The Letters of Evelyn Underhill

EVELYN UNDERHILL was born in the afternoon of 6 December, 1875 at
Wolverhampton. Her father was Arthur--afterwards Sir Arthur--
Underhill. He was a distinguished barrister and a bencher of
Lincoln's Inn, son of Henry Underhill for some time Town Clerk of
Wolverhampton; her mother was Alice Lucy Ironmonger. The family home
was always in London--a pleasant well-to-do home of what used to be
called the Tory kind. She was educated there, except for some three
years (1888-1891) till she was sixteen at a private school at
Folkestone; afterwards in London she went to King's College for
Women, where she read history and botany.

Her young experience, however, included also the sea and Europe. Her
father was an enthusiastic yachtsman; he was founder and for many
years Commodore of the Royal Cruising Club. In 1888 she went for her
first cruise in his yacht Amoretta. The log-book which she kept
records her learning to sail and to sketch. She became a good
small-boat sailor-she could race and win prizes; she had all her
life a passion for efficiency.

The family were friends with their neighbours, the Stuart Moores,
whose yacht often sailed in company with the Amoretta. The Stuart
Moore boys were her chief-almost her only-young companions. A letter
written to her mother when she was fourteen says: "I hope you
enjoyed the Nevilles' dinner-party; have they got an eligible child
as a companion for me? if so, mind you let me know her." In that
sense she was a lonely child-which not all only children are, for
she had (it is clear) all her life a great capacity for and
enjoyment of friendship. But two things began during that childhood.
One was her companionship in activity with Hubert Stuart Moore, who
afterwards became her husband; the other was her own personal
activity of writing. She had begun this before she was sixteen, for
she then won the first prize in a short-story competition organized
by the magazine Hearth and Home, and she occasionally followed this
story with others. It was after 1898, when she was twenty-three and
living with her family in London, that in general her own
friendships began. She moved, though not exclusively, in one of the
"literary sets" of the day. She knew Maurice Hewlett, and at his
house met Laurence Housman and Sarah Bernhardt. She also became
acquainted with May Sinclair--now too little recollected; for the
present writer and for others of the then young her novels had a
quite unusual attraction; with Arthur Machen--whose interests were,
in some respects, very like her own, though in the expression of
them she turned rather to actuality and he to myth; with Mrs.
Baillie Reynolds and Mrs. Belloc Lowndes, Mary Cholmondeley and
Evelyn Sharp, Mrs. Ernest Dowson and Mrs. Wilfrid Ward; and with
Arthur Symons But her chief friendship was with Ethel Ross Barker,
and this was one of the most intimate of her life; it ended only
with her friend's death in 1920.

In 1890 she had first gone to France; she wrote of it: "France is
charming." But from 1898 she began a habit of going to Europe with
her mother in the spring of every year-a habit which lasted until
1913. In 1898 they went to Lucerne, Lugano, Como, and Milan; and she
alone went on to Florence. In 1899 she was at Florence again; in
1900 she first saw Chartres; in 1901, Assisi. In 1910 she went first
to Rome. She wrote from Florence during her first (1898) visit:
"Once you have found it out (what Italian painters are really trying
to paint) you must love them till the end of your days"; and again:
"This place has taught me more than I can tell you; it's a sort of
gradual unconscious growing into an understanding of things." She
was then twenty-two.