He proposed to Edith Craig, Craig's sister, in 1903 and was accepted. Edy was a successful, prolific but now largely forgotten theatre director, producer, costume designer and early pioneer of the women's suffrage movement in England. The marriage was prevented by Ellen Terry, out of jealousy for her daughter's affection, and by Christabel Marshall (Christopher St John), with whom Edith lived from 1899, according to Michael Holroyd in his book "A Strange Eventful History (2008)". A thinly fictionalised account of this episode appears in St John's autobiographical novel "Hungerheart: The Story of a Soul (1915)".