The Quite Extraordinary Mrs Ross

Or: How to triumph as the Social Queen of Tuscany!

Janet Ross, by Lord Leighton

‘We had come through the crowded streets of Florence out into the open country and up through the carefully tended olives and vineyards of Poggio Gherardo, to the huge wooden door of the villa...the fire in Aunt Janet’s hearth never goes out and it is made of olive boughs and the ash of the olive is very sweet to smell and very white to look at.’

‘Aunt Janet’ was the redoubtable Mrs Ross. ‘Handsome … [with] classical features and … thickly marked eyebrows accentuating the earnestness of her gaze’, Janet Ross was, according to her niece Lina Waterfield, ceaselessly active, practical, and as reliable as clockwork. Despite an irresistible joie de vivre and an exceptional talent for friendship, she apparently had no understanding of romantic passion, only limited imagination, and curiously little appreciation for beauty (she was apparently unmoved by the beautiful views surrounding her house, Poggio Gherardo). The art historian, Kenneth Clark, who knew her at the end of her life , described her as ‘the most completely extrovert human being I have ever known … her passions had passed like water off a duck's back.’ Formidable yet approachable, cultured but not erudite, she was an unconventional and vital Victorian woman who used her privileged social standing, intellectual background, and attractive appearance to achieve the fullest life available to her.

This remarkable woman was born Janet Duff-Gordon in London in 1842, the daughter of Alexander Cornewall Duff-Gordon, and his wife, Lucie. Her parents moved in prominent social and literary circles: her father was from a patrician family which had fallen on hard times, her mother was the only daughter of the jurist John Austin and the translator Sarah Austin. Janet spent her childhood as ‘a spoiled and rather lonely child’. She did not seem to make friends of her own age, preferring the company of her parents’ circle: celebrities such as the Hon. Caroline Norton, William Makepeace Thackeray, Tom Taylor (Editor of Punch), and Thomas Carlyle (whom she disliked, considering him to be rude to her mother).

Soon after moving from central London to Surrey in the early 1850s, the Duff-Gordons realized that they had neglected their daughter's education. They hired a German governess and then sent Janet to spend a year at a school in Dresden; at the age of 14, in 1856, she was taken to Paris to learn French. Although she was a natural linguist, it was too late for education to turn her into a model Victorian maiden. A daring enthusiast for outdoor sports, especially riding, hunting, and fishing, Janet Duff-Gordon had developed into a highly unconventional young woman, with a free and easy manner which offended society ladies. She cultivated an extraordinarily diverse collection of men friends, addressed her father as ‘dear old boy’, and moved with a staggering lack of awe among a glittering circle of artistic, literary, and political celebrities. She picnicked on the River Mole with the artist Millais and spent a winter with the Tennysons, becoming devotedly attached to the invalid Mrs Tennyson. She rode with the Duke of Beaufort's hounds and was sketched by G. F. Watts for the frescoes commissioned for Bowood House. The writer George Meredith (who, Janet later claimed, had fallen deeply in love with her) portrayed her as Rose Jocelyn in his semi-autobiographical novel Evan Harrington (1860).

At a dinner in 1860 Janet Duff-Gordon met Henry James Ross, a friend of the explorer and archaeologist, Sir Austen Henry Layard. His tales of pig-sticking in Egypt proved to be irresistible, and she invited him to stay at her parents’ house in Esher. Here they hunted together, and, ‘impressed by his admirable riding, his pleasant conversations, and his kindly ways’, she accepted his proposal of marriage, despite his twenty years' seniority. She was only eighteen, but the appeal of Eastern adventure, and the chance to follow in her mother’s footsteps, may well explain Janet's surprising choice. They were married at Ventnor on the Isle of Wight on 5 December 1860 and then departed to take up residence in Egypt. After the couple landed in Alexandria in January 1861, she immediately began to learn Arabic from her house-boy and visited Cairo. She rode desert races against Egyptian pashas, travelled by camel to see the Suez Canal under construction, and acted as the Egyptian correspondent for The Times.

