ABSTRACT
Despite her pre-war disdain for the cultural parochialism in pre-war Brussels, Lalla Vandervelde, the British-born wife of Belgium’s Minister of State, experienced brief celebrity as a patriotic heroine of relief efforts for her adopted country. In her speaking tours of the United States, Great Britain, Belgium, and France, she mobilised a limited repertoire of dramatic speeches, patriotic and Belgian folk songs, and Edward Elgar’s Carillon, Op. 40, to raise hundreds of thousands of Belgian francs for charitable funds. Lalla Vandervelde’s performances and orations during the war were marked by the fluidity of national boundaries, political allegiances, and personal loyalties for married women during and immediately after the war.
