Marina Felix is a writer, researcher and creator; her penchant for storytelling has led her to discover new narratives across art, architecture, and interiors. This time, however, her curiosity has led her further afield—back to her childhood home and then onwards, travelling across the US in an attempt to piece together a fragmented biography of the continent's once richest lady, Arabella Huntington.
Arabella Huntington was an art collector, philanthropist and wife of railway tycoon Collis P. Huntington—on that history agrees. From there, the accounts begin to differ. Arabella is a woman immortalised in contradiction, to some she was conceited and deceitful, to others smart and charismatic. Rather than blindly believing either speculative narrative, Marina opted to refer to the evidence at her disposal. And so began her journey across America, tracing the story of Arabella Huntington through scholarly archives, public records and scattered ephemera: letters, receipts, menus, drawings, and journals.
Marina's work is an act of female solidarity; repositioning Arabella as a public figure in her own right, regardless of her marital status. But it is also a personal act of kindness, a modern-day woman recognising another woman's incapacity to control public perception and taking it upon herself to rewrite her story.
As told in Marina Felix's own words.
When and how did you first become acquainted with Arabella?
I have, in a vague sense, known of Arabella since I was a child. I grew up in San Marino, California—a small suburb of Los Angeles that most people have only heard of because of the cultural institution that it lays claim to: The Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens. When it first opened to the public in 1927, the institution was called the Henry E. Huntington Library & Art Gallery—Henry Edwards Huntington was Arabella’s husband for the last 11 years of her life.
About a year ago, I learned, for the first time, that Henry E. Huntington was not alone in founding the museum that had always been in my backyard. He and Arabella jointly signed an indenture in August 1919 that would leave their estate—which at the time included 500 acres of land, botanical gardens, agricultural operations, and two priceless cultural collections, one of books and manuscripts and the other of art and decorative objects—to the public after their deaths as a benefaction of sorts. I spent the first 18 years of my life living in San Marino; I visited The Huntington at least annually, if not multiple times a year, and I did not know that. The sole portrait of Arabella that was and is on display at The Huntington frightened me as a kid, and I much preferred to run through the botanical gardens than to sit inside the museum.
Come spring 2022, I found myself in the early stages of dissertation research for my master’s program in Edinburgh and decided that I wanted to incorporate The Huntington into my research as a case study, but it eventually became its focal point. The Huntington is an Eden-like place and I credit so much of my pursuit of art history and Early Modern history to its influence. It was through the dissertation research that I became more intimately acquainted with Arabella. As I learned more about Arabella, I encountered a lot of conflicting data. Some accounts of her are scathing, describing an unparalleled hauteur and an air of condescension that not even royals could afford (that’s a paraphrase of a direct quote); others tell of a mother whose heart of gold and love for her son was unlike any other, of an enchanting, charismatic woman whose wit, taste, and sense of humour made her a beloved presence.
There are tales of a salacious, indecent Arabella who lied her way to the top; but I never fully believed that storyline. So I looked for more evidence—I looked at her collections and tried to imagine the kind of person that would be compelled to bring those objects into their life, to aggregate things in such a way that they created an impression of a character. I looked at the art that she was drawn to, the decorative schemes that she dreamt up, I looked at the titles from her personal library, and I thought about her attitude toward counterfeits and her commitment to women’s charities. I recognised a character who valued, at least, the aesthetics of truth and someone who prized beauty—in layered textiles and antiques, in authenticity, in philanthropy—and I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was more to her story.
Why is it important to unravel Arabella's lost biography—both for the public and for you personally?
I think it’s exciting, frankly, that there is still mystery in the world, and that not all of it lies ahead of us. That, and the fact that Arabella's story deserves to be told as a standalone work.
I didn’t really consider the public when I started this project, and it wasn’t so much for myself either. It’s been for Arabella. I’ve just been following my nose, steered by some invisible compulsion and a feeling that it’s the thing I should be doing. My father told me once to be a friend to the friendless. It’s not that Arabella had no friends, but since she died in 1924, the interpretations of her life that found their way into the world haven’t always been friendly. As this project has played a greater role in my life, the growing possibility of it being received by the public has made me think more broadly about the themes in her life, in her character, that transcend time. Her story, like so many, is nuanced and it’s important to me that each dimension gets its due diligence. Sadly, Arabella is just one of many influential women whose story has been lost in history.
Can you share a timeline of your journey so far?
