Had Beatrice been the heroine of a Victorian novel, its author would have felt obliged to offer some justification for making the question of her destiny the “center of interest.” In The Portrait of a Lady, published in 1881, Henry James had done exactly that: “Millions of presumptuous girls, intelligent or not intelligent, daily affront their destiny, and what is it open to their destiny to be, at the most, that we should make an ado about it?” James asked in his preface.10 Before middle-class women had viable alternatives to early marriage and motherhood, and the Married Women’s Property Act of 1882 gave them the right to their own incomes, the recurring question in The Portrait of a Lady—“Well, what will she do?”—could hardly have merited a reader’s interest.
“You are young, pretty, rich, clever, what more do you want?” Beatrice’s cousin Margaret Harkness, the novelist daughter of a poor country parson, had asked with a trace of exasperation when they were at school together. “Why cannot you be satisfied?”11 Like James’s heroine Isabel Archer, Beatrice had been brought up with an unusual freedom to travel, read, form friendships, and satisfy her “great desire for knowledge” and “immense curiosity about life.” Beatrice preferred the company of men and took it for granted that most would fall under her spell, but like Isabel she had no desire to “begin life by marrying.”12 She was as interested in winning recognition for her intellectual achievements as for her feminine charms. Each passing year made her longing for a “real aim and occupation” more urgent.13 She was conscious of “a special mission” and believed with all her heart that she was meant to live “a life with some result.”14 Like Dorothea in Middlemarch, Beatrice yearned for principles, “something by which her life might be filled with action at once rational and ardent.”15
Beatrice’s identity was shaped by having been born into Britain’s “new ruling class,”16 and her mind by having been “brought up in the midst of capitalist speculation” and “the restless spirit of big enterprise.”17 As the historian Barbara Caine notes, Beatrice distinguished her class not by wealth but by the fact that it was “a class of persons who habitually gave orders, but who seldom, if ever, executed the orders of other people.”18 Her grandfathers were both self-made men. Her father had lost the lion’s share of his inheritance in the crash of 1848, only to quickly recoup his losses by supplying tents to the French army during the Crimean War. By the time Beatrice was born in 1858, Richard Potter had amassed a third fortune from timber and railways and had become a director (and future chairman of the board) of the Great Western Railway. More entrepreneur and speculator than hands-on manager, Potter once toyed with a scheme to build a waterway to rival the Suez Canal. His business interests were scattered from Turkey to Canada, and he and his family were constantly traveling. The Potters’ Gloucester estate, Standish, as grand and impersonal as a hotel, was filled with an ever-changing contingent of visiting relatives, guests, employees, and hangers-on.
Though Richard Potter began to vote Conservative in middle age, he was never a stereotypical Tory plutocrat. His father, a wholesaler in the cotton industry, was for a time a Radical member of Parliament and had helped found the Manchester Guardian19 (“our organ,” as Beatrice used to say).20 Intellectually engaged, broad-minded, and convivial, he counted scientists, philosophers, and journalists among his closest friends. Herbert Spencer, the most lionized intellectual in England in the 1860s and 1870s and a former railway engineer and Economist editorialist, called Richard Potter “the most lovable being I have yet seen.”21 Even the latter’s cheerful indifference to Spencer’s philosophical interests could not squelch Spencer’s lifelong adoration.
It is almost axiomatic that behind every extraordinary woman there is a remarkable father. Potter encouraged Beatrice and her sisters to read and gave them free run of his large library. He made no effort to restrict their discussion or friendships. He enjoyed their company so much that he rarely took a business trip without one or another as a companion. Beatrice claimed that “he was the only man I ever knew who genuinely believed that women were superior to men, and acted as if he did.”22 She gave him credit for her own “audacity and pluck and my familiarity with the risks and chances of big enterprises.”23
In some ways, Laurencina Potter was even more unusual than her husband, bearing even less resemblance to the plump and placid mothers that populate Trollope novels than her husband did to the stereotypical businessmen. When Spencer met the Potters for the first time shortly after their marriage, he thought they were “the most admirable pair I have ever seen.”24 As he got to know them better, he was surprised to learn that Laurencina’s perfectly feminine, graceful, and refined personage hid “so independent a character.”25 In contrast to her easygoing husband, Laurencina was cerebral, puritanical, and discontented. Born Heyworth, she came from a family of liberal Liverpool merchants who educated her no differently from her brothers; that is, trained her in mathematics, languages, and political economy. As a young woman, she became a local celebrity and the subject of newspaper articles as a result of the zeal with which she canvassed against the Corn Laws. Decades later, Beatrice was used to seeing pamphlets on economic issues appear on her dressing table.
Laurencina was a very unhappy woman. The cause of her frustration was not hard for her daughter to divine. She had envisioned a married life of “close intellectual comradeship with my father, possibly of intellectual achievement, surrounded by distinguished friends.”26 Instead, for the first two decades after her marriage, she was almost always pregnant or nursing an infant and banished to the company of women and children while her husband traveled on business and dined with writers and intellectuals. Her real ambition had been to write novels, and she did publish one, Laura Gay, before the demands of family life overwhelmed her.
When Laurencina’s ninth child and only son, Dickie, was born, she devoted herself completely to him. But when the boy died of scarlet fever at age two, she became severely depressed and withdrew from her other children. Beatrice, who was seven at the time, recalled her mother as “a remote personage discussing business with my father or poring over books in her boudoir.” As a consequence of her mother’s coldness, Beatrice came to believe that “I was not made to be loved; there must be something repulsive about my character.” Moody, self-dramatizing, and inclined to fib and exaggerate, she had also inherited the Heyworths’ tendency to Weltschmerz and suicide. Two of Laurencina’s relatives had died by their own hand. “My childhood was not on the whole a happy one,” reflected Beatrice as an adult. “Ill-health and starved affection and the mental disorders which spring from these, ill temper and resentment, marred it . . . Its loneliness was absolute.”27 Beatrice herself had toyed with bottles of chloroform even as a child.
Rebuffed by her mother, a biographer says, Beatrice sought affection “below stairs” among the servants who helped keep the Potter household running. She and her older sisters were especially close to Martha Jackson, or Dada as they called her, who took care of the children. Dada, Beatrice learned much later, was actually a relative from a branch of her mother’s family who were poor but respectable Lancashire hand-loom weavers. Caine credits Dada with planting in Beatrice the notion of original sin that gave her the determination to do good and the identification she felt all her life with the “respectable” working poor. But it was Laurencina’s example that inspired her to write. On her fifteenth birthday, Beatrice began a journal that she kept until her death. “Sometimes I feel as if I must write, as if I must pour my poor crooked thoughts into somebody’s heart, even if it be into my own.”28
Among the intellectuals who frequented the Potter house were the biologist Thomas Huxley; Sir Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin’s; and other proponents of the new “scientific” point of view that was undermining traditional beliefs. By the time Beatrice was in her teens, Spencer, who shared the Potters’ background as dissenting Protestants, had become Laurencina’s closest confidant and the dominant intellectual influence in the household.
Spencer, who coined the term “survival of the fittest,” was a bigger celebrity in the 1860s than Charles Darwin. His notion that social institutions, like animal or plant species, were evolving—and therefore could be observed, classified, and analyzed like plants or animals—had captured the public’s imagination. One of the