Laurence Housman

Clemence Housman, Writer and Engraver.

1861-1955.

The Werewolf | The Life of Sir Aglovale de Galis | Unknown Sea

Clemence Housman was the third child in the Housman family of seven. She was two years younger than A. E. and four years older than Laurence, with whom she spent almost the whole of her long life. She died aged 94. From the family home in Worcestershire, Clemence and Laurence went to London in 1883 to attend art college, Clemence to learn wood-engraving, and Laurence drawing. Among their fellow-students at the Kennington School of Arts and Crafts and the Miller's Lane School in South Lambeth were Ricketts and Shannon.

Thus began twenty-five years of London life; during the first part of this period Clemence and Laurence made considerable reputations for themselves as artists and writers, Clemence with her brilliant engravings and three novels, Laurence as a writer and illustrator of his own and others' books. They met all the members of the Art Nouveau movement and the literary coteries of the day. The second part involved them actively in the battle for Woman Suffrage, to the extent that Clemence served a week's sentence in Holloway prison for her resistance to paying house-tax, the battle-cry being "No taxation without representation." But after this she withdrew from public life, becoming the reserved but totally caring presence behind Laurence and his work for the rest of their lives.

Clemence published her three books during the London years. The first was The Were Wolf, published in 1896 by John Lane; in his autobiography, The Unexpected Years, Laurence says that it was composed to amuse her fellow students. It is not, however, a hastily dashed-off horror story, but a work of art of some beauty and merit. The tale, of novella length, takes place in a unnamed snow-covered Nordic land, and its theme is Clemence's preferred one of salvation of the hero's soul through vicarious suffering and sacrifice (called by Laurence her 'inborn appetite'), in the Christian struggle between good and evil.

Her second book, The Unknown Sea, was a full-length novel, published by Duckworth in 1898. The setting for this was the wild sea-coast of a southern land, and an offshore island guarded by savage rocks and tides, with a secret interior bay, the haunt of a sea-witch. The hero, named Christian as in The Were Wolf, fights to save her soul, successfully but at the cost of his own life. The supernatural elements are skilfully interwoven with details of the lives of the people of the fishing village where part of the action is depicted, and the description of the island and sea are remarkably fine in their Swinburnian ebullience.

Thirdly, in 1905 appeared The Life of Sir Aglovale de Gaul, published by Methuen, the most ambitious of Clemence Housman's works, and considered by Laurence to be a masterpiece that far excelled any of his own books. Since Laurence was not the greatest of writers, this seems a fair enough judgment. Clemence was a devotee of Malory, and for her chief character she took one of the knights in Morte D'Arthur. who receives merely brief mention there, and told his story as she felt it to have developed - the life of a man deprived of due affection in childhood, embittered and fallen into evil ways, then repenting, practising self-abnegation, and, finally, faced with death, regaining hope, or rather, losing his belief in the inevitability of hell.

Laurence recorded that the book took Clemence fourteen years to write, with considerable difficulty. The style is elaborately poetic as in the other works, full of archaism and arcane words, with notes referring to passages in Malory. But the psychiligy and the passionate emotions are direct, original and moving, even apparently causing disapproval in some quarters on publication owing to their forthrightness. Laurence never lost his admiration for this book, spoke of it in radio talks in the early 1950's, and arranged for its reprinting in 1954, the year before Clemence's death.

edited by Ernest Rhys and C. A. Dawson Scott, and published in New York in 1923. It is the strange tale of a spiritual conflict between as unnamed king and his half-brother, in a desert country of red sand. It could quite easily pass for one of the prose poems of Oscar Wilde.

Clemence helped her brother with ideas for a number of his own short stories but her activities after Sir Aglovale were concentrated on more domestic occupations - embroidery (she had helped to make the Suffragist banners), cookery and gardening.

Her engravings are probably her most important contributions to art. She obtained employment as an engraver after two years' training, with the weekly Graphic, the Illustrated London News and other journals, working in an office in Chancery Lane; until Laurence made a name for himself by illustrating and writing she supported them both. She also engrave his illustrations to his own early books of fairy tales and legend, and for such works as Christian Rossetti's Goblin Market and Shelley's The Sensitive Plant, now much sought-after by collectors. James Guthrie said of her work that "it is an admirably balanced art, completely under control, unconscious of its own perfection, belonging to its own particular time and place, adapted to a single purpose. In technical range no engraver has carried the art further." The Print-Collectors' Quarterly, April, 1924.

But after making a series of illustrations for a description of Chipping Camden in the early twenties she laid her tools aside. Poor eyesight had compelled Laurence to relinquish his drawing much earlier than this.

From 1924 onwards Laurence and Clemence lived in Street in Somerset, in the house that Laurence had built close to the home of their friends, the Clark family. Here Clemence died in 1955; her ashes are buried in Smallcombe Cemetery, Bath, close to the memorial erected to the Housman family by its most renowned member, A.E.

Text of "The Were Wolf"