Lilian Sauter

Lilian Sauter (née Blanche Lilian Galsworthy, 1 September 1864 – 27 October 1924) was a poet and suffragist who, as a 'well read and independent-minded woman', was a significant influence on the life and work of her brother John Galsworthy.

Life

Blanche Lilian Galsworthy was born 1 September 1864, As well as two brothers, John and Hubert, she had a sister: Mabel Edith (born 1871). Lilian, who loved to attend lectures, exhibitions, and concerts, was known as the "intellectual sister". In 1894, Lilian married the German artist Georg Sauter.

Writer and poet Ralph Hale Mottram wrote of Sauter that she 'won my rather overawed provincial heart with the first glance of her beautiful grey-blue eyes... Beautifully dressed, with just a touch to show her devotion to the arts and to the current internationalism that differentiated her from the average Kensington hostess, she made me welcome.'

As well as being a lover of the arts and known for fostering a welcoming salon for the artists and writers of London, Sauter was a suffragist. of the Spiritual Militancy League, a suffrage organisation led by Adela Coit.

Death and legacy In 1924, Sauter contracted pleurisy, and though she seemed to have recovered, subsequently died from a heart attack. In the years since, Lilian Sauter's influence on her family and wider circles has been acknowledged. According to Helen Carr:[Lilian] had led the family rebellion against their narrow-minded and deeply conformist mother, and married Sauter, who was not only a foreigner and an artist but of peasant stock, against considerable family opposition; this act of defiance in support of the arts, Sauter himself always thought, gave Galsworthy the courage to become, in spite of family disapproval, a novelist and writer.