Christabel LaMotte
PossessionChristabel LaMotte is a Victorian poet whose life and writing become the center of a history reconstructed from poems, private letters, and conflicting memories. Her work turns the figure of Melusina, a magical half-woman and half-snake, into a way of thinking about female power and vulnerability; her hidden relationship with Randolph Henry Ash and her later protection of their daughter Maia give that imaginative problem a personal history. The surviving record never makes her wholly transparent: her own letters explain much, but their hesitations and silences remain part of what the modern investigators must interpret.
Identity and Background
Born in 1825, Christabel was the younger daughter of Isidore and Arabel Gumpert LaMotte. Her father was strongly influenced by German scholarship on folk tales and biblical narrative while holding to a distinctively mystical Breton Christianity. Her mother’s steady religious faith shaped Christabel’s childhood. The family’s connections also joined religious and intellectual inheritances: Isidore’s mother was the sister of Raoul de Kercoz, a republican, anticlerical historian and folklore enthusiast who maintained the family manor at Kernemet. Christabel’s elder sister, Sophie, later married Sir George Bailey of Seal Close in the Lincolnshire Wolds.
Christabel lived with her parents until 1853, when money left to her by her maiden aunt Antoinette de Kercoz gave her a measure of independence. She then established a household in Richmond, Surrey, with Blanche Glover, a young woman she had met and who shared her artistic ambitions. That arrangement placed women’s work and companionship at the center of Christabel’s adult life, away from the conventional household her family might have expected.
Blanche painted large oil canvases, none of which survived, and made the intricate, mysterious wood engravings that illustrated Christabel’s books. Their collaboration encompassed Tales for Innocents, Tales Told in November, and Christabel’s religious lyrics, Orisons. Blanche is believed to have encouraged Christabel to undertake her ambitious epic, The Fairy Melusina. The partnership was therefore not merely domestic: it joined artistic labor, shared independence, and the making of a public body of work.
Poetry and the Figure of Melusina
The Fairy Melusina retells the story of a magical woman who is half human and half snake. Its design is described as elaborate and densely worked, and it attracted admiration during the Pre-Raphaelite period. Swinburne praised its vigor and venom while observing that it lacked conventional narrative momentum. Such responses register the poem’s strangeness as part of its achievement: its force lies less in straightforward action than in the pressure of its images and the complexity of its central figure.
Christabel’s own account of how she would write Melusina clarifies her artistic method. Rather than inhabiting the heroine’s skin in a first-person voice, she would view her as a creature at once powerful and frail, afraid of returning to the air from which she came and of being finally annihilated there. This perspective keeps the heroine both near and strange. Melusina is not reduced to an emblem or made fully knowable; she is seen as a being whose power carries the possibility of loss.
Ash’s response to the poem offers a formulation Christabel accepts and enlarges. She recognizes in her Melusina a combination of the orderly and humane with the unnatural and wild: a founder of the hearth who is also a destroying demon. She pointedly adds that the figure is female, a feature Ash has not remarked upon. The correction matters. It directs attention to the poem’s gendered double image, in which domestic creation and threatening force belong to the same woman rather than to opposing characters.
The poem’s treatment of folklore also brings inherited stories into contact with contemporary ideas about women and authority. During a Black Nights gathering at Kernemet, Ash interprets a tale as an expression of fear of women and of passion, intuition, and imagination, while also reading it as a survival of older female divinities displaced by Christianity. Christabel responds through her knitting, first working faster and then setting it aside as the discussion becomes physically charged. Her cousin Gode tells the story; she sees her father take Christabel’s hand and hold it, and Christabel allows him to do so before clinging to him after the tale. In this scene, oral storytelling, bodily response, and the argument over female power meet without being resolved into one authoritative explanation.
Correspondence and the Relationship with Ash
Christabel and Ash first appear in the record of a breakfast at Crabb Robinson’s, attended by literary figures including Mrs Jameson and Mr Bagehot. Ash is present without Ellen, who is indisposed. Christabel, called the Princess in the account, speaks sensibly with him and professes admiration for his poetry. The diarist, by contrast, doubts Ash’s seriousness and finds his poetry inferior to Alfred Tennyson’s. From its first traces, their association is refracted through other people’s judgments as well as through their own writing.
Their correspondence eventually comes to light in two neat bundles of open letters wrapped in oiled silk and tied with black ribbon. The letters carry different hands and addresses: Christabel’s are signed from Bethany on Mount Ararat Road in Richmond, while Ash’s bear the address of 29 Russell Square, London. The material arrangement makes the discovery tangible, but the letters also answer a larger biographical absence. A modern researcher argues that writers’ collected letters and biographies always leave something out, often because letters have been destroyed; these papers may be the crucial surviving record of what mattered most to Christabel.
