Notes and Queries Advance Access originally published online on August 20, 2009
Notes and Queries 2009 56(3):425-426; doi:10.1093/notesj/gjp095
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Gabrielle Vassal and the Countess Von Hoenstadt
Institute of Historical Research, London
GABRIELLE VASSAL (1880–1959) was an Englishwoman married to a French doctor. She followed her husband to his postings in the French colonial world, and wrote about her experiences. She published in English and French, and her books included On and Off Duty in Annam (London: W. Heinemann, 1910), In and Round Yunnan Fou (London: W. Heinemann, 1922), Life In French Congo (London: T. F. Unwin, 1925) and she achieved some measure of personal fame as a travel writer. She was also a keen amateur naturalist, who contributed bird and mammal specimens from Africa and Southeast Asia to the Natural History Museum in London.
I became curious when I saw some of her books in libraries catalogued under another name, Countess von Hoenstadt. I thought that perhaps she had remarried, but looking more closely, can find no indication of her using that name. Her death notice in the Times shows that her name was still Vassal at the time of her death, and lists her as the ‘widow of Dr. Joseph M. Vassal’ with no mention of any other marriage.1 None of Vassal's books was published under the name Hoenstadt. Nonetheless, the WorldCat database demonstrates the conflation of these identities, with Vassal's books variously listed with ‘Gabrielle von Hoenstadt’ in brackets after the author name, or where they have been recatalogued under von Hoenstadt.
The Countess von Hoenstadt was also listed as an author of George Moore's Correspondence with the Mysterious Countess (1984). This book is a collection of letters between Moore and an unidentified correspondent, the ‘Mysterious Countess’, with whom he had a lengthy, flirtatious epistolary affair. Despite making some tentative plans, it seems they never met in person. Her first name was Gabrielle and Moore used the letters to create dialogue for his play, The Coming of Gabrielle.
The editors have concluded that Countess von Hoenstadt was not her real name, and that in life she was a Baroness Franzi Ripp, although they found no biographical information on her. However, the first name ‘Gabrielle’ led them to also note that Moore's secretary referred to another correspondence with ‘Gabrielle Vassal’2 towards the end of his life, and speculate that this may have been the same person.
David Eakin and Robert Langenfeld conclude that the identity of the author of the Countess’ letters in the Moore collection is not known, and acknowledge that it could have been another woman by the name of Gabrielle (and not Vassal). Nonetheless, this speculative association has led to the retrospective recataloguing of many of Vassal's books in various libraries with von Hoenstadt as the secondary author, in some cases implying that ‘Gabrielle Vassal’ was a nom de plume. That George Moore's Correspondence is the source of this confusion is also suggested by the fact that this has only occurred in English language collections; I cannot find any French libraries where Vassal's books have been recatalogued under Hoenstadt.
Gabrielle Vassal was an established writer of travelogues with an extensive correspondence; that she wrote to Moore at some stage is not completely remarkable. Nothing in her biodata (or that of the ‘mysterious countess’) suggests that they are the same person. To the contrary, there is overwhelming evidence that the Countess von Hoenstadt/Baroness Franzi Ripp (whoever she was) and Gabrielle Vassal were not the same person. The fact that Vassal was in Asia and Africa during the time that Moore's correspondent was writing from Vienna should alone rule her out of consideration.
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1 The Times, London, 1 June 1959.
2 David B. Eakin and Robert Langenfeld (eds), George Moore’s Correspondence with the Mysterious Countess, English Literary Studies (University of Victoria, 1984), 10–11.
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