Marriage and Family
On 13 June 1903 Goddard married her friend John Ellingham Brooks, an unsuccessful pianist and translator who was in deep financial difficulty. He was homosexual, and the bisexual Goddard never revealed exactly why she married him. Her biographer Meryle Secrest suggests that she was motivated by concern for him and a desire for companionship, rather than the need for a marriage of convenience. They quarrelled almost immediately when she cut her hair and ordered men's clothes for a planned walking tour of England; he refused to be seen in public with her dressed that way. Chafing at his desire for outward propriety, she left him after only a year and moved to London. Brooks spent the rest of his life on Capri (where he died in 1929) and, for a while, lived there with E. F. Benson, author of the Mapp and Lucia novels.
Read more about this topic: Romaine Brooks
Famous quotes containing the words marriage and/or family:
“With my desire to write he seemed in full sympathy, and in urging our early marriage he argued that my first necessity was leisure in which to develop and to master my craft. It appeared to me that with such a man as teacher and guide I could not fail, and it was in a queer mixture of young love and vaulting ambition that I became a wife.”
—Rheta Childe Dorr (1866–1948)
“While one family is well-fed and clothed, a thousand others grumble.”
—Chinese proverb.