Page 26 - Life of Gertrude Bell

GERTRUDE BELL
a very bad attack this time, and I really don’t see at the present
time how I shall ever get them all done’. Another of her mother’s
school friends, Carrie Coxhead, invited her to spend part of her
summer holiday in 1884 at her home in Northumberland, and so
another family tie was re-established.
Her letters show a quickening sense of purpose and a develop­
ing critical faculty. *1 was very much disappointed with Uncle
Hugh’s books,’ she told her father after staying with Mary’s
brother, Hugh Shield. ‘I don’t think they arc at all interesting.
Also I don’t think much of his pictures. Of course I don’t know
but that’s what I think. Am I right? On the other hand he has
five Turner engravings, very large ones, they’re very beautiful.
One I recognized to be from a picture Ruskin talks about,
because of a peculiar shadow ... ’
She began to find her feet socially during her second year at
Queen’s College. ‘It’s a very disagreeable process finding out that
one is no better than the common run of people,’ she wrote after
staying with Mrs Richmond Ritchie, Thackeray’s daughter
Anne, and discovering through her that modesty was not
without attraction. She added with commendable candour: ‘I’ve
gone through rather a hard course of it since I came to College
and I don’t like it at all; still I am afraid there is a good deal more
to come yet.’ She went with Anne Ritchie to the National
Portrait Gallery to see a picture of Anne’s father. She met Fanny
Kemble, Mrs Siddons’s niece, who was well known to her step­
mother, and spent some time with her uncle Hugh Shield,
whose books she disapproved of, at his rooms in the Temple.
She had two history lecturers at Queen’s College, Mr de Soyres
and Mr Rankine, and her attitude to them showed signs of the
outspoken relationship that she was to have with authority for
the rest of her life. She sent her father an essay she had written
on Cromwell, together with Mr de Soyres’s comments. Her
master wrote:

There is an abundance of ability in this essay but it is rather
a brilliant piece of advocacy for Cromwell, like a clever
Barrister’s address to the jury, calmly assuming some things
really in doubt, pressing on all the adversary’s weak points
and ignoring his strong points. It is this drawback which
makes me hesitate to affix ‘Excellent’ though I have given it to
one or two essays distinctly inferior in talent.