Paul Lay speaks to David Waller, author of The Magnificent Mrs Tennant: The Adventurous Life of Gertrude Tennant, Victorian Grande Dame.

What inspired you to write a book about Mrs Tennant, she is a little-known figure?

It all started with a visit to a farmhouse in Surrey one dark, wet Sunday afternoon some six years ago. As I describe in the opening pages of the book, I had been invited down to have a look at some family papers that had been sitting undisturbed in the attic of the house for at least half a century. My friend and I pushed our way through the usual attic clutter – old record players, bicycles etc – to two large old chests. We opened them and found a huge stash of documents – diaries, literally thousands of letters, some of them dating back to the early 19th century, books, newspapers, personal mementos. Some of the bundles were labelled and I pulled one out and read: ‘Letters from Distinguished Persons, Do not Throw Away.’ I undid the bundle. There were letters from Oscar Wilde, Henry James, Gladstone, Disraeli, Balfour, Rodin, Watts, Browning, George Eliot, Henry Morton Stanley and other luminaries of late 19th-century European literary, artistic and political life. I knew immediately that I was on to something. The letters were addressed to Gertrude Tennant née Collier. There were also presentation copies of Madame Bovary, Salammbo and Trois Contes, each with an inscription from Gustave Flaubert to Gertrude. On a subsequent visit I found 24 letters from Flaubert to Mrs Tennant. It wasn’t clear at the outset precisely what or who my book would be about but I knew this was a rare find and it was my challenge to track down as much as possible about Mrs Tennant and her milieu.

How did you research the book?

The first task was to make sense of all the primary sources – the diaries and the personal letters and also the various lightly fictionalised accounts of my subject’s youthful encounters with Flaubert. At the same time I was looking through all the published sources, chiefly the biographies of Flaubert, which typically mentioned Gertrude in passing – and of Henry Morton Stanley, the great explorer who became Gertrude’s son-in-law. I soon discovered that Stanley, the man who traversed Africa several times, was afraid of only one human being in the world and that was his mother-in-law. Gertrude figures as something of a footnote in his life as well. My challenge was to put her in the foreground and to fashion an ‘intimate history’ of a woman who lived to be nearly 100 years old, from 1819 to 1918, living through a century of extraordinary social change and who knew so many of the major figures of the time. I found it striking that she lost six uncles in the Napoleonic wars and also a grandson in the First World War.

How did Mrs Tennant become this extraordinary society hostess?

After she was widowed in her early fifties, she was left alone with her children in a large house in Richmond Terrace, Whitehall. For the first time in her life she was rich and independent. She deployed both her money and her charm to turn the house into the kind of ‘salon’ she had frequented while growing up in Paris in the 1830s and 1840s. Gertrude’s daughter Dolly, painted by Millais and Watts, was very beautiful and entertaining and I’m sure many of the men who frequented the salon were captivated by her as well. Certainly it seems that Dolly had love affairs with the cabinet minister Sir George Trevelyan, as well as Andrew Carnegie, the industrialist, before she settled down with Stanley in 1890.

Tell us something about the extraordinary range of characters that became part of Mrs Tennant’s circle.

Probably the most important relationship was with Gustave Flaubert. They met at the beachside resort of Trouville in the summer of 1842, when Gertrude was 22 and Flaubert 20. Flaubert was an unhappy law student with aspirations to become a writer; Gertrude was an intelligent young woman of marriageable age. They forged an intense friendship and when they returned to Paris the young Flaubert became a regular guest at the Collier family apartment on the Champs Élysées. Gertrude left a poignant memoir of this time, including the circumstances of the death of Flaubert’s sister, Caroline, in 1846. Shortly thereafter Gertrude and family returned to England. Flaubert sent her a copy of Madame Bovary when it was first published in 1857: she wrote back, saying she detested it: how could he have squandered his talent? Flaubert seems to have been delighted with this response and they corresponded thereafter. In 1878, two years before Flaubert’s death, they were reunited in Paris, a meeting that prompted a flow of letters from Flaubert to Gertrude. Some of these were published in the 1890s, but around a dozen are printed for the first time in my book. In the 1880s the Richmond Terrace salon attracted a ‘high Bohemian’ crowd. Ned Burne-Jones turned up with his young nephew, who spent time writing stories about Dolly’s pets: the nephew was Rudyard Kipling. Wilde came along with Ruskin. In the 1890s guests included Mark Twain, Lord Kitchener and Alphonse Daudet, the French novelist.

How did you structure the book?

Her life fell into three unequal sections: her youth in raffish, expatriate society in Paris; a respectable quarter of a century as a wife, mother and all round 19th-century domestic goddess and then nearly 50 years as an increasingly grande dame.

What kind of reception did the book receive?