By the mid 1860s the bank Briggs & Co, in which Henry Ross was a partner, had hit financial difficulties; the couple decided to cut their losses, give up the house in Alexandria, sell the furniture and retire to England. Ross sent Janet on ahead to Florence to wait for him as it would be warmer than England and she had friends there, Sir Henry and Lady Elliot. Sir Henry was at that time the British Ambassador to Italy, so Janet was immediately launched into the centre of Anglo-Florentine society. The Rosses were never to leave.

At the time of their arrival, Florence was not only a major centre for Anglo-American expatriates but was also, for a short time, the capital of the newly reunified Italy. English writers and artists had been visiting Florence for centuries, but the community expanded rapidly from the 1840s, when Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Fanny Trollope and her sons arrived. Over the next fifty years, the city and its surroundings would become a haven for intellectuals, and in particular, a refuge for those whose sexual preferences made them uncomfortable in their own land. There were additional advantages – the climate suited invalids, and one could manage to live well on very limited means. In 1877, Henry James wrote that one could rent a villa with a tower, a garden chapel and 30 windows for as little as $500 per annum. As Shelley wrote, Florence was the ‘paradise of exiles’. The city did not suit everyone – there was little attempt made by the incomers to learn Italian or to mix with the locals, and Walter Savage Landor described it as ‘the filthiest capital in Europe.’ But in the 1870s, it is estimated that some 30,000 of the population of 200,000 were British or American. By 1911, the British community alone living in and around Florence had reached 35,000, and of course there were just as many Americans, plus a smattering of Europeans, particularly Poles and Russians. There was an English bank, several English doctors, chemists and dentists. You could buy tea, tweeds, mackintoshes. For the artists among them, Molini’s stocked Reeves’ colours, paintbrushes, pens and ink. There were several English language publications such as the Florence Directory and the Florence Herald, to allow you to keep up to date with society’s comings and goings. Living was cheap, servants were easier to find and more amenable, and British and American spinsters and widows could swap suburban digs for top floor apartments with amazing views.

By September 1869 the Rosses had settled into an apartment in Florence right on the banks of the Arno, where they mixed in Anglo-Florentine literary, artistic, and social circles; in the early 1870s they rented a villa just outside the city at Castagnolo (owned by the Marchese della Stufa, who became Janet’s very close companion, and possibly her lover). In 1888 they bought their own property, near Settignano, south of Florence. It was Poggio Gherardo, an old castle with a romantic history, and here Henry and Janet spent the rest of their lives. It is an austere plain building, with crenelated battlements and a lookout tower – more like a castle than a home. Legend has it that this was one of the two villas in which the tales that make up Boccaccio’s Decameron were first told, by young nobility fleeing a plague in Florence.

By the 1880s the Italians had taken control of Rome, which became the nation’s capital, and Florence’s political influence began to wane. A quieter country life suited Henry Ross, who wanted to cultivate orchids, and Janet also learnt to enjoy more peaceful pursuits. She studied the agricultural life of Tuscany, helping out with the olive and grape harvests and collecting Tuscan peasant songs, which she sang to visitors, accompanying herself on the guitar. Mrs Ross established herself as a fashionable hostess in the Anglo-Florentine literary world: her prestige is demonstrated by the part she played in looking after the aged W. E. Gladstone on his final visit to Florence. Her writings began to be published - in 1888 she published Three Generations of Englishwomen, a triple biography of her mother, her grandmother (Sarah Austin), and her great-grandmother (Susannah Taylor of Norwich): based on and containing family papers, it remains the most important source for the lives of these three women of letters.

