Olga Rudge & Ezra Pound: "What Thou Lovest Well..."

12 Julia and Her Daughter
child, leaving his wife and three children just enough to exist on. My
mother, the eldest, at eighteen commenced to support the others with her
music. Her piano playing was good enough for her to get accompanying
work, and her voice unusual enough to get a good church position before
she had any lessons.’’
When she could a√ord it, Julia studied singing with two of the leading
vocal coaches in New York. But Europe was the home of classical music.
Determined to study voice in London, she gave ‘‘a grand concert’’ in
Steinway Hall on Friday evening, April 11, 1890, as a benefit to finance her
coaching under Alberto Randegger and Sir George Henschel, renowned
professors of singing at the Royal Conservatory of Music. Julia made her
debut in London in Il Trovatore, and a performance with the celebrated
Lucille Hill of the D’Oyly Carte Opera accompanied by Isidore de Lara
drew praise: ‘‘Miss O’Connell sang so well that she was invited to the
houses of royalty.’’ She was the soloist at another ‘‘grand evening concert’’
at St. James’s Hall under the honorary patronage of Princess Christian of
Schleswig-Holstein and the Honorable William E. Gladstone, the British
prime minister.
In May 1892, Julia returned from two years of study in London and
Paris. She was described then as possessing ‘‘beauty of the brunette type
with large brown eyes. . . . Her greatest charm is a simple, una√ected
manner, which wins friends on every side.’’ At the time of her marriage
she was twenty-nine—considered a spinster in that era—but her voice and
her charm won John Edgar Rudge’s heart.
Photos of Olga’s father in his thirties show a handsome man of above
average height with impressive gray eyes and a thick handlebar mustache
—one of Youngstown’s most eligible bachelors. He married Julia in New
York’s St. Paul the Apostle Roman Catholic Church on Sixtieth Street and
Columbus Avenue on August 16, 1893. The bride’s sister, Louise Birt
O’Connell, and J. Edgar’s brother, William Rudge, signed as witnesses.
Their first child, Olga Ludovica (Louise) Rudge, was born two years
later on April 13, a birthdate shared with Thomas Je√erson, a fact she
mentioned often throughout her long and unconventional life. She sat for
a first photo—a plump baby in a lace-trimmed, pu√-sleeved dress—on a
brocade-upholstered parlor chair in the white-frame Victorian home at