The Red Rose Girls: Unraveling

1913 Christmas card from Elizabeth Shippen Green Elliott

'The shaky alliance between the women remaining at Cogslea was unraveling. In July 1913 Huger agreed that he and Elizabeth should spend some time there. Finally reunited after two painful years, the four women enjoyed what was to be their last time together as a family. The visit was a resounding success. When the Elliotts were leaving to return to Cambridge, Elizabeth extracted a promise that her three friends would come for an extended visit. Jessie and Henrietta were to come in September, but serious problems at Cogslea intervened and the visit was canceled.

Violet Oakley was having trouble finding a studio large enough to accommodate her enormous murals. There are two versions of what happened next. According to Violet, she was obliged to sell all her assets and purchase Cogslea in order to enlarge the studio. It is also conceivable that she wanted to stay in her home because she was apprehensive about moving her aging mother, who had been living with them. Jessie, Violet always contended, was supportive of this new arrangement and happily agreed to buy a quarter of the land and build an adjacent home on the property. Violet later assured her biographers that, when the new house was built, Jessie and Henrietta willingly moved out of Cogslea and into their charming new home.

However a letter from Elizabeth to Jessie and Henrietta tells a very different story:

'I don't believe you realize what it has meant to me not to have you here through September. We went away from Coglea in July confidently looking forward to it - and as for it seeming that I did not realize that you had left Cogslea and giving you my interest and sympathy - why it has never been out of my mind. If I have not said much about it in my letters it's because I can't write about what I feel so intensely - all the disagreeablenesses which brought it about and I don't suppose I know half of them for you never write about them.

Violet is a strange person - she wrote me the most intense letter after I wrote that we would not spend Christmas at Cogslea - but that you were coming to us. I'd like you to see it. One of those intense Christian Science letters implying that I had let myself be pressured by the thought that she wanted you two to leave Cogslea but she had tried with all her might that you would stay and she would build... I really feared that when she opened up the subject it would lead to a row for I would in all probability have told her how I felt about her attitude about not making the slightest suggestion that you stay with her during building... Violet is certainly a remarkable person and certainly has a dual personality. How can I feel as I do toward her uncanny inhuman side... and yet enjoy her and find her disarming and likeable too? You know how it is, for she's always been that way.'

To be continued

(Excerpts from "The Red Rose Girls: Art and Love on Philadelphia's Main Line" by Alice A. Carter.)