Marianne North: A Bright Performance

"Japanese Lily" by Marianne North

"Marianne North had set out to paint the fauna of the world in their own environments, and in 1885 the purpose of her travels was as complete as it need be. She felt more and more 'the need of perfect rest.' She could not even stand the fatigue of going down to Kew, and began to look about for 'some quiet cottage in a garden.' The following year she found the house she was seeking, at Alderley in Gloucestershire, and devoted herself to the making of a garden.

She experienced anew the pleasure of farming and the society of country families, which must have reminded her of her childhood at Rougham. Something of her old enthusiasm and humour returned. 'When are you coming to see the most perfect garden in England?' she wrote a friend.

Her sisters three daughters came to spend the Jubileee summer of 1887 with her. Her favourite nephew, Fred, spent the vacations there with his law books. 'Strength is gone and rest is coming,' she wrote to Sir Joseph Hooker, 'and come to some extent, enough to make life very enjoyable.' The enjoyment was short enough. In the winter of 1887-8 she fell ill. Her step-sister's daughter was with her through the worst of it, and another wrote that Marianne was 'about as ill as it is possible to be.' With remarkable tenacity she lived another two years, but died on the 30th of August 1890. She was fifty-nine years old.

Of her two public memorials, the gallery was standing at Kew. Her autobiography 'Recollections of a Happy Life' was still lying in manuscript, waiting for an editor to reduce it to proportions acceptable to a publisher. It fell to her sister to take on that task. "Your aunt had a wonderful brain,' wrote Catherine to her daughter more than a decade later. 'It is good to be reminded of this now that her personality is already indistinct.' But her personality shows through in her recollections as clearly as in the lines of her brush and the crisp colour of her paints. It was, as an objective assessor had said of her book, 'a bright sort of performance.'"

(Excerpt from the biographical note at the end of "A Vision of Eden: the Life and Work of Marianne North" written by Brenda E. Moon.)