Rupert Brooke’s Mysterious Widow: The Marchesa Agnes Capponi

Abstract

Crossing the American continent in the spring of 1913, Rupert Brooke stopped at the Chateau Lake Louise. There he met Leona1 Agnes Smith, Marchesa Capponi. Brooke’s letters to Agnes are few and short; perhaps because of this, no one has paid as much attention to her as to Brooke’s other lovers. Perhaps, too, because the letters from Rupert to Agnes have been known only in incomplete form, some have seen her as a very minor player in Rupert’s life. In fact, Martin and Hall, in their book Rupert Brooke in Canada, state that “In Washington [D.C] Brooke saw the Marchesa Capponi, but the spark had gone out of the affair. The attraction probably had been as much Lake Louise as the widow in the first place.”2 No doubt, Lake Louise was, for Rupert, a beautiful place. But Agnes Smith Capponi was, if a minor character, attractive to...