I discovered the tip of this project’s iceberg in May 2022 during my master’s dissertation. As I got deeper into that work, I started imagining scenes of Arabella’s life, encounters with other figures and things she might say or do, and that was all firing in my imagination as I put the finishing touches on what was a pretty academic work. Since I’d never taken on a project like this, I was hesitant to speak it out loud—what if I didn’t find any new answers? What if I got to the end and didn’t like what I found? What if it took me years, not months? How would I pay for my life? So I reached out to a few writers that I knew and I asked them, "How do you make it work? How do you feed yourself while you’re researching and writing something that no one has asked for?" After that, I spent some more time thinking through what savings I had, and how to logistically orchestrate this for myself.
In the end, I got really, really lucky. It turns out an old family friend of ours, Nancy Armitage, had been researching the Huntington family since the early 2000s purely out of her own passionate interest—she’s a California-based artist (and her sons had been my babysitters!) At the suggestion of my mother, I called Nancy up and soon realised I had a real friend to share all of this energy with. She is relentless as a researcher, and she told me on the phone that she had “a lot of journals” filled with information about the Huntington family. She asked if I planned to go in person to do more research, and in the same breath offered to let me stay in one of her spare bedrooms.
Her house is about a 12-minute bike ride from The Huntington and so, I needed a bike. The best way to bring a bike from your parent’s house in Wisconsin out to California is via Amtrak. Knowing that Arabella travelled by long-haul train for so much of her life, it seemed like a worthwhile experience for me to have, if only to gain a bit of a descriptive edge. So in October 2022, I boarded a train from Chicago to Los Angeles and that is what I consider to be the real first step in this journey. And yes, I definitely over-romanticised the experience ahead of time, though I would not trade that experience for anything. I spent nearly eight weeks in San Gabriel, California, biking to and from The Huntington most days, treating archival research like my job. During that time, I realised I was going to have to consult more material than was available in San Marino if I wanted real answers—or at least, information that hadn’t passed through someone else’s historical filter.
In mid-December, I flew from California to Austin, Texas, where Arabella’s brother and sister lived; it was also the birthplace of her best friend and personal secretary, Carrie Campbell. I found a few leads in San Marcos, Texas that I’m still now chasing down. By the beginning of 2023, I had purchased a used car and arranged for research appointments in Syracuse, New York, where there is a good amount of archival information on American artist Anna Hyatt Huntington, Arabella’s daughter-in-law. On New Year’s Day, I drove from my parent’s home in the Midwest to upstate New York and I spent three weeks in a little Airbnb in Syracuse, avoiding slips on ice and devouring material in the university’s Special Collections Research Centre. At the end of three weeks, I had a lot of material that I’d never seen before, and neither had Nancy for all of her years of work. That was big for me. When my time in Syracuse was up, I set off for New York City via Oneonta, New York—H. E. Huntington’s birthplace and the city in which he had grown up.
Once in New York City, I took a trip to The Metropolitan Museum to see one of Arabella’s old interiors named the Worsham-Rockefeller Dressing Room. I was also very lucky to consult materials at the Hispanic Society of America, where the staff quite generously let me into their archives to see what material I could in a single day. I went to Tiffany & Co. on Fifth Avenue, since Arabella’s last New York residence was what stood before it, and I asked the staff if any of them knew that information. They didn’t.
From New York, I drove to Richmond, Virginia—the city in which Arabella grew up. While in Richmond I commuted to Newport News, Virginia, where I spent some magical days at the city’s Mariner’s Museum—an odd-sounding place to find information on a female art collector, but Collis Huntington’s 1869-70 railroad venture with the Chesapeake & Ohio Railway in no small way led to the founding of the town and I suspect it was then, while he was completing the negotiations for that job, that he first met Arabella. With great thanks to the late Cerinda Evans, former librarian at the museum, there is a wealth of material on both Arabella and Collis Huntington. It was also there that I saw the only known sculpture of Arabella—a definite win. We are very lucky to live in a world where emailing archivists and librarians goes a long way! I have definitely made the most of that where I could.
I spent a few weeks digesting all of this information, trying to make sense of what I’d gathered when I got lucky again. I was offered a place at ChaNorth, an artist’s residency in the Hudson Valley run by New York–based arts nonprofit ChaShaMa. After the residency, I made my way back to Austin, where I was able to (finally) verify the birth and death dates of Arabella's closest friend, Caroline "Carrie" M. Campbell—an oddly difficult task up until my visit to the Austin History Center by way of the Austin Public Library. A few new rabbit holes presented themselves to me there and, whilst I've made efforts to see them through, it's now a matter of sitting down to give shape to this work. There are a few other places of interest that I could stand to visit—New Orleans, Alabama—but for the scope of what I'm writing now, they may come further down the line.
Your information has been primarily sourced from scattered ephemera—how do you find it?
