey Barnes. After her mother's death, she and her brother were raised in Florence, Italy by her maternal grandparents, with lives that were privileged, cultured, and cosmopolitan. After these beloved grandparents died, the children attended boarding schools in England. In 1 909 she moved to London and in 1910 married the eminent barrister St. John (Jack) Hutchinson, a marriage that lasted until his death in 1942, despite her various affairs. A wealthy socialite and a member of the beau monde, she was famous for her elegant soirées at their homes Eleanor House and River House and for her stylish fashion sense, a source both of admiration and of envy.
Virginia Woolf, for example, often commented admiringly on her clothing, describing in her diary in January 1923 Hutchinson's "lemon-colored trousers with green ribbons" (Diary II, 223); in a letter to Quentin Bell in July 1933, she wrote, "Mary is to me ravishing in chalk white with a yellow turban," but couldn't resist adding that she looked "like an Arab horse, or a pierrot" (Letters V, 207). As David Bradshaw notes, Virginia regarded her as "a paragon of style," asking her in 1924 to write a book on fashion for the Hogarth Press; that the book never materialized was a source of some annoyance to Virginia (II, 7).
In 1914 Hutchinson began a twelve-year affair with the art critic Clive Bell and through him was included in the activities of the Bloomsbury group. However, she was always considered a bit of an outsider and was often the subject of jealousy, spiteful comments, and gossip. With the hope of winning their acceptance of...