The novel follows a group of women artists living together in Rome. In one scene the artist Hilda and her friend even discuss Beatrice Cenci. “Beatrice’s sin may not have been so great,” argues the friend; perhaps murdering her rapist should be considered “virtue” given the circumstances.
Hawthorne was deeply affected by Charlotte when he met her, and she was equally impressed with him. Although Hawthorne had previously sworn he would never sit for another portrait, when she asked him to do it (so she could have an image of him to hang in her house), he responded effusively, “After the impression of her own face which Miss Cushman has indelibly stamped on my remembrance, she has a right to do just what she pleases with mine.”
The Jolly Bachelors seemed to charm nearly everyone who met them. When Hattie’s father, Dr. Hosmer, came to check on her, the women in the house liked him so much they adopted him as one of their own and began calling him “Elizabeth.” He didn’t mind a bit.
A few people, however, found a group of women living together distasteful, and their artistic ambitions suspect. For example, the sculptor and poet William Wetmore Story had made his home in Rome years earlier and considered it his territory. He wrote back to friends in America about the disgusting spectacle he thought Charlotte and Hattie made, dressing in men’s pants and ties and riding far and fast across the fields like young men. He hid his dislike under seeming concern about the damage they were doing to their reputation—and to that of all Americans living in Italy. Hattie, he wrote, “takes a high hand here in Rome, and would have the Romans know a Yankee girl can do anything she pleases, walk alone, ride her horse alone, and laugh at their rules.” Apparently, on at least one occasion the spectacle of Hattie riding alone created such a riot that the police had to intervene. But Story was biased against women artists in general; he believed Hattie was a good copyist, “but if she has inventive powers as an artist… will not she be the first woman?”
The group of expatriates living full-time in Rome was small, and Charlotte often met Story at parties. He scoffed at her habit of entertaining the guests with ballads, complaining that her voice sounded savage and too masculine. He called Charlotte’s group of artists a “harem-scarem,” and when his friend Henry James visited Rome, James also mocked them, as the “white marmorean flock.” Part of this dislike was the fact that the women in Charlotte’s circle were not only gifted artists but also successful ones. Story and his friends were not used to competing with women, and they didn’t like it.
Harriet Hosmer with workmen circa 1850s
Others, however, including Elizabeth and Robert Browning, found the Jolly Bachelors exciting, and Charlotte’s home soon became the epicenter of social life for expat artists living in Rome. In an echo of Christina Rosetti’s poem Goblin Market, one guest felt that anyone who sat down at their “Apician feasts” bore their sweetness on his lips forever. Charlotte, Max, Grace, Hattie, and their new friend Virginia Vaughan became known as the “Five Wise Virgins,” and only the brightest and most fascinating were invited to their regular Wednesday night dinners. The conversation was brilliant, the politics radical. Guests left inspired, having had “contact with every form and kind of art—quickened by the peculiar eagerness of all who were in a far and strange land.”
One evening, a starstruck young man begged Charlotte to sing. She laughed it off at first, claiming she had lost her voice years ago, but sat down at the piano and began to play quietly, “just touching the keys so as to give a background to the picture.” Then she sang, “paint[ing] on the air the old ballad of Chevy Chase with such marvellous dramatic power that the whole story became real.” Charlotte sang ballad after ballad, finishing with an old Russian hymn, tears falling down her face until finally she broke off, bowing her head to weep.
Charlotte and her friends wanted to expand the possibilities for all women. They befriended women’s rights reformers, like Jane Carlyle and Lucretia Mott, who believed that friendships, not marriage, formed the core of a woman’s emotional life. Charlotte went further, on one hand believing that marriage was sacred and on the other hand convinced that marriage was, for most women, more of an evil than a good, even a form of slavery. The artist colony Charlotte and the other “Five Wise Virgins” had built without men was novel, even utopian.
Privately, however, the reality was that the house was full of passionate artists who fell in and out of love with one another. Brilliant as they were, they were not immune to jealousy. Charlotte noticed when Max and Hattie started spending more time together. She saw Max’s face flushed with excitement when she came home after visiting Hattie’s studio. Though Charlotte claimed to be retired, it pained her to hear Max gush about Hattie’s accomplishments. Meanwhile, Charlotte spent her days socializing and writing letters. Friendship, ambition, and desire were a volatile combination.
Charlotte was hurt when Hattie began complaining that as “head of the house”
