The Routledge Companion to Literature and Feminism 0367410265, 9780367410261

Table of contents :
Cover
Endrosements Page
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Table of Contents
List of Contributors
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Writing Women's Rights – From Enlightenment to Ecofeminism
Part I: Rights
1 Like Nobody Else: Women and Independence in the Novels of Charlotte Smith and Mary Wollstonecraft
2 Romantic Women Travel Writers, Politics and the Environment: An Ecofeminist Reading of the Swiss Landscape
3 Feminism and Animal Advocacy in the Long Nineteenth Century: Anne Brontë and the 'abuses of society'
4 "They all revolved about her": Disability, Femininity, and Power in Mid-Victorian Women's Writing
5 The "quest for harmony"? Utopia, Matriarchal Communities, and Feminist Self-Critique
6 Jan Morris and the Territory Between: Interrogating Nation and Normality in Contemporary Welsh Trans Writing
Part II: Networks
7 "Men shall not make us foes": Charlotte Brontë's Letters and her Female Friendship Networks
8 Transatlantic Feminism and Antislavery Activism: Women's Networks, Letter Writing, and Literature in the Long Nineteenth Century
9 Forgotten Feminist Fiction: Netta Syrett, New Woman Writing, and Women's Suffrage
10 "It was Little more than a dining club": Examining the Epistolary Networks of Willa Muir and Helen B. Cruickshank in the Founding of Scottish PEN
11 "What means a frontier?" Nancy Cunard, Feminist Internationalism, and the Spanish Civil War
Part III: Bodies
12 Reputation of [her] pen: Retrieving the Black Female Body From the Margins of the Page and the Stage
13 "We wear the bandages, but our limbs have not grown to them": Eugenic Feminism and Female Economic Dependence in Mona Caird, Olive Schreiner, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman
14 Lesbian-trans-feminist Modernism and Sexual Science: Irene Clyde and Urania
15 "Beauty in Revolt": Fashioning Feminists in Rebecca West and Jean Rhys
16 "The rule of three": Textual Triads, Trialogues, and Women's Voices in Sylvia Plath, Jackie Kay, and Debbie Tucker Green
17 Feminism, Eugenics, and Genetics: From Convergence to Contestation
Part IV: Production
18 "O Happiness, thou pleasing dream, / Where is thy substance found?" Anne Steele's Public and Private Eighteenth-Century Writings on Happiness
19 "Dearest Norah…": The Professional and Personal Relationships Forged Between an Editor and her Authors
20 Feminist Citation in Buchi Emecheta's Early Fiction and Autobiography: Publishing Race, Class, and Gender
21 "Working with the cloth": Materialising Women's Creative Labour in the Work of Rosamond Lehmann, Beryl Bainbridge, and Joan Riley
22 "To the sisters I always wanted": Women, Writers' Groups, and Print Culture in Glasgow, 1980–1988
23 Mother Country: Leonora Brito Writes Wales – Black British Identity, Maternity, and Memory in the Welsh Short Story
Part V: Activism
24 In a Circle with Mary Hays: Writing Novels to Reform Society in the 1790s
25 In the Advance Guard of Victorian Literary Feminism: The Actress as an Independent Woman and Social Reformer in Eliza Lynn Linton's Realities: A Tale (1851)
26 "Rice puddings, made without milk": Mother Seacole Reforms "home habits" in the Crimea
27 "Your Great Adventure is to report her faithfully": The Centring of Women's Voices and Stories in Suffrage Theatre
28 A Life Can Be a Manifesto: Connecting Bernadine Evaristo to a History of Feminist Manifestos
29 Holding Women's Voices: Open Clasp as an Example of Feminist Theatre Practice
30 Protecting the Land, Safeguarding the Future: Ecofeminism, Activist Women's Writing, and Contemporary Publishing in Wales
Index

Citation preview

“Bold and imaginative in its aims, this Companion presents an exciting mix of under-represented writers alongside canonical figures. Both global and local in scope, it is a rare example of a book that foregrounds the internal diversity of Britain and its constituent nations while addressing urgent transnational issues including decolonisation and the environmental crisis.” – Professor Kirsti Bohata, Swansea University “The Routledge Companion to Literature and Feminism offers a wonderful combination of historical scope, innovative readings of a wide range of texts and a consistently stimulating exploration of literary, cultural and political ideas. It is an indispensable study for anyone interested in how literature and feminism speak to each other.” – Mary Eagleton, formerly Professor of Contemporary Women’s Writing, Leeds Beckett University “This wide-ranging collection offers a welcome addition to the scholarship, re-shaping readers’ understandings of the rich, diverse traditions of British feminism(s) in literature and charting out paths for literary feminism’s future directions.” – Professor Anne Schwan, Edinburgh Napier University “At a time when Equality Matters for All, Rachel Carroll and Fiona Tolan’s timely edited collection asks vital questions and analyses key debates from the late eighteenth century to the present in Britain. Well-known scholars explore the historical and cultural conditions of women’s writing and women’s rights across the nation. With its sensitive compilation of evolving debates on British feminism the volume is a must read for both beginners and established scholars interested in the woman question and its connectivity to matters related to equality, diversity and inclusion.” – Professor Amina Yaqin, University of Exeter

THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO LITERATURE AND FEMINISM

The Routledge Companion to Literature and Feminism brings unique literary, critical, and historical perspectives to the relationship between women’s writing and women’s rights in British contexts from the late eighteenth century to the present. Thematically organised around five central concepts—Rights, Networks, Bodies, Production, and Activism—the Companion tracks vital questions and debates, offering fresh perspectives on changing priorities and enduring continuities in relation to women’s ongoing struggle for liberty and equality. This groundbreaking collection brings into focus the historical and cultural conditions which have shaped the formation of British literary feminisms, including the legacies of slavery, colonialism, and Empire. From the political novel of the 1790s to early twentieth-century suffrage theatre and contemporary ecofeminism, and from the mid-Victorian antislavery movement to anti-fascist activism in the 1930s and working-class women’s writing groups in the 1980s, this book testifies to the diverse and dynamic character of the relationship between literature and feminism. Featuring contributions from leading feminist scholars, the Companion offers new insights into the crucial role played by women’s literary production in the evolving history of women’s rights discourses, feminist activism, and movements for gender equality. It will appeal to students and scholars in the fields of women’s writing, British literature, cultural history, and gender and feminist studies. Rachel Carroll is Associate Professor in English at Teesside University, UK. She is the author of Transgender and the Literary Imagination: Changing Gender in Twentieth-Century Writing (2018) and Rereading Heterosexuality: Feminism, Queer Theory and Contemporary Fiction (2012). Fiona Tolan is Reader in Contemporary Women’s Writing at Liverpool John Moores University, UK. She is the author of The Fiction of Margaret Atwood (2022) and Margaret Atwood: Feminism and Fiction (2007).

ROUTLEDGE LITERATURE COMPANIONS

Also available in this series: THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO ROMANTIC WOMEN WRITERS Edited by Ann R. Hawkins, Catherine S. Blackwell, and E. Leigh Bonds THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO GLOBAL LITERARY ADAPTATION IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY Edited by Brandon Chua and Elizabeth Ho THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO POLITICS AND LITERATURE IN ENGLISH Edited by Matthew Stratton THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO LITERARY MEDIA Edited by Astrid Ensslin, Julia Round and Bronwen Thomas THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO FOLK HORROR Edited by Robert Edgar and Wayne Johnson THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO LITERATURE AND THE GLOBAL SOUTH Edited by Alfred J. López and Ricardo Quintana-Vallejo THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO CHILDREN’S LITERATURE AND CULTURE Edited by Claudia Nelson, Elisabeth Wesseling, and Andrea Mei-Ying Wu THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO LITERATURE AND FEMINISM Edited by Rachel Carroll and Fiona Tolan For more information on this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/Routledge-LiteratureCompanions/book-series/RC4444

THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO LITERATURE AND FEMINISM

Edited by Rachel Carroll and Fiona Tolan

Designed cover image: Denise Jones, ‘Entangled’ (2015−2020), Exhibited in ‘Textures of Understanding’ (2021), at The Lightbox, Woking, Surrey. An image from the doctoral thesis ‘Embroidering and the Body Under Threat: Suffragette Embroidered Cloths Worked in Holloway Prison, 1911−1912’ (2020), (University for the Creative Arts, Farnham and University of the Arts, London). First published 2024 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 selection and editorial matter, Rachel Carroll and Fiona Tolan; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Rachel Carroll and Fiona Tolan to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-0-367-41026-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-55291-0 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-42995-1 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003429951 Typeset in Times New Roman by codeMantra

A volume such as this takes shape over time. Over the course of its preparation, chapters were written alongside house moves and job moves, bereavements and births, in conditions of stress, precarity and illness, and against the unprecedented backdrop of COVID-19, which brought lockdowns, home-schooling, and travel and access restrictions. The editors would like to thank the contributors, who, in a period of pandemic and uncertainty, have shared their time, energy, and knowledge to produce essays that speak eloquently to a complex history of feminist writing. We further extend our thanks to the network of less visible contributors who sustained this project: those who offered their encouragement, expertise, and recommendations, as well as those who read, commented, advised, and reviewed. This project would not have been possible without the generosity and dedication of all concerned.

CONTENTS

List of contributors xiii Acknowledgementsxvii Introduction: writing women’s rights – from Enlightenment to ecofeminism Rachel Carroll and Fiona Tolan

1

PART I

Rights27   1 Like nobody else: women and independence in the novels of Charlotte Smith and Mary Wollstonecraft Kaley Kramer

29

  2 Romantic women travel writers, politics and the environment: an ecofeminist reading of the Swiss landscape Kathryn Walchester

42

  3 Feminism and animal advocacy in the long nineteenth century: Anne Brontë and the ‘abuses of society’ Helena Habibi

55

  4 “They all revolved about her”: disability, femininity, and power in ­mid-Victorian women’s writing Clare Walker Gore

69

ix

Contents

  5 The “quest for harmony”? Utopia, matriarchal communities, and feminist self-critique Kaye Mitchell

82

  6 Jan Morris and the territory between: interrogating nation and normality in contemporary Welsh trans writing Gina Gwenffrewi

96

PART II

Networks111   7 “Men shall not make us foes”: Charlotte Brontë’s letters and her female friendship networks Deborah Wynne

113

  8 Transatlantic feminism and antislavery activism: women’s networks, letter writing, and literature in the long nineteenth century Clare Frances Elliott

125

  9 Forgotten feminist fiction: Netta Syrett, New Woman writing, and women’s suffrage Lucy Ella Rose

138

10 “It was little more than a dining club”: examining the epistolary networks of Willa Muir and Helen B. Cruickshank in the founding of Scottish PEN Emily L. Pickard 11 “What means a frontier?” Nancy Cunard, feminist internationalism, and the Spanish Civil War Eleanor Careless

150

165

PART III

Bodies181 12 Reputation of [her] pen: retrieving the black female body from the margins of the page and the stage Marl’ene Edwin 13 “We wear the bandages, but our limbs have not grown to them”: eugenic feminism and female economic dependence in Mona Caird, Olive Schreiner, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman Jane Ford x

183

201

Contents

14 Lesbian-trans-feminist modernism and sexual science: Irene Clyde and Urania Jana Funke 15 “Beauty in Revolt”: fashioning feminists in Rebecca West and Jean Rhys Sophie Oliver 16 “The rule of three”: textual triads, trialogues, and women’s voices in Sylvia Plath, Jackie Kay, and debbie tucker green Deirdre Osborne 17 Feminism, eugenics, and genetics: from convergence to contestation Clare Hanson

215 230

244 263

PART IV

Production275 18 “O Happiness, thou pleasing dream, / Where is thy substance found?” Anne Steele’s public and private eighteenth-century writings on happiness Nancy Jiwon Cho

277

19 “Dearest Norah…”: the professional and personal relationships forged between an editor and her authors Elizabeth West

293

20 Feminist citation in Buchi Emecheta’s early fiction and autobiography: publishing race, class, and gender Nicola Wilson

306

21 “Working with the cloth”: materialising women’s creative labour in the work of Rosamond Lehmann, Beryl Bainbridge, and Joan Riley Rachel Carroll

322

22 “To the sisters I always wanted”: women, writers’ groups, and print culture in Glasgow, 1980–1988 Kate Wilson

336

23 Mother Country: Leonora Brito writes Wales – black British identity, maternity, and memory in the Welsh short story Bethan Evans and Jenni Ramone

352

xi

Contents PART V

Activism365 24 In a circle with Mary Hays: writing novels to reform society in the 1790s Eliza O’Brien 25 In the advance guard of Victorian literary feminism: the actress as an independent woman and social reformer in Eliza Lynn Linton’s Realities: A Tale (1851) Teja Varma Pusapati

367

380

26 “Rice puddings, made without milk”: Mother Seacole reforms “home habits” in the Crimea Sarah Dredge

393

27 “Your Great Adventure is to report her faithfully”: the centring of women’s voices and stories in suffrage theatre Naomi Paxton

406

28 A life can be a manifesto: connecting Bernadine Evaristo to a history of feminist manifestos Fiona Tolan

419

29 Holding women’s voices: Open Clasp as an example of feminist theatre practice Kate Chedgzoy, Rosalind Haslett, and Catrina McHugh

432

30 Protecting the land, safeguarding the future: ecofeminism, activist women’s writing, and contemporary publishing in Wales Michelle Deininger

446

Index462

xii

CONTRIBUTORS

Eleanor Careless is a Research Fellow for the AHRC-funded project Liberating Histories: ­Women’s Movement Magazines, Media Activism and Periodical Pedagogies based at Northumbria University, UK. She is currently working on her first monograph on the poetry of Anna Mendelssohn (Bloomsbury) and a co-authored monograph entitled Feminist Periodicals, the Women’s Movement and Networks of Feeling, 1968–Today (with Victoria Bazin and Melanie Waters, Edinburgh University Press). Rachel Carroll is Associate Professor in English at Teesside University, UK. She is the author of Transgender and the Literary Imagination: Changing Gender in Twentieth Century Writing (Edinburgh University Press, 2018) and Rereading Heterosexuality: Feminism, Queer Theory and Contemporary Fiction (Edinburgh University Press, 2012). Kate Chedgzoy’s research takes a queer and feminist approach to both early modern and contemporary cultures. She is working to offer Open Clasp’s archive a permanent home at Newcastle University and to develop its research and teaching potential for a wide range of users, at the same time as pursuing research on gender, sexuality, and childhood in seventeenth-century life writing. Nancy Jiwon Cho is a Research Associate of the Centre for Baptist Studies at Regent’s Park College, Oxford, UK. Her work is located in the intersections of gender, religion, theology, and history. Her recent publications include chapters in Religion and the Life Cycle and The Cambridge Companion to Quakerism. Michelle Deininger is Senior Lecturer in Humanities within the Division of Lifelong Learning at Cardiff University, UK where she manages a wide portfolio of courses for adults. She specialises in women’s writing, the short story, and environmental writing. Sarah Dredge is Senior Lecturer in nineteenth-century literature at Sheffield Hallam University, UK, focusing on women’s political writing. Recent work has concerned women writers’ creative engagement with political economy, and she has published on Jane Marcet, Harriet Martineau, Jane Austen, and Elizabeth Gaskell in this context. xiii

Contributors

Marl’ene Edwin is Deputy Director of the Centre for Caribbean and Diaspora Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London, UK. She is a senior fellow of the HEA and also a Churchill Fellow. Her research interests are Caribbean creole languages and oral literature. Clare Frances Elliott is Senior Lecturer in nineteenth-century literature at Northumbria University, UK. Her research is in Atlantic literary studies and she is the co-editor (with Leslie Eckel) of The Edinburgh Companion to Atlantic Literary Studies (2016). She has published widely on transatlantic connections in literature of the long nineteenth century. Bethan Evans completed her PhD at Nottingham Trent University, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council through the Midlands3Cities Doctoral Training Partnership. Bethan’s thesis considers the potential, place, and publishing circumstances of black British short stories in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. She is currently writing on Zadie Smith’s short stories. Jane Ford is Senior Lecturer in English Studies at Teesside University, UK. She is a specialist in the literature of the fin de siècle and is currently completing a monograph examining metaphors of economic exploitation in late-nineteenth-century writing. She is co-editor of Lucas Malet Dissident Pilgrim: Critical Essays (Routledge, 2019) and Economies of Desire at the Victorian Fin de Siècle: Libidinal Lives (Routledge, 2016). Jana Funke is Associate Professor of English and Sexuality Studies in the Department of English and Creative Writing at the University of Exeter. Her research and publications focus on modernist literature, the history of sexual science, and queer, feminist and trans studies. Gina Gwenffrewi is currently based at the University of Edinburgh, UK as Co-Director of Scottish Universities International Summer School, having graduated at the University of Edinburgh with a PhD in Trans Studies/English Literature in 2021. She specialises in trans cultural production, media studies, and digital humanities. Helena Habibi completed her PhD at Durham University, UK in 2020. Her thesis examines intersections between speciesism and gendered oppression and explores the development of a feministvegetarian consciousness that reverberates palimpsestuously across time. She has published on the Brontës and Daphne du Maurier and is currently working on a project on vegetarianism in Gothic fiction. Clare Hanson is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Southampton, UK and the author of A Cultural History of Pregnancy (2004), Eugenics, Literature and Culture in Post-war Britain (2012), and Genetics and the Literary Imagination (2020). She is currently working on multi-species relations. Rosalind Haslett researches community theatre and has a particular interest in the way that these communities are sustained by storytelling, anecdote, reminiscence, and the telling of jokes. She has published in journals including Performance Research and Contemporary Theatre Review. Kaley Kramer is Head of English, History and Creative Writing at Sheffield Hallam University, UK. She is the co-editor of Women During the English Reformations (Palgrave 2014), Time, the City and the Literary Imagination (Palgrave 2020), and Print Culture, Agency and Regionality in xiv

Contributors

the Hand Press Period (Palgrave 2022). She has published work on women’s Gothic and sentimental novels and is currently researching women’s roles in the print trades during the hand-press period. Catrina McHugh, MBE, established the Open Clasp Theatre Company in 1998 and has been Artistic Director ever since. Catrina has dedicated her professional life to making ground-breaking theatre that matters and changes lives for the better. Her philosophy is written into the DNA of Open Clasp, which seeks to ‘Change the World – one play at a time’. Kaye Mitchell is Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Literature and Director of the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester, UK. Her most recent monograph is Writing Shame (EUP, 2020), and she co-edits the OUP journal, Contemporary Women’s Writing. Eliza O’Brien is an independent scholar, currently working in further education. With Helen Stark and Beatrice Turner, she is co-editor of New Approaches to William Godwin: Forms, Fears, Futures (Palgrave, 2021) and has published on Mary Wollstonecraft, Thomas Holcroft, and ­eighteenth-century penal reform. She was awarded a doctorate from the University of Glasgow and is a senior fellow of the Higher Education Academy. Sophie Oliver is Lecturer in Modernism at the University of Liverpool, UK. Her first monograph, a women’s history of modernism told through clothes, is forthcoming. Deirdre Osborne is Reader in English Literature and Drama at Goldsmiths University, UK. Her research spans late-Victorian literature to contemporary culture. She is associate editor, Women’s Writing (Taylor and Francis). Her publications include the edited book, Cambridge Companion to British Black and Asian Literature (1945–2010) (2016) and the co-authored book, This is the Canon: Decolonise Your Bookshelf in Fifty Books with Joan Anim-Addo and Kadija Sesay (Hachette, 2021). Naomi Paxton is Public and Cultural Engagement Fellow at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London. She received the TaPRA ECR Prize in 2019 for her body of work on suffrage theatre, and is also a professional broadcaster, comedian, and magician. Emily L. Pickard completed her PhD (“The Other Muir: Willa Muir, Motherhood, and Writing”) at the University of Glasgow in 2022. Her current research interests include Willa Muir, Helen Cruickshank, women’s correspondence networks, and domestic and emotional labour. Teja Varma Pusapati is Associate Professor in English at Shiv Nadar Institution of Eminence, India. Her articles on Victorian women’s foreign correspondence, feminist journalism, and celebrity culture have appeared in Victorian Periodicals Review, Women’s Writing and Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies. Her book, Model Women of the Press: Gender, Politics and Women’s Professional Journalism, 1850–1880, is forthcoming with Routledge. Jenni Ramone is Associate Professor of Postcolonial and Global Literatures and a director of the Postcolonial Studies Centre at Nottingham Trent University. Her recent publications include Postcolonial Literatures in the Local Literary Marketplace: Located Reading, The Bloomsbury Introduction to Postcolonial Writing, Postcolonial Theories, and Salman Rushdie and Translation. She is currently undertaking new projects on global literature and gender as well as literature and maternity. xv

Contributors

Lucy Ella Rose is Lecturer in Victorian Literature at the University of Surrey, UK. She is author of the book Suffragist Artists in Partnership: Gender, Word and Image (EUP 2018). Rose focuses on neglected women in creative partnerships and is currently working on fin-de-siècle feminist networks. Fiona Tolan is Reader in Contemporary Women’s Writing at Liverpool John Moores University, UK. She is author of The Fiction of Margaret Atwood (Bloomsbury, 2022) and Margaret Atwood: Feminism and Fiction (Rodopi, 2007). She is currently writing a monograph, The Politics of Cleaning in Post-War Women’s Writing, and co-editing Jackie Kay: Critical Essays. Kathryn Walchester is Reader in English Literature at Liverpool John Moores University, UK. Recent publications include Travelling Servants: Mobility and Employment in British Fiction and Travel Writing 1750–1850 (Routledge, 2019); Keywords for Travel Writing Studies: A Critical Glossary (co-edited, Anthem, 2019) and is currently co-editing a volume of essays, Microtravel: Confinement, Deceleration, Microspection (Anthem, 2022). Clare Walker Gore is Assistant Professor of English at Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge, UK, having been a Junior Research Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge. Her first monograph, Plotting Disability in the Nineteenth-Century Novel, was published by Edinburgh University Press in 2019. She has also co-edited a collection of essays on the work of Charlotte M. Yonge (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023). Her current project explores nineteenth-century women novelists’ life writing. Elizabeth West received her PhD from the University of Reading, UK in 2021. She is a Visiting Fellow at Reading’s Centre for Book Cultures and Publishing. Her monograph, The Women Who Invented Twentieth Century Children’s Literature: Only The Best (2022) is published by Routledge. Kate Wilson is an AHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the Scottish Oral History Centre, University of Strathclyde. Her research examines post-1945 histories of urban social movements and writing and combines oral history with literary and cultural analysis. Nicola Wilson is Associate Professor of Book and Publishing Studies at the University of Reading and Co-Director of the Centre for Book Cultures and Publishing. She is author of Home in British Working-Class Fiction (2015) and co-author of Scholarly Adventures in Digital Humanities: Making the Modernist Archives Publishing Project (2017). Deborah Wynne is Professor of English at the University of Chester, UK. She is the author of Women and Personal Property in the Victorian Novel (2010) and The Sensation Novel and the Victorian Family Magazine (2001), and co-editor with Amber Regis of Charlotte Brontë: Legacies and Afterlives (2017) and the forthcoming The Edinburgh Companion to the Brontës and the Arts.

