Biographies

Fairlie Harmar (1876 – 1945) She was born in Weymouth and studied at the Slade, showing her work in London and abroad, and becoming a member of the New English Art Club in 1917. She married the seventh Vicount Harberton, whose mother had formed the Rational Dress Society in 1881, and begun a great debate about women’s clothing. This was a formidable mother-in-law. Fairlie Harmer was known as a painter, and her work is said to be in many public collections, but we have succeeded in locating any images of it. Ezra Pound thought she was a man, in reviewing a work of hers in 1918, of which he observed after moving from close range to the other side of the gallery, that “Mr. F. Harmer [sic] has put good work into it” . (NA 22.12:236)