Bella’s marriage to Sir Aubrey Blessington

Bella’s marriage to General Sir Aubrey de la Pole Blessington is a turning point in her account of how the men around her shaped her life: what she first welcomes as escape and security becomes a source of bodily distress, exposing the harm concealed beneath the respectable institution of marriage.

Education and the decision to marry

Before the wedding, Bella was sent to a convent school in Lausanne. She describes her earlier upbringing as training her for domestic service and the nuns’ education as preparing her to be a wealthy man’s ornamental companion. By the time she returned, her mother had died. She could speak French, dance and play the piano, and had been taught to discuss current affairs through the perspective of Conservative newspapers—knowledge the nuns thought might appeal to a prospective husband. General Sir Aubrey de la Pole Blessington seemed to offer both status and escape. He was rich, famous, and still handsome; despite his wounds, he waltzed beautifully. Bella was tall, but he was taller, and the other dancers stopped to watch them. She recalls loving him for several reasons: girls her age were expected to have husbands, homes, and babies, and marriage also offered a route away from her father, who had arranged the opportunity. On her wedding day, she felt genuinely happy.

The wedding and its immediate aftermath

The celebration’s promise did not survive the wedding night. Bella recounts discovering why fellow officers called her husband “The Arctic Pole,” yet at the time she believed the fault lay with her. The contrast between her happiness at the ceremony and her self-blame afterward marks a sharp reversal: the marriage she had chosen in part to escape one form of dependence placed her in another, without giving her the knowledge to recognize the mistreatment as his rather than hers. Six months later, Bella experienced her third hysterical pregnancy and begged for a clitoridectomy. Dr. Prickett told her that a skilled Scottish surgeon in London might perform the operation, which the General wanted for her. The proposed procedure thus appears not as an independent choice made with full understanding, but as the outcome of her distress and her husband’s wishes.

Baxter’s intervention

Dr. Prickett’s arrangements brought Godwin Baxter to Bella. He asked why she wanted the operation and questioned the explanation she gave, listening as she recounted her childhood, schooling, and marriage. He told her she had been badly treated by selfish, greedy, foolish men, while also observing that those men had themselves been badly educated. He opposed the operation, explaining that it could not help her, and said he would communicate his view to Dr. Prickett even though he expected the doctor not to accept it. Crucially, he insisted that Bella had a right to know his opinion. The episode therefore links the marriage to the intervention that interrupts its immediate consequences. Bella’s account moves from a wedding she entered happily, through the bodily and psychological distress that followed, to a moment when someone questions the explanation she has been given and gives her information with which to judge the proposed treatment.