Victoria McCandless (Bella Baxter)—Sir Aubrey de la Pole Blessington

Bella Baxter / Victoria McCandless’s marriage to Sir Aubrey de la Pole Blessington is a passage from one form of dependence to another. She enters it hoping to escape her father and feeling happy on her wedding day; she leaves after sexual suffering, pressure to undergo an operation she does not need, and the discovery that her husband is to have a child with a servant. Her retrospective account presents the marriage not simply as a failed match, but as a relationship shaped by the limited choices offered to a young woman and by men who mistake control for care.

Courtship and the promise of escape

After her mother’s death, Bella Baxter / Victoria McCandless was sent to a convent school in Lausanne. The nuns taught her French, dancing and piano, and trained her in the manners of a lady; they also taught her to discuss events as Conservative newspapers reported them, on the assumption that husbands might value wives with some knowledge of the world. This education prepared her for marriage as a social role, rather than giving her independence. She describes her earlier upbringing as training for domestic service, followed by the convent’s preparation of her as a rich man’s decorative companion.

Sir Aubrey de la Pole Blessington was rich, famous and still handsome, and she was drawn to him for several reasons. He was taller than she was, and, despite his wounds, danced the waltz beautifully. Their appearance together attracted the attention of the other dancers. Yet her account also makes clear that marriage was an expected destination for girls her age, who were supposed to acquire husbands, homes and babies. She wanted to escape her father, who had provided the route by which she could marry. The wedding therefore carried real happiness for her, but that happiness rested partly on the hope that marriage would remove her from an intolerable household.

Intimacy, pregnancy, and medical pressure

The wedding-night experience overturned that hope. Only afterward did she understand why fellow officers called Sir Aubrey de la Pole Blessington both Thunderbolt Blessington and the Arctic Pole. Her account does not detail the encounter; instead, it records the name by which his emotional and sexual coldness was known, and her own immediate misreading of it. She thought the fault lay with her. That belief matters: the marriage leaves her interpreting her distress as personal failure rather than as evidence of her husband’s treatment of her.

Six months later, she had her third hysterical pregnancy and was asking for a clitoridectomy. Dr. Prickett told her that a skilled Scottish surgeon in London might perform the operation. The proposed procedure was not an independent choice made with full understanding: it was an intervention that Sir Aubrey de la Pole Blessington wanted, presented to her through a doctor who believed it would help. Her repeated pregnancies and the operation sought to address them show how the marriage’s private misery becomes a medical problem managed by men, while her own account of what she has endured is at risk of being discounted.

When Godwin Baxter visited her, he asked why she wanted the operation and questioned the explanation she gave. He connected her account of childhood, schooling and marriage to a lifetime of mistreatment by selfish, greedy and foolish men, and told her that the operation would not help. He also explained that Dr. Prickett genuinely believed in the proposed treatment, having himself been badly educated in the assumptions that made it seem beneficial. The exchange gives Bella Baxter / Victoria McCandless a judgment she had been unable to confirm for herself: her suffering is not proof that she is at fault. She wept with grief and gratitude, then told Baxter that she feared she would be driven mad if she stayed and asked where she could go.

Betrayal and departure

Baxter did not pretend that escape would be easy. Without a friend to shelter her, money, or experience of earning a living, he warned, leaving her husband would be suicidal. His warning identifies the material trap behind the marriage: recognizing mistreatment did not automatically give her the resources to escape it. She nevertheless understood his kindness as an opening, and when she later said goodbye, she left knowing that the problem was neither her imagined inadequacy nor an operation that could make the marriage right.

Two months later, the final opportunity to leave came. She was not pregnant and had never considered leaping from a bridge when she arrived in Glasgow by cab at 18 Park Circus. She had just learned that the husband who would not give her a child was about to have one with a servant ten years younger than she was. The discovery gives the marriage’s reproductive conflict a sharp reversal: the woman made to bear repeated hysterical pregnancies and urged toward surgery was not the only person in the household whose sexuality and fertility mattered. Sir Aubrey de la Pole Blessington’s expected child with a servant exposes the unequal terms on which he had treated his wife.

The meaning of the relationship

The marriage begins with a contradiction. Bella Baxter / Victoria McCandless loves Sir Aubrey de la Pole Blessington for his attractiveness, status and ability to offer escape, while the social expectations surrounding her leave few imaginable alternatives to becoming a wife. Her happiness on the wedding day is real, but it does not protect her from what follows. The relationship turns the promise of a home and family into sexual distress, recurrent pregnancies, and pressure for an operation that Baxter recognizes as harmful.

Her eventual flight is thus not a sudden rejection of a once-secure marriage. It follows a process of learning to name mistreatment, testing the possibility of leaving, and confronting the practical dependence that makes departure dangerous. The revelation about the servant supplies the immediate occasion, while the earlier history explains why staying has become untenable. In her account, the decisive change is that she no longer has to accept her husband’s wishes, or her own earlier self-blame, as the measure of what is right for her.