There were some very nice reviews. Among ordinary readers, women tended to love the book especially women of my mother’s age i.e. in their seventies. I’d love to think that was attributable to my enormous sensitivity as a writer, but actually Gertrude’s life story provides an unusual female vantage point on a whole century of social history. It is a narrative about coming to terms with the limitations of a woman’s position in 19th-century society.

What else are you working on?

I am working on the second draft of a screenplay of Mrs Tennant: the challenge is to capture the broad historical sweep while preserving the human drama of Gertrude’s key relationships, particularly with Flaubert. My life of Eugen Sandow (1867-1925), the Victorian strongman has also just been published (The Perfect Man: The Muscular Life and Times of Eugen Sandow, published by Victorian Secrets, was reviewed in the January issue of HT). Sandow is a very different subject from Gertrude Tennant, but they did meet. In 1897 Sandow opened his Institute of Physical Culture in St James’s and when Gertrude fell down the stairs and broke her arm, she went to visit him for treatment. I don’t think she ever invited him to her salon, however.

The Magnificent Mrs Tennant is out now in paperback.

Our Book Club recommendation for December is Map of a Nation: A Biography of the Ordnance Survey by Rachel Hewitt. Here the author discusses her work with Paul Lay.

What inspired you to write a book on maps? Tell us about the state of cartographical history.

As an enthusiastic hiker I’ve had a long-standing appreciation and love for Ordnance Survey maps. I remember being taught to map-read and navigate by my stepfather and the ability to translate the squiggles and numbers on the map into an imaginary picture of landscape was a real revelation to me. But, although that love of maps had been there for many years, my intellectual interest in the Ordnance Survey dates a little later from the end of my undergraduate degree in English literature. I’d developed a real love of Romantic landscape poetry. Then I discovered that the OS was founded in 1791, right at the beginning of the Romantic period. It seemed resonant that, at the precise moment that poets such as Wordsworth were metaphorically remapping the British landscape through poetry, that territory was being literally remapped by the OS. I wanted to investigate further, not only how those first maps were made, and why, but what sort of cultural impact the OS’s activities had.

Cartographical history is a wonderfully vibrant area. It benefits hugely from its hybrid nature: researchers come to map history from all sorts of backgrounds – from social and cultural history, from military history, from art history and literature and from non-academic areas too. This brings a real freshness to its methodology.

Who is the book aimed at?

I really hoped it would appeal to a wide range of readers: to those who, like me, love the OS primarily for its iconic folded maps and its association with rambling; but also to those who are interested in the history and culture of the French Revolutionary period and the Industrial Revolution. I really wanted to embed the OS in its historical and cultural context. The book is as much about national identity, the formation of the United Kingdom and the culture of patriotism as it is about copper-plate engraving, brass theodolites and triangulation. I hope it appeals to a general history readership as well as more specialised cartographic historians.

How did you research the book?

I started working on Map of a Nation after completing a PhD in Romantic landscape poetry and mapping, so a lot of my research for the book was able to springboard from that. But whereas my doctoral research was more concerned with general ideas of ‘mapping’ in the 18th century, the research for the book was more focused on specificities: the archives of the OS, their instruments, and methods, for example. I also wanted to attempt to bring to life the characters involved in the early OS: to try to piece together their backgrounds, obsessions and motivations. That was why the book has the subtitle A Biography of the Ordnance Survey: I wanted to tell the life of the institution through the lives of its most important personalities.

What does a map tell us about a nation and its people?

A national map is often an image of a particular conception of that nation. A wonderful book by Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood (1992), shows how, as Britain became more democratic, its maps changed to reflect that fact: coats-of-arms of local aristocrats, or even the monarch, were gradually displaced by images of the land itself. The period of Map of a Nation is the period of the birth of the United Kingdom and takes in the 1707 Anglo-Scottish Union and the 1801 Act of Union with Ireland. I was interested in how conceptions of national identity changed during that period and the role that maps played in cementing an idea of a united kingdom. For some, the OS – which mapped England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland – was an image of a happily united nation. Wordsworth used the OS in a poem as an icon of what he called ‘Britain’s calm felicity and power’.

What about the people you write about in your book?

The OS was established as a military survey and its chief personnel in its early years operated within a military context. They were mostly taken from the Engineering Corps or the Royal Regiment of Artillery. But I was struck by the way in which its directors were guided by motives that went far beyond military ones. The OS’s first real director was a man called William Mudge, who was descended from a remarkable Enlightenment family and numbered the portrait painter Joshua Reynolds, the actor David Garrick and the playwright Oliver Goldsmith among his family friends. This immersion in Enlightenment culture gave Mudge an expansive sense of the possibilities of the OS: he was intent on it becoming a national mapping agency, with responsibility to present British citizens with the first complete, accurate and up-to-date map of their nation. He always conceived of it as more than a military survey.