Rosamund Marriott Watson

Rosamund (Ball) Marriott Watson (1860–1911) was a Victorian poet, nature writer, and critic who early in her career wrote under the pseudonyms of Graham R. Tomson and Rushworth (or R.) Armytage.

Rosamund Ball, known as 'Rose', was born October 6, 1860, the fifth child of Benjamin Williams Ball, an accountant and amateur poet, and Sylvia (Good) Ball. Her older brother Wilfrid Ball became a painter of landscapes and marine subjects who helped introduced her to London's literary circles, including John Lane, the influential publisher of The Yellow Book.

Her mother died of cancer when she was just 13, and she would later recall that one consequence of this was that she had an unusual amount of freedom to pursue reading and writing. No records of any formal education for the young Ball have been found. She initially intended to become a painter but her father forbade it; her aesthetic sensibilities would later shape her writing about gardens and interior design.

Watson began her writing career in 1883, with a column on 'modern' fashion for the Fortnightly Review. She followed this up with other magazine writing, and by 1886 she had gotten her first poems printed in the American periodicals Scribner's Magazine and the New York Independent.

These early works were mostly published under one or other of the Armytage pseudonyms, which she adopted following her 1879 marriage to George Francis Armytage, a rich Australian. Their daughter Eulalie was born the following year, but by September 1884, when their second daughter, Daphne, was born, the couple had parted ways and would later divorce. Around 1886, she eloped with the artist Arthur Graham Tomson, shortly afterwards dropping the Armytage pseudonym in favor of 'Graham R. Tomson'. During her years with Tomson, they lived in London and often summered in Cornwall. She later divorced Tomson as well and lived with the novelist H.B. Marriott Watson until her death; they never married, although some of her obituaries referred to her as his wife. They had a son, Richard, who was killed in World War I.

Watson's major success came from her poetry, which stood in the lineages of Alfred Lord Tennyson and Dante Gabriel Rossetti without, at its best, being derivative. Technically accomplished, Watson deployed a wide range of poetic forms and methods, including sonnets, ballads, rondeaux, villanelles, poems in dialect, and translations. Her subject matter ranged from nature, the supernatural, legends, and folk tales to love, loss, and art itself. Although the poems can be mannered, her clarity of insight and feminist rereadings of traditional stories have kept her work fresh, while her penchant for formal experimentation presaged modernism.

...
Wikipedia