xvi

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Quotations are reproduced with permission from the following publishers: W.H. Auden, “Spain” (1937) Copyright © 1937 by W.H. Auden, renewed. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. All rights reserved. Taylor Edmonds, “My Magnolia Tree” and “Our Town Was Built Around The Oak Tree” (­Broken Sleep Books) Taylor Edmonds, “In Bloom” (Lucent Dreaming) Jackie Kay, The Adoption Papers (Bloodaxe Books) Out in the Wash (self-published by various contributors) Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders. Please advise the publisher of any errors or omissions and these will be corrected in subsequent editions.

xvii

INTRODUCTION Writing women’s rights – from Enlightenment to ecofeminism Rachel Carroll and Fiona Tolan

Historically excluded from formal education, the professions, and politics, women have found meaning, purpose, and agency on the page. The written word has played a catalysing role in women’s struggle for equality, both past and present: whether as a vehicle for personal expression, private exchange, or public communication, the practice of writing – at once reflective, creative, and productive – has enabled women to create liberating spaces in which to critique and challenge the realities of their experience. The circulation of women’s words has further served to validate experience, foster shared identity, and fuel collective intent, empowering women to overcome both barriers to authorship and resistance to the troubling truths their words disclose. The forging of feminist communities of the word is an impulse which also finds expression in this collection. Bringing together specially commissioned essays by leading feminist scholars, The Routledge Companion to Literature and Feminism offers new insights into the crucial role played by women’s literary production in the evolving history of women’s rights discourses, feminist activism, and movements for gender equality. The transformative power of women’s words is explored in literary forms ranging from novels, plays, and poetry to letters, journals, and travel writing, and from journalism, essays, and manifestos to biography, autobiography, and memoir. Foregrounding the material and cultural conditions which have shaped histories of women’s literary activity, new light is cast on women’s role as editors, publishers, and cultural activists in championing women’s voices. Writing can be considered an inherently political enterprise for women: the right to write – denied on the grounds of race and class as well as gender – constitutes a foundational claim for women’s entitlement to self-determination. The very act of writing represents an assertion of individuality and autonomy in contexts where women’s existence as independent beings has been erased in principle or suppressed in practice. It serves as a demonstration of imaginative and intellectual faculty in defiance of the historical derogation of women’s abilities and achievements and gives a unique voice to the experiences and perspectives of women, redressing the marginalisation and silencing to which women have been subject. Finally, it provides a vehicle through which to confront the injustice of gender prejudice, discrimination, and inequality, exposing and contesting sexual, economic, and racial forms of exploitation, oppression, and violence, whether in the home, the family, the workplace, or beyond.



1

DOI: 10.4324/9781003429951-1

Rachel Carroll and Fiona Tolan

Through a distinctive emphasis on the relationship between women’s writing and women’s rights in British contexts from the late eighteenth century to the present, this collection seeks to bring into new focus the historical and cultural conditions which have shaped the formation of ­literary feminisms. As a literature of the Anglophone Global North, writing by women published in British contexts enjoys relative privilege when considered in the wider context of world literatures. Certainly, the literary outputs of a select number of British women authors were prominent in field-defining studies of women’s writing published by leading feminist scholars in the United States and United Kingdom in the 1970s. The Anglo-American character of these synoptic histories speaks to shared concerns and ambitions, with women’s and feminist presses in the United Kingdom in turn fostering readerships for contemporary writing by North American women. ­However, critical paradigms originating in the United States do not always serve the specificities and complexities of women’s writing in British contexts, particularly with regard to the diversity of cultures, languages, and national identities that make up the United Kingdom and the experiences and legacies of Empire and migration. Recognising the close and complex relationship between the evolution of nation-states and the development of discourses of political rights, this collection acknowledges the specific legal traditions, political arrangements, and economic systems which have informed the agendas and imperatives of feminist activism in British contexts. Conversely, this focus casts into greater relief the particular character and significance of international feminist networks and movements, including the European, the transatlantic, and the postcolonial. Inclusion in the collection is not limited by place of birth, national affiliation, or citizenship, but rather extends to writing by women which has significantly shaped – or been shaped by – British literary and cultural contexts, whether of production, readership, or reception. A historicising impulse is central to this collection’s approach to women writers and women’s writing, situating authors and texts within a range of social, economic, political, and cultural contexts, revisiting the reputation of critically neglected or historically overlooked writers, and drawing on original archival research to offer new insights into the politics of creative practice and cultural production. Chapters explore the significance of contexts relating to the French Revolution and its aftermath, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century cultures of political and religious dissent, slavery, colonialism and Empire, interwar internationalism and anti-fascism, and environmental activism as well as the suffrage and women’s liberation movements of the twentieth century. Seeking to generate fresh perspectives on changing priorities and enduring continuities (while cautious not to impose a newly totalising narrative on the history of women’s writing), this collection eschews the limitations of chronological structuring. Thematically organised around five central concepts – Rights, Networks, Bodies, Production, and Activism – it tracks vital questions, debates, and demands across time. In the remainder of this Introduction, we set out the historical scope of the collection, articulate the rationale underpinning its thematic structure, situate individual contributions within the overarching conceptual design, and reflect on the contemporary contexts in which the volume has been produced.

Mapping feminist histories of women’s writing The publication of Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792 is widely recognised as a watershed moment in the history of women’s rights discourses: as such, it serves as an important starting point for this collection. Wollstonecraft was not the first woman to enlist the written word to advance claims on behalf of her sex; there is a long history of women writers employing the pen to defend their sex against accusations of inferiority, as embodied in doctrines of church and state and motivated by deep-seated misogyny. However, Wollstonecraft’s treatise, 2

Writing women’s rights – from enlightenment to ecofeminism

with its impassioned and sustained exposition of the causes of women’s subordination, stands as a powerful precedent for later generations of women writers and feminist activists. A radical intervention in the emerging discourse of political rights in the late eighteenth century, Wollstonecraft’s argument on behalf of women of her class (and implicitly her race) serves as a benchmark for both the ambition and the limits of rights-based discourses as remedies for inequalities of power. The problematic properties inherent in this historically and culturally specific philosophy of rights – its universalising tendencies, its presumption of individualism, and its privileging of reason – are ­interrogated in different ways over the course of this collection, including from postcolonial, disability studies, and ecofeminist perspectives. The legacies of Wollstonecraft’s late-eighteenth-­century concerns are both directly and indirectly revisited, contextualised, and extended – ­including in relation to her contemporaries and predecessors – in the chapters which make up this study, taking feminist enquiry through a further two centuries and more of nuanced and evolving critical engagement with women’s lives and women’s rights. The legacies of the Enlightenment, the impact of the French Revolution and its aftermath, and the importance of radical communities of political and religious dissent are examined in chapters exploring women’s writing in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, an era which witnessed both the historical emergence of the revolutionary concept of rights and the exclusion of women from its entitlements. Authors including Mary Hays, Elizabeth Heyrick, Harriet Martineau, Amelia Opie, Mary Shelley, Charlotte Smith, Anne Steele, Helen Maria Williams, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Dorothy Wordsworth all contribute in different ways to debates about the promise and the parameters of political ideals of liberty, independence, and happiness in relation to gender and race, including the inequalities and oppressions perpetuated by the institution of marriage, women’s legal status, lack of access to formal education, and the institution of slavery. These chapters also testify to the reputational risk attending women’s entry into the public sphere of the printed word in this era, and to the different ways in which women achieved expression through modes of communication including travel writing, journals, letters, and the devotional lyric as well as the novel. Continuities of concern are evident in chapters exploring women’s writing in the latter half of the nineteenth century, especially in relation to education and marriage, but with new attention being brought to the ideological contradictions of domestic femininity, the liberating potential of professional work, and women’s entry into the public sphere through social reform activism, including within the transatlantic antislavery movement. Prose fiction and non-fiction, including life writing and correspondence, provide public and private platforms for writers such as Anne Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell, Julia Griffiths, Eliza Lynn Linton, Mary Seacole, Mary Taylor, and Charlotte Yonge to critically engage with Victorian discourses of gender and race in the era of industrial capitalism and the British Empire. Feminist voices are nurtured through sustaining female friendship networks and given expression in narrative strategies ranging from coded critique to subversive appropriation and radical defiance. Exploring women writers’ depiction of oppression based on race and disability as well as gender, and tracing women’s role in a nascent animal rights movement, these chapters also bear witness to the historical emergence of analogies of oppression, the new political alliances which they make possible, and the hierarchies of power which they potentially obscure. The late Victorian to early twentieth-century periods witness a historically significant concentration of feminist activism in the public sphere, centring first on the New Woman movement and its transgressive challenges to conventional gender roles and, secondly, on the suffrage movement and its dedication to the achievement of political rights. Chapters exploring the fiction and non-fiction work of authors such as Mona Caird, George Egerton, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and 3

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Sarah Grand foreground their dissection of prevailing modes of economic, sexual, and reproductive organisation and their speculative imagining of radical alternatives. The stage provides the focal point for personal, political, and professional networks of feminist activism in chapters exploring suffrage theatre and fiction and the diverse strategies they employed to enlighten, convert, and enlist their audiences. Chapters exploring women’s literary production as authors (of fiction, poetry, private correspondence, and public journalism), editors, or publishers in the first decades of the twentieth century – including Irene Clyde, Helen Cruickshank, Nancy Cunard, Charlotte Haldane, Rosamond Lehmann, Willa Muir, Jean Rhys, Norah Smallwood, Rebecca West, and Virginia Woolf – seek to complicate perceptions of this era as one of political stagnation or retreat where feminist activism is concerned. Examining the role of women writers variously within literary modernism, queer subcultures, the Scottish Renaissance, and the international anti-colonial and anti-fascist movements of the 1930s, they explore the formation of feminist subjectivity, make visible women’s endeavours in support of fellow women writers within literary networks and the publishing industry, and draw new attention to women’s political activism in international contexts. Moving into the mid-to-late twentieth century, an era closely associated with the resurgence of feminist activism now known as the Second Wave, the experiences of working-class and black British women are foregrounded in chapters examining the relationship among class, race, and gender oppression, from the work of Buchi Emecheta, Beryl Bainbridge, and Joan Riley to working-class women’s writing groups in 1980s Glasgow, feminist theatre, and women’s environmental activism. The legacies of slavery and colonialism, the impact of systemic racism and the effects of cultural policies shaped by public debates around multiculturalism, migration, national identity, and citizenship are explored in different ways in chapters addressing the work of contemporary black British authors, including Joan Anim-Addo, Leonora Brito, Bernardine Evaristo, Jackie Kay, Zadie Smith, and debbie tucker green, interrogating past and present through fiction, poetry, ­libretto, life writing, and manifesto. In this same spirit of giving voice to the specificities of multivalent identities, the importance of national and regional experiences that countermand a presumed metropolitan Englishness is expressed by writers like Leonora Brito, Jan Morris, Philippa Holloway, and Kathryn Simmonds. Published in an era that saw the emergence of feminist scholarship as a transformative force in literary and cultural studies, these texts interrogate the hierarchies of power which privilege some women over others, and to which feminism itself is not immune. Taken together, these chapters reframe the terms by which canons of women’s writing – one of the defining legacies of Second-Wave feminist literary history and criticism – are conceived, bringing new perspectives and methodologies to the history of women’s writing in the late twentieth century. As the focus of chapters on contemporary writers still publishing today – Joan Anim-Addo, Bernardine Evaristo, Sarah Hall, Jackie Kay, Zadie Smith, and others – brings the discussion up to the present moment, the instinct of feminism to return to fundamental debates and ideas is apparent. Essays in the following volume chart new feminist experiments in utopian thinking, returns to questions of bodies and the environment, the rewriting and revivifying of the manifesto as a potent political form, the reconstruction of traumatic histories of slavery and Empire from the perspective of women of colour, and the re-evaluation of the works of earlier writers, with the aim to address neglected subjectivities and absent stories. Each of these returns ensures that the women’s writing of the past and present remain in dynamic dialogue; the still urgent questions articulated by previous generations find new meaning and audiences, while the priorities of the present moment bring new perspectives to the legacies of the past. The breadth of content encompassed in this collection serves to challenge any excessively narrow equation between ‘feminism’ as a political phenomenon and the movements with which 4

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the term is most closely associated in British contexts: the suffragette movement of the early twentieth century and the women’s liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s. At the same time, it ­underlines the importance of the cultural sphere to radical movements for social change, demonstrating the potential of literary and cultural activism to significantly extend the ambit of campaigns initially centring on legislative change.

Rights The chapters collected in this section range from the radical politics and revolutionary sympathies of the Romantic era, through the conservative feminism of the mid-Victorian period, to the gender politics of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Considered together, they demonstrate the diverse ways in which women writers have engaged with questions of power and agency across time, ranging from complex negotiations with restricted fields of action to defiant assertions of autonomy and provocative imaginings of alternate realities, whether in relation to the institutions of state or nation or the dynamics of marriage, family, and the home. The historic crucibles of women’s rights activism – education, work, the law, marriage – are addressed and extended to include the natural and non-human worlds. These chapters also testify to the formative impact of international networks, whether that be the revolutionary politics of continental Europe or the postcolonial struggles and transnational alliances of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The conjuring of emancipatory ‘elsewheres’ through the spatial mobility of travel writing and the speculative extrapolations of utopian fiction serves as a counterpoint to some of the more troubling legacies consequent from the historical relationship between political rights, the nation state, and constructions of citizenship. Wollstonecraft (1759–1797) acts as a fitting focus for the opening chapter of the collection. Kaley Kramer’s “Like nobody else: women and independence in the novels of Charlotte Smith and Mary Wollstonecraft” directs attention to Wollstonecraft’s literary output, situating her novels alongside the work of a lesser-known contemporary and arguing that it is in fiction that the condition of women is ‘most radically tested’. By placing Smith (1749–1806) and Wollstonecraft’s work within contemporary literary and philosophical contexts, from the novelistic traditions of Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Romantic narratives of self, Kramer traces their complex navigation of Enlightenment legacies, including the ideological double bind embodied in the construction of ‘masculine’ reason and ‘feminine’ sensibility. Predating the French Revolution, the event which catalysed public debate about the scope and legitimacy of political rights, the fictions considered in this chapter examine the unique challenges experienced by women in their aspirations to individuality, autonomy, and independence, qualities which served as pre-requisites for the exercise of rights and from which women were routinely excluded. As Kramer demonstrates, woman’s sole agency conventionally consisted in her consent to marriage, an institution which erased her legal existence. In her discussion of Smith’s Emmeline (1788) and Ethelinde (1789) and Wollstonecraft’s Mary, A Fiction (1788), Kramer powerfully illustrates the courage and risk entailed in the assertion of women’s individuality; at a time when ‘exceptionality’ and ‘infamy’ served as predictable poles of public response to women’s assertions of individuality, Wollstonecraft’s attempt to conjure in fiction ‘the mind of a woman who has thinking powers’ becomes truly radical. The authors who form the focus of Kathryn Walchester’s chapter, “Romantic women travel writers, politics and the environment: an ecofeminist reading of the Swiss landscape”, were subject in different ways to the same problematic paradigm in relation to individuality and the woman writer set out by Kramer. Where Helen Maria Williams (1759–1827) was publicly castigated for 5

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her revolutionary sympathies, the literary achievement of Mary Shelley (1797–1851) and Dorothy Wordsworth (1771–1855) was routinely subordinated to that of their more famous male relatives until the advent of feminist literary scholarship restored their place within canons of British Romantic writing. Questions of political agency in women’s writing are at the heart of Walchester’s chapter, which examines the hybrid genre of travel writing as a unique platform for women’s entry into the public sphere of political debate. Drawing on forms more commonly associated with the private realm – such as the letter, the journal, and the memoir – Walchester argues that the observational mode of travel writing licensed women’s commentary on the comparative merits of different modes of social and political organisation, opening up space for critique. Travelling with male companions, whether in family or friendship groups, women of Williams, Shelley, and Wordsworth’s class were able to experience unprecedented degrees of mobility. Moreover, the itineraries of these post-French Revolution journeys, undertaken by Romantic writers of radical sympathies, enabled the authors of these journals to comment on the nature and legitimacy of political power, with Switzerland serving as a favoured destination, given its long history of republican modes of government. Walchester pays special attention to the role of landscape within these accounts, going beyond the Romantic lexicon of the sublime to investigate its gendered meanings for women travellers and writers. In this context, the time-honoured alignment between women and nature, long given as justification for women’s subjugation, generates metaphors of oppression and liberation which herald the terms of later ecofeminist movements. In Walchester’s chapter, the sublime power of nature is enlisted to give figurative expression to women’s political agency as thinking and speaking subjects and citizens, capable of contributing to public debate about the future of democracy. In Helena Habibi’s chapter, “Feminism and animal advocacy in the long nineteenth century: Anne Brontë and the ‘abuses of society’”, a politicised affinity between women and the natural world is articulated in texts which foreground analogies of oppression between women and nonhuman animals, their bodies similarly subject to commodified exchange and consumption and their legal status reduced to that of property. Habibi places the work of Anne Brontë (1820–1849) within a much wider context which testifies to the leading role played by women over the course of the nineteenth century in campaigning for the improved welfare of animals and their greater protection against cruelty and exploitation, whether in the form of hunting, vivisection, or slaughter for food. Revisiting the Enlightenment discourses within which Wollstonecraft framed her argument, Habibi draws critical attention to the wider implications of the privileging of reason and its implications for those beings assumed not to exercise its command. Returning to novels – Agnes Grey (1847) and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) – long recognised by feminist scholars as foregrounding crucial issues of marriage (including divorce, property law, and child custody) and work (in the figure of the governess), Habibi traces parallels between motifs to do with hunting, cruelty against animals and meat eating, and the exploitation of women’s bodies and labour. Her focus on the depredation of birds – whether in the name of game, fashion, or food – proves especially resonant, given the longstanding figurative use of the bird to signify women’s liberty or lack of it. Adopting a ‘feminist vegetarian’ perspective, Habibi demonstrates how these texts disrupt discourses which naturalise the exploitation of animals and women alike; in doing so, they implicitly test the prerogatives of rights discourses, challenging their equation with masculine subjects and restriction to human agents. Clare Walker Gore’s chapter, “‘They all revolved about her’: disability, femininity and power in mid-Victorian women’s writing”, revisits nineteenth-century narratives occupying nominally conservative genres to argue that significant interventions in the fictional exploration of women’s power and agency are not the exclusive preserve of overtly radical texts. As Walker Gore 6

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acknowledges, the popularity of the figure of the female invalid in Victorian narratives of domestic sentiment, constructing women and people with disabilities alike as occupying a feminised state of powerlessness and presenting this as the proper condition of women, forges an equation which invites critique from both feminist and disability studies standpoints. However, in her reading of fictions by Elizabeth Gaskell (1810–1865) and Charlotte Yonge (1823–1901), Walker Gore challenges the presumption that the figure of the exemplary female invalid should be read as a prescription for passivity. Reaffirming the dignity, authority, and power with which these authors invested women with disabilities, Walker Gore reads them as exemplars of ‘instructive invalidism’, a woman-centred model of informal education in which younger women are mentored to navigate the ‘inequitable realities’ of their existence. Empowered to both preserve and assert a resilient sense of self within their limited field of action, they subtly contest conventional dynamics of gender and power. Walker Gore’s chapter offers fresh perspectives on Victorian women writers’ negotiations with dominant discourses of domestic femininity, recovering women with disabilities in Gaskell’s The Moorland Cottage (1850) and Yonge’s The Clever Woman of the Family (1865) from critical traditions which have seen them as little more than didactic devices for ideologically conservative agendas. Where the landscapes of the Alps and the political experiments of Europe provide potentially utopian spaces for the imaginations of late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century women writers, the texts considered in Kaye Mitchell’s chapter, “The ‘quest for harmony’? Utopia, matriarchal communities, and feminist self-critique”, conjure imaginary worlds within which to test radical solutions to gender inequalities. Considering narratives which span the twentieth century, Mitchell places them in an even longer history, reaching back to Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World (1666), with its bold declaration of narrative prerogative. Challenging readings of utopian fiction as prescriptive and totalising, Mitchell argues that the critical impulse inherent in the feminist tradition of utopian writing can be seen as having internal as well as outward-facing applications. In this context, feminist utopian fiction is understood as offering a space in which the tensions and conflicts integral to a movement of many voices can be explored and in which the ‘discomfort’ of dissension becomes a virtue to be embraced, rather than a failing to be avoided. This multiplicity is recognised in the diversity of the texts examined in this chapter, including Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland (1915), Joanna Russ’ The Female Man (1975), and Sarah Hall’s The Carhullan Army (2007), whose narratives are both future-oriented and restrospective, revisiting the First- and Second-Wave histories of feminism as well as plotting its potential futures. Through a focus on a genre which has strong associations with feminist intent but also a persistent reputation for didacticism, Mitchell unsettles perceptions of feminism as an exclusively goal-oriented political project, embracing instead the open-ended impulse which characterises the ongoing debates by which feminism continually revisits and renews its vision. The connections between travel writing, the nation state, global citizenship, and utopian thinking combine in Gina Gwenffrewi’s chapter “Jan Morris and the territory between: interrogating nation and normality in contemporary Welsh trans writing”. Best known for her 1974 memoir Conundrum, a text with a significant place in the canons of trans life writing, the later non-fiction writing of Jan Morris (1926–2020) forms the focus of this chapter. Acknowledging the misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia with which some of Morris’ earlier work has been associated, as well as the Orientialist tendencies of her travel writing, Gwenffrewi brings new critical attention to the anti-imperial and transnational currents in Morris’ later work, foregrounding her identity as a Welsh author. Revisiting the role of idealised cities and landscapes in Morris’ writing – from Venice and Trieste to Kashmir and Nepal – Gwenffrewi tracks the changing meaning of identity in relation to the nation-states. With a special focus on contemporary Welsh language trans writing, 7

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this chapter places Morris’ work as a Welsh writer within contexts of English colonialism, British imperialism, and globalisation, and within histories of trans representation and rights from the late twentieth century to the present, exploring the relationship between gender identity, language, and citizenship in global contexts.

