Ellen Ash and Christabel LaMotte's indirect connection

Ellen Ash and Christabel LaMotte's indirect connection is shaped by the private letters of Randolph Henry Ash and by the choices made after his death. They do not meet in the evidence presented here; instead, Christabel addresses Ellen across the silence surrounding the affair, placing a sealed letter and the fate of her secret in Ellen’s hands. Ellen’s response—destroying one letter, keeping another, and recognizing Christabel as the mother of Randolph’s child—turns an unseen relationship into a consequential encounter between two women whose lives have been organized around the same man.

An Indirect Connection Through Letters

Christabel’s letter to Ellen arrives after Randolph’s death, when both women are old. Christabel opens by saying she believes Ellen already knows something of her, while acknowledging that Ellen may be receiving the letter as a complete surprise. The letter is therefore at once an introduction and a belated appeal: Christabel cannot address Ellen through a shared history or direct conversation, so she writes into the space left by Randolph’s silence.

The letter’s central gesture is an act of surrender. Christabel says she has written things for Randolph’s eyes alone and sealed them; Ellen may read the letter if she wishes, but Christabel hopes Randolph might have read it and decided what should happen. If he cannot or will not, she leaves the sealed letter as a hostage in Ellen’s keeping and says she is in Ellen’s hands. The wording gives Ellen authority over disclosure while exposing Christabel’s vulnerability: the woman who had remained absent from Ellen’s life now depends on her judgment.

That dependence has a longer history. Christabel recalls having done great harm without intending it and hopes that nothing irretrievable has been done to Ellen. She describes herself as living in a turret like an old witch and writing verses nobody wants, and asks Ellen to tell her what became of Randolph. The appeal joins personal remorse to a request for information, but it cannot repair the years in which the women knew nothing directly of one another. The letter is their closest approach to an exchange, and its form preserves the distance it tries to cross.

Ellen’s Response and the Letters’ Unequal Fates

Ellen considers Christabel’s letter amid several objects connected with Randolph: a packet of letters bound in faded violet ribbon, a bracelet made from their hair, his watch, an unfinished letter in his hand, and a sealed envelope. Trembling slightly, she takes up the letter addressed to her. The objects place her decision within the physical remains of her marriage, but Christabel’s words bring another claim into that intimate arrangement.

Ellen burns a separate letter from Randolph, holding it gingerly by a corner as if it were a stunned, biting creature. She turns it in a small fire with the poker until it becomes black flakes. She considers adding the sealed letter but lets the flames die instead. Her decision distinguishes between two documents rather than treating the papers as a single archive: Randolph’s letter, with its accusations and painful implications, will not persist; Christabel’s sealed communication is spared. Ellen believes neither Randolph nor Christabel would have wanted his letter to survive, while the sealed one remains for her to judge.

The decision does not bring relief. Ellen thinks that her life has been built around a lie, a house made to hold one. When she turns Christabel’s letter over, she howls and asks what she will be without Randolph. She recognizes that she had also misled her sisters by implying that she and Randolph were supremely happy and had simply been unlucky in having no children. Christabel becomes, in Ellen’s reckoning, Randolph’s true wife in one sense and the mother of his child, at least briefly. Ellen’s response holds grief and recognition together: the discovery alters her understanding of her marriage without erasing her love for Randolph.

Kinship, Transmission, and Literary Legacy

The connection between Ellen and Christabel extends beyond their correspondence into the later custody of Christabel’s papers. After Christabel died in 1890, her sister Sophia sent a package of papers and poems to her daughter May, who was Maud Bailey’s great-great-grandmother. Sophia explained that Christabel had wished May to have her papers and had believed in handing things on through the female line. The account places the papers within a family history marked by friction: the then Sir George disapproved of the marriage of first cousins, and the families did not get on. May kept the material, though the account gives no evidence that she took an interest in it or attended Christabel’s funeral.

That inheritance helps explain why the women’s literary histories are reconstructed through documents rather than through direct testimony. Maud says that her family deposited manuscripts, including works by Christabel, at the Women’s Studies Resource Centre at Lincoln; the family had also bought Blanche Glover’s journal in a Sotheby’s sale, without publicizing its importance. Maud raises the possibility that she may own the copyright in Christabel’s portion of the correspondence, but doubts that there was a will. The question of who can preserve, publish, or control the papers thus remains bound to the family line through which they passed.

The subject of transmission also appears in Randolph’s letter to Sophia, a child who sends him drawings of ducks and drakes. He replies that, as an old man without children or grandchildren, he treasures her gift and reciprocates with a drawing of the ash tree. He describes the tree’s place in Norse belief as the structure holding the world together and tells Sophia that she will grow wise, though for now it is her playing-time. This small exchange does not establish a direct relation between Ellen and Christabel, but it sharpens the contrast around inheritance and care: Randolph’s affectionate address to a child exists beside the concealed parentage and divided family history that his relationship with Christabel produced.

A Connection Recovered, Not Resolved

Christabel’s own account, written under cover to Randolph’s wife, calls the letter a kind of testament. She says that the two friends she trusted were Blanche Glover and Randolph, and that she loved both too well; she regrets less the lost days of passion than the old letters in which their minds recognized one another. Her account makes correspondence both the means by which intimacy was sustained and the fragile record through which it might later be known.

The connection reaches into the present through scholarship as well as inheritance. James Blackadder offers Roland Michell a full-time research fellowship on Randolph, funded by a Scottish philanthropic trust whose lawyer is obsessed with the poet. The offer signals that Randolph’s papers and literary reputation continue to attract institutional and private attention. Yet the histories of Ellen and Christabel are not made equivalent by that renewed interest: Ellen receives the letter and must decide what to do with it, while Christabel’s papers travel through a female line before becoming objects of scholarly custody.

Their indirect relationship is therefore defined by mediation—letters, sealed documents, family transfers, and later research—rather than by a shared scene. Christabel entrusts Ellen with a choice; Ellen preserves one letter while burning another; their descendants and scholars continue to handle the records. What passes between the women is neither a reconciliation nor a direct conversation, but a belated knowledge that revises Ellen’s account of her marriage and gives Christabel’s concealed history a route into the future.