Catherine Gladstone - Genius

Genius

"Catherine Gladstone", wrote Masterman, "was one of those informal geniuses who conduct life, and with complete success, on what the poverty of language compels me to call a method of their own."

She was "like a fresh breeze" wherever she went and could, wrote a friend, grasp the subject of a discussion in "a few minutes' airy inattention". Unlike her husband, she was a notoriously untidy person, habitually leaving her letters strewn on the floor in the well-founded faith that someone would eventually pick them up and post them. Her chests of drawers were similarly messy, and she was rarely much bothered with fancy attire. "What a bore you would have been," she teased her husband, "if you had married someone as tidy as you are."

If her own life was always somewhat dishevelled, she went to great pains to improve the lives of others as a founder of convalescent homes, orphanages and the like. "Few people", wrote Masterman, "can have given so much of themselves to so many, and can have been directly responsible for more practical and effectual enterprises. This seems to have been achieved by a mind that kept the thread of its intentions through a series of inspired impulses and improvisations sustained, it should be said, by a circle of devoted people whose minds worked on more conventional lines."