Madge Symonds, the best friend of Janet’s niece Lina and daughter of the author John Addington Symonds, wrote a memoir fondly recalling her visits with her father and later with Lina to Poggio Gherardo. She remembered that Janet was ‘impatient of all social bores, and vehemently intolerant of fools…she showed the utmost tenderness for all sick and ailing persons. How often had she gone down from her roomy villa to some hot fever bed in lodgings or in a hotel in Florence and packed and brought back with her and herself nursed back to a new life some suffering creature...If one had once become the privileged guest of the villa, one must expect to see little or nothing of the society in the city. The City might come up to the villa, and it did come in very great crowds on Sunday afternoons, but down to the drawing rooms of the city one very rarely went except to visit its churches and its picture galleries and to hurry home with some rushed shopping done.

Janet Ross (on the right) with Henry and Lina

It was the combined writing talents of Madge and Lina which brought Janet into contact with the publisher Joseph Dent - he had commissioned them to write a couple of books for his Medieval Towns Series - The Story of Assisi and The Story of Perugia. They found the writing process stressful and took refuge at Poggio Gherardo, where Dent pursued them, arriving with his wife, in the summer of 1899. There Janet spotted an opportunity. Lina wrote ‘Aunt J has got him into her claws and she’s going to make him ‘pay up’ for any work she does for him!’. Dent had tried to persuade Lina to write a book on the delicious Tuscan cookery he was discovering at the Rosses’ table, but she found the work of transcribing recipes from her Aunt’s chef far too boring. Janet, never one to miss an income generating opportunity, took the project on herself. Or, as Janet put it ‘my niece very soon got tired of such dull work, so I took it up and was rather amused, and I confess puzzled, when I sent the last pages to London, by Mr Dent asking me to write a ‘literary introduction’ to the work.’

Leaves From a Tuscan Kitchen, published by Dent later that year, was a cookery classic for many years. For some people, this is the only work by Janet Ross that they will ever see – several times updated by her Lina’s grandson Michael Waterfield, it is still in print and now available as an e-book. It is worth remembering that Janet never cooked herself  - these are all transcriptions from the recipes of her cook of thirty years, Giuseppi Volpi.

In the summer of 1900 Dent visited Janet Ross again and fell further under her spell. He was later to write: ‘Mrs Ross was quite the Grande Dame, yet democratic in her choice of friends. To have done anything of note was sufficient for an entrée to her circle. Cleverness, talent or capability were the qualities that made her your friend’. He enjoyed the social life on offer at Poggio Gherardo ‘Here I met many notabilities, for Mrs Ross’s Sunday afternoons were a marked feature in Florence and people of all nationalities resorted to these conversaziones…..Professor and Madame Villari…Lady Paget…Mr Bernard Berenson and his wife, Sir William and Lady Markby and many others’.

He commissioned a further significant work, ‘Florentine Villas’ . It was a very unusual project for Dent,  a limited edition (200 copies in England, 100 in the US) of what we would now call a ‘coffee table’ book.  In all the volume featured some 23 villas, and was illustrated with more than 50 beautifully detailed line drawings by Nelly Erichsen. With only 300 copies printed one must assume that the target audience was the owners of the villas and those who aspired to own them or to be invited to stay in one of them. Not Dent’s usual target audience at all, and it is hard to think how he was persuaded by Janet and Nelly to undertake the project. But Janet was proud of the work, her scrapbooks in the British Institute in Florence contain carefully clipped reviews from the New York Daily Tribune, the Daily Telegraph and The Spectator among others. The book has little in the way of architectural description, Janet’s preference was always to revel in the historic scandals of the Medici and their contemporaries, occasionally brought up to date with references to the Brownings or Victor Emanuel. If the reader wanted to know what the villas actually looked like, they would have turned to Nelly’s illustrations. As Janet wrote in her introduction, Nelly’s ‘charming drawings of the villas and gardens as they now appear add so much to the beauty and interest of the book.’

Lina gives us a vivid description of a fact-finding mission she undertook, accompanied by Nelly and Herbert Horne (a Florentine based art historian and collector, the founder of the Museum Horne).

