Irene Osgood (1869-1922)

She was born near Richmond, Virginia, and depending on which source you read her father was either John William Parker Belote or John Leatherbury Belotte. The year of her birth is typically given as 1875, but that would have made her just twelve years old at the time of her first marriage. She was in fact eighteen when she married her first husband in 1887. Her family was described as, "cultured with cosmopolitan tastes" and she travelled with them in Switzerland, France and England.

From the age of sixteen she lived almost exclusively in Europe where she, "developed aristocratic airs to go with her natural charm and imperiousness". Southern belle Nannie Irene Belote soon aggrandized and ennobled herself to Nonie Irène de Belote. However, her father's taste for gambling threatened the family's future and in 1887 she ran away with, and was married in New York to John Cleveland Osgood, eighteen years her senior, and the wealthiest and most influential coal baron of his era in Colorado. He was a great-grandson of Samuel Osgood, U.S. Postmaster-General and 1st President of the City Bank of New York whose townhouse served as the new Republic's first Presidential mansion.

Irene was already passionate about writing and her husband indulged her by establishing the Cleveland Publishing Company, New York, under which her first book - The Shadow of Desire - was released in 1893. Reviews on the whole were not scintillating but neither unkind, except perhaps that which appeared in The Spectator and was reprinted in the Catholic World: "The title of this book is unpleasantly suggestive (then implying as was much of the content)... One married woman is infatuated by (the hero). Another not only allows him to kiss her, but in the madness of the moment, 'gives back kisses hot & fast'".

Although Osgood's coal empire was in Colorado, he was often in England and New York on business and initially he and Irene divided their time between the three. However, it was at her insistence that they began to spend most of their time in England and from 1893 they leased Bulwer Lytton's old home in Hertfordshire, Knebworth House. Irene loved hunting in the English countryside and she found Colorado "dull and uninviting" although it was the former that was shared with the press as, "her chief reason for living in England". In the meantime Osgood was making plans to settle permanently in Redstone, the corporate town he founded in Colorado, and citing "desertion" he quietly divorced her in 1899. Not wishing to court scandal, back in Colorado confident that Irene would never step foot there again, Osgood circulated the story that Irene had been killed by a runaway horse in New York's Central Park, and three months later, he married his second wife. But, there was a public scandal there too that involved the suicide of Arthur E. Cobb (d.1899) who just prior to the marriage had been the second Mrs Osgood's riding master.

Irene's more than favorable divorce settlement allowed her to buy 15 Cowley Street in London and a country estate in Northamptonshire, Guilsborough Hall, "another seat which she took for the hunting". It was also, "one of the most beautiful houses in the Midlands, and the gardens that surround it are the admiration of all the authorities on artistic gardening. These gardens were designed and carried out by the fair owner, whose taste and discernment in their construction proves that she is an artist in more walks of life than one. A pretty fancy is shown by Mrs Osgood in her all-white garden, which for simplicity and beauty is unrivalled, every shrub and flower being pure white."

In his memoirs, the Anglo-Irish publisher Ramsay Colles (1862-1919) recalled that, "One of the most fascinating women I have ever met is Mrs Irene Osgood... I recall many talks with this young and gifted woman in the exquisite Adam Room which forms part of her private suite, and which she designates the Music Room. She is by no means a mere woman of letters, for she was, until she met with many nasty accidents in the field, an enthusiastic rider to hounds, and her taste in dress as perfect as her form... One of the greatest charms of Irene Osgood is her voice. It reminded me of Walt Whitman's beautiful lines, 'Surely whoever speaks to me in the right voice, Him or her I shall follow, as the water follows the moon, Anywhere around the globe'... I was particularly delighted with Irene Osgood's love and protection of wild birds. Hundreds of nesting boxes are to be seen in the trees in the park, and trays of food are outside most of the bedroom windows, with saucers of water for the birds to either drink or bathe in. And the birds are not ungrateful for morning and evening the whole place is filled with the music of their songs."

