Free Among the Bohemians by Virginia Nicholson Page A

you – and love you so much?I know now what it is to be an abandoned female.I am an abandoned female.I’m not ashamed – of the things I’m doing.’…
    In their Alpine sanctuary the lovers feel invulnerable from the condemning, conventional world, able to celebrate their new-found liberty beyond the reach of ‘the established prohibitions of society’, the tattling busybodies; ‘We’re the rarest of mortals…’
    This sense of superiority to common humanity is most exaltedly expressed by the dancer Isadora Duncan, describing her first meeting with the actor and theatre designer Gordon Craig:
    Here stood before me brilliant youth, beauty, genius; and, all inflamed with sudden love, I flew into his arms with all the magnetic willingness of a temperament which had for two years lain dormant, but waiting to spring forth.Here I found an answering temperament, worthy of my metal.In him I had found the flesh of my flesh, the blood of my blood…
    … Hardly were my eyes ravished by his beauty than I was drawn towards him, entwined, melted.As flame meets flame, we burned in one bright fire.Here, at last, was my mate; my love; my self – for we were not two, but one, that one amazing being of whom Plato tells in the Phaedrus, two halves of the same soul.
    This was not a young man making love to a girl.This was the meeting of twin souls…
    Despite the Mills & Boon flavour of this encounter, in the context of pre-permissive society there is something courageous about Isadora’s certainty and idealism, her radiant belief in complete emotional, spiritual and sexual fulfilment.
    Rosalind Thornycroft was born in 1891.Her father, Sir Hamo, was an eminent sculptor many of whose busts and figures still stand to commemorate the great and the good of past centuries.The Thornycroft family lived comfortably in Hampstead; Sir Hamo and his wife, Agatha, were involved in the various liberal movements of the day – Fabianism, positivism, coeducation.They were ‘arty’, despised Philistines, and brought their childrenup in an ‘advanced’ way.When Rosalind – a fresh-faced ‘stunner’ of sixteen – met the magnificent Godwin Baynes at a Wagnerian singing party, she was bowled over by his Siegmund; soon afterwards there was a great snowstorm and Godwin took Rosalind tobogganing on Hampstead Heath.How could she resist when he picked her up in his strong arms and carried her over a snowdrift?

Isadora Duncan: ‘When she appeared we all had the feeling that God was present.’
    Love flowered.There were trips to the Russian ballet, a holiday with Arnold Bax soaking up the Irish twilight in the mountains of County Kerry, and happy Sunday afternoons with their Bohemian friends, laughing and singing – ‘everyone was either musical or literary or an art student’.Then they became engaged.Rosalind felt their love to be transcendent, and her faith in this was so powerful that she was able to persuade her parents to allow the pair to go – unmarried – to Paris together in the summer of 1912:
    I think [my parents’] ‘free’ attitude was based on an absolute belief in the pure and innocent behaviour of anyone brought up in the way I had been by them.I agreed with this view, but, convinced that we were a special case by virtue of our perfect love on the lines of German romanticism – (Wagner’s Ewig Einig Ohne Ende) – we felt we were justified in becoming complete lovers.I did not, however, confess this ‘marriage’ to Mother, although it was a way of life that was lived by many of our contemporaries of advanced people among Fabians and students.
    Back in England the pair set up home in Bethnal Green, where Godwin practised as a doctor, with his sister Ruth as ‘chaperone’.They were not legally married for another year.
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    The romanticism of Herminia Grey and Ann Veronica in fiction, or of Isadora Duncan and Rosalind Thornycroft in real life, runs like a seam of gold through Bohemia’s attitude to love, just as the same