Introduction

Lilian Isabel Fox was the daughter of Robert Fox. She married the Irish poet and playwright (Frederick) Herbert Trench (1865–1923) in 1891 and they had five children. KM had possibly encountered the couple as early as 1910, when both she and Herbert Trench were contributing to the New Age. By the time the article ‘The Staging of Plays, And a Conversation with Mr. Herbert Trench’ by T. Martin Wood had appeared in the New Age on 2 June 1910, KM had already met the editor A. R. Orage and contributed four of her Bavarian stories.

In 1901 Herbert Trench’s translation of Dmitry Merezhkovsky’s 1895 novel, Death of the Gods, had been much admired. His early writing career and especially his two poetry volumes, Deirdre Wedded and other Poems (1900) and New Poems (1907), marked him out as a ‘mystical poet’. Joseph Holbrooke’s 1907 Symphony no. 2, Apollo and the Seaman (Dramatic Symphony, Opus 51), set Trench’s best-known and most anthologised poem, ‘Apollo and the Seaman’, to music. Some of Trench’s other poems were set to music by Arnold Bax. From 1909 to 1911 Trench was artistic director of the Haymarket Theatre in London, where his productions of King Lear and Maeterlinck’s The Blue Bird were well received. In 1911 the couple moved to Settignano, near Florence. As a result, his later poetry collection, Ode from Italy in Time of War (1915), was inspired by their life in that country. His final volume of poetry, Poems, with Fables in Prose (1918), garnered little critical attention.

[August 1919] [ATL]

2 Portland Villas

East Heath Road

Hampstead NW3.

Dear Mrs Trench,

It is most kind of you and your husband to ask me to come & stay with you in October. I should love to: thank you most sincerely. I ought to tell you that Ive been ill for nearly three years & am only getting better. That means I cant walk very much or climb & have to go slow. It doesn’t mean anything more – I promise you I never wear a little shawl, or whimper faintly or ask for a cup of Bengers…

I am going over to France in September – Will you be in London before then? It would be very nice if we could meet.