My grandmother, Meena [[Meacham-526|Lillian Florence (Meacham) Gunn (1886-1973)]] , was “quite a character”.
A friend of mine, who knew her in her 80s, said Meena was the “first liberated woman I ever met”.
In her teens, at the turn of the last century, she studied piano at the Royal Academy in London. Instead of staying in the genteel boarding house arranged by her parents, she rented her own flat, where she entertained the playwright G. B. Shaw, the writer H.G. Wells, the sculptor Eric Gill, and other members of the Bohemian, Theosophical and Fabian communities. She made her piano debut on the London, and won two gold medals for her playing, whereupon she lost interest in playing piano.
In the 19-teens, when her first marriage fell apart, she and her young son moved to Italy, where the cost of living was lower, and stayed there through the first year of WW I. She went on to marry two more times, the third marriage was to man who was younger than her first son.
She pursued a number of interests, but after she perfected each, she abandoned it. She had a one-woman ceramics show (where she sold everything) and had a terracotta piece displayed in the Victoria and Albert, and never worked with clay again. The same with weaving, bookbinding, batik, and so on.
The only thing she stuck with was psychoanalysis, which she studied under Freud and Ferenczi in the 1920s. She was still seeing patients through the late 1960s, when she was in her 80s. By that time, she was living in Lake Peekskill, in a summer community, which meant that the water was turned off in the winter. She had clients bring milk jugs of water when they came for their sessions.
She was very single minded. When she paying attention to you, she could make you feel that you were the most important person, to her, in the universe. That is probably one of the reasons she was so successful as a psychoanalyst. But when she was focused on something else, you might as well not be there. She was commonly called “Dr. Gunn”, though she had no such academic or medical credentials.
She had no sense of smell. (When my father was a child she made him eat rancid butter, claiming there was nothing wrong with it.) She raised dogs, first Samoyeds (which she showed a Crufts, the big dog show in London) and later Pekineses. At Lake Peekskill she had 21 Pekineses, none of them house trained or neutered. (She claimed that “it would damage their psyche.”) When she came to our house for Christmas, my mother would take her upstairs to have a bath, and would run her clothes through the washer and dryer. THEN she would get dressed in her clean clothes, and we would all say hello to her.
She rarely used suitcases. She travelled with a multitude of cardboard boxes tied up with string, containing “everything but the kitchen sink.”
Another character is my 16th great grandmother, Lady Constance [[Stokes-3673|Constance (Stokes) Riviere (1330-1419)]] , who led a “naught lyf.” Even though she died over 600 years ago, you can tell from the limited documentation that she was a character. Her first husband, Henry de Percy, went on crusade (and died in Cologne) because of "the naughty lyf the said Constance his second wyf lyved in with the bisshoppe Wayvile and with others. " She had an illegitimate son by Robert Wyvil, Bishop of Salisbury. Henry de Percy left her a life interest in the manor of Great Chalfield (Wiltshire) https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Space:Great_Chalfield . In 1361 she convinced her step daughter, Beatrice, Henry’s daughter by his first marriage, to sign over her residual rights to the estate. This related in a series of lawsuits, mostly about whether Beatrice had the right to sign over her residual rights, which were not resolved until 1467, long after they both were dead.
She went on to survive 4 husbands, the Great Plague, and the social disorder that followed it. She lived until at least age 88.
