Edna Clarke Hall, aged sixteen, ca. 1895. Photograph courtesy of Abbott and Holder Ltd.
The artwork of Edna Clarke Hall was born out of a kind of fixation more often associated with outsider artists, but Hall herself began as something of an insider. Accepted to London’s prestigious Slade School of Fine Art at just fourteen years old, she studied under the painter Philip Wilson Steer and became the favorite student of the school’s director, the renowned drawing instructor Henry Tonks. Many of her peers would go on to be celebrated artists—the stage designer Albert Rutherston, the painter Arthur Ambrose McEvoy, the sibling portraitists Gwen and Augustus John—and Hall seemed destined for similar success. But her fortunes changed six years later, with her marriage to William Clarke Hall, a lawyer thirteen years her senior with an affinity for young girls. (The poet Ernest Dowson once described him as a “devout follower of the most excellent cult of La Fillette.”)
Hall’s husband had been a friend of her father, the reverend Benjamin Waugh, a well-known campaigner who founded the organization that later became the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. William had also dedicated his legal career to children’s advocacy, focusing in particular on legislation to preserve the purity of young girls, like a bill raising the age of consent to twenty-one. (Though he also advocated prosecuting underage girls for their own abuse at the hands of older men. “Girls under 16 years of age,” he wrote in his book The Law Relating to Children, “are frequently of the most depraved character, and often at least equally guilty with the boys and men who yield to their solicitations.”) This vocation did not, however, dissuade him from proposing to Hall, a sixteen-year-old whom he’d known since she’d turned thirteen.
William’s “Lewis Carroll-like inclinations,” as the historian Max Browne terms them, made it “almost impossible to accept the girl he fell in love with as a woman.” His affection for Hall waned shortly after their wedding. “In the first months of marriage,” she confessed in her unpublished autobiography “The Heritage of Ages,” “I was left standing like a confused child by an unkindness I could not interpret.” Though William had initially supported Hall’s artistic ambitions, he began to discourage her artistic practice in favor of more traditional housewife pastimes. Holed up in their mansion, Great Tomkyns, in Essex, she felt “deserted,” isolated and adrift without her art. It was around this time that she first began to sketch scenes from Wuthering Heights, the book on which she would ruminate for the next three decades of her life.
Edna Clarke Hall (1879–1979), Untitled, ca. 1920s, etching. Collection of Richard Clarke Hall, © the Estate of Edna Clarke Hall; photograph courtesy of Richard Clarke Hall/Abbott and Holder Ltd.
