ABSTRACT
Hulton Getty (HG) social life was similarly compressed, consisting of one relationship—a long chaste courtship with his first cousin, Isabel Mary Wells, whom he married on October 31, 1891. HG wrote at some length in the Postscript about Jane’s funeral. Beatrice Webb theorized that HG’s revolt against the Puritanism of the leading Fabians drew him to the charm and glamour of smart society and the company of nobility, especially of countesses and duchesses. HG offered his Ann Veronica manuscript to Frederick Macmillan in September 1908. Meanwhile, the relationship between Rebecca and HG had been showing strains since 1917, and the differences in their temperaments eventually overran their passion for each other. HG acknowledged having his own gene for “imaginative consolation,” and it probably came from his mother. Sarah’s fixation on the royal family, which resuited in many trips to crowded street corners fed HG’s hostility to things royal and wove a sturdy “thread of republicanism” into his self-described “resentful nature.”
