Richard Le Gallienne


Richard Le Gallienne was an English author and poet. The British-American actress Eva Le Gallienne was his daughter, by his second marriage to Danish journalist Julie Nørregaard.

Life and career

He was born Richard Thomas Gallienne in Liverpool, England to a middle class family. He attended the all boys public school Liverpool College. After leaving school he changed his name to Le Gallienne and started work in an accountant's office in London. In 1883, his father took him to a lecture by Oscar Wilde in Birkenhead. He soon abandoned this job to become a professional writer with ambitions of being a poet. His book My Ladies' Sonnets appeared in 1887, and in 1889 he became, for a brief time, literary secretary to Wilson Barrett. In the summer of 1888, he met Wilde, and the two had a brief affair. Le Gallienne and Wilde continued an intimate correspondence after the end of the affair.
He joined the staff of the newspaper The Star in 1891, and wrote for various papers by the name Logroller. He contributed to The Yellow Book, and associated with the Rhymers' Club.
His first wife, Mildred Lee and their second daughter Maria died in 1894 during childbirth, leaving behind Richard and their daughter Hesper. After Mildred's death he carried with him at all times, including while married to his second wife, an urn containing Mildred's ashes. Rupert Brooke, who met Le Gallienne in 1913 aboard a ship bound for the United States but did not warm to him, wrote a short poem "For Mildred's Urn" satirising this behaviour.
In 1897 he married the Danish journalist Julie Nørregaard. She became stepmother to Hesper and their daughter Eva was born 11 January 1899. In 1901 and 1902, he was a writer for The Rambler, a magazine produced by Herbert Vivian, intended to be a revival of Samuel Johnson's periodical of the same name.
In 1903 Nørregaard left Richard, taking both of his daughters to live in Paris. Nørregaard later sent Hesper to live with her paternal grandparents in an affluent part of London, while Eva remained with her mother. Julie later cited his inability to provide a stable home, pay his debts, alcoholism and womanising as grounds for divorce. Their daughter Eva would grow up to take on some of her father's negative traits including womanising and heavy drinking.
Le Gallienne subsequently became a resident of the United States. He has been credited with the 1906 translation from the Danish of Peter Nansen's Love's Trilogy; but most sources and the book itself attribute it to Julie. They were divorced in June 1911. On 27 October 1911, he married Mrs. Irma Perry, née Hinton, whose previous marriage to her first cousin, the painter and sculptor Roland Hinton Perry, had been dissolved in 1904. Le Gallienne and Irma had known each other for some time, and had jointly published an article as early as 1906. Irma's daughter Gwendolyn Perry subsequently called herself "Gwen Le Gallienne", but was almost certainly not his natural daughter, having been born in 1874.
Le Gallienne and Irma lived in Paris from the late 1920s, where Gwen was by then an established figure in the expatriate bohème and where he wrote a regular newspaper column.
Le Gallienne lived in Menton on the French Riviera during the 1940s. During the Second World War Le Gallienne was prevented from returning to his Menton home and lived in Monaco for the rest of the war. Le Gallienne's house in Menton was occupied by German troops and his library was nearly sent back to Germany as bounty. Le Gallienne appealed to a German officer in Monaco who allowed him to return to Menton to collect his books. During the war Le Gallienne refused to write propaganda for the local German and Italian authorities, and with no income, once collapsed in the street due to hunger.
In later times he knew Llewelyn Powys and John Cowper Powys.
Asked how to say his name, he told The Literary Digest the stress was "on the last syllable: le gal-i-enn'. As a rule I hear it pronounced as if it were spelled 'gallion,' which, of course, is wrong."
A number of his works are now available online.
He also wrote the foreword to "The Days I Knew" by Lillie Langtry 1925, George H. Doran Company on Murray Hill New York.
Le Gallienne is buried in Menton in a grave whose lease does not expire until 2023.

Exhibitions

In 2016 an exhibition on the life and works of Richard Le Gallienne was held at the central library in his home city of Liverpool, England. Entitled "Richard Le Gallienne: Liverpool's Wild Poet", it featured his affair with Oscar Wilde, his famous actress daughter Eva Le Gallienne and his personal ties to the city. The exhibition ran for 6 weeks between August and October 2016 and a talk about him was held at the Victorian Literary Symposium during Liverpool's Literary festival the same year.

Works