Networks Where the emerging and evolving discourse of rights provides a conceptual framework through which to conceive, articulate, and advance women’s claims for personal and political liberty, the networks of affinity, alliance, and activism which women have nurtured in different historical contexts foster the conditions in which these claims can be realised. Ranging from the interpersonal to the international, the networks considered in this section encompass communities of friendship, profession, and political action. Formed in historical contexts in which women are excluded from the class, race, and religion-based professional and political networks by which power and influence are perpetuated in the public sphere, they seek to remedy the dispersal of women as a collective group through their allocation to roles – as daughters, sisters, wives, and mothers – ­determined by their relation to men. Written correspondence between women plays an important role in enabling and sustaining the networks explored in these chapters, from personal letters written without the constraints or risks of publication and exchanged by women in a spirit of intellectual friendship or professional endeavour, to the open letter, petition, or manifesto – whether individual or collective, published under a pseudonym or anonymously – by which a wider public audience can be addressed. Feminist theatre also emerges as a significant space in which women’s voices can take centre stage and in which experiences of collectivity can be fostered. While some of the networks considered here are overtly feminist, including those associated with the suffrage movement of the early twentieth century, others make subtly subversive use of seemingly conservative modes of single-sex social organisation. Likewise, while some are exclusively concerned with gender equality, others are situated within a range of historical movements for social and political change, both national and international, including the radical politics of religious dissent in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the antislavery movement of the Victorian period and the anti-fascist and anti-colonial movements of the 1930s and beyond. Serving as platforms for women’s political agency or vehicles of feminist awakening, these movements forge alliances which testify to the complex relationship between gender, class, race, and colonialism, with analogies of oppression made in the name of women’s emancipation giving rise to shared solidarity while being underpinned by hierarchies of power between women. Deborah Wynne’s chapter, “‘Men shall not make us foes’: Charlotte Brontë’s letters and her female friendship networks”, foregrounds the relationships which shaped and made possible the emergence of a feminist voice in the work of Charlotte Brontë (1815–1855). Through a focus on the personal correspondence exchanged between Brontë and fellow writers, Elizabeth Gaskell (1810–1865) and Mary Taylor (1817–1893), it demonstrates the vital space offered by the letter form for the development of women’s professional identities in an era in which women’s authorship continued to attract public and private resistance and censure. It identifies Victorian female friendship communities as important sources of emotional and intellectual support, overcoming barriers of time and distance to provide mutually sustaining relationships as a resource for professional aspiration and defying prevailing perceptions about women’s inability to sustain same-sex friendships. Revisiting Brontë’s personal experience and fictional depiction of education, Wynne finds in the female-headed girls’ school a model of women’s professionalism, with Brontë’s time at Roe Head School providing stimulating access to the radical dissenting views of her classmates 8

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and their families as well as lifelong friendship with the avowedly feminist and intrepid Taylor (who emigrated to New Zealand). Offering the vivid literary culture generated between Brontë and her sisters Emily and Anne as a model for future female networks, Wynne also approaches Gaskell’s biography of Charlotte Brontë as a pioneering depiction of a woman professional. Challenging perceptions of Victorian literary women’s lives as isolated or insular, this chapter places the author of narratives which have long been seen as playing a formative role in the development of canons of modern feminist literature in a context in which intellectual and professional networks were carefully cultivated, highly valued, and fiercely defended. Letters also play an important role in Clare Elliot’s chapter, “Transatlantic Feminism and Antislavery Activism: Women’s networks, letter writing, and literature in the long nineteenth century”, extending beyond the private sphere of personal correspondence to encompass the individual or collective open letter or petition. This chapter focuses on the role of women in transatlantic antislavery networks in the 1840s and 1850s, bringing to the fore the relationship between campaigns for the abolition of American slavery and movements for women’s rights on both sides of the Atlantic. Elliot brings specific attention to the role of British women, such as Amelia Opie, Elizabeth Heyrick, and Harriet Martineau, in antislavery campaigns, including in relation to the work of the leading African American abolitionist and women’s rights advocate Frederick Douglass, whose speaking tours of Britain and Ireland forged friendships and political alliances, not least with the English Quaker activists, Anna and Ellen Richardson. The contribution of British-born Julia Griffiths (1811–1895), co-editor of the leading antislavery periodical, Frederick Douglass’ Paper, is placed within a wider culture of public lectures, book tours, journalism, and letters. Elliot’s focus also extends to the anonymous signatories to the Scottish Women’s Letter (1848) and British Women’s Petition (1867), addressing the white women of America and engaging, alongside more famous authors like Harriet Beecher Stowe, in a public debate in which the moral virtues of motherhood – a central pillar in Victorian constructions of ideologies of gender – were mobilised to contest the institution of slavery. As this chapter demonstrates, the transatlantic abolition movement provided a platform for women’s political activism, one which has been seen as catalysing women’s agitation for rights denied to them on the grounds of their gender; as such, this historical moment offers a formative space in which both the hopes and challenges of intersectional activism can be considered. Lucy Ella Rose’s chapter, “Forgotten Feminist Fiction: Netta Syrett, New Woman writing, and women’s suffrage”, revisits the work of an author often overshadowed by her more famous New Woman peers, situating Syrett’s (1865–1943) work firmly within the artistic, professional, and political networks which underpinned the early twentieth century campaign for the vote. Expanding the canon of suffrage literature beyond the period of the movement, it examines the theatre as a public platform for politically driven drama in Syrett’s play Might is Right (1909), set in an imagined future, and the novel as a discursive space for intergenerational reflection on the historical meaning and legacy of the suffrage struggle, in her retrospective novel Portrait of a Rebel (1930). Tracking Syrett’s involvement in and contribution to a range of women’s groups, societies, and events, Rose reconstructs the feminist literary and political communities of the fin de siècle and beyond, including those formalised by the founding of the Actresses’ Franchise League and Women Writers’ Suffrage Guild (both 1908), which combined professional networks with political intent. A sense of community across time is exemplified in the diversity of suffrage voices showcased in Might is Right and by the intermingling of historical and fictional figures in Portrait of a Rebel which, in tracing the life history of an activist to the present day, embodies an historicising imperative in its desire to preserve the memory of struggle. The title of Syrett’s autobiography, The Sheltering Tree (1939), taken from a poem about friendship by the Romantic poet Samuel 9

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Taylor Coleridge, affirms the importance of women’s networks combining personal, professional, and political concerns. Rose’s recuperation of Syrett’s place within a history of feminist literary activism, and her recovery of works which have fallen out of the public eye, serves to keep these historic networks alive. Emily Pickard’s chapter, “‘It was little more than a dining club’: examining the epistolary networks of Willa Muir and Helen B. Cruickshank in the founding of Scottish PEN”, returns to the topic of women’s correspondence as an archive of personal and political bonds, exploring the role of Scottish women writers in the early work of PEN International, an organisation launched in the years following the First World War and dedicated to the defence of writers’ freedoms in global contexts. This chapter brings new critical attention to women writers more commonly seen as supporting actors in the evolution of the male-dominated Scottish Renaissance in the interwar years, re-evaluating the vital but often invisible intellectual, administrative, and emotional labour that they provided. Pickard explores the particular relationship between national identity, language, and literary culture in the context of English colonialism and European internationalism, with the latter providing a stage for the assertion of Scottish voices and languages. Contrasting the published life writing of Willa Muir (1890–1970) with her private correspondence with, among others, Helen Cruickshank (1886–1975), this chapter brings to light alternative histories of national and international literary communities, highlighting the role played by women in movements which sought to liberate literary voices. Eleanor Careless’ chapter “‘What means a frontier?’ Nancy Cunard, feminist internationalism, and the Spanish Civil War”, examines the war poetry and journalism of the author, editor, and activist Nancy Cunard (1896–1965), placing her work within the context of feminist internationalism, from the Edwardian avant-garde of the early twentieth century to the women’s liberation movement of the 1970s and 1980s. Revisiting the 1930s as a time of transition between different forms of feminism, it situates an apparent withdrawal from overt feminist identification in the decades following the waning of the New Woman and suffrage movements in the context of women’s involvement in critiques of nationalism, colonialism, and fascism. Careless considers Cunard’s work in relation to the print cultures of the time, contrasting the empathic ‘immediacy’ of her journalism and poetry with the abstraction and defeatism of the work of the more celebrated male writers of Spanish Civil War poetry. Bringing particular attention to Cunard’s reporting on the plight of political refugees in French detention camps, Careless’ reading of her work places women’s political activism within a framework informed by anti-colonial and anti-fascist networks in global contexts.

Bodies Feminism has often diverged in its disparate views on the body. The female body has been, at various times in feminist history, an insignificant distraction best ignored in pursuit of intellectual equality, an inconvenient obstacle to be overcome with the aid of science, and an essential difference to be celebrated. The feminist politics of bodies extends into many areas: the ability to express sexual and gender identities free from violence and coercion, legal rights and restrictions around maternity and reproduction, access to equitable health care, the status of sex workers, the ethics of pornography, representation, and objectification, and the particular pressures and oppression experienced by racialised or colonised bodies, medicalised bodies, bodies with disabilities, ageing bodies, and bodies that do not conform in any manner of ways to the culturally accepted patriarchal and heteronormative ideals of western late capitalism. Rooted in a long geopolitical history in which women’s bodies have – legally and literally – often not been their own to direct, 10

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the pursuit of bodily autonomy is perhaps the most persistent thread running through feminist theory and practice. In the chapters that follow, the authors take up histories of slavery and colonisation as well as eugenics and sexology; they examine the maternal body, the fashioned body, and the queered body. Stretching from responses to Aphra Behn’s marginalisation of the black female body in her 1688 prose fiction, Oroonoko, through New Woman writing, modernism, and twentieth century poetry and drama, to Zadie Smith’s connecting of eugenics to present-day genetic science in her 2000 novel, White Teeth, they collectively demonstrate that the body – that most material and shared (even in difference) of experiences – lies at the heart of an extraordinary variety of writerly engagements with women’s lives and women’s rights. In her chapter, “Reputation of [her] pen: retrieving the black female body from the margins of the page and the stage”, Marl’ene Edwin traces a rich and productive web of interconnections between body, voice, text, and authorship. Her essay argues that Joan Anim-Addo’s 2008 neoslave narrative libretto, Imoinda – a rewriting of Behn’s Oroonoko that brings Imoinda’s story to the fore – uses Behn’s text as a ‘source of evidence’ from which to create a new and contemporary ‘creolised archive’ in the form of her three-act opera. Edwin explores how Anim-Addo’s work gives voice to the ‘historically muted’ subject of slavery, emphasising the physicality of the enslaved (female) body, and tying bodily autonomy to authorship. The chapter makes evolving connections between the fight of an African Caribbean author (working in a medium that typically credits the musical composer but not the librettist) to centre and claim her authorship with Anim-Addo’s project to centre the body of a black woman slave on the stage, retrieving her from the margins of Behn’s page, and from the long and traumatic history of European colonisation and the Atlantic slave trade. A seemingly different set of bodily concerns motivates the writers addressed in Jane Ford’s chapter, “‘We wear the bandages, but our limbs have not grown to them’: eugenic feminism and female economic dependence in Mona Caird, Olive Schreiner, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman”, although, inevitably, echoing assumptions of imperial and racial supremacy haunt the eugenic feminist writings of this period. Ford returns to the New Woman writings of these three influential figures, tracing international networks of feminist thinking on eugenics and their implication for gender relations in the wake of Darwin’s theory of evolution. With a particular focus on their common use of insect imagery drawn from entomology and microscopy to reflect on the ideal structure of society and the division of labour, Ford notes that many First-Wave feminists found in eugenic theory and ‘the languages of evolution’ the potential for an emancipatory vision of gender equality and social harmony. In a critical observation, Ford notes how the Second-Wave impulse to uncouple gender from sex is absent in these earlier attempts to rationalise and champion women’s ‘natural’ biological function. The female body in these feminist eugenic discourses is a site of anxiety and potential social degradation: parasitic and weakened by women’s economic dependence on men. Seeking eugenic solutions to envision a more healthful, equitable contribution by women to social progress, writers such as Mona Caird (1854–1932), Olive Schreiner (1855–1920), and Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935) championed different routes to gender equality, but they share an urgent vision of the necessity of women’s full engagement in ‘human industry and intellectual life’. In this essay, Ford demonstrates how these women writers shaped the scientific and political debates of their day, while also tracing the coalescence of feminist and colonial ideology that continues to shadow this period of feminist development. As the language of eugenics influenced many New Woman writers of the 1880s and 1890s, so sexology – the new discourse of sexual science working to define sex, gender, and sexuality at the turn of the twentieth century – was of interest to many feminist writers working in the modernist period. In her chapter, “Lesbian-Trans-Feminist Modernism and Sexual Science: Irene Clyde and 11

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Urania”, Jana Funke takes up the radical work of Irene Clyde (1869–1954), a writer of fiction and non-fiction and co-editor of the feminist journal Urania, to examine Clyde’s responses to the sexologists’ framings of lesbian and trans women and her engagement more widely with lesbian, queer, and trans feminist movements and literary cultures of the interwar period. As Funke demonstrates, Clyde’s work also speaks back to many of the same feminist debates outlined in Ford’s chapter. Resistant to the suffrage movement, which she criticised for its essentialising assumption of women’s function in heteronormative marriage and motherhood and for prioritising the vote over a more radical upending of gender construction, Clyde was nevertheless similarly drawn to investigations into evolutionary models of development, bringing her into conversation with the utopian work of Perkins Gilman, for example. Funke’s essay further situates Clyde’s work against an expanding backdrop of other significant modernist women writers similarly responding to current debates, some of whom, like Radclyffe Hall, famously championed sexology as a way to locate lesbian and trans identities within a coherent sexual scientific rhetoric, while others, like Virginia Woolf and Djuna Barnes, instead resisted sexology’s ‘rigid definitions and identity categories’. Funke’s exploration of Clyde’s theorising of sex and gender, and her investigations into queer constructions of androgyny, same-sex desire, and other disruptions to heterosexual relations and biological reproduction, demonstrates how Clyde was able to simultaneously mobilise and unsettle sexological systems of classification in a way that resonated with queer constructions of lesbian and trans identities in the modernist period and which anticipates the rise of queer feminist theories of the later twentieth century. Fiction produced on the rich productive cusp of New Woman writing and modernism remains at the fore of the next chapter: Sophie Oliver’s “‘Beauty in Revolt’: Fashioning feminists in Rebecca West and Jean Rhys”. Reading Rebecca West’s (1892–1983) The Sentinel alongside Jean Rhys’ (1890–1979) “Triple Sec” – both ‘scrappy, unfinished first texts’ – Oliver reveals in these works and their descriptions of clothing and fashion the writers’ responses to late Edwardian women’s experiences of sexual objectification, sexual violence, and a sexual double standard that demanded premarital chastity from (specifically, white middle- and upper-class) women. Women’s clothing, as Oliver demonstrates, carries a weight of significance, functioning on the page as a material engagement with highly politicised notions of desire, representation, restriction, autonomy, and – in the age of the suffragette, who was simultaneously clearly coded as feminine but also on the march – of highly visible protest. These fictions, like the clothes they describe, argues Oliver, ‘constitute material feminist actions’. The dressed female body becomes, in West and Rhys’ works, a dynamic force, resisting a static, fixed idea of the feminine. Once again, in these fictions produced as the British Empire was beginning to wane, feminist writers reach for problematic colonialist metaphors in describing women’s subjection, but Oliver’s essay also draws out these writers’ identification of ‘a global system that rests on the circulation of goods and money, the labour of the exploited, and white men’s violent abuse’. In this, we see the feminist writer’s potential to extend her critique from the local, material concern of a single clothed body to an expansive analysis of interrelated power relations. The same expansion outwards from intimate bodily experiences to global power structures with which Oliver concludes her essay functions as a central motif in Deirdre Osborne’s chapter, “‘The rule of three’: textual triads, trialogues, and women’s voices in Sylvia Plath, Jackie Kay, and debbie tucker green”. Examining Sylvia Plath’s “Three Women: A Poem for Three Voices” (1962), Jackie Kay’s poem sequence, “The Adoption Papers” (1991), and debbie tucker green’s drama, trade (2005), Osborne argues that each text works to destabilise persistent essentialising tropes that frame women as ‘sexualised, racialised and pacified bodies’ within patriarchal social systems. The various female bodies described in these three works of poetry and drama are, like the works 12

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themselves, framed by the legacies of Empire, and Osborne speaks to a history of conquest and violence as she examines the women-centred experiences they recount: of childbirth and child loss, transracial adoption, and sex tourism. Plath (1932–1962), Kay (1961–), and tucker green variously draw on recent histories of reproduction (including access to contraception and abortion, and the often traumatic medicalisation of childbirth), on social constructions of ‘illegitimacy’, and resultant forced adoption, further imbricated by strictures against racial mixing, and on postcolonial economics that limit the autonomy of the most disadvantaged even further. Commencing with form but drawing out connections around bodily autonomy and (in a ready connection with Edwin’s chapter on Imoinda) a desire to speak silenced women’s stories, Osborne’s essay exposes both sympathies and dissonances between the works of three women writers who variously inhabit and inherit the legacy of Empire. From Plath’s experience of the privileges and limitations of white women’s presumed maternal function, through Kay’s connecting of Scotland’s diasporic legacy and attitudes to those of mixed race heritage and the limited opportunities of mid-twentieth century women found pregnant outside of marriage, to tucker green’s centring of the lives of the local women in the unspecified Caribbean setting of her play, as well as her use of black women actors to play all roles and prioritising of black urban vernacular, Osborne’s grouping of these three texts produces ‘uneasiness’ as well as ‘reassuring balance’ in a manner that perhaps exemplifies feminist theorising of the body, where race repeatedly disrupts any feminist politics that attempts to ignore colonial legacies. The final chapter in the “Bodies” section, Clare Hanson’s “Feminism, Eugenics and Genetics: From convergence to contestation”, returns to eugenics and provides a bridge from the New Woman writing discussed in detail by Ford, through to recent works by women writers such as Margaret Atwood (1939–), Octavia Butler (1947–2006) and Zadie Smith (1975–), who are interested in the ethics of genetic engineering, and whose work speaks back to a feminist eugenicist inheritance. Adding to Ford’s discussion, Hanson compares Caird’s work (a ‘lone voice’ in resisting the biological determinism and pro-natalism of eugenic thinking) to that of Sarah Grand (1854–1943) and George Egerton (1859–1945), both of whom supplied a combination of progressive and conservative views on sex and gender, and her essay further interrogates the colonialist attitudes underpinning feminist eugenicist discourse at this time. Hanson also makes a crucial connection between the conditions in the early twentieth century that prompted interest in eugenics (a move towards greater state intervention in public health and welfare) with a post-war shift towards a neoliberal discourse of individual choice; the ethical issues raised by eugenics and genetic engineering are thus, argues Hanson, ‘differently inflected’. From post-war writers such as Naomi Mitchison (1897–1999) and Doris Lessing (1919–2013), she traces a fascination with the interplay of genes and the environment and the new science of genetic engineering that persists even after the realisation of the full horrors of Nazi Germany’s eugenic project. Drawing on the work of Donna Haraway, Hanson identifies a new field of feminist ethical enquiry into genetic science, which is then taken up by Smith in White Teeth (2000). In such recent works, more alert to the history of eugenics and its association with racial thinking, Hanson observes in this history of feminist discourse on heredity and biological determinism a shift ‘from closeness and collusion to contestation and critique’. This development in biological thinking that comes about with contemporary women’s writing on the fascinations but also the dangers of manipulating genetic inheritance, argues Hanson, raises social and ethical questions ‘too important to be left in the hands of biotech companies’. In this, she arguably expresses the most critical role of feminist-engaged literatures in exploring the politics of bodies that might otherwise remain within the jurisdiction of legal and medical spheres that lack the nuance, reflection, and lived experience brought to them by women and non-binary writers. 13