In 1903, she married Capt. Charles Pigott Harvey, of Sudborough House, Thrapston. He moved into Guilsborough with Irene and the following year was duly appointed High Sheriff of Northamptonshire, only to drop dead that September. Irene inherited two-thirds of his estate which added to her existing fortune now gave her £12,000 a year. Seeking solace, she took a villa in the South of France from 1905 where she became reacquainted with Robert Harborough Sherard, an impoverished great-grandson of the Poet Laureate, William Wordsworth, and the first biographer and friend of Oscar Wilde. She hired him to be her literary secretary and in 1906 gave him £100 ($500) to divorce his estranged wife.

In May, 1908, Irene and Sherard were married at the British Consulate in Paris. It was less a love match and more one of suspicious convenience, "in consequence of anonymous letters with regard to her travelling about with (Sherard) as her secretary." By as early as 1909 there was every reason to believe that all was not well when Irene was quoted in the press, calling English husbands "tightwads" and their wives downtrodden, "their husband's hold the purse strings and they hold them tightly". Sherard, a former alcoholic, returned to drink and in one drunken rage threatened to make her life a "Red Hell" if she did not do what he wanted. Either that year or the next, Irene finally threw Sherard out of Guilsborough after he'd got drunk (again) and broke through a window in an attempt to burn the house down before threatening to, "beat her bloody American brains out". Citing cruelty, she won seperation in 1911 and took back the name "Osgood". In 1915, their very public divorce was finalized in a trial that made headlines on both sides of the Atlantic.

During the divorce proceedings in 1911, Sherard caused quite a spectacle when he wept on the witness stand after Irene gained custody of, “the only friend he had” - their cat, 'Gainsborough'. Perhaps in revenge, Sherard then accused Irene of fraud, claiming that it was in fact he who had authored of all her works between 1906 and 1910, "except the novel" To a Nun Confess'd (1906) that the Athenaeum called, "this talented author's first great success." In addition, he also claimed that he had co-authored Irene's first and most famous book, Shadow of Desire. In 1912, to "explode" her ex-husband's claims she sought the help of her publisher Charles Sisley and together they devised a scheme whereby Irene anonymously created her own publishing company, "John Richmond Ltd., London".

The ruse worked, Irene cleared her name, and she continued to run her - distinctly boutique - publishing house until her death. Some of her books fetch a high price today less for her writing, but more for the superb quality of their design and illustration in the final days before publisher's favored the more cost effective dust jacket: The theosophist Reginald W. Machell illustrated An Idol's Passion (1895) and The Chant of a Lonely Soul (1897); and in 1914 for John Richmond Ltd., William Gordon Mein designed and illustrated Where Pharoah Dreams (written in Helwan near Cairo) and The Indelicate Duellist.

During World War I, Irene placed Guilsborough at the disposal of the Red Cross to be used as an Auxiliary Hospital and she was decorated with the Order of Mercy by King George V for the role she played managing three military hospitals in London. By the time peace was declared in 1918 ill-health had caught up with her and she died in 1922 at Guilsborough where in her own words she once, "rode all day and danced all night". Being childless, she left her considerable estate to her niece, Dorothy Ward, daughter of her sister, Mrs Louise Ward. Her valuable library was likely sold off then and years later Dorothy became a Sister known as "Theodora" in the Society of the Salutation, using her aunt's inheritance to purchase a new home for the nuns, Burford Priory, in Oxfordshire.

Her novels were: Shadow of Desire (1893); An Idol's Passion (1895); The Chant of a Lonely Soul (2v, 1897); To a Nun Confess'd (1906); Servitude (1908); A Blood-Moon, The Buhl Cabinet, and Stories From Algiers (1911); A Mother in Dreams (1912); The Irene Osgood Thought Book (1913); A Book of Verses (1913); The House of Dolls (1913); Where Pharoah Dreams (1914); The Indelicate Duellist (1914); The Garden Anthology (1914); The Winged Anthology (1914); Behind the Fan; and, The Garden of Spices. Her plays included: The Menace (1915); A Rich Bohemian (1916); and, one of her last dramas before she died was Une Aventure de Capitane Lebrun, produced in 1913 at the Theatre Molière, Paris.