David Waller of history

(appearing on 9 November)

Who was Gertrude Tennant - and why was she so magnificent?

David Waller: Gertrude Tennant was a Victorian grande dame who lived from the last weeks of the Georgian era right through to the First World War. She was born in 1819 and died in 1918; she had six uncles who lost their lives in the Napoleonic wars and a grandson who died on the Somme. For nearly half a century she ran a literary and social salon at her splendid home at Richmond Terrace in Whitehall (the direct extension of Downing Street) where the luminaries of the nineteenth century would assemble. Henry James, Oscar Wilde, John Millais, Thomas Huxley, Gladstone, Balfour and even Mark Twain were among those who came to her soirees. Brought up in France, she managed to fit in a lifelong passionate friendship with Gustave Flaubert, the great French novelist. She was spirited, beautiful, influential, captivating in conversation, a feisty lady who had to overcome neglect and genteel poverty to achieve her position of eminence in late Victorian society. Hence the Magnificent Mrs Tennant.

What do you think Gertrude would have thought of the London History Festival and your Women in History event?

David Waller: She was born in the same year as Queen Victoria and the same week as George Eliot, the novelist. This was a time when women had very few opportunities, even those who came from a privileged background like Gertrude. By the time her daughters were growing up in the 1880s and 1890s, there had been profound social changes - one daughter became an accomplished photographer, the other a painter exhibited at the Royal Academy. Her life illustrates in intimate terms how one woman charted a course through history. I think she would have loved it.

Who would you have most liked to have met in Gertrude's literary salon?

David Waller: Henry James in con - versation with Gertrude's son-in-law Frederick Myers, the pioneer of psychical research. It was thought that Myers's children - Gertrude's grandchildren - were the models for the children in James's ghost story The Turn of the Screw.