Early in her new book about Isabel Rawsthorne, Carol Jacobi steps briefly out of her role as biographer to note conventions that bedevil art historians and biographers alike, particularly when addressing overlooked female artists. “Sex, conception and reproduction are marginalised events in art history, appropriated by biography, or neglected merely as such,” she writes. “They are particularly problematic when the artist is a woman, often set aside as ‘other’ to her art making or incorporated into a reduction of that making to self-reflexive illustrations of her life.”
The event in Rawsthorne’s life that provokes this observation is a newspaper announcement of 1934, that she was “renouncing and abandoning” her birth name of Isabel Nicholas. She would henceforth be known as Margaret Epstein—the name of the actual wife of sculptor Jacob Epstein. Two months later, when Rawsthorne gave birth to a little boy, the baby’s mother was duly noted as Margaret Epstein, wife of Jacob Epstein. Aged only 22, she had effectively erased herself for the sake of another woman.