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Production Writing has long been a feminist act. Moving beyond feminist-inspired content, the publication of women’s work – and their articulation of previously absent narratives – attests to an historical struggle to gain access to the public sphere of creative production. The materiality of this struggle is bound up in women’s fight for access to publishers, editors, and agents, for equitable payment for their labour, and for recognition and distribution of their work. The chapters in this section attest to these challenges and the pioneering women who met them (while often also facing other barriers to success rooted in race, nationality, class, education, and more). Commencing with Anne Steele, the eighteenth-century ‘mother of English hymn writing’, they proceed to the twentieth century, examining women in publishing, alternative modes of women’s creative practice, the politics of women’s creative labour, and community-based women’s writing groups. A recurrent theme is pathbreaking women: those who opened up new routes for women’s professional and creative practice. Feminism has always been a notably literary movement; feminist protest and praxis has always gone hand-in-hand with literary expression. From suffragette dramas to the radical poetry of the women’s liberation movement, to the feminist autofictions of today, feminism finds expression in women’s creative practice. In the chapters that follow, the authors make visible the material frameworks of production that have both hindered and enabled that work. This section commences with a chapter on eighteenth-century Baptist poet and hymn writer, Anne Steele (1717–1778). In “‘O Happiness, thou pleasing dream, / Where is thy substance found?’: Anne Steele’s public and private eighteenth-century writings on happiness”, Nancy ­Jiwon Cho provides the earliest extended reading of women’s writing contained in this collection, pointing to traditions of writing that predate Wollstonecraft’s more famous contributions. Her study explores how earlier women writers found routes into the male-dominated print culture. For Steele, hymn writing provided a respectable means for a woman of her class and religion to engage in literary production (although, as Cho observes, the devotional form could also be artistically limiting). Focusing on Steele’s engagement with the trope of happiness – a prominent Enlightenment topic – the chapter examines how Steele’s published devotional works adhere to an orthodox rendering of ‘happiness as a heavenly condition’ while, in her unpublished lyric poetry, circulated amongst friends, happiness is located instead in ‘the pleasures of writing and the greater freedoms offered to women by singleness’. Cho’s essay provides a powerful way into thinking about women’s access to publication, the means by which they continued to write in less public realms, and the related importance of intellectual and friendship networks in enabling their work to circulate. Coming from a prominent Baptist family with extensive social networks, Steele was able to exchange written political and cultural views with a wide circle of friends and acquaintances, alongside successfully publishing her hymns. While the former allowed for more rigorous debate and controversial positions (on the dissatisfactions of marriage and women’s need for autonomy and fulfilling work), the latter provided a genre both ‘accessible and acceptable’ to women in the eighteenth century that enabled Steele, and those who emulated her, to engage in, and prove themselves more than capable of, public literary production. While Steele stands as an early outlier in this section on production, Cho’s account of an ­eighteenth-century woman writer seeking access to publication, sustaining both privately circulating correspondence and public professional reputation, and the importance of informal networks in sustaining women in the male-dominated sphere of literary and artistic production, all underpin the subsequent accounts in this section. Thus Elizabeth West’s chapter, “‘Dearest Norah….’: the professional and personal relationships forged between an editor and her authors”, makes use of archival materials to examine the career and influence of Norah Smallwood (1909–1984), pioneering 14

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editor at publishers Chatto and Windus, whose working life spanned the mid-twentieth century. Entering publishing in the 1930s, when the marriage bar was still in place at the BBC and in the Civil Service, the industry presented a rare (although still severely limited) opportunity for professional advancement for women, and West charts Smallwood’s progress through the then maledominated industry and the relationships she forged with other women editors and writers. At the heart of West’s chapter is a legacy of correspondence between Smallwood and novelists such as Iris Murdoch, Sylvia Townsend Warner, and AL Barker, which charts her idiosyncratic manner of combining fierce professional commitment to her authors with intimate friendship, encouragement, and solidarity; again, the importance of networks resurfaces. Despite the presence of some significant female figures in mid-twentieth century publishing (Diana Athill, Grace Hogarth, Eleanor Graham), West notes that these women have – until recently – largely been forgotten in publishing history, their achievements ‘relegated to a footnote’. West’s chapter functions as a recovery project therefore, capturing a moment in publishing history when women were slowly advancing, but the influence of Second-Wave feminism – which would see Carmen Callil, for example, founding Virago Press in the 1970s – was yet to be felt. Pre-feminist in many ways, Smallwood is nevertheless identified as a crucial pathbreaking figure for subsequent women in publishing. West’s account of Smallwood’s career and her relationships with the women writers on her list makes a striking companion piece to Nicola Wilson’s chapter on “Citation in Buchi Emecheta’s early fiction and autobiography: publishing race, class, and gender”. Nigerian-born novelist and memoirist Buchi Emecheta (1944–2017) began publishing in the early 1970s with works examining the lives of black working-class immigrants and their families in post-war Britain. Wilson’s chapter obliquely charts another history of British publishing, recounting Emecheta’s publishing relationship with first Barrie & Jenkins, then Allison and Busby, before setting up her own press, Ogwugwu Afor, with her son in the early 1980s, largely in consequence of her ‘frustrations’ with the western publishing industry. Emecheta has often been neglected in accounts of contemporary women’s writing that have tended to centre white women’s writing and activism as the originating source of feminism; when she appears, she is typically recalled as an outsider figure: a workingclass immigrant woman making her way in the largely white middle-class world of publishing, writing a little too early to benefit from the rising 1980s interest in black women’s writing (largely prompted by work coming out of the United States by writers like Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker), and dissatisfied with a burgeoning feminist movement that she deemed neglectful of race and class in its analysis of oppression. Nevertheless, in focusing on the material production of Emecheta’s work and her practice of employing citation as ‘feminist memory’ – a term borrowed from Sara Ahmed – as a way to construct a history and lineage of women writers, agents, and publishers in aiding the production of her work, Wilson demonstrates how Emecheta locates herself within a web of women working in literary production. For Wilson, Emecheta’s struggle to publish her work is part of the longer history of black women’s writing and activism in Britain in the late 1960s and 1970s. Emecheta, as Wilson observes, makes visible the ‘gendered, racialised, colonial and socio-economic contexts’ that shaped her writing career. Again, this essay examines the recurring theme of the importance of access to literary and publishing networks, particularly for black women writers, who are too often marginalised. As Wilson concludes, the difficulties that Emecheta faced when trying to publish stories about poor black migrant women in Britain in the early 1970s still persist today and ‘the structural politics of publishing ecosystems’ remain critical to questions of how women’s writing circulates, and how its longevity is sustained. While the above chapters speak to women’s public and private writings, their careers in literary production, and their access to literary networks and publishing, Rachel Carroll’s essay extends the study of women’s production and creative labour into the realm of the textiles arts and 15

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industries. In “‘Working with the cloth’: materialising women’s creative labour in the work of Rosamond Lehmann, Beryl Bainbridge, and Joan Riley”, Carroll uses needlework as a resonant trope around which a host of meanings coalesce: around women’s labour and leisure, public and private domains, and assumed ‘hierarchies of art, craft and design’. Carroll’s discussion focuses on three novels (whose settings span the 1930s to the 1980s) in which needlework recurs as a theme. She traces the tensions around sewing as an occupation that paradoxically signifies both leisure and work, functional household craft and artistic expression, denounced as a symbol of women’s subordination (most notably by Wollstonecraft) but elsewhere embraced as a vehicle for subversive creative expression. Like Steele’s hymn writing, needlework can function as an acceptable mode of women’s creativity. Through the figure of the seamstress, however – recurring in Rosamond Lehmann (1901–1990), Beryl Bainbridge (1932–2010), and Joan Riley’s (1958–) work – the perceived gentility of women’s craftwork is brought into the economic realm of commercial dressmaking. Needlework is imbricated in complex class relations, as both upper-class leisure pursuit and working-class labour; as work undertaken by women for profit both within and outside the home, it disrupts the boundaries of the domestic sphere; and as one of the restricted routes into paid work for immigrant women in the post-war United Kingdom, as depicted in Riley’s novel, it becomes entangled in a complex history of race and labour relations. A shared skilled practice associated with women that crosses lines of race and class, women’s work with the needle is both the object of historic exploitation (as witnessed by the figure of the ‘distressed seamstress’ and her successors) and a potentially empowering enterprise, enabling women to exercise economic autonomy and command both space and property. The dressmaker, as Carroll observes, is a peripheral figure in the feminist histories of women’s education and employment in the twentieth century, but one that can be recovered by paying close attention to ‘her sometimes intermittent and often oblique presence in the fictional landscapes of women writers’. As these chapters demonstrate, the history of women’s creative production is often a history of marginalisation. Women have had to struggle for inclusion in the sphere of artistic and literary practice, but their inclusion has proved transformative – to individuals, to communities, and to professions. In her chapter “‘To the sisters I always wanted’: women, writers’ groups, and print culture in Glasgow, 1980–1988”, Kate Wilson uses oral history to document a particular manifestation of late-twentieth-century women’s writing in the form of a working-class women’s writing group. Castlemilk Women Readers and Writers was founded in Glasgow in 1984, motivated by a combination of the writers’ group movement of the 1980s, the adult education movement, and the feminist movement (and the rise of Scottish feminist publishing in the 1980s more broadly), and funded by regional development programmes targeted at areas of deprivation. Examining the aims and practices of the group, Wilson reflects on how such writers’ workshops often echoed the aims of feminist consciousness-raising groups, providing a safe women-only space in which participants could explore and give creative expression to life experiences, from the mundane to the traumatic. As Wilson argues, while sometimes criticised in the context of the Thatcherite 1980s as ‘ephemeral, inadequate cultural palliatives to wider social issues’, the radical adult education movement evolved, in the form of women’s writing workshops, into women-led, supportive, discursive spaces that facilitated a nascent feminist politics, and sometimes resulted in engagement with activism elsewhere. They also extended women’s amateur literary production into the public sphere by publishing anthologies of work, and had a material impact in connecting working-class women, excluded from more rarified middle-class cultured spaces, with networks of other writing women. Regional contexts and national cultures also underpin Bethan Evans and Jenni Ramone’s chapter, “Mother Country: Leonora Brito writes Wales – black British identity, maternity, and memory in the Welsh short story”, in which they examine Dat’s Love, a 1995 short story collection by black 16

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British Welsh writer, Leonora Brito (1954–2007). Evans and Ramone situate Brito in a tradition of women’s short story writing in Wales, identifying a common engagement, ‘in a strong feminist voice’, with themes of domesticity, family, the everyday, motherhood, and memory. In Brito’s work, however, these familiar tropes are reframed through the lens of black Welsh experience. Her stories, argue Evans and Ramone, are not simply tales of post-war British multiculturalism, but are specific to Wales and to Cardiff, writing Welsh regional identities in defiance of universalising representations of what constitutes ‘black British’ experience. Furthermore, they articulate black women’s experiences in ways that ‘unsettle the masculine focus’ of black Welsh representation. In Dat’s Love – a determinedly feminist and black Welsh text – Brito expands the representation of black Wales, creating in her characters identities that do not yet ‘have space for expression in the accepted articulations of black Welsh identity’. As in Edwin’s discussion of Anim-Addo’s Imoinda, or Wilson and Carroll’s discussion of Emecheta and Riley’s writing of black working-class lives in post-war London, Evans and Ramone pay attention to how Brito’s stories give voice to marginalised and silenced women’s experiences, simultaneously exposing the absence of textual representations of black Welsh women while ‘creating space for such representation’. And just as Wilson views Emecheta as a forerunner of black women’s writing of the 1980s, or as West describes Smallwood carving a path for women in publishing, and even back to Cho’s account of Steele trailblazing a woman’s celebrated public literary career (within the constraints of acceptable form), Evans and Ramone identify Brito as ‘a literary foremother for writing black Wales’. Women’s creative production speaks to and enables women’s creative production; working in different spheres and modes and contexts, women facilitate the work of other women – by being visible and by laying down a trace in the history of women’s writing.

Activism This collection implicitly seeks to expand what constitutes activism in relation to women’s writing and women’s rights by examining the various ways in which authors have given critical expression to women’s experience, shaping and extending the meaning of liberty and equality in changing historical and cultural contexts. The final section of this volume turns to texts which engage explicitly with questions of social change, whether by articulating powerful critiques of current realities, depicting women’s agency as social reformers and activists, or by employing the written or spoken word to move wider audiences to action. Questions of women’s rights are mostly central to the activism advocated, depicted, or embodied, but involvement in social reform movements may also serve as a vehicle for women’s political education, providing the enabling conditions for subsequent feminist agitation. These socially engaged texts address a range of issues to do with women’s oppression across time, including the significance of marriage as an institution in which inequalities are perpetuated, the role of work as both a site of exploitation and a vehicle of liberation, the importance of political participation and the impact of environmental injustice. A range of written platforms are employed – from personal correspondence to the ‘political novel’, from memoirs to manifestos and from campaigning drama to flash fiction – to give representation to the realities of women’s experience, to raise political awareness and to advance feminist causes and movements. The collective character of movements for social change comes to the fore in texts which seek to embody new feminist solidarities. The suffrage movement in the early twentieth century and the Second-Wave women’s movement in the late twentieth century provide more familiar political impetus centring on women’s collective action, but the role of faith communities in nurturing women’s political agency is also made manifest in chapters exploring dissenting or radical unitarian traditions. The complex relationship between women’s rights activism and other 17

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liberation movements to do with class, race, sexuality, and disability as well as non-human animals and the environment is a recurring concern in the chapters comprising this collection as well as this section, with affinities forming the grounds for powerful alliances while simultaneously in tension with unacknowledged hierarchies and inequalities. Returning to the historical period with which this collection opened, Eliza O’Brien’s chapter “In a circle with Mary Hays: writing novels to reform society in the 1790s” examines the ‘­political novel’ of the 1790s, placing the work of Mary Hays (1759–1843) within the context of her more widely remembered contemporaries, including Anna Letitia Barbauld, Charlotte Smith, Helen Maria Williams, and Mary Wollstonecraft. Motifs to do with personal liberty and women’s struggle for independence are at the forefront of O’Brien’s discussion of two novels, Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796) and The Victim of Prejudice (1799), in which Hays’ critique of the social and intellectual confinement of women, including through the inequities of marriage, are given increasingly forceful and uncompromising expression. Writing within a tradition of religious dissent – in which exclusion from professions, political participation, and university education was experienced by men on the grounds of their faith as well as by women on the grounds of their gender – enables Hays to access intellectual stimulation and alternative forms of education in the context of communal and spiritual fellowship. However, tracking the metaphor of the ‘magic circle’ across Hays’ writing, O’Brien explores themes of confinement as well as community, ­exploring the vexed meanings of the latter for a writer whose political education was facilitated by networks of radical politics and religious dissent but whose personal and professional reputation as a writer was subject to derision and defamation by her contemporaries. This chapter reiterates the role of personal correspondence and public letter writing in the evolution of women writers’ political understanding and professional development, providing private networks of support and (­anonymous) ­platforms for public expression. Where O’Brien restores the dignity and ambition of Hays’ narrative experiments, redressing the problematic legacies of literary reputation for women writers, Teja Varma Pusapati’s chapter, “In the advance guard of Victorian literary feminism: the actress as an independent woman and social reformer in Eliza Lynn Linton’s Realities: A Tale (1851)”, revisits the work of a writer whose memory has become equated with the anti-feminist sentiment of her later journalistic output (most famously as the author of “The Girl of the Period”). Like Hays before her, Eliza Lynn Linton (1822–1898) is placed within the context of a movement combining political and religious dissent; linking the radical unitarians with Wollstonecraft, Pusapati demonstrates how their focus on rationality, education, and the individual gave rise to markedly more progressive attitudes to women and work than those adopted by their radical contemporaries. Indeed, work is a central concern of this chapter, whose subject was to become the first female salaried reporter on a national daily newspaper, her career facilitated by the progressive periodicals of Victorian print culture. Pusapati offers Linton’s theatre novel of 1851 as one of the first to provide a critical exposition of the gendered dynamics which enable sexual harassment and abuse in the workplace. The relationship between women’s employment and female emancipation or exploitation is explored in a range of women’s work, in the figures of the actress, the sex worker, and the social reformer. The chapter argues that Linton’s heroine offers a new fictional model for the woman professional, embracing the creative fulfilment and economic independence offered by the acting profession, defying the fear of reputational damage by which so many women’s lives have been policed, and transforming the charitable philanthropy permitted to middle-class women into a vehicle of feminist social reform. Significantly, marriage is reconfigured in turn as an intellectual, professional, and political partnership. Contesting the perception of Linton as a ‘conservative woman of letters’, Pusapati reads her novel in the tradition of literature as a means of social transformation, one reaching back 18

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to the political novels of the late eighteenth century and forwards to the activist writing of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Sarah Dredge’s chapter, “‘Rice puddings, made without milk’: Mother Seacole reforms ‘home habits’ in the Crimea”, takes as its focus Mary Seacole’s 1857 autobiography, Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands, a significant contribution to traditions of women’s travel and life writing, demonstrating how Seacole (1805–1881) confounded Victorian constructions of domestic femininity and women’s work, exposing their colonial as well as gendered formation. A skilled ‘doctress’ in the Jamaican tradition, Seacole’s interventions exceed those exercised by white British nurses (whether skilled working-class women or middle-class volunteers) and implicitly challenge the gendered division of labour between male doctor and female nurse. An enterprising businesswoman and hotelier, Seacole’s assumption of the role of surrogate mother – a figure associated with unpaid emotional and economic labour – finds an avid audience among her military charges and the readers of the British print press. Indeed, Dredge argues that through her narrative Seacole implicitly challenges the gendered ideologies of ‘home’ on which the British Empire depends, subtly critiquing the imperial discourses of race by which white British journalists seek to contain her. Dredge traces the implications of colonial and gendered discourses, demonstrating how the domestic domain of the white British woman was constructed as the foundation of the British Empire: the moral and spiritual virtues of the home assumed to underpin and guarantee masculine endeavours in the public sphere, both national and imperial. By depicting British men as infantilised by their dependency on home and offering her own ministrations as compensation for the inadequacies of white women as mothers, daughters, sisters, and wives, Seacole uses the celebrity status conferred on her by an often patronising and racist British public to implicitly critique colonial hierarchies of gender and race. Using her apparently exceptional position and writing within genres not explicitly associated with radical political agendas, Seacole’s narrative demonstrates the diverse and sometimes coded forms which critique can take in women’s writing of the period. It exposes the whiteness of British womanhood by giving voice to a British Caribbean woman’s perspective in ways which reinforce the impossibility of considering the history of women’s rights in Britain without simultaneously considering histories of slavery, Empire, and race. Naomi Paxton’s chapter, “‘Your Great Adventure is to report her faithfully’: The centring of women’s voices and stories in suffrage theatre”, returns to the stage as a platform for women’s emancipation in the context of the Votes for Women movement of the early twentieth century. Professional networks of creative women practitioners, including the Actresses’ Franchise League and Women Writers’ League, provide the political and organisational infrastructure which informs the collective spirit of suffrage theatre. The writers, speakers, and performers who are the subject of this chapter are likewise sustaining careers across the theatre and entertainment industries, literature, and journalism, often in concert with networks forged by personal friendships and working partnerships. Paxton places the dramatic work of authors including Cicely Hamilton (1872–1952), Elizabeth Robins (1862–1952), and Christopher St John (1871–1960) in a wider context of ‘performative propaganda’, in which dramatic works advancing the suffrage cause are staged in a variety of arenas, going beyond traditional theatre spaces to include programmes of politically oriented entertainment, exhibitions, and festivals. The specific plays examined in this chapter illustrate the variety of strategies employed within suffrage theatre to engage audiences and enlist them to the cause, significantly exceeding the didactic social realism with which political theatre might be associated. Grounded in first-hand research and drawing on recognisable individuals and voices, Robins’ Votes for Women! reconstructs suffragette voices through the dramatic device of an open-air meeting in Trafalgar Square. Hamilton’s Diana of Dobson’s and How the Vote Was Won employ comedy, whether grounded in the workplace inequalities of a contemporary draper’s shop 19

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or the speculative fantasy of a women’s general strike. The uncompromising realities of suffrage struggle and the state persecution of its advocates are confronted in St John’s Her Will, in which the reading of a will following a death caused by forced feeding serves as a powerful posthumous testimony to women’s political agency. Hamilton’s A Pageant of Great Women – a play which makes no direct reference to the vote – demonstrates a similar concern with history, memory, and legacy, enabling its audience to place the struggle for the vote within a longer history of women’s achievement, combining education and spectacle to cultivate a sense of shared history. Creative enterprise, professional employment, and political activism come together in suffrage theatre, in which the stage provides a public platform for the advancement of women’s rights through a combination of individual and collective imagination and endeavour. As a radical mode of writing – one that, by its nature, calls for revolutionary thinking – the manifesto has long been of interest to feminism. In her chapter “A life can be a manifesto: connecting Bernardine Evaristo to a history of feminist manifestos”, Fiona Tolan examines the complex hybridity of this disruptive, ‘troublesome’ genre and its relationship to women’s writing and argues for its expansion to include modes of writing that might not immediately seem to fit within the manifesto tradition. The chapter focuses on the work of Bernardine Evaristo (1959–), a pioneer of radical black theatre in the 1980s and the author of a series of experimental narratives exploring the history of black British women. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s reflections on the purpose and intent of the feminist manifesto, Tolan reads Evaristo’s 2019 novel, Girl, Woman, Other and her 2021 autobiography, Manifesto, alongside some of her non-fiction prose writing, as contributing to a ‘cumulative manifesto’. Examining questions of lineage, history, and community in relation to black British feminism and women’s writing, these texts are situated in the context of Evaristo’s longstanding creative commitment to contest the invisibility of black British women in literature and to give voice to the diversity of black British women’s experience, past and present. Tolan argues that Evaristo’s work embodies an inclusive and expansive feminism grounded in the recognition of the importance of acknowledging ongoing feminist legacies and continuities, as well as addressing areas of tension and dissent. The legacies of women’s theatrical activism are further explored in Kate Chedgzoy, Rosalind Haslett, and Catrina McHugh’s chapter, “Holding women’s voices: Open Clasp as an example of feminist theatre practice”, which offers a case study in contemporary feminist theatre practice through a focus on Open Clasp, a company founded in North-East England in the 1990s. Combining a feminist ethos, working methods, and practice, Open Clasp specialises in issue-based collaborative practice, often working with vulnerable or marginalised constituencies. Contextualising the work of Open Clasp through reflections on the history of feminist theatre theory, this chapter positions its practice as a response to the artistic and financial barriers to theatrical spaces and funding effected by gatekeeping on the part of male producers, playwrights, and performers. The presumption of a male spectator in conventional theatre is further contested by the womencentred practice of Open Clasp and its direct address to women audiences; emotion, pleasure, and laughter are recognised as important vehicles of empathy, identification, and action. The authors identify the 1980s as a particularly formative period in British feminist theatre and place Open Clasp within a historical lineage of radical and socialist theatre making, also aligning it with queer performance cultures (including its adoption of DIY aesthetics and appropriation of popular culture) and experimental theatre (with reference to its use of non-realist strategies and incorporation of comedy, music, and cabaret). Through this case study, integrating history, theory, and practice, and grounding theatre in region and community, this chapter preserves a history of feminist performance practice and explores the power of the spoken and embodied word as a vehicle of feminist activism. 20

Writing women’s rights – from enlightenment to ecofeminism

This collection closes significantly with Michelle Deininger’s chapter “Protecting the land, safeguarding the future: ecofeminism, activist women’s writing, and contemporary publishing in Wales” which explores the contribution of women as activists and advocates of environmental justice in Welsh contexts, whether as writers, editors, or publishers. It draws attention to a specifically Welsh women’s history of environmental activism and writing, exploring the relationship between industrial and natural landscapes in contexts shaped by colonial legacies and consumer capitalism. Deininger foregrounds the role of Welsh journals, periodicals, and presses, both in print and online, in providing a platform for addressing issues to do with environmental damage, pollution, loss of landscape, and climate change. Acknowledging the interplay of oppressions affecting women, colonised people, and nature, the chapter places particular emphasis on the leading role played by women of colour in contemporary ecofeminist writing published in Wales. Examining women’s writing from the 1970s to the present, the chapter explores poetry, short stories, and novels, including work published in Welsh platforms by the Scottish and Irish nature writers Kathleen Jamie (1962–) and Paula Meehan (1955–). The role played by the Welsh women’s group Women for Life on Earth in the establishment of the Greenham Common protest camp is explored through Kathryn Simmonds’ (1972–) novel Love and Fallout (2014), which juxtaposes Second-Wave feminist activism with contemporary environmental campaigns. The long-lasting environmental impact of the Chernobyl disaster on rural Welsh communities is explored through discussion of Philippa Holloway’s The Half Life of Snails (2022), set during the Maidan Revolution of 2014 and drawing parallels between nuclear power industries in Wales and Ukraine. Deininger’s chapter amply demonstrates the urgency of connecting the ‘local’ with the global, with Welsh women writers and campaigners’ concerns about the impact of nuclear power and weapons (for example) on livelihoods, landscapes, and future generations providing an integrating impetus for activism addressing global causes and consequences. In this way the inseparability of women’s – and hence human – rights and environmental justice is vividly underlined.

