Helen Beauclerk

Helen Beauclerk was born in 1892, the daughter of an Indian army officer Major Sydney Edwin Bellingham 1853-1893 and his wife Mary Dunlop.  Upon her father’s death she was adopted by Ferdinand Beauclerk, an army officer and close family friend.  He had been divorced by his wife a decade earlier and appears to have had no children.  Her name was changed by deed poll from  Bellingham to Beauclerk. She had a number of siblings by her natural parents, it is unclear why she was adopted.   She studied at the Paris Conservatoire, and for a while made her living teaching music and accompanying on the piano.  She returned to England just before WWI and became the companion of the French artist Edmond Dulac staying with him until his death in 1953.  She was a novelist, writing a number of fantasy novels, The Green Lacquer Pavilion (1926) and The Love of the Foolish Angel (1929). She also wrote Mountain and the Tree (1935) and Shadows on the Wall (1941).  Dulac used her as a model for some of his work, along with illustrations for a number of her novels.  She maintained contact with her birth family, since in the 1939 Register of England and Wales she is in Bridport in Dorset with her birth mother, Helen Mary Dunlop and Dulac.  She died in 1953, the same year as Dulac.