Christabel’s letters show a writer who resists being separated from her work. She admits that her family history is running into a discussion meant to concern the Melusina epic: her sister Sophie has little interest in such matters, and family members resent the secluded life Christabel has chosen. She explains that the poem and her life are intertwined, and that she trusts Ash with the connection. The letter is both an account of her artistic aims and an act of intimacy, making the boundary between literary exchange and personal confidence difficult to maintain.
That intimacy is also a source of alarm. Christabel describes herself as a voice that should remain small and still, yet says she owes Ash an explanation that she must not give and must nevertheless provide. In another letter she recalls walking from Mount Ararat Road to the Tempting Knoll, with Dog Tray circling and growling at Ash. She wonders whether the two were godlike, as Ash had promised, and whether a touch of their fingers briefly arrested universal time. At the same time, she asks whether they would not prefer the freedom of the white page and whether their primordial innocence is already lost. The correspondence keeps desire and restraint together: writing makes a meeting possible, but cannot protect either writer from what the meeting means.
Separation, Return, and the Missing Year
The later record leaves a conspicuous gap between July 1859 and the summer of 1860. During those months Ash published nothing and wrote few letters; those that survive are dated from Bloomsbury. There is no record that he was away from home. Christabel’s apparent absence around the time of Blanche’s death had earlier led LaMotte scholars to suppose that the two women had quarrelled. With the new documents, that explanation looks different, although the reason for Christabel’s disappearance remains unclear. The blank in the chronology does not disappear when new evidence is found; it becomes newly charged with possibilities.
When Christabel arrives at Kernemet, she has written to ask for a home for some time but has not permitted her hosts to discuss the reason. Her father explains that he offered sanctuary and that Gode soon enlightened him, while leaving open whether Christabel might eventually turn to Gode. The household understands her need as urgent, but the account preserves the limits of what they know and what she is willing to say.
Christabel then disappears, and her return is recorded by Sabine as an unsettling reversal. She comes back to the manor in daylight, after the family has been discussing where she might have gone, including whether she travelled in a cart or the innkeeper’s trap. She is thin and frail, tightly belted, and pale; her body appears sharply reduced, and she has cut off her curls, leaving short, dull spikes. The change makes her return look almost like the arrival of a revenant, but the narrative does not turn that appearance into a supernatural explanation. It presents physical transformation as evidence of an ordeal whose causes remain partly concealed.
The family’s uncertainty is central to the way Christabel’s story is told. They offer shelter, observe her changed body, and try to infer what she intends, but her own silence keeps the decisive facts out of their reach. The missing year and the altered appearance therefore work together: the first withholds a sequence of events, while the second shows that the absence has left a visible cost.
Maia, Secrecy, and the Later Life
Christabel’s later letter to Ash reveals that they have a daughter, Maia, who is well, married, and the mother of a son. She sends Ash a picture and tells him that Maia resembles, she likes to think, both her parents, although Maia knows neither of them as her parent. The disclosure changes the meaning of the earlier secrecy: what the correspondence had kept private was not only a love affair but also a child’s concealed parentage and a life shaped by that concealment.
Writing to Ash when he is very ill, Christabel recalls her anger, love, and fear in language that joins several relationships rather than separating them. She describes herself as an old witch in a turret, writing verses by permission of a brother-in-law and living as a dependent on her sister’s financial good fortune. She remembers the rage, spite, and love she had felt for Ash, for Maia, and for Blanche. Her self-description sets poetic work beside diminished social independence, while the address to Ash brings back an intimacy that time and illness have not erased.
Christabel explains the decision she had kept secret: she feared that Ash and his wife would want to take Maia and raise her as their own. Maia was hers, she writes, because she had borne her. The fear is not presented as proof that Ash would have acted in that way; it is Christabel’s account of what she could not risk. Her decision protects the bond she claims as a mother, but it also leaves Maia without knowledge of either parent and Ash without a recognized relationship to his daughter.
The letter does not end in a simple reconciliation or a recovered family history. Christabel offers Ash a blessing and asks his forgiveness, acknowledging that he would have cared for her and Maia, while confessing that she could not entrust Maia to the possibility of losing her. The fragmentary ending leaves the protective decision intact even as it exposes its cost. Across the novel, Christabel’s poems and letters preserve a voice that is at once candid and guarded: she can interpret the forces shaping her life, but she also determines which truths are disclosed, when they are disclosed, and who is permitted to know them.
