Violet Hunt (Isobel Violet Hunt) Biography

English novelist and biographer, born in Durham. The daughter of the minor painter William Albert Hunt, she studied art, and grew up among the Pre-Raphaelites of the ‘Rossetti circle’. A renowned society hostess, who encouraged D. H. Lawrence among others, and a friend of H. G. Wells and Henry James, she wrote much literary journalism and later campaigned actively for women's suffrage. Her close friendship with Ford Madox Ford is recorded in her autobiography, The Flurried Years (1926; US title I Have This To Say). She was probably the model for Florence in Ford's The Good Soldier (1915), and the two collaborated on Zeppelin Nights (1915), a book of historical sketches. She is best known for The Wife of Rossetti (1932), a biography of the tragic Elizabeth Siddal, based on her own memories. Her many novels include The Maiden's Progress (1894), Sooner or Later (1904), based on one of her love affairs, The White Rose of Weary Leaf (1908), and The Tiger Skin (1924). She also wrote the macabre Tales of the Uneasy (1911).