Marking the moment: reflecting on feminism today 2018 saw the centenary of the Representation of the People Act that granted women in the U.K. partial suffrage: the historical achievement of the suffragette movement and one which might have seemed to signal the closure of the ‘woman question’. It also saw the fiftieth anniversary of a year conventionally seen as a turning point in the history of countercultural protest and rebellion in the West, with identity-based rights movements soon bringing radical new agendas to the very foundations of political action: 1968 witnessed the founding of the British Black Panther Party, 1969 the launch of the first Women’s Liberation Conference at Ruskin College, Oxford, and 1970 the emergence of the Gay Liberation Front, with queer, disability, and trans rights movements coming to prominence in the decades which followed. These anniversaries have prompted reflection on the historical legacy of feminism – and its relationship to other civil rights or liberation movements – in contemporary contexts: a process to which this collection seeks to contribute. Despite the gains of the past 200 years and more, many fundamental inequalities remain. The gender pay gap stubbornly persists (Office for National Statistics 2022) and is even greater for women of colour (Fawcett Society et al. 2021), with 75% of women of colour experiencing racism at work (Gyimah et al. 2022). Cuts to welfare and services in consequence of a decade of fiscal austerity (2010–2019) have disproportionately affected women, and especially women of colour, in recent years (Gillibrand 2020; Hasting, Matthews and Wang 2021), with black and minority ethnic people being 2.5 times more likely to be in poverty than white people (Edmiston, Begum and Kataria 2022). A high incidence of hate crime affects non-binary and LGBT people, with one 21

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in five LGBT people, and two in five trans people, experiencing a hate crime because of their sexuality or gender identity (Stonewall 2017). Disabled people, and particularly disabled women, experience disproportionately higher rates of hate crime, domestic abuse, and sexual assault (Office for National Statistics 2019). These longstanding and persistent inequalities are met by the vicissitudes of the present moment. The journey of this collection from inception to publication has coincided with a series of global crises, including those to do with climate emergency, public health pandemics, racial oppression, migration and displacement, and war: 2018 saw the founding of the U.K.-based Extinction Rebellion movement, employing civil disobedience strategies to draw attention to environmental crisis; the global pandemic announced by the World Health Organization in 2020 exposed stark social and economic inequalities in the United Kingdom, especially in relation to black and minority ethnic people and people with disabilities; the killing of George Floyd in the United States in 2020 provoked renewed Black Lives Matter protests in the United Kingdom, centring on the complicity of British heritage and cultural organisations in the legacies of the slave trade; 2022 saw the Russian invasion of Ukraine, triggering the largest refugee crisis in Europe since World War Two and an energy and cost-of-living crisis compounding existing inequalities. Women, and especially women of colour, were also the hardest hit by the economic, health, and social consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic: domestic violence against women rose during this period, women shouldered a greater burden of childcare when nurseries and schools closed, and being more commonly in precarious and low-pay employment (including in the health and social care sector), women were more likely to either continue working in dangerous conditions or to lose paid work during lockdowns. These trends were repeated on a global scale (Kelly 2021; Oxfam International n.d.). This collection enters into print at a time when its central concerns – Rights, Networks, Bodies, Production, and Activism – impact on women both as individuals and collectives in ways which are shaped by both local and global contexts. International and transnational (including European) frameworks for human rights first founded in the decades following the Second World War, anticolonial movements which hastened the demise of the British Empire in the latter half of the twentieth century, equality legislation (from the Sex Discrimination Act of 1975, Race Relations Act of 1976 and Disability Discrimination Act of 1995 to the Equality Act of 2010) and new global discourses on gender equality embodied in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (2016) have all combined with the legacies of centuries of feminist activism to shape the terms by which women’s rights are imagined, discussed, and advanced in British contexts in the twentyfirst century. While the integration of women’s rights discourses into national and international political debates has opened up new fields of ambition and action, the language of equality and empowerment has also been subject to appropriation, driven by the needs of neoliberal markets, neo-colonial agendas, and geopolitical rivalries. Networking has been transformed by the advent of internet technology and digital media, revolutionising the speed and scope by which feminist ideas and campaigns circulate. Individuals and activists are able to bypass the gatekeeping function of mass media monopolies to expose issues of gender inequality and injustice to global audiences, while the authors of bestselling book titles in the field of popular feminism, especially those aimed at young women, often first gain traction via their social media profiles. The impact of digital technology on feminist ­consciousness-raising is perhaps exemplified by the #MeToo movement, with hashtag activism rapidly accelerating the creation of virtual networks based on shared experience. Originating in 2006 with Tarana Burke’s use of the phrase in her work with victims of sexual violence, this impactful expression of testimony and solidarity went viral on social media in 2017, intensified by the 22

Writing women’s rights – from enlightenment to ecofeminism

worldwide reporting of accusations of sexual assault against film producer Harvey Weinstein; the courage and tenacity of women survivors defying silence, stigma, and intimidation to make their voices heard inspired an unprecedented groundswell of public testimony from women and girls from across the globe. However, while these online spaces facilitate new communities and new conversations, they also double as platforms for the production of new forms of gender-based harassment, hate, and harm, with women in public life often serving as targets of vicious online misogyny. The right to bodily, sexual, and reproductive autonomy, so central to feminist debates in both the First and Second Waves, continues to persist as a critical issue for feminism. Hard-won rights remain precarious and vulnerable to encroachment. The successful repeal of the eighth amendment to the Republic of Ireland’s constitution (following an historic referendum in 2018, allowing the government to legislate for abortion), and the legalisation of abortion in Northern Ireland in 2019, were quickly followed in the United States by the overturning in 2022 by the Supreme Court of the 1973 landmark ‘Roe v Wade’ ruling that protected the constitutional right to abortion. Women and girls remain far more likely to suffer sexual violence, exploitation, and trafficking (UN Women 2022). Meanwhile, revelations about the complicity of major organisations, institutions, and industries (including within the cultural sphere) as well as agencies of the state (in the United Kingdom as elsewhere) in the perpetration and perpetuation of forms of gender and sexual harassment, abuse, exploitation, and violence have served to forcefully underline its historic reach and systemic nature. In the field of cultural production, the success of notable forerunners such as Laura Bates’ Everyday Sexism (2014) and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s We Should All Be Feminists (2014) signalled an unmet appetite for contemporary returns to feminist consciousness-raising, and a slew of feminist books have subsequently topped best-seller lists in the United Kingdom and across global markets. As Rosalind Gill observes, after years of considering the movement outdated and dull, media culture has a revived appetite for feminist stories (Gill 2016). Concerns have been raised, however, about the nature and sustainability of this suddenly fashionable feminism; while many of the most visible, media-friendly manifestations of the kind of neoliberal ‘lean-in’ feminism circulating today speaks to a young, white, affluent elite (Rottenberg 2018; McRobbie 2020; Phipps 2020), writers like Bernadine Evaristo question whether the concurrent recent boom in new feminist writings by young black women will prove a passing fad, quickly dropped when publishers’ attentions migrate elsewhere (Evaristo 2019). In a globally, if unevenly, connected age, digital transnational women’s rights activism is increasingly visible, with explosive growth in online participation in campaigns such as International Women’s Day apparent from 2018 onwards (Forester et al. 2020: 23). Global online platforms can serve as vehicles to fortify and galvanise feminist campaigns across different regions and contexts, while reversals in women’s rights (such as the exclusion of girls and women from education, work, and healthcare in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan in 2021) attract expressions of outrage and solidarity which draw on a shared recognition of common cause as a vital resource for survival and resistance. Feminist protests against femicide in Latin America (2016 to date) in response to the violent killings of girls and women, the Women’s March on Washington (2017) in protest at the inauguration of Donald Trump in the United States, Aurat marches in Pakistan (2018 to date) coinciding with International Women’s Day, the March of Indigenous Women in Brazil to protect ancestral land rights (2019), the Women’s Strike against anti-abortion legislation in Poland (2020), and the women-led demonstrations in Iran provoked by the violent death in custody of Mahsa Amini (2022) are all very visible expressions of feminist protest in the public sphere, each one shaped by its own specific and complex historical legacies and cultural conditions. 23

Rachel Carroll and Fiona Tolan

The method underpinning this collection – mapping recurring thematic motifs across a designated time period within a defined cultural context – seeks to bring critical attentiveness to the specificities of the historical, cultural, social, and economic conditions in which women’s writing is written and read while simultaneously tracking significant modalities of feminist thinking, organising, and action over time. While the focus of this collection is on literature and feminism in British contexts, it presents an approach which might be extended to other formations of feminism, including those beyond the Global North, adopting modes of conceptual organisation befitting each unique manifestation, whether to do with ethnicity, geography, language, region, religious faith, or other. As we move through the early decades of the twenty-first century, feminism is evidently an urgent and resurgent force. The current moment is one of reflection, revision, and renewed action; as new schisms emerge, so do new consensuses. And against this vital backdrop, women are writing. Finding the words to name an experience whose very existence dominant discourses either deny or disparage is an endeavour which has played a central role in the history of women’s struggle for equality, from the vindications of the late Enlightenment era to the hashtags of contemporary digital activism. Indeed, feminism has always been a notably literary movement; alongside pamphlets and draft legislation, feminist debates – as this volume attests – have always also circulated in poems, dramas, short stories, novels, and myriad other literary forms. This collection is offered as a creative, literary, cultural, and intellectual resource for those interested in understanding or advancing the development of women’s rights discourses in British contexts and beyond. As the diverse contributions gathered together in this collection demonstrate, literary production continues to further feminist aims: in giving voice to silenced narratives, challenging oppressive representations, opening up new avenues of thought, and imagining better, more equitable futures.

Bibliography Edmiston, Daniel, in collaboration with Shabna Begum and Mandeer Kataria (2022) Falling Faster Amidst a Cost-of-Living Crisis, The Runnymede Trust. Available at: https://assets.website-files.com/ 61488f992b58e687f1108c7c/633d8007a3bfa49bd4cd0fa8_Runnymede%20Briefing%20Cost%20of%20 Living%20FINAL.pdf (Accessed: 20 Jan 2023). Evaristo, Bernadine (2019) “What a Time to Be a (Black) (British) (Womxn) Writer,” in Susheila Nasta (ed.) Brave New Words: The Power of Writing Now, Oxford: Myriad Editions, pp. 87–105. Fawcett Society, Monica Dey, Caroline White and Sanmeet Kaur (2021) The Pay and Progression of Women of Colour – A Literature Review, Fawcett Society and The Runnymede Trust. Available at: https:// www.fawcettsociety.org.uk/Handlers/Download.ashx?IDMF=c1300375-f221-4a88-8c66-­edf3c30bd2c7 (Accessed: 12 Jan 2023). Forester, Summer, Amber Lusvardi, Kaitlin Kelly-Thompson and S. Laurel Weldon (2020) “New Dimensions of Global Feminist Influence: Tracking Feminist Mobilization Worldwide, 1975–2015,” Working Paper #1, Feminist Mobilization and Economic Empowerment Project. Available at: https://www.sfu.ca/politics/ feministmovement/working-papers.html (Accessed: 8 Feb 2023). Gill, Rosalind (2016) “Post-Postfeminism?: New Feminist Visibilities in Postfeminist Times,” Feminist Media Studies, 16(4): 610–630. Gillibrand, Stephanie (2020) “The Ideological Dangers of Austerity – and Why Women Are Bearing the Brunt of It,” Women’s Budget Group. Available at: https://wbg.org.uk/blog/the-ideological-dangers-of-austerityand-why-women-are-bearing-the-brunt-of-it/ (Accessed: 12 Jan 2023). Gyimah, Michelle, Zaimal Azad, Shabna Begum, Alba Kapoor, Lizzie Ville, Alison Henderson and Monica Dey (2022) Broken Ladders: The Myth of Meritocracy for Women of Colour in the Workplace, Fawcett Society and The Runnymede Trust. Available at: https://assets.website-files.com/61488f992b58e687f1108c7c/ 628cf1924ac4e10b1ba8917b_Fawcett%20%26%20Runnymede%20Trust%20-%20Broken%20 Ladders%20(final).pdf (Accessed: 20 Jan 2023).

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Writing women’s rights – from enlightenment to ecofeminism Hastings, Annette, Peter Matthews and Yang Wang (2021) “Unequal and Gendered: Assessing the Impacts of Austerity Cuts on Public Service Users,” Social Policy and Society, 1–21. Available at: https:// www.­cambridge.org/core/journals/social-policy-and-society/article/unequal-and-gendered-assessingthe-­impacts-of-austerity-cuts-on-public-service-users/594BB10A72B294C0006D389DB9F28D86 (Accessed: 12 Jan 2023). Kelly, L. (2021) “Direct and Indirect Impacts of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Women and Girls,” 4KD Helpdesk Report. Institute of Development Studies. Available at: https://www.gov.uk/research-for-­ development-outputs/direct-and-indirect-impacts-of-the-covid-19-pandemic-on-women-and-girls (­Accessed: 12 Jan 2023). McRobbie, Angela (2020) Feminism and the Politics of Resilience: Essays on Gender, Media and the End of Welfare, Cambridge: Polity. Office for National Statistics (2019) “Disability and Crime, UK: 2019.” Available at: https://www.ons.gov. uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/disability/bulletins/disabilityandcrimeuk/2019 (­Accessed: 20 Jan 2023). Office for National Statistics (2022) “Gender Pay Gap in the UK: 2022.” Available at: https://www. ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/earningsandworkinghours/bulletins/­ genderpaygapintheuk/2022 (Accessed: 12 Jan 2023). Oxfam International (n.d.) “5 Ways Women and Girls Have Been Hardest Hit by Covid 19.” Available at: https://www.oxfam.org/en/5-ways-women-and-girls-have-been-hardest-hit-covid-19 (Accessed: 12 Jan 2023). Phipps, Alison (2020) Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism, Manchester: Manchester ­University Press. Rottenberg, Catherine (2018) The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stonewall (2017) LGBT in Britain – Hate Crime and Discrimination. Available at: https://www.stonewall.org. uk/system/files/lgbt_in_britain_hate_crime.pdf (Accessed: 20 Jan 2023). UN Women (2022) Facts and Figures: Ending Violence Against Women. Available at: https://www.unwomen. org/en/what-we-do/ending-violence-against-women/facts-and-figures (Accessed: 12 Jan 2023).

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PART I

Rights

1 LIKE NOBODY ELSE Women and independence in the novels of Charlotte Smith and Mary Wollstonecraft Kaley Kramer

One of the most frequently quoted remarks from Mary Wollstonecraft’s blazing and foundational Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) is her assertion that she does “not wish [for women] to have power over men, but over themselves” (1995: 138). As with many such quotations from her complex exploration of British middle-class women’s experience at the end of the eighteenth century, extracting it from the text silences the critical dialectics that inform all of Wollstonecraft’s work. In this specific case, she is responding to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s insistence that educating women “like men” would be detrimental to women as “the more they resemble our sex the less power they will have over us” (quoted in Vindication 1995: 138). As Martina Reuter argues, Rousseau is not simply a flourish in the Vindication; Wollstonecraft’s criticism of his writing, particularly Emile, Or Treatise on Education (1762) is “an essential component of [her] feminist argument” (2014: 925). It is against his gendered concept of freedom and independence that Wollstonecraft articulates her radical vision of equality and rights. Wollstonecraft’s desire for women to have power over themselves is inextricable from – and indeed is in many ways a reiteration of – her understanding of freedom as a “capacity to act in one’s own name without requiring permission or the goodwill of others” (Coffee 2014: 910). This power, for Wollstonecraft, both emerges from and guarantees individual freedom and that independence that is the “basis of every virtue” (Wollstonecraft 1995: 67). Crucially, for Wollstonecraft, independence is not incompatible with the mutual reliance that exists between individuals for social and community life. Thus, while Rousseau insists rather on self-sufficiency as the condition for liberty, Wollstonecraft’s independent and free woman participates in relationships governed by equality (the foundation of civil independence) and virtue (the foundation of independence of mind) (Coffee 2014: 913; Reuter 2014: 926). Having power over themselves enables women to choose how they will participate in civil society while remaining free of arbitrary control. Wollstonecraft’s equality, which produces civil independence, requires community, a condition evident in Wollstonecraft’s metaphor for equality: friendship between equals based on sympathy, mutual respect and common ambitions, “not a stand-off between equally powerful but hostile or mutually indifferent agents” (Halldenius 2007: 94). Yet, there is in Rousseau’s determined self-­ sufficiency an attractive rejection of any external control and an absolute justification for individual desire. In Confessions (1782), Rousseau sets out his project by insisting on his divinely granted uniqueness: “I am not made like any that I have seen; I venture to believe that I was not made like

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DOI: 10.4324/9781003429951-3

Kaley Kramer

any that exist. If I am not more deserving, at least I am different” (2008: 5). This extreme assertion of individuality finds odd echoes in the fictional work of both Mary Wollstonecraft and Charlotte Smith, both of whom explore through fiction the restrictive and ultimately damaging conditions of women’s lives. Drawing on Wollstonecraft’s first novel, Mary, A Fiction (1788), and Charlotte Smith’s first two novels, Emmeline, Or The Orphan of the Castle (1788) and Ethelinde, or The Recluse of the Lake (1789), this chapter argues that women’s independence was most radically tested in fiction through women’s attempts to assert their autonomy. In these novels, the eponymous protagonists demonstrate through a variety of circumstances that, on one hand, women are expected to demonstrate independent reason in making decisions while, on the other hand, they are also required to sacrifice independence to social expectations of polite femininity. Most often, these issues coalesce around marriage, the institution that dominated women’s lives and enacted exactly this paradox: in entering marriage, women had to freely accept a condition that erased their individuality. “Coverture”, as William Blackstone explains in his Commentaries on the Laws of England, refers to the “union of person in husband and wife”: By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law; that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband: under whose wing, protection, and cover, she performs every thing…her condition during her marriage is called her coverture. (Blackstone 1765–1769: 443) The apparent equivalence of ‘being or legal existence’ is telling: without legal existence, women’s actual being in the world could be called into question. While more explicitly Gothic authors foreground this legal fiction (Sophia Lee’s The Recess [1783–1785] is an excellent example), writers like Smith and Wollstonecraft nonetheless negotiate the same contortions expected of women by legal and cultural discourses. Indicting the conventions of genre as well as cultural discourses of gender and sensibility, Wollstonecraft and Smith’s novels sketch the need for the kind of revolution in female manners that the Vindication of the Rights of Woman demands. Wollstonecraft’s Vindication is titled in the singular (the rights of woman unlike her previous justification for the rights of men), and ‘woman’ throughout allows her to address a wide readership while simultaneously creating a specific kind of ‘woman’ whose rights she seeks to vindicate. The introduction sets out this creature more specifically: “I pay particular attention to those in the middle class, because they appear to be in the most natural state” (Wollstonecraft 1995: 76). ‘Woman’ is thus simultaneously all women and a discrete group: it does not include ‘ladies’, for example, or those already spoiled by sensibility and false education. Nor, without additional explanation, does it include working-class women. “Poor women” are also a separate group whose belonging to the broader category of “woman” is not as “natural”: Wollstonecraft positions “poor women” in opposition to the indolence of gentlewomen but also as an indicator of virtue for women “in the middle rank of life”, who might employ them, thus offering poor women an opportunity for industrious virtue (Wollstonecraft 1995: 153–155). It is part of Wollstonecraft’s utopian project that the ‘Woman’ of the title emerges by the end of her treatise as the promise of what will come when the rights she has outlined are vindicated more widely: Rousseau, she claims, “exerts himself to prove that all was right originally; a crowd of authors that all is now right: and I, that all will be right” (1995: 82, emphasis in original). Wollstonecraft’s independent woman is the future, fit not for the current state of civilisation but for a post-revolutionary culture of equality. Rousseau’s individual, on the other hand, was already imaginatively and ideologically available, not least for Rousseau himself in his Confessions (1782). The opening gambit of Rousseau’s daring 30

