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Mrs. Innes
Opera singer and mother of opera singer Evelyn Innes from the 1898 novel Eveyln Innes: a novel by George Moore. Evelyn's mother died when she was young and she was raised by her musician father, Mr. Innes.
She was successful; "...was paid three and four hundred a week." But she lost her voice, and became a music teacher instead. Not much else is revealed about her, but her daughter is eager to hear comparisons about her voice and her mothers.
Mrs. Innes had deep-set brown eyes, and died early of some disease that caused her to "...grow white, and lie coughing on the sofa..."
Oddly, her first name is never given.
Above the virginal on which Mr. Innes was playing there hung a portrait of a woman, and, happening to look up, a sudden memory came upon him, and he began to play an aria out of Don Giovanni. But he stopped before many bars, and holding the candle end high, so that he could see the face, continued the melody with his right hand. To see her lips and to strike the notes was almost like hearing her sing it again. Her voice came to him through many years, from the first evening he had heard her sing at La Scala. Then he was a young man spending a holiday in Italy, and she had made his fortune for the time by singing one of his songs. They were married in Italy, and at the end of some months they had gone to Paris and to Brussels, where Mrs. Innes had engagements to fulfil. It was in Brussels that she had lost her voice. For a long while it was believed that she might recover it, but these hopes proved illusory, and, in trying to regain what she had lost irrevocably, the money she had earned dwindled to a last few hundred pounds. The Innes' had returned to London, and, with a baby-daughter, settled in Dulwich. Mr. Innes accepted the post of organist at St. Joseph's, the parish church in Southwark, and Mrs. Innes had begun her singing classes.
Her reputation as a singer favoured her, and an aptitude for teaching enabled her to maintain, for many years, a distinguished position in the musical world.