Beneath the shadow of a huge umbrella ..I have gone on a voyage of inspection of Florentine Villas for the Zia [Lina’s name for her aunt]. Yesterday was a typical excursion...we started by tram to Bagni a Ripoli ...and with some difficulty procured an animal, I can hardly give it the dignified name of horse, and we shambled along...then began the drenching rain and the horse refused to drag us up the hills so bidding sad farewell to our sheltering though inelegant vehicle we trudged bravely over hill and dale and across numerous ploughed fields until after much weariness we reached a deserted and battered looking villa – the former royal Medicean villa of Lappeggi – ye Gods what a scene of havoc and squalid poverty to be viewed on such a day. You may imagine with what suspicion we were looked upon by the fattore as he saw three drenched individuals laden with sketch books, Kodaks, umbrellas, rugs and luncheon baskets claiming admittance to his villa. 

Eventually they were allowed in, where they caught glimpses of what must have been once a sumptuous interior, but with visible evidence of the destruction wrought by centuries of neglect, compounded by the effects of the terrible 1895 earthquake. After they had finished peering round the interior, presumably full of polite compliment, the fattore relaxed enough to let them spread their picnic out to eat, whereafter they  ‘wandered about the garden in the drenching rain taking photographs beneath an umbrella.’ This is the only evidence we have that Nelly used a camera to help her with her illustrations, but so much of her work has a photographic quality that it is an obvious assumption. The first box camera which made amateur photography accessible and portable had come to market in 1888. The film was on a roll, not plates, and would be returned to Kodak for development. ‘You press the button and we’ll do the rest’ went the strapline.

Dent also tells a charming story of the perils of being one of a party led by Mrs Ross. ‘On my last visit to Florence, while staying at Poggio Gherardo, together with Miss Nelly Erichsen (the artist who took up Miss James’s task after her death) and Dr Lindsay, we decided with Mrs Ross to take a carriage and drive to Siena and stay at San Gimignano by the way. The four of us were packed comfortably into an open carriage…’ but when they got to Poggibonsi the heavens opened and the party were soaked. Lindsay and Nelly turned back, but Dent had a business appointment to keep and so he and Mrs Ross went on to Siena, with Ross insisting that Dent, who spoke no Italian, could not manage alone…Arriving in Siena, they had terrible trouble getting a room. When they eventually found lodgings, Dent was enchanted by the view from his window:  ‘that picture is in my possession and will never be erased. When we met in the morning Mrs R was very cross…had never slept a wink…had lain in her rug on the sofa all night. When breakfast appeared the bread was unleavened and sour …and she could eat nothing. I was crushed! She suggested that people who were unable to take care of themselves should not go travelling about to other people’s annoyance, and I, a poor boy of only some 50 odd summers, followed her down to the carriage with my tail well between my legs’.

In 1904 Dent published ‘Old Florence and Modern Tuscany’ , a collection of Janet’s essays, many of which had appeared earlier in English periodicals. These reflected her Italian life and interests, mingling short historical pieces on Florentine art and culture and accounts of visits to Italian tourist spots with more unusual pieces such as descriptions of oil-making in Tuscany and the land tenure system known as mezzaria. It included some more illustrations by Nelly Erichsen, including her drawing of Poggio Gherardo. In 1905 Dent published Janet’s ‘Florentine Palaces and their stories’.

Janet’s later years were sad and lonely. Her husband died, she quarrelled with her niece Lina over Lina’ choice of husband, she was estranged from her only son. She lost good friends in the First World War. Nelly Erichsen died of Spanish flu in 1918. After the War, the political unrest of Italy began to touch upon Janet Ross's life: her initial tendency to favour fascism was reversed when blackshirts intruded into her house, demanding money. After several years of deteriorating health, she died at her home on 23 August 1927.

For more about Janet, Lina, Dent, Lindsay and of course Nelly Erichsen, you can read Nelly Erichsen: A Hidden Life

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