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autobiography establishes the author as the product of experience, rational self-reflection and independence. Rather than a model for emulation, Rousseau introduces himself as “[m]yself alone. As to whether nature did well or ill to break the mould in which I was cast, that is something no one can judge until after they have read me” (Rousseau 2008: 5). This solitary and unique individual introduces the autobiography, which will detail its formation, and it is also the object of inquiry. Thus, Rousseau’s individual is antecedent to social interaction as much as it is shaped by and through such interactions: where the desires of the individual differ from those of society, Rousseau’s individual remains free to choose. Though consequences may attend individual action, his Confessions establishes the individual as a “unique subject who can only be understood on his terms” (Herbold 1999: 334). Confessions thus provides a model of independence based on an innate individuality through which desires can be articulated and against which there is very little recourse. Claiming the kind of independence that Wollstonecraft called the “grand blessing of life” (1995: 67) and which Rousseau takes for granted presented considerable challenges for women throughout the eighteenth century. Wollstonecraft opens the Vindication of the Rights of Woman with a dedication to Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, formerly the Bishop of Autun and a revolutionary whom she saw as an ally in the early 1790s, in which she sets out her valuation of independence by asserting that she would “secure” it “by contracting my wants, though I were to live on a barren heath” (1995: 67). This dramatic gesture captures – perhaps unintentionally – the extent to which independence demanded extreme sacrifice from women and points precisely to one of the central problems for women’s independence: that it threatens women with social and cultural isolation. Non-persons in most respects, women lacked legal autonomy, political representation or the franchise and could exercise only limited control in public and semi-public spaces. Female individuality was most often detectable through exceptionality or infamy. A woman could stand outside of ‘women’ and become a notable or worthy woman or she could be notorious for the wrong reasons. Anthologies of ‘women worthies’, such as Several Ladies of Great Britain (1752) and The Female Worthies (1766), provided lists of exceptional models of femininity; The Newgate Calendar (appearing from the mid-century onwards) offered tantalising details of infamous women. In either case, such individuality entailed an independence that manifested itself in separation from community, rather than emerging from self-determination that might enable or enhance inclusion. As Bonnie Latimer notes, both John Locke and Mary Astell conceive of an individual that “potentially stands in relation to others, but necessarily enjoys a relation to God and to itself” (emphasis in original, Latimer 2013: 11). The sheer amount of conduct literature that agonises over women’s responsibility for ensuring that polite society was enticing to men suggests that the choice remained for men who could, at least philosophically, choose to reject society. Men’s disinterested participation in political and civil life as an effect of their independence finds expression by the end of the century in the ideal citizen, a figure epitomising the importance of the individual as part of the community. But the independent man also had options: the Romanticperiod wanderer held out the promise of a splendid and admirable self-imposed isolation. The figure of the independent woman, however, remained vexed. As Kathleen Wilson notes, sensibility, politeness and even conjectural histories such as William Alexander’s A History of Women (1779) centred women as the “key to refinement, elevation, polish, and support of their men” (2003: 23). Yet, these discourses depended on connecting women’s virtue with “subjugation and passivity”, a “false morality” against which Wollstonecraft rails and which Smith subtly exposes (Halldenius 2007: 78). Sensibility – for both men and women – sat uneasily alongside the Lockean concept of the fundamentally rational individual. Since the mid-century, sensibility had provided specific 31

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configurations of socially and morally valued behaviour for women. This ‘guidance’ appeared in literature, conduct books and periodicals from a bewildering range of sources, most famously, Samuel Richardson, whose 1740 novel, Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded established many of the key tenets of sensibility. Rather than prescribe, sensibility – particularly in fictional texts – seemed to describe and promote behaviour through characters offered to readers as models for emulation or appropriate criticism. Sensibility celebrated a refined capacity for feeling exhibited through autonomic physical responses to external stimuli. This seemed initially to value the individual and their pre-rational, intuitive and feeling reactions to the world. Quickly, however, this feeling individual was codified into a set of expectations associated firmly with gender (women), class (middle class) and race (white). Women’s ability to claim individuality based on their emotional responses was curtailed: their sensibility would be recognised through predictable, repeated actions and behaviours. Moreover, women’s awareness of their own sensibility threatened to destabilise its sincerity: their natural and highly valued connection to feeling came at the expense of reason. If the individual was understood as a “continuous, indivisible, conscious self who participates in society by means of rational thought and the ability to give consent to this engagement”, the woman of sensibility faced nearly insurmountable challenges to claiming such a status (Latimer 2013: 11). Masculine reason could and did explain, illustrate and pathologise feminine feeling; female reason, on the other hand, was suspect. Critical awareness of their own ‘natural’ and emotional responses in a woman implied that sensibility, even if it was a natural and innate set of responses, could also be manipulated and performed to further self-interest, rather than disinterested moral virtue. Where women could be suspected of consciously working to satisfy their own desires, development or gain, they were often represented as cunning rather than rational. Henry Fielding’s An Apology for the Life of Mrs Shamela Andrews appeared in 1741, less than a year after Richardson’s Pamela. Fielding’s work reinterprets Richardson’s new model of feminine virtue as a threat to private and public morality by making her consciously perform her ‘instinctively’ moral responses in a calculated attempt at social mobility. Crucially, Shamela’s affected performance of sensibility is indistinguishable from Pamela’s sincere responses to her wealthy master, Mr B—. The swiftness of Fielding’s response to Richardson’s novel indicates the extent to which the suspicion of sensibility emerged nearly in tandem with its cultural rise. Writing at the end of the century, both Charlotte Smith and Mary Wollstonecraft inherited a discourse at once culturally pervasive and riven with contradictions. These novels explore the challenges women faced in articulating and asserting their independence, whether financial, philosophical or social. Despite her claim in the Vindication that a “crowd of writers” insists that “all is now right”, Wollstonecraft writes out of a sharp and clear understanding of the wrongness of women’s circumstances in her present time period (1995: 82, emphasis in original). For both, sensibility remained a troubling discourse: on one hand, it offered women moral power and authority, but on the other hand, it demanded women’s almost total surrender of rational thought. Wollstonecraft’s first novel, Mary, A Fiction (1788) promised a new kind of heroine: “neither a Clarissa, a Lady G---, nor a Sophie” (1998: xxxi). The daughter of the “tyrannical and passionate” Edward and his “mere nothing” of a wife, Eliza, the eponymous Mary demonstrates from childhood a propensity for “sublime ideas” and philosophical speculation (1998: 5, 3). Her ‘sensibility’ – a “quickness of sensation; quickness of perception” as Wollstonecraft would limit the concept to in Vindication, following Samuel Johnson’s mid-century definition – is distinct from her rational faculties and leads her to a dangerous enjoyment of “tales of woe” through which she salves the “exquisite pain” of her parents’ neglect (1998: 6). Married hastily to “quash” a litigation affecting her father’s estate, Mary’s persistent efforts to assert her independence inform the novel’s trajectory. Unlike Smith’s heroines, however, Mary never verbalises her independence in the novel. Wollstonecraft’s 32

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style focalises so intensely through the eponymous character that her independence is unquestioned: as she would later write of her approach in the Vindication, Wollstonecraft employs her efforts in her novel on “things, not words!” (1995: 77). Mary exercises what independence she can as a married woman to alleviate the poverty of those in her immediate community, including her dear friend, Ann. The narrative keeps her husband firmly in the background, but crucially, his permission is sought and received for Mary’s decisions. Despite following Mary’s independent travels and her individual development, the novel concludes with her husband’s return and a promise exhorted from Mary to live with him for one year – during which, the narrator records, she can bear neither his physical touch nor his protestations of love, longing only for a world “where there is neither marrying, nor giving in marriage” (1998: 68, emphasis in original). The extended exploration of independence under coverture sets Wollstonecraft’s novel apart from Smith’s, in which the heroines must struggle to assert their autonomy before marriage. For both, marriage provided the crucible in which women’s independence could be tested. Marriage, after all, required that women freely declare their consent to having their “very being or legal existence…suspended” and subsumed under their husband’s (Blackstone 1765–1769: vol. 1, 431). Socially, marriage could offer women some, strictly limited, personal freedom. Married women, as Wollstonecraft’s Mary illustrates, could enjoy greater mobility and less scrutiny of their public appearances in terms of their virtue; they could act as chaperones rather than requiring a chaperone themselves. They were, however, also wholly subject to the protection and ultimately the whims of their husband, which is the crashing conclusion of Wollstonecraft’s Mary and a theme that Smith explores in Ethelinde. Given the centrality of marriage to women’s lives and expectations, it provided the key issue for questions of women’s education, public and civic roles and their independence. Marriage was the analogy for oppression for Wollstonecraft, who saw it as “legal prostitution” and a form of slavery (1995: 239, 248). Smith’s novels hold out the hope that sensibility offered of promoting companionate marriages and the greater cultural and moral good (if in appearance alone) of allowing women to choose their future husband. Smith’s first two heroines represent very different familial and financial positions: Emmeline is an orphan, the rightful but displaced heir to a grand fortune; Ethelinde is the youngest child of a once wealthy and now destitute family. Both are the daughters of love marriages and without, it is implied, due regard for the financial ramifications of disappointing family expectations. Unlike Mary, Smith’s heroines must assert their independence without the fortune that Mary both takes for granted and bewails. Their insistence on independence thus develops a less explicit but no less considered exploration of the importance of women’s fully informed and independent consent to the foundational institution of social and civil stability. In Emmeline, or, The Orphan of the Castle (1788), Smith’s first novel, words are very much the thing. From the beginning, Emmeline is caught between obligation and her own independent desires. The novel breaks with generic conventions in allowing Emmeline to marry not the first, but the second suitor to whom she is engaged. Loraine Fletcher considers Emmeline as embodying “a fantasy…that a young woman can win devoted love and overcome all difficulties by her personal qualities alone, without the help of family or dowry” (2003: 15). While Emmeline ‘wins’, however, the novel is not without significant challenges to generic expectations or gender discourse. Twice in the novel Emmeline must emphatically assert her right to independence – both times regarding marriage. Though she manages, as Ethelinde and Mary do not, to find “a midway point between sense and sensibility” (Fletcher 2003: 15), the text nonetheless signals, like Mary, the ways in which sensibility fails to provide language with which to articulate women’s independence. Ethelinde, or, The Recluse of the Lake (1789) is Smith’s second novel and the least well-known in terms of critical scholarship. At five volumes, it is Smith’s longest novel; it is also 33

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her most ambitious in many ways. Ethelinde offers a scathing critique of male behaviour and the impossible expectations that sensibility placed on women. Its geographical scope is broader than in Emmeline, locating characters and circumstances in Imperial machinations in the East and West Indies. It is also far less concerned, as Emmeline is, with family history. Property remains a central concern, but the narrative is more interested in the proper performance of ownership vis-à-vis family duty than with consolidating or ensuring the inheritance of a specific contested property. It is also remarkable for the strength of insistence that the eponymous protagonist brings to her declarations of independence. Unlike Emmeline, who must play on models of sensibility and sentimental duty and whose independence stems from her family connections and social position, Ethelinde’s claims are founded on her belief that she is “like no body else” (Smith 1789: vol. 1, 193). In Desire and Domestic Fiction, Nancy Armstrong asserts that “[t]he modern individual was first and foremost a woman” (1990: 16). Armstrong’s argument foregrounds the importance of cultural authority, positioning the “new female self” as the product of the rise of the novel and the growth of the middle class in England throughout the eighteenth century. Armstrong’s concept of the individual emerges from discourses that rely on fictionality, from Rousseau’s creation of an individual who “exists prior to the formation of any group”, to David Hume’s recognition that the “power of consent derives from the fiction of an original contract [between a government and its people] and not from the fact of its enactment” and to Jeremy Bentham’s claim that people understand physical life “in term of fictions of right, obligation, truth, or justice” (Armstrong 1990: 39, 42). Bonnie Latimer points out that while individuality might have opened to women in the eighteenth century, the criteria that underpinned the “individual” were “normatively masculine” (2013: 12). The “debilitating cultural association of femininity with dependence”, combined with a traditional conception of women as lacking self-awareness, produced a common trope of the woman as blank (McCormack 2005: 4). Throughout the century, male writers accused women of lacking individual characters, from Pope’s couplet in ‘An Epistle to a Lady’ that there was “Nothing so true as what you once let fall/‘Most women have no Characters at all’” (ll. 1–2) to Tristram Shandy’s insistence that while the male Shandys are of “an original character throughout”, “the females had no character at all” (Sterne 1980: 47). Women were a type rather than individuals, an assumption that sensibility continued to reinforce through its insistence on specific, socially recognised physical and emotional responses. Where the law required women’s independent action, it relied on the convenient fiction that an individual could be conjured up by legal necessity and as quickly exorcised. Women’s independence in consenting to marriage underscored her essential dependence: as Smith and Wollstonecraft’s novels demonstrate, women’s options could be very narrowly restricted. The modern individual as a woman was beleaguered rather than empowered. For both writers, legal fictions (in particular, a woman’s ‘suspended’ identity during marriage) create conditions in which only other fictions can intervene. Wollstonecraft’s ‘Advertisement’ for Mary, A Fiction explicitly rejects previous fictional models for her attempt to “develop a character different from those generally portrayed” (1998: xxxi). What Mary is is left to the unfolding of the narrative, but Wollstonecraft emphatically refuses ‘type’ and begins from a negative space in which her new kind of heroine can rise and take form. The argument in the ‘Advertisement’ emphasises the empowering and emancipatory space of fiction and the importance of independent reasoning: In an artless tale, without episodes, the mind of a woman, who has thinking powers is displayed. The female organs have been thought too weak for this arduous employment; and experience seems to justify this assertion. Without arguing physically about possibilities— in a fiction, such a being may be allowed to exist; whose grandeur is derived from the 34

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operations of its own faculties, not subjugated to opinion; but drawn by the individual from the original source. (Wollstonecraft 1998: xxxi; emphasis added) Wollstonecraft’s new kind of character is self-aware, autonomous and, crucially, ‘not subjugated to opinion’. Thus, she is equally entitled to “freedom”, which, for Wollstonecraft meant the absence of arbitrary power (Coffee 2014: 908). Fiction seems, initially, to provide Wollstonecraft with the potential space in which an independent, thinking woman can exist. Whether such a being can thrive, however, is less certain. Legal fictions – particularly those that underpin coverture – present even Wollstonecraft’s fiction with significant barriers. In her later work, The Wrongs of Woman, the protagonist laments that “Marriage had Bastilled me for life!” (Wollstonecraft 1998: 154–155). Incarcerated in an asylum, Maria provides a conclusion to Wollstonecraft’s earlier experiments with genre and her belief that fiction could provide a space for ‘possibilities’. Mary (in 1788) longs for a world without marriage; Maria (by 1797/1798) experiences marriage as a death: “when I reflected that I was bound to live with [Mr Venables] forever – my heart died within me; my desire of improvement became languid, and baleful, corroding melancholy took possession of my soul” (Wollstonecraft 1998: 154). Smith’s more expansive engagement with genre produces little more hope for women either within fiction or without. Marriage, as a potent and omnipresent indicator of women’s lack of secure and fundamental autonomy, is a condition that fiction cannot escape. Even in Smith’s more expansive negotiations with genre, her protagonists can ameliorate the effects of coverture only superficially by focusing on a relationship based on romantic love that is also supported by appropriate and deserved wealth. Emmeline and Ethelinde may reach a happier conclusion, but they are no less subject to legal erasure. Early on in Mary, A Fiction, Wollstonecraft establishes threats to her protagonist’s independence in her cruel father and dissolute husband, representatives of the arbitrary powers oppressing women whose origins may be in legal fictions but whose effects are decidedly real. The former “always exclaimed against female acquirements” and is pleased by his “wife’s indolence and illhealth”, which keep her world narrowly circumscribed (Wollstonecraft 1998: 5). Her husband – “the man she had promised to obey” – leaves for the continent immediately after their hasty wedding and prolongs his absence by extending his stay, not, Mary despairs, “to cultivate his taste… but to join in the masquerades, and such burlesque amusements” (19, 58). Whether physically too close or too distant, fathers and husbands present an insurmountable existential threat to Mary’s independence. Her mother, Eliza, on the other hand, who is more present than Mary’s brutal father in the opening chapters, serves to strengthen Mary’s independence, rather than threaten it. Indeed, Mary’s independence and her strength of character derive early on from her rejection of Eliza’s example. Rather than being “taught by the example of [her] mother”, Mary thrives through her neglect (Wollstonecraft 1995: 87). It is an “old house-keeper” who teaches her to read, after which the little girl is “left to the operations of her own mind […] and learned to think” (Wollstonecraft 1998: 4). Solitude, for Mary, provides the foundation for her individual character and her independence, which grows from childish addresses to “angels” that she heard “sometimes visit[ ] this earth” into “[s]ublime ideas” that burst forth in “extemporary effusions of gratitude, and rhapsodies of praise” (Wollstonecraft 1998: 4, 5). She later uses her independence to provide succour to the local village, impoverished through the mismanagement and greed of landowners like her father and, specifically, to aid Ann’s family. The community she establishes with Ann and later with Henry, a gentleman of sensibility with whom Mary forms an intense relationship while travelling, provides a crucial model for a sustainable network of support for her independent desires. In these temporary and ultimately doomed connections, Mary demonstrates Wollstonecraft’s developing 35

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consideration of independence and citizenship – namely, that “it is not possible to fully enjoy liberty whilst also oppressing an other or others” (Hague 2019: 814). In this, Mary finds the surest support for her independence in friendship based in equality and mutual respect – a potential she makes available, importantly, for both men and women. Smith’s protagonists face rather different threats: in both Emmeline and Ethelinde, fathers are less notable for their absence than for the ineffectual protection they offer their daughters. Emmeline’s father is dead, and her uncle believes her to be a ‘natural’ (that is, illegitimate) child, entitled to nothing and reliant on sentimental familial charity. Ethelinde’s father, Colonel Chesterville, may be a caring and sympathetic figure, but he is ultimately unable to protect or advance (and indeed actively damages) his daughter’s expectations and future. Both heroines navigate a social world that superficially celebrates ideologies that seem to champion women’s independence while ensuring that they remain fundamentally subjugated. Ethelinde, in particular, finds herself menaced by well-meaning, ostensibly harmless men who weaponise sensibility against women. Sir Edward Newenden, her cousin’s husband, is the unlikely trap in a novel otherwise populated with dissolute and obviously dangerous men. Lord Danesforte, a neighbouring nobleman of immediately questionable morals, and Davenant, “a young man not yet of age […] distantly related to Sir Edward and also his ward” (Smith 1789: vol. 1, 3), both dance attendance on Ethelinde for their own dissolute purposes, providing a more obvious danger for Ethelinde’s innocence and reputation. Sir Edward’s apparent sensibility and moral rectitude, as well as his public status as the husband of Ethelinde’s cousin and her de facto guardian, preserve him from initial suspicion. As Joseph Morrissey notes, however, in his treatment of both Ethelinde and his wife, Sir Edward is “repeatedly shown as capable of harming women under his protection” (2019: 354). Unlike many of Smith’s other dangerous male characters, and unlike Wollstonecraft’s explicitly tyrannical characters, Sir Edward believes he is helping the protagonist. His unwillingness to admit his complicity in her oppression makes him the greatest threat to her independence. His apparent support of Ethelinde is predicated on her dependence and very nearly destroys her peace as well as his family’s. Sir Edward spends his wife’s family’s money on Ethelinde while allowing his secret affection for his ward to grow to the point that, when he considers her married and “irrevocably another’s”, he “fancied he could rather bear to destroy her, and then himself” (Smith 1789: 2:241–242). Lord Danesforte, whose sexually predatory behaviour later tempts Lady Newenden from her family and into disrepute, ironically respects Ethelinde’s refusal more than Sir Edward does. While Wollstonecraft’s Mary seeks to discover a place where ‘a thinking woman’ can exist, such a utopia for women is ultimately not even to be found in fiction. It is certainly not found in England, where “the laws … afford [women] no protection or redress”, nor even a secure or reliable identity (Wollstonecraft 1998: 159). Barbara Taylor argues evocatively for Wollstonecraft’s repeated demands for, and exploration of the conditions inhibiting, “the primary demand…for a self-identity that is psychically and culturally viable” (2003: 128). Such an identity is beyond Wollstonecraft’s heroines but closer in some ways for Smith’s Emmeline and Ethelinde. While Wollstonecraft indicts the entire institution of marriage, Smith is less broadly condemning, representing marriage as a situation that women can navigate to their advantage. Her heroines have multiple examples of women to emulate or reject, and in both cases, find a mutually supportive and sympathetic older female friend who provides emotional support and practical advice. Mrs Stafford provides this for Emmeline; Mrs Montgomery does so for Ethelinde. These examples of female companionship are far more sustainable than, for example, Mary’s relationship with Ann, which, while it “softened” Mary’s manners and provides some emotional stability, flounders due to their radically different material circumstances (Wollstonecraft 1998: 8). Independence, Wollstonecraft recognises later in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and in The Wrongs of Woman, 36