For the objective sources, it really comes down to archives and other books/histories about either Collis P. Huntington or Henry E. Huntington, of which there are a couple of really fantastic examples (and to those scholars I have to express my deep appreciation and admiration because there is a lot of material to sort through). In the archives I’ve found old shopping receipts, letters, calling cards, telegrams, photographs, journals, sketches, newspaper clippings, you name it.
I have also been gathering old magazines, postcards, etchings and advertisements from the time period and own a growing collection of books by authors that I know Arabella had in her personal library. Admittedly, these sources are more peripheral but they help to create an atmosphere for myself as a writer and for my eventual reader.
Handling such a personal collection must be a very intimate experience. How do you approach the process with respect?
It’s incredibly intimate. It may sound silly, but there have been portraits of Arabella that I’ve seen in these archives, ones that have never been published, that took my breath away or brought tears to my eyes. Or there have been moments when I’m reading a journal entry or a letter, and I’m so moved by the small favours and moments of kindness that I’ve encountered. I can say very honestly that none of the information that I’ve found thus far is particularly shocking or scandalous, at least not by the standards of my modern frame of reference.
Respecting this process and the delicacy of it is something that I’ve thought a great deal about since she clearly went to pretty extensive lengths to keep parts of her past concealed. If Arabella were alive today, I hope that whatever I put out there she would be glad for. Much of that comes down to what I mentioned before—societal values and what is deemed “indecent” or “becoming” today are vastly different from the social norms that were in place between 1850 and 1924. Given my understanding of the massive paradigm shifts that have taken place for a woman’s agency, independence, and personal freedom since then, what I am writing approaches her life with respect and honesty, to the best of my ability. That said, I do intend to weave in more than one perspective on Arabella, and I hope that my readers see the value that comes with that multi-dimensionality.
You are able to draw a more honest picture of Arabella from these intimate records than had you been able to conduct an interview—agree or disagree?
I agree. After all, the whole basis of my interest in Arabella’s life came from the records and pieces of her life that still exist. Piecing together someone’s character based on the objects and artworks they were/are attracted to is almost easier than having a conversation with them. There is less interruption and a certain bareness to that kind of introduction—the objects speak for themselves.
I will, however, temper my agreement because if I’ve learned anything during my brief stint as a journalist it's this: you can always be surprised in an interview.
What challenges have you faced in putting together the puzzle of Arabella's life?
The biggest challenge for me has been learning to recognise and/or accept what might truly be a dead end. Just today I received an email from the archivist at an all-girls finishing school in New Orleans that has been operative since 1727, and we know through oral history that Arabella attended a finishing school in New Orleans roughly during the Civil War. It has transpired that it wasn’t that finishing school, though I still have lines in the water to see if I can find an old student record that can confirm her attendance. I’m also interested to know what name she was using at the time.
Another challenge is making sense of the sheer volume of research that I’ve collected. Whilst there isn’t exactly a deadline for a manuscript, I am constantly self-auditing my day-to-day work output. It’s been a real exercise in patience with myself to accept that the road I’m walking is a long one.
This is your first project of this kind, is it your last?
It is. My background is in art history and architectural conservation, and the resulting skillset is one that has led me to pursue this project with confidence, however naive or misplaced that may seem.
Is it my last? Not no! But with where I stand now, I don’t think that a forgotten figure tale will be the next project that I take on. I love writing stories about misunderstood characters, or characters where your first impression wasn’t the right one. It just so happens that Arabella’s story is also, in a sense, a forgotten one, or at least one that I think deserves retelling.
What can we expect from the finished product?
I’m currently writing the manuscript of what is going to be a book that paints a portrait of Arabella—if I had a talent for painting I would probably do that, but all I have are words. It’ll be a book somewhere between fiction and non-fiction, and I hope that it captures the story of her life and character as even-handedly as I can manage.
Curating an exhibition isn’t out of the question, either—I proposed one to The Huntington to celebrate the centennial of her death, but for understandable reasons, they respectfully declined the proposal. I, for one, think it would make a spectacular exhibition in addition to a book.
What do you hope your audience will take away from Arabella's story?
I want to see Arabella recognised and celebrated for her contributions to American art history and museology, but I don’t expect the general public to become too concerned with that aspect of it. Maybe they will. What I see in Arabella’s story is a struggle to define herself, to try (and inevitably fail) to control how she is perceived by those around her. In an age where so many people are constantly curating and editing their digital profiles and personas, I believe Arabella’s experience could provide a worthwhile model. Some things don’t change, or at least not as much as we think. Individuals are complex and nuanced and imperfect and this is a concept that has been weighing on minds for a long time.
To learn more about Marina Felix's work and keep up to date with her Arabella Huntington project, visit her website.
