Glad to read there's someone interested in Sophie Brzeska's life.
Sophie Susanne Brzeska was born in Poland in 1871.
According to Roger Cole's biography on Gaudier ["Gaudier-Brzeksa. Artist and Myth" (Ransom & Company; Bristol, 1995)], Sophie was already writing a novel about his early years in Warsaw, focusing largely in his difficult relationship with his parents, when she met Henri in Paris in 1910. Although this novel was never to be completed, Henri made many drawings for its eventual bookcover.
Claire Tomalin's biography on Katherine Mansfield gives some information about Sophie's life before she met Henri. Tomalin writes that Sophie ran away from his home in Poland and then she wandered across Europe during her twenties. The book also states that she ended up in New York in the late 1890s, to support herself as an au-pair.
Besides, it seems that the only surviving work by Sophie Brzeska is her diary, which is as far as I know, still unpublished. You can read passages of it in Cole's book. She wrote mainly remembrances of her past life with Henri, which she went to "romantize" quite a bit after the young man's death. In later entries, she tells about being stalked by people from the nearby houses. According to Cole, Sophie was just being paranoid.
Sophie's mental health had rapidly declined by then. She wrote most of her diary in an isolated house in the British countryside, where she moved shortly after being fired from a job in London. There she would write many bitter letters to Ezra Pound, some of which are also reproduced in Henri's biography. She also kept Gaudier's estate and helped assemble some of his works for an exhibition of his in I think New York in 1916. Cole suggests that she did so somewhat reluctantly, as she was over-zealous of Gaudier's work.
In the very early 1920s, the Welsh artist Nina Hamnett —also a friend of Henri and Sophie in the early 1910s— spent some time in Sophie's house in the countryside. There's an account of this visit in Hamnett's autobiography "The Laughing Torso", which you can find online at archive.org. Hamnet remembers her shouting down the stairs to "stalkers".
Sophie was taken to the County Mental Hospital, Barnwood Rural District in November, 1922. The asylum kept some of her belongings, including his diary. Sophie died there on March 17th, 1925.
I hope this information will help!
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