Biographical information provided by Helen Smith for the He Tohu exhibition:
Marie Leanora Howard Drummond (also known as Nellie Stone) was born in England in 1868, and married Henry James in 1885. The couple lived in Wellington and Napier, and had a son and two daughters. Some time in the 1890s Leanora had an affair with Joseph Barry, and went to live with him in Sydney, where they assumed the alias Bentley, and had another child. In 1900 Leanora married Constable James Baker. She was convicted of bigamy in 1905 after a sensational trial, and was imprisoned for two years. Bigamy was not uncommon at a time when divorce was difficult to obtain. Leanora lived in Finsbury, England, from 1923, and returned to New South Wales in 1930. She died in 1949.