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has a material aspect, particularly where it is understood as part of the foundation of republican citizenship. There is a careful balance to be struck, nonetheless, as too much material wealth leads to the indulgences of the upper classes: a woman’s independence depends on her being “raised sufficiently above abject poverty not to be obliged to weigh the consequence of every farthing [spent], and having sufficient to prevent their attending to a frigid system of economy which narrows both heart and mind” (Wollstonecraft 1995: 233). The ability to ignore economy distinguishes Smith’s heroines, who, even while struggling with financial ruin, as Ethelinde does, are never reduced to the extremes from which Ann must be delivered. This freedom from economy, however, might be what enables Smith’s heroines to make clearer verbal attempts to assert their independence. Emmeline’s first articulation of self-determined identity occurs while she resides at Mowbray Castle and is a direct interference in patriarchal control over her body and choices. Following the deaths of the house-keeper and steward, family domestics who cared for both Emmeline’s father and Emmeline, Smith’s protagonist realises that she “belongs to nobody; [has] no right to claim the protection of anyone; [and] no power to procure for herself the necessities of life” (Smith 2003: 49). Furthermore, she understands her vulnerability as an unprotected young woman, alone in the castle with the predatory Mr Maloney, Lord Montreville’s ill-considered replacement for Emmeline’s devoted steward and stand-in ‘father’. When Montreville’s son, Delamere, announces his intention to reside at Mowbray Castle, Emmeline’s circumstances demand attention. The simplest expedient is to marry her away from Montreville’s family – and Mr Maloney provides an easy solution. In addition to legally erasing any connection she might leverage against the estate, such a marriage would also tie her – contractually – to the castle in a wholly different way, effectively limiting her ability to develop her individual identity according to her own rational choices. Montreville’s arguments are bolstered by his appeal to feminine propriety: given Delamere’s intentions to reside there, Emmeline can only remain as the wife of another man. Her response to Montreville’s favourable presentation of Maloney’s proposal insists on her rational capacities as a thinking woman: suffer me to be a servant; and believe I have a mind, which tho’ it will not recoil from any situation where I can earn my bread by honest labour, is infinitely superior to any advantages [Maloney] can offer me! (Smith 2003: 66) Refusing to be married for her own protection, Emmeline insists on her right to self-determination, even if it means, as Wollstonecraft’s Maria would claim in The Wrongs of Woman, being “classed [with] the lowest” as long as she remains “mistress of [her] own actions” (Wollstonecraft 1998: 141). Women’s inability to direct their own actions, or the external perception of those actions, is evident in Montreville’s insistence that she has “undoubtedly encouraged” Maloney to propose marriage, and that her “extraordinary emotion” stems from either “artifice or coquetry” (Smith 2003: 66). Emmeline’s final pronouncement, in response to Montreville’s bewildered inquiry over what he should tell Maloney, comes closer still to self-determination: “Tell him that you are astonished at his insolence in daring to lift his eyes to a person bearing the name of Mowbray; and shocked at his falsehood in presuming to assert that I ever encouraged his impertinent pretensions!” (Smith 2003: 67; emphasis added). Yet it is not Emmeline’s reason that sways Montreville: the episode concludes with his appropriate response to her emotional state – she is reduced, in his perspective, to an image of virtue-in-distress: “The violent and artless sorrow of a beautiful young woman, whose fate appeared to be in his power, affected him” (Smith 2003: 67; emphasis added). A woman ‘with thinking powers’ was not quite yet the suitable individual for a novel. 37

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Emmeline’s next declaration of individuality is much stronger and emerges from her growing confidence in dealing critically with social norms and adjusting to the dictates of her own prudence. Montreville’s attempts to quickly marry her away from the family are matched, however, by the determination that his son, Delamere, shows in his desire to bring her into the family by marriage, against Montreville’s explicit commands. Their early engagement, contracted secretly and awaiting the consent of Lord and Lady Montreville, dominates the bulk of the narrative, and it is through negotiating her changing responses to this contracted marriage that Emmeline develops as an individual. Having been doubted and insulted by Delamere, Emmeline refuses to re-acknowledge their secret engagement, which he had dissolved and which she no longer wants. “Content to engage” herself to be Delamere’s wife at one point because “such an engagement would make [him] happy”, she cannot make the same promise knowing that it will not make her happy (Smith 2003: 381–383). The length of this exchange, in which Delamere insists that she conform to a fixity of intention that he has not demonstrated, offers an illustrative example of the difficulty with which women could articulate their individual desires. Emmeline’s attempt to reassure Delamere of her rational decision ends with her self-exile from any future marriage; to convince Delamere of her sincerity, she must reject not only his reassertion of their engagement, but “disclaim all intention of marriage whatever” (Smith 2003: 383). Emmeline’s two declarations of individual preference are based on very different foundations. In the first, her insistence that she would rather “earn her bread by honest labour” suggests the extent to which she will go to preserve her autonomy. That it fails to move Montreville can also be ascribed to the romantic naivety of such a claim. In Ethelinde, a similar bold declaration is made by Ethelinde’s lover, Montgomery, and dismissed more firmly and quickly by Newenden, who demands what labour Montgomery imagines he would undertake that would support a family (Smith 1789: vol. 4, 239). Emmeline’s assumption that she has the skills or constitution to labour as a servant betrays her limited experience, as well as the unquestionable class bias that permeates Smith’s – and Wollstonecraft’s – understanding of the parameters of an ‘individual’. For both writers, if gender could be challenged, class, with its very different considerations of economic dependence and limited self-determination, remained relatively stable. Emmeline’s second assertion of individuality, however, draws on reason and exhibits her superior self-management and recognition of herself as a conscious and rational agent, able to give and withhold consent about her inclusion in contracts and communities. Smith’s next novel, Ethelinde; or, The Recluse of the Lake (1789) contains a more forceful attempt to work through women’s individuality inside of patriarchal narratives and social roles. Her independence is not necessarily a positive goal, but a state she is forced into through her difference from the social circle in which she finds herself. The novel is unique for several reasons: Ethelinde is not a conventionally orphaned heroine, neither is she an heiress. Like Emmeline’s father, Ethelinde’s father, the younger brother of the family, marries for love rather than money, thereby disinheriting himself and his children from his family’s considerable wealth, which is inherited entirely by his brother, Lord Hawkhurst. Furthermore, in many ways, the plot does not trace the re-establishment of a family to its historical status and property; instead, it follows Ethelinde’s development as an autonomous, if not financially independent, woman. Neither is Ethelinde a ‘new kind of heroine’, demonstrating many of the same character traits and narrative difficulties as other heroines of sensibility. More than Smith’s previous heroine and like Wollstonecraft’s Mary and Maria, Ethelinde makes explicit the connection between suffering and sensibility. Yet, despite Ethelinde’s unquestionable merit as a sentimental heroine, she is not rewarded with a vastly improved social or financial position through a marriage that unites love and money. Her assertion of independence is not connected to actions that emphasise her resolution. Ethelinde is far less legally 38

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and financially independent than Wollstonecraft’s heroine, Mary. The daughter of a dissolute gambler, Ethelinde lives on the financial generosity of her cousin’s family – in many ways, her narrative is closer to Ann’s (in Mary, A Fiction). Ethelinde lives by the continued favour of wealthier friends and extended family. She does however, make the strongest claim to independence of any female character: asked to defend her preference for solitude, Ethelinde replies that it is “[f]or no other reason in the world, but because I am like no body else” (Smith 1789: 1: 193). This remarkable declaration both echoes Rousseau’s claim in his Confessions that “I was not made like any that exist” (2008: 5) and claims such independence for a young woman. It is also the opening of a discussion that requires Ethelinde, like Emmeline, to assert and then defend her right to reject a proposal of marriage. In a series of questionable revelations, Sir Edward Newenden informs Ethelinde that her beloved father, while being “quite well”, requires her to return to London; then, that Davenant has desired Sir Edward to “offer […] his heart and fortune” (Smith 1789: 1.194–196). Despite Ethelinde’s firm assurance that “no considerations shall influence me to unite myself to Mr Davenant”, Sir Edward carries out his commission only as far as telling Davenant that “she seems […] averse to any proposals of marriage” (Smith 1789: 1.202). Morrissey claims that Ethelinde consistently positions Sir Edward between herself and Davenant with regard to his proposal, despite saying that she would speak to Davenant herself if he requested it. While he acknowledges that “talking to Davenant herself could expose [Ethelinde] to gossip, charges of coquetry, or be construed by Davenant as encouragement”, Morrissey considers Ethelinde as “petulant”, arguing that her “tirade of speech gestures towards excess rather than delicacy, denoting spontaneous wilfulness and exasperation at the thought of not getting her own way” (2019: 346). Given the stakes of marriage for women, particularly a young, unpropertied woman without sufficient paternal protection or independent wealth, this representation of Ethelinde seems contrary to what Morrissey’s argument later acknowledges as Smith’s “deep resentment about patriarchy and what indigent women must do to survive” (Morrissey 2019: 356–357). Indeed, while Wollstonecraft’s Mary finds herself creating more fictions – a place “where there is neither marrying, nor giving in marriage” – Ethelinde finds herself pushed to a real geographical margin. Her early insistence that she is “like no body else” is given material dimensions in the novel by her eventual self-exile to the banks of Grasmere Lake, where she shares a cottage with Mrs Montgomery, believing her beloved Montgomery to have died overseas. As a character ‘type’, of course, Ethelinde is part of Smith’s critique of genre and thus, her belief in her own individuality an ironic comment on the conventions of fictional heroines; yet the comment can also be read as a sincere declaration of personal subjectivity and a resistance to social conventions regulating female identity. Smith concludes the narrative with an idealised vision of middle-class domesticity supported by moderate wealth – a tenuous and ultimately unstable narrative conclusion for a heroine like no other. In both Smith and Wollstonecraft, the historical context against which women struggled to articulate individual identity is present throughout genre and structure. The parameters and restrictions that permit certain expressions of individuality while proscribing others emerges stylistically throughout their novels. Wollstonecraft’s explanation of her original heroine is couched clearly in generic terms: Mary will be “neither a Clarissa, nor a Sophie, nor a Lady G---” – naming the heroines-cum-tropes of Richardson and Rousseau’s novels of sensibility. Yet, despite their unequivocal assertions of individuality, the expectations of genre threaten to overwhelm Smith and Wollstonecraft’s protagonists. Joan Forbes notes of Smith’s Emmeline that the conventional triumph of sentimentalised, middle-class, heterosexual society (contained symbolically in the emotionally restrained, private marriages between the protagonist and her beloved) seem overly pat and artificially truncated (Forbes 1995: 303). Emmeline, for example, unfolds over four volumes yet the fate of the eponymous character is decided in the final chapter. Having found her perfect 39

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conjugal companion in Godolphin and been freed from her foolish promise never to marry by the death of her unwanted suitor, Delamere, Emmeline attempts to set aside some time for herself. This wish, however, is so incompatible with sentimental convention that Smith must remind the reader (and heroine) of Emmeline’s extreme sensibility and her proper desire to “make [others] happy” before herself: [T]ho’ she still meant to adhere to her resolution of remaining single until she became of age, the tender importunity of her lover, the pressing entreaties of friends, and her own wishes to make them happy, were […] powerfully undermining it […T]heir increasing solicitations obliged her to consent to shorten the term to three months [and] Godolphin undertook to make it the particular request of Lord Montreville and his daughter, that their marriage should take place within three weeks. (Smith 2003: 474–475) Wollstonecraft’s The Wrongs of Woman, published in its unfinished state, dissolves into a series of possible endings collected by the ‘editor’ (William Godwin) from Wollstonecraft’s notes. Her earlier novel, Mary, began with a claim for the potentialities of fiction to provide a space for ‘thinking women’ but concludes with a utopian dream of independence beyond this world. While for Smith, women’s limited independence finds some space within existing discourses of gender and identity, for Wollstonecraft, it remains wholly incompatible with existing ideological, political and social structures. By the end of the eighteenth century, sensibility was increasingly under attack as a threat to social order, cohesion and rationality. Although it was largely formulated by British philosophers, scientists and political thinkers such as David Hume, Adam Smith, Isaac Newton and John Locke, sensibility had developed a close association with French writers, particularly Rousseau through La Nouvelle Héloise (1761) and Emile, Or Treatise on Education (1762). This connection with France was emphasised by critics in Britain as the French Revolution devolved into the Terror throughout the 1790s (Ellis 1996: 190). Smith and Wollstonecraft were both ardent and vocal supporters of the French Revolution; the new French Constitution of 1791, which “formally denied political rights” to women, must have been a severe blow (Taylor 2003: 209). Yet the Declaration of the Rights of Man only made public what was implicit in sentimental ideology: women’s ‘equality’ did not grant them the same – or even comparable – independence. Though the French Constitution did not directly affect British women, transnational migration of ideas and representations did influence the ‘masculinization’ of radical and reactionary British culture. Talleyrand’s summation of women’s roles in his report on national education eerily echoes Blackstone’s assessment of women as the ‘favourites’ of British law: the common happiness, especially that of women, requires that they do not aspire to exercise rights and political functions […] Let us teach them the real measure of their duties and rights. They will find, not insubstantial hopes, but real advantages under the empire of liberty; that the less they participate in the making of the law, the more they will receive from it protection and strength; and that especially when they renounce all political rights, they will acquire the certainty of seeing their civil rights substantiated and even expanded. (quoted in Taylor, 2003: 210, emphasis added) Tallyrand’s paradoxical insistence that women were most free by rejecting individual rights echoes Sir William Blackstone’s earlier insistence that women are “so great a favourite of the laws 40

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of England” that “even the disabilities, which a wife lies under, are for the most part intended for her protection and benefit” (Blackstone 1765–1769: vol. 1, 433). Both contradictory and hugely problematic statements contain the same paradoxes as sensibility: a woman’s source of strength is her weakness and only by abdicating her individual identity will she be included in civil society. What fiction provided, nonetheless, was a space for experimentation – a space from which alternatives to subjugation, isolation and compliance could be put to a wide and interested readership and from which community could arise.

Works Cited Armstrong, Nancy (1990) Desire and Domestic Fiction, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Blackstone, Sir William (1765–1769) Commentaries on the Laws of England (4 vols.), Oxford: Clarendon Press. Coffee, Alan M.S.J. (2014) “Freedom as Independence: Mary Wollstonecraft and the Grand Blessing of Life,” Hypatia, 29(4): 908–924. Ellis, Markman (1996) The Politics of Sensibility, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fletcher, Loraine (2001) Charlotte Smith: A Critical Biography, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Fletcher, Loraine (2003) “Introduction,” in Loraine Fletcher (ed.) Smith, Charlotte. Emmeline; or, The ­Orphan of the Castle, Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, pp. 9–35. Forbes, Joan (1995) “Anti-Romantic Discourse as Resistance,” in Jackie Stacey and Lynne Pearce (eds.) Romance Revisited, London: Lawrence and Wishart, pp. 293–303. Hague, Ros (2019) “Autonomy as Disposition to Non-Domination in the Work of Mary Wollstonecraft,” Journal of Gender Studies, 28(7): 814–825. Halldenius, Lena (2007) “The Primacy of Right: On the Triad of Liberty, Equality, and Virtue in Wollstonecraft’s Political Thought,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 15(1): 75–99. Herbold, Sarah (1999) “Rousseau’s Dance of the Veils: The Confessions and the Imagined Female Reader,” Eighteenth-Century Studies, Spring 32(3): 333–353. Latimer, Bonnie (2013) Making Gender, Culture, and Self in the Fiction of Samuel Richardson: The Novel Individual, London: Ashgate. Lee, Sophia (2000) The Recess; Or, A Tale of Other Times, edited by April Alliston, Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky. Locke, John (1988) Two Treatises of Government, edited by Peter Laslett, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McCormack, Matthew (2005) The Independent Man: Citizenship and Gender Politics in Georgian England, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Morrissey, Joseph (2019) “Sensibility, Sincerity, and Self-Interest in Charlotte Smith’s Ethelinde,” Women’s Writing, 26(3): 342–357. Reuter, Martina (2014) “‘Like a Fanciful Kind of Half Being’: Mary Wollstonecraft’s Criticism of ­Jean-Jacques Rousseau,” Hypatia, 29(4): 925–941. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (2008) Confessions, edited by Patrick Colman, trans. Angela Scholar, Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics. Smith, Charlotte (1789) Ethelinde; or, The Recluse of the Lake, London: printed for T. Cadell. Smith, Charlotte (2003) Emmeline; or, The Orphan of the Castle, edited by Lorraine Fletcher, Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press. Sterne, Laurence (1980) Tristram Shandy, edited by Howard Anderson, London: W.W. Norton & Co. Taylor, Barbara (2003) Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination, Cambridge: Cambridge ­University Press. Wilson, Kathleen (2003) This Island Race: Englishness, Empire and Gender in the Eighteenth Century, ­London: Routledge. Wollstonecraft, Mary (1995) A Vindication of the Rights of Men and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, edited by Sylvana Tomaselli, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wollstonecraft, Mary (1998) Mary and The Wrongs of Woman, edited by Gary Kelly, Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics.

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2 ROMANTIC WOMEN TRAVEL WRITERS, POLITICS AND THE ENVIRONMENT An ecofeminist reading of the Swiss landscape Kathryn Walchester Although male writers have been more often associated with mobility and public discourse than their female counterparts, there were, as Sara Mills, Shirley Foster and others since the 1990s have shown, substantial numbers of women writing and publishing accounts of their travels in the nineteenth century. Travel writing is a notoriously capacious form, a “most hybrid and assimilable of literary genres” according to Patrick Holland and Graham Hugan, and as such, facilitates the inclusion of the discussion of a wide range of topics including politics, local culture and accounts of the landscape of writing, as well as memoir and personal reflection, offering women writers a form in which to express views on topics which had been largely dominated by male authors, and so make important literary and cultural interventions (1998: xiii). This chapter focuses on the travel writing of Helen Maria Williams, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and Dorothy Wordsworth, who visited Switzerland in 1794, 1814 and 1820 respectively and discusses the ways in which the accounts of their travels present alternative perspectives to these conventionally male-dominated discourses. Solitary travel by women was exceptionally unusual during this period, and it was not until the early decades of the nineteenth century that developments in tourist infrastructure facilitated travel for women as part of larger family groups. All three authors made their journeys accompanied by male companions: in Shelley’s case, by her husband, Wordsworth, by her brother and Williams by John Hurford Stone, her unmarried partner, which attracted some criticism and contributed further to Williams’ scandalous reputation. Thus to travel to impressive natural locations is for all these women an especially noteworthy opportunity, and their remarkable travel writing illustrates a common aim to draw together accounts of the encounter with the Swiss landscape with articulations of their political desires and beliefs. This chapter takes an ecofeminist approach and foregrounds the ways in which women’s travel writing about landscape demonstrates a female-centred view of politics. Although their political views differed, the work of the authors described in this chapter presents their views on politics through a distinctive use of examples and tropes which bring together femininity and nature to describe positive social movements or the overthrow of non-democratic governments. From their overview of critical work in the field of ecocriticism and eighteenth-century studies, Erin Drew and John Sitter argue that this scholarship commences from “the fundamental ecofeminist assumption that women have a unique relationship with nature due to the ways they have been culturally DOI: 10.4324/9781003429951-4

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aligned with it, both positively and negatively” (Drew and Sitter 2011: 234). This chapter likewise identifies a common approach to the representations of nature in the writing of the three authors under scrutiny, which derives not only from the way in which women were and are associated with nature in cultural and artistic representations but also from the way in which contemporary conventions circumscribed their behaviour and mobility. By focusing on the way in which these women write about the natural environment of their travels, I argue that they find in nature a connection, not only through the archetypal link between women and nature, but a sense in which both femininity and nature have been historically dominated and appropriated and could nevertheless offer solutions to apparently intractable social problems and be a source of positive political action. The timings of the journeys by Williams, Shelley and Wordsworth to Switzerland encompassed dramatic political change across Continental Europe. Although travel to the continent was limited during the post-revolutionary period, some travellers and writers did visit Switzerland at the end of the eighteenth century, including William Wordsworth in 1790. In 1794, while fleeing briefly from persecution in Robespierre’s France, Williams travelled to Switzerland. The account of the trip, A Tour of Switzerland, published in 1798, stretches even the capacious possibilities of the travelogue, including not only descriptions of places and experiences from the six-month journey, but as the long title indicates, “a view of the Present State of Governments and Manners of those Cantons, with Comparative Sketches of the Present State of Paris”. Shelley’s History of a Six Weeks’ Tour describes two visits to the Alps: the first in 1814, a remarkable journey of elopement through the politically unstable France, Switzerland, Germany and Holland with Percy Bysshe Shelley and her half-sister, Claire Clairmont, and a second section in the form of a series of letters from both Mary and Percy Shelley from their 1816 stay near Geneva. As Helen Boden notes, between the beginning of the new century and 1815; “the more dangerous threat of war did not subside” (1995: xviii). After 1815, as Michael Heafford has shown, Switzerland’s popularity was forged as a destination in its own right, as opposed to being merely a through-route to Italy for Grand Tourists (Heafford 2006: 44). The final text to be considered in this chapter is the account of Wordsworth’s three-and-a-half-month journey beginning in July 1820, which took her and her brother, sister-in-law and their friends, the Monkhouses, to France, Germany, Switzerland and the borders of Italy. Wordsworth’s journal, covering this later period, indicates how, even after advancements in infrastructure brought about by the Napoleonic Wars, the Swiss Alps retained a sense of danger and exclusivity due to the enduring challenges of crossing its mountains, particularly for women travellers. Despite the difficulties of the journey, the landscape of Switzerland drew increased numbers of foreign visitors into the nineteenth century and attracted considerable literary interest. It is not surprising that these accounts of travels in Switzerland, along with many others, should contain discussions of politics. The country had, since its confederation in 1291, been a collection of diverse cantons in linguistic, religious, and government terms. These small regions were organised according to a range of constitutional arrangements. The canton of Bern, for example, was ruled according to a patrician–aristocratic model, Zurich, by a collection of guilds, and other cantons such as Schwyz were governed by a democratic assembly (Lerner 2012: 8). Such a diversity of republican models within a relatively small geographical area encouraged observers to compare their models and discuss their different levels of democracy, with Switzerland becoming what Marc Lerner has called “a living laboratory of political thought” during the unsettled period after the French Revolution of 1789, including the intervention by Napoleon in 1798, until the formation of the Swiss Confederation in 1848 (Lerner 2012: 2). Both politics and theories of landscape aesthetics were, at the end of the eighteenth century, areas of discourse which had seen relatively little contribution from women writers. Those women who did enter into public debate were widely criticised, particularly if they held what might be 43

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seen as radical views. As Jeanne Moskal shows in her account of the reception of Lady Sydney Morgan’s France, travel writing offered a genre in which women could engage in debate about aesthetics and politics, although this did not necessarily mean they could avoid censure (Bohls 1995: 191). Williams, one of Britain’s most famous “bluestockings”, was identified with and castigated for her sympathetic views of revolutionary politics (Kelly 1993: 69), where writing by Shelley and Wordsworth was considered only in terms of its connection to the work of their more famous male relatives. Dorothy Wordsworth’s Journal of a Tour on the Continent has, as Helen Boden notes, been seen as a “pilgrimage” to her brother’s 1790 tour (Boden 1995: xii). Likewise, Shelley’s travel writing has been largely considered in relation to Percy Shelley’s contributions to her text of his letters and the poem “Mont Blanc”. In the following three sections, my focus will be on the way in which Williams, Shelley and Wordsworth reframe the discussion of European politics to a discourse which centres on femininity and the natural world. The geographical locus of the attention of these writers and their contemporaries is Altdorf and Lake Uri, the place of the famous Wilhelm Tell legend of political fight against the oppressive Austrian regime. In the travel writing by Williams, Shelley and Wordsworth, the mountains of Switzerland are central to the forging of new political hope during a time of European upheaval at the turn of the nineteenth century. One of the most dominant images in this merging of landscape and politics is a domestic image of familial care, with the landscape around Altdorf being the “cradle of” revolutionary thinkers and political activists according to Mary Shelley (1817: 50). Switzerland’s natural landscape is portrayed in the travel writing as the source of its positive political potential. In contrast, Williams’ more dynamic image is that of the revolutionary Alpine avalanche sweeping away inequality and oppression to achieve ‘Liberty’, who is figured as a powerful woman. In all three accounts, but perhaps most strongly articulated in Dorothy Wordsworth’s Journal, is an emphasis on the influence and power of nature. Vandana Shiva, Maria Mies and Ariel Salleh argue that an ecofeminist perspective involves “rejecting the notion that Man’s freedom and happiness depend on an ongoing process of emancipation from nature, on independence from, and dominance over natural processes” (1993: 6). In their accounts of politics and history in Switzerland, these women writers foreground the significance of sublime landscape on human character and see nature as ultimately vanquishing vain human ambition. Where initially, travel writing by Williams, Shelley and Wordsworth was commonly considered by critics in relation to poetic accounts of the Alps and political writing by male writers, more recently, revisionist feminist scholarship addressing non-fiction Romantic period writing has examined the three women’s travel writing about Switzerland, bringing into focus the significance of their writing to literary developments in the period. The specific focus here, on the representation of nature and landscape in their accounts of travels to Switzerland, indicates the extent to which descriptions of nature are bound up with the expression of political and philosophical ideals by these important female writers.

Helen Maria Williams: feminine revolutionary politics and the power of nature This section addresses Helen Maria Williams’ writing about Switzerland, a significant part of Williams’ writing which has received less critical interest than her more famous works about France, and which arguably brings to the fore Williams’ particular emphasis on the relationship of the landscape to political action. Williams, born in 1761 of Welsh and Scottish parents and raised in Berwick, was an established author by the late 1790s, having moved to France in 1790 to observe and chronicle its revolutionary events (Kelly 1993: 30; Kennedy 2010). 44

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There had been a number of texts addressing travels to Switzerland during the late eighteenth century, including William Coxe’s Sketches of the Natural, Civil, and Political State of Switzerland, published in 1779; however, in her writing, Williams seeks to re-write these views by foregrounding her own political perspective. In the preface, Williams also acknowledges that the scenery of Switzerland has been described in accounts by previous travellers and asserts the novelty of her text as being the combination of both an account of landscape and its current political situation: It is the present moral situation of Switzerland that justifies the appearance of these volumes in which an attempt is made to trace the important effects which the French Revolution has produced in that country, and which are about to unfold a new æra in its history. (Williams 1798: I ii) In giving an account of the different governing regimes in various cantons, she could, as noted by Chris Jones and Deborah Kennedy, challenge previous assertions of Swiss freedom and “convince readers that the Swiss should follow France’s lead in political revolution” (Jones 1989; Kennedy 2002: 129). Scholarship on Williams since the 1990s has focused on her revolutionary politics, what critics such as Gary Kelly, Anne Mellor and Deborah Kennedy have called her “radical sensibility” and her engagement with sublime landscapes, most often in relation to her earlier, eight volume Letters from France (Kelly 1993; Mellor 1993; Kennedy 2002). Williams has been seen as an inspiration and precursor to Romantic poets including William Wordsworth, who, according to Deborah Kennedy, bought a copy of the translation of Williams’ Tour in 1795 and used it to form the basis of his poem, “The Ruined Cottage”, published as Book I of his nine volume The Excursion in 1814 (2002: 123). Williams set off for Switzerland in the Summer of 1794 with the recently divorced printer and Unitarian radical writer John Hurford Stone (1763–1818). She used Basel as a base for the first part of her tour, staying as guest of Colonel Johann-Rudolf Frey, a relative of her new brother-inlaw. On this first tour, she travelled north, to Baden, Zurich and the falls at Schaffhaussen; on a subsequent tour from Basel to the south, she went to Lucerne and Altdorf and as far as Lugano, where she stayed in August. Her final trip of the summer was to the west of the country, to Neuchatel, Lausanne and then to Sion, Freiburg and Berne. Noting the “swelling mountains” in the vicinity of Basel, Williams writes how, “the first view of Switzerland awakened my enthusiasm most powerfully” (Williams 1798: I. 3,4). At this point, excited by the dramatic scenery, Williams looks forward to seeing evidence of democracy and political freedom. She writes, I shall no longer see liberty profaned and violated; –here she smiles upon the hills, and decorates the vallies [sic], and finds, in the uncorrupted simplicity of this people, a firmer barrier than in the cragginess of their rocks, or the snows of their Glaciers. (Williams 1789: I, 5) There is a two-fold connection between politics and the Swiss countryside. “Liberty”, personified as a woman, acknowledges the hilly landscape and Williams expects to see the firm features of the landscape reflected in its people. She anticipates this connection between the environment and its people from her first sights of the mountains. The initial hints of a divergence in the actions and character of the Swiss from her expectations occur at Basel, where she notes that “the toils of trade find no relaxation” and that the burghers 45

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of the city prioritise “commercial dealing” and “strik[ing] deals” (Williams 1798: I, 7). Later, in Gerseau near Lucerne, she writes how, despite its status as a small republic, it “bore many marks of the vices and defects of more extensive governments” (Williams 1789: I, 138). The text is critical of the despotic governments of such cantons, where Williams’ conclusion, informed by her experience in France, is that Switzerland is in need of a revolution. Where other writers had been won over by romanticised descriptions of Chillon in Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Helloïse, Williams sees this as a politicised landscape with the castle used to house prisoners from the Pays du Vaud (1798: II, 140). Despite her apparent disappointment in the current inhabitants of the region, Williams, like many travellers inspired by the “Swiss myth” or past “golden age” of democracy, was drawn to explore the area around Lucerne and describes seeing the chapel of William Tell (Hentschel 2002). Williams, conflating the environment and the political action which occurred there, writes: No place could surely be found more correspondent to a great and generous purpose, more worthy of an heroical and sublime action, than the august and solemn scenery around us. (1798: I, 141) As Deborah Kennedy points out, Williams’ accounts of the landscape throughout her travel ­writing “have been used to exemplify the eighteenth-century sublime” and her description of the area around the William Tell chapel is a particularly strong example of the use of the tropes and rhetoric of Romantic period accounts of the sublime to depict the natural scenery (Kennedy 2004: 133). At the entrance to Lake Uri: insulated pointed rocks of singular form rise boldly from the water. Having passed those precipices, we entered into a gulph, of which the boundaries were awfully terrific. On each side of the profound abyss, the dark lowering rocks rose sometimes abrupt and barren, sometimes presenting tufts of pine and beech. (1798: I 141) In this landscape, Williams and her party are amazed into silence; “we sailed” she writes, “gazing with that kind of wrapt [sic] astonishment which fears to disturb, or be disturbed by the mutual communication of thought” (1798: I 142). Williams uses the sublime scenery of the Alps as a parallel to the power of revolutionary politics. Walking in the mountains around the Swiss village of Wassen, Williams notes how man is “obliged to be continually at war with nature” because of the danger of avalanches. Nature is portrayed as a sublime, unstoppable force; however, the local residents continue to work and have faith in their survival. Looking at the wrecks of trees and the remains of the gravelly mountain, she writes: When whole forests of majestic height are swept away with irresistible fury, what means of defence can human force oppose to such mighty destruction? Men, however, live tranquilly amidst the danger, and build their houses in such positions, and after such a construction, that the enemy, even if he chances to take the direction of their habitations, may pass over them unhurt. (1798: I 154) Given the immense power of the avalanche against the wooden houses constructed by the local inhabitants, it seems unlikely that they would survive. And yet, this recalls a construction which 46

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Williams uses to describe the agency of the revolution. In Chapter 7, where Williams describes Basel and makes a comparison between the state of the peasantry in Switzerland and France, she notes the effect of the Revolution on the French lower classes: The husbandman, emancipated from every feudal chain, exonerated from every species of personal servitude, disburthened of every tax, and relieved from every oppression, has, above all others, had cause to bless the dawn of liberty. (1798: I 102) Williams continues the account using the imagery of the avalanche: Even the horrible tempest of revolutionary terror passed harmless over his head, and while the palace was devastated, and the chateau levelled to the ground, his cottage stood erect. (1798: I 102) Thus revolution, capable of sublime, devastating power, acts in the same way as the avalanche in Wassen, passing over the heads of the ordinary citizens and selectively destroying only those parts of society deemed harmful. As Anthony Ozturk notes, “Dissatisfied with the Swiss ‘Elysium’, Helen Maria Williams offers an insurgent and feminizing counterpoint, adapting the Alpine sublime to her own revolutionary purposes” (Ozturk 2011: 84.) Williams’ use of the powerful natural imagery of the Alps to symbolise revolutionary advance was not new; as Theresa Kelley discusses in relation to Wordsworth’s writing during the revolutionary decade, the notion of the torrent révolutionaire had been noted by Camille Desmoulins, a revolutionary, executed in 1794 by Jacobins (Kelley 1988: 188). However, in her description of Switzerland, the parallel between the power of political action and the force of nature impresses more forcibly because the terrifying effects of avalanches and other natural phenomena such as glaciers could be witnessed at first hand. Despite her covering much the same ground as previous travel writers such as William Coxe and John Moore, Williams’ skill at depicting the natural scenes was praised in some of the reviews of Tour in Switzerland (Kennedy 2002: 133). Her discussion of politics, however, was less favourably reviewed. Having published her accounts of the events of the French Revolution in her Letters Written in France, between 1790 and 1796, her political views and enduring support of the revolution were seen as controversial and radical. In contrast to her earlier writing about the events of the revolution in France, initially Switzerland had offered a positive political model. As Kennedy notes, “she had gone to Switzerland expecting to find wonderful scenery and enlightened society, but only the glorious scenery lived up to expectation” (2002: 129–130). However, the most dramatic of the sublime landscapes, such as those of Lake Uri, are entwined with the politics of the nation’s history and although some of the current governments in the cantons, in Williams’ view, would warrant a period of revolution, in the power of the sublime landscape, which inspired political action in Switzerland’s past, there remains some hope for the future. Williams’ foregrounding of the female ‘Liberty’, at home in Switzerland’s mountains and valleys, presents positive change as both dynamic and feminine and embedded in the natural environment.

Mary Shelley’s History of a Six Weeks’ Tour: Switzerland’s mountains as a ‘fit cradle’ Whilst Frankenstein (1817) has received considerable attention from an ecocritical perspective in recent years (Hutchings 2007; Phillips 2006; Mellor 2017; Mayer 2018; Hogle 2020), Mary 47

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Shelley’s travel writing has been largely overlooked from this perspective, despite its similar ­focus on the Alpine landscape, geographical features and the force of natural phenomena. The view of the mountains in History of a Six Weeks’ Tour is emblematic of her anticipation and excitement on approaching Switzerland for the first time. In contrast to the “range after range of black mountains” she sees on leaving Neufchâtel, “towering above every feature of the scene, [were] the snowy Alps” (Shelley 1817: 43). Shelley’s anticipation was prompted by the association of the Alps with utopian ideas of democratic government in the cantons of the region. In Shelley’s feminine vision of politics, like that of Williams, the landscape of Switzerland is the source for a democratic and well-governed society based on equality. Her version of the “Swiss myth”, was, by the 1810s, bound up with a number of literary and artistic texts re-imagining the mountains of Switzerland for audiences in France, Germany and Britain. In Shelley’s preface introducing Switzerland, the principal attractions are sites connected to Rousseau’s Julie, or the New Heloise and Chillon, featured in Byron’s narrative poem of 1816, alongside natural features: They [the reader] will be interested to hear of one who has visited Mellerie, and Clarens, and Chillon, and Vevai [sic] – classic ground, people with tender and glorious imaginations of the present and past. They have perhaps never talked with one who has beheld in the enthusiasm of youth the glacier, the lakes, the forests, and the foundations of the mighty Alps. (Shelley 1817: v). The focus in the preface on sites associated with Rousseau’s famous work indicates not only its symbolic political resonance for Shelley but also her awareness of the popularity of Julie, or the New Heloise and its interest to a potential readership. In his account of Mary Shelley’s portrayal of history and progress, Stephen Tedeschi draws attention to the connection between landscape and politics in Shelleys’ choice of destination for their 1816 stay: Shelley dates her letters in the second edition of the History from among the mountains of Switzerland, where she and her friends retire to preserve and disseminate the hope of republican progress in an age of reaction. (1817: 35) As Tedeschi has identified, Shelley’s landscape is one which is mediated by precursor texts, such as Tacitus’ (Historiae I:67), Lucan’s Civil War and, closer to home, William Godwin’s Fleetwood (1805). For the initial 1814 journey to the continent, it is clear that Lake Uri is to be a primary focus. The Shelleys follow the journey of Godwin’s eponymous hero to Uri, the site of the ­fourteenth-century myth of Wilhelm Tell. There, Fleetwood also encounters a Rousseauvianfigure, Monsieur Ruffigny. The figure of Rousseau and his philosophy emphasising the importance of the centrality of nature in education, outlined in Émile; ou de l’ Éducation (1762), comes to haunt Shelley’s text. Despite Shelley’s interest in other literary accounts such as Rousseau’s featuring the landscape of Switzerland, the texts and the travellers seem drawn to Lake Uri, which appears to have been the principal destination from the start. Having read Godwin’s Fleetwood and the evocative descriptions of Uri, its lake “as smooth as crystal, and the arching precipices that inclosed [sic] it” and the sense of it as a place where “William Tell and the glorious founders of the Swiss liberty” had lived, the Shelleys and Claire Clairmont sought a base there in which to establish their own utopian vision (Godwin 1805: 72; Seymour 2001: 108). Shelley notes that the group, “resolved to journey 48

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towards the lake of Uri, and seek in that romantic and interesting country some cottage where we might dwell in peace and solitude” (Shelley 1817: 45). The Wilhelm Tell story had received new interest at the turn of the century, with a number of political dramatic works produced reworking the folk legend, such as Helvetic Liberty, anonymously produced by “A Kentish Bowman” in 1792 and later Friedrich von Schiller’s 1804, Wilhelm Tell (Taylor 2004: 74). As Zurbuchen describes, this drew on the literary and historical accounts in Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell (1804) and Johannes von Müller’s History of the Swiss Confederation (1786–1808) (2004: 692). In such works, its hero was cast as a model for a Swiss resurgence and revolution against imperial rule. Staying overnight in Brunen, Shelley looks over Lake Uri and, in her description, there is a clear association between the landscape and positive political agency. Nothing could be more magnificent than the view from this spot. The high mountains encompassed us, darkening the waters, at a distance on the shores of Uri we could perceive the chapel of Tell, and this was the village where he matured the conspiracy which was to overthrow the tyrant of his country; and indeed this lovely lake, these sublime mountains, and wild forests, seemed a fit cradle for a mind aspiring to high adventure and heroic deeds. (Shelley 1817: 49–50) The natural surroundings of the mountains are domesticised by Shelley here, as a “cradle” which is the basis of the formation of formidable political character, as influential as that of Tell. However, Shelley’s vision of hope for Europe, rooted in a maternal image, is not realised and the change in her view of the current political agency of the Swiss people in this canton is evident in her next statement: “Yet we saw no glimpse of his spirit in his present countrymen. The Swiss appeared to us then, and experience has confirmed our opinion, a people slow of comprehension and of action” (Shelley 1817: 50). Shelley’s reference to “his present countrymen”, perhaps refers to her disappointment about the events surrounding the fall of the Swiss Confederacy in 1798, when Napoleonic troops began their challenge to existing governments in Basel, and then Berne. Between 1798 and 1803, the influence of the French brought about a new centralised government in Switzerland, known as the Helvetic Republic. Although this government fell in 1803, when the region reverted to its confederation of cantons, it surprised and disappointed some political observers, who had revered what they saw as the constancy and strength of the Swiss people’s belief in their liberty. The leaning of predominantly Catholic cantons towards French control was seen as a divergence from the Swiss tradition of independence and self-rule. The legend of Tell and the fight for democracy in the Canton of Uri against the Austrian rule, and its setting described in detail in Godwin’s novel, was a large part of the couple’s decision to visit the area. The events of the revolutionary aftermath had in their eyes diminished this mythical version of the Swiss people as politically dynamic and steadfast and despite the inspiring nursery of the mountains, the character of the Swiss people disappoints Shelley. However, Shelley retains some hope for the political future of the region, and she concludes this section with a return to her previous imagined version of the political will of the Swiss, writing, “but habit has made them unfit for slavery, and they would, I have little doubt, make a brave defence against any invader of their freedom” (Shelley 1817: 49–50). Shelley’s vision of political agency formed by nature, figured in her writing through maternal imagery, is centred on the Alps. The mountains, which draw Shelley in from afar, are both the focus of her journey and symbolic of a Swiss mythology of political freedom associated notably with Wilhelm Tell. This is the turning point for the journey; the place at which the group realise that they cannot afford to stay in Switzerland and, having seen the object of their travels, turn 49

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northwards to home. It is, however, in this “cradle” of the mountains where Shelley realises the current state of Swiss political action, in comparison with the legends of the past associated with the place.

Dorothy Wordsworth’s Journal of a Tour of the Continent: the dominance of feminine nature Like Mary Shelley, Dorothy Wordsworth’s tour of the continent with its focus on Switzerland, was the physical and intellectual consequence of various literary precursors and friends. The Wordsworths, Mary, Dorothy and William, travelled with Mr and Mrs Monkhouse (Samuel was Mary’s cousin), and Miss Horrocks, Jane Monkhouse’s sister, and their maid. Wordsworth’s anticipation of Switzerland as the focal point of her journey is evident as the group cross the German Black Forest. “Here we have a foretaste of Switzerland!” she exclaims in Hornberg, won over by the pastoral scene outside the village (1952: II 79). Leaving Hornberg, Wordsworth continues to look forward to Switzerland: “this long mountain valley is very interesting, especially to the traveller who has been dreaming of Switzerland from the days of his youth” (1952: II 83). The traveller imagined by Wordsworth here is male; a conflation perhaps of herself, who had not yet been to the Alps, and her brother, whose youthful journey the group were re-tracing. Despite Wordsworth’s identification of the implied traveller as male, her own feminine perspective of the political history of Switzerland, one which highlights nature’s dominance over human ambition, is woven through her account of the region. The first glimpse of the mountains on approach is as affecting for Wordsworth as it is for Shelley. Wordsworth, her account tempered by the fact that the mountains are obscured by cloud, notes: “This first sight of that country so dear to the imagination, though then of no particular grandeur, affected me with various emotions” (1952: II 86). The centrality of nature to Wordsworth’s understanding of Switzerland is evident in the symbolic resonance of the Alps. Even before she catches sight of the mountains of Switzerland, Wordsworth indicates the way in which looking at the natural world underpins her view of the contribution of human beings, and of her life and mortality more generally. Seeing “multitudes of swallows” on and around the roof of the cathedral in Ghent, Wordsworth cites a revised line from William Wordsworth’s Prelude, as she muses on a time when this impressive but decaying building will be “lorded over and possessed by nature” (1952: II 22). However, where William’s poem portrays the valley as overwhelmed with man-made structures, “by naked huts, wood-built”, Dorothy’s vision is of nature reclaiming the city (William Wordsworth 1805/1850: vi. 449–450). Susan Levin sees this reworking of the Prelude quotation as indicative of Dorothy Wordsworth’s “concern with the passage of time, death, and decay”, and while mortality and age are certainly preoccupations in the Journal, it is an important statement about her emphasis on the supremacy of nature (2009: 88). “Ruggedness” or “rude” simplicity is a recurring indication of admiration by Wordsworth for the social organisation of the society she is viewing and is a repeated refrain in the section which describes the symbolic heart of Swiss political democracy, Altdorf. The Wordsworths’ tour, like that of the Shelleys and countless other visitors to the region, involved a trip high into the mountainous valleys near the Jungfrau and Grindelwald, and then west to Lake Lucerne and Altdorf. Wordsworth describes how the inn in which they are staying is opposite “the Tower of the Arsenal, built upon the spot where grew the Linden-tree to which [Wilhelm] Tell’s son is reported to have been bound when the arrow was shot” (1952: II 174). Visiting the interior of this tower, Wordsworth looks at the “rude paintings [of the legend] on its walls. I studied them with infinite 50

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satisfaction” (1952: II 174). Nature and politics are enmeshed more fully at Tell’s birthplace. Wordsworth describes how: After dinner we walked up the valley to the reported birthplace of Tell; it is a small village at the foot of a glen, rich, yet very wild. A rude unroofed modern bridge crosses the boisterous river, and beside the bridge, is a fantastic mill-race constructed in the same rustic style – ­uncramped by apprehensions of committing waste upon the woods. (1952: II 175) Once again, the human constructions – bridges and mill-race here, rather than paintings – are “rude” and “rustic”, and accompany rather than constrain the “boisterous” river. Wordsworth’s emphasis on the wildness of nature in this place, both glen and river, recalls her account of her travels in Scotland from 1803. In his ecocritical account of Wordsworth’s “Recollections of a Tour made in Scotland”, Onno Oerlemans suggests that wildness is “the inability of a natural landscape to reflect or hold such meaning, so that the land figures only itself, its own materiality, its connection to the larger materiality of the physical world” (2002: 199). In her description of Altdorf, Wordsworth brings political meaning to the wildness of nature. Courage, liberty and democracy spring from rugged mountainous places, it seems. Despite being written almost seven years after the end of the Napoleonic conflict and 30 years after the French Revolution, Wordsworth’s unpublished travel journal resonates not only with the inflections of French revolutionary politics which had informed her brother’s travels from 30 years previously but also the effects of the Napoleonic conflict across the European continent. This included the physical landscape and the means of getting from one place to another, as Robin Jarvis points out. The mule path, which William Wordsworth and his companion Robert Jones had followed, had been “superseded and partially