Dorothy Shakespear - Marriage

Marriage

On 20 April 1914, Dorothy married Pound despite her father's opposition who relented when the couple agreed to a church rather than a civil ceremony. The marriage ceremony took place in the morning with six guests in attendance; official witnesses were the bride's father and her uncle Henry Tucker. As a wedding present Olivia gave them two circus drawings by Pablo Picasso.

Dorothy and Pound moved into an apartment at 5 Holland Place, with Hilda Doolittle, recently married to Richard Aldington, living in the adjacent apartment. Hilda was shocked and hurt when Pound married Dorothy, and even more shocked to find he rented the apartment opposite at Holland Place. She and Dorothy were not on friendly terms, with Hilda writing of her, "she is unbearably critical and never has been known to make a warm friend with a man or woman. She loathes (she says) children! However that may be a little pose. She is a bit addictive to little mannerisms. I don't think she can be poignantly sensitive or she would never have stuck Ezra". When Dorothy came to in the small apartment she refused to cook—ever. In fact, she never cooked until she was to forced to during World War II. Pound cooked in the larger room and worked in a small better-lit room. He made furniture for the apartment where they stayed until 1919.

Although Dorothy and Ezra planned to honeymoon in Spain that September, the outbreak of World War I forced them to postpone. Instead they lived with W.B. Yeats at Stone Cottage for the winter, where Pound worked on proofs for the second issue of BLAST magazine. Of Dorothy, Yeats wrote, "she looks as if her face were made out of Dresden china. I look at her in perpetual wonder. It is hard to believe she is real; yet she spends all her daylight hours drawing the most monstrous cubist pictures." Poet Iris Barry, writing in the 1930s about the Pounds during this period, describes Dorothy as, "With came Mrs. Pound, carrying herself delicately with the air, always of a young Victorian lady out skating, and a profile as clear and lovely as that as a porcelain Kuan-yin".

From her father she learned landscape art but by 1913 her art showed influences of Japanese prints. Additionally, she was influenced by exposure to artists such as Wyndham Lewis and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and by 1914 had assimilated her own abstract Vorticist style. In 1915, she designed the cover-art for her husband's volume of poetry, Ripostes, and she designed for her husband Chinese characters to add to his manuscripts. Her work was simply signed as 'D.S.' and never exhibited.

Despite her fragile demeanor, when BLAST was published, Dorothy carried the brightly coloured avant-garde magazine conspicuously along Tottenham Court Road in an effort to promote the publication.