Elizabeth Bellamy - Marriage

Marriage

In Winter 1908, she becomes involved with a group of socialist poets, and upsets her parents by inviting them to tea. She also, under the influence of one member, spends over £4 on shoes for street children, then refuses to pay for them. Her father intervenes, and pays for the shoes. After one argument with her parents, she runs away from home to stay with her friend Henrietta Winchmore, and is only discovered after Rose is forced to tell Hudson where Elizabeth is staying. Her father visits, and shortly after, Elizabeth and fellow poet Lawrence Kirbridge have tea at Eaton Place.

While Elizabeth is reluctant to marry, the head housemaid and friend Rose, persuades her it is the right thing to do. She and Lawrence Kirbridge, the Cambridge-educated maternal grandson of a Dorset baronet, marry in June 1909. They take their honeymoon in Vienna, and set up home in Greenwich.

The marriage is an unhappy affair from the start, and Lawrence does not wish to consummate the relationship. He 'arranges' for his publisher, Sir Edwin Partridge, to make love to Elizabeth at a soiree the couple hosts. During Christmas 1909, Elizabeth informs her parents that her marriage has failed. The family solicitor, Sir Geoffrey Dillon, prepares for an annulment of the marriage on the grounds it has not been consummated. However, after an examination by a physician, it is discovered that Elizabeth is pregnant and she is forced by her father to divulge the identity of the father. In order to avoid a scandal, Lawrence is sent abroad with an allowance, and the Greenwich house is sold.

Later, Elizabeth Kirbridge gives birth to a daughter, Lucy Elizabeth, in a London nursing home. To avoid scandal and since Lawrence is the legal father, he is asked to attend the baby's christening. Following the ceremony, he is never heard from again. Elizabeth, lacking maternal feelings, is indifferent to the baby and content to have Lucy be brought up in the nursery by servants.