In her first letters to her new beau Oscar, she dared to disagree with his opinions on art: In these new places, Constance found like-minded men and women with whom she could converse and engage with socially and intellectually. To the right, Oscar Wilde and his set are portrayed in aesthetic dress while listening to his lecture. William Powell Firth, A Private View at the Royal Academy, 1881. London’s first restaurant for women, Dorothy’s, opened on the highly-trafficked Oxford Street with a radical proposition - a place for women to sit and eat alone. Grosvenor Gallery welcomed women and their friends to converse with artists and sometimes show their own art. London in the 1880s was a place where women could increasingly roam freely among certain artistic circles, especially among the Aesthetics. If I eventually do not marry, I will not live with Auntie all my life, I shall do something… I want something specific to do to prevent my continually dreaming ‘til I get perfectly morbid. I cannot say I prefer the life I am leading at present. In the fall of 1880, twenty-one-year-old Constance was living apart from her mother and experiencing London life fully for the first time. With a comfortable income provided by her grandfather, Constance Lloyd had the luxury of viewing marriage as a choice. She is wearing controversial “aesthetic” dress, with a loose-fitting blouse and sleeves for extra movement. Constance in her early-twenties, before her marriage to Oscar Wilde. Oscar Wilde ( public library), Constance Lloyd was a driven, creative, passionate, humorous, and fiercely modern woman, both when she wed Wilde and when she separated from him. But as Franny Moyle reveals in Constance: The Tragic and Scandalous Life of Mrs. It was a circle in which young Constance Lloyd found herself enthralled and seduced by its rising star, the critic, poet, and playboy Oscar Wilde, the twentieth century’s first pop culture celebrity.Ĭonstance’s life with Oscar was brief - a little more than ten years as London’s most famous literary couple - when in 1895 the secret life he led with Lord Alfred “Bosie” Douglas exploded publicly, first in a libel suit, then in a criminal suit for sodomy that sent Wilde to prison for two years. These women were encouraged by the Aesthetics, a fashionable social set that included painters James MacNeil Whistler and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, actress Ellen Terry, and poet Charles Swinburne.

For a middle class of women who were neither required to work nor aristocratically obligated to marry, art offered both intellectual fulfillment and the possibility of a career. Art schools and galleries began to fill with young women, no longer satisfied with simply playing the muse, who desired to create. London in the 1880s was a city where a woman could create a life of her own, socially, intellectually, and artistically.

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