Mabel Batten

Mabel Batten was a singer, a society beauty painted by Sargent, and the woman who made Radclyffe Hall a writer before dying in the middle of a quarrel about her. She was born in India to a colonial official, married an Indian Civil Service man twenty-four years her senior, and ran a musical salon in London; she was an accomplished amateur mezzo-soprano, gave recitals, and was close to Elgar and Percy Grainger, who wrote for her. Sargent drew her, and Edward VII was among her lovers. She met Radclyffe Hall in 1907, when Batten was fifty-one and Hall twenty-seven, and they lived together after Batten was widowed; it was Batten who told Hall to stop writing occasional verse and write seriously, who introduced her to the Catholic church that both of them converted to, and who gave her the name John. In 1915 Hall began an affair with Batten's own cousin Una Troubridge. The three of them quarrelled, and Batten died of a stroke in 1916 during or just after one of those quarrels - Hall believed she had caused it, and the guilt ran through the rest of her life. Hall and Troubridge consulted mediums for years trying to reach her, and presented a paper on it to the Society for Psychical Research. Hall is buried in Batten's vault at Highgate. Her portrait by John Singer Sargent is in a private collection. Elgar dedicated a song to her. Her granddaughter Honey Harris was part of the same circle and knew Hall and Troubridge for decades.

• Lived: 1856 CE – 1916 CE
• Nationality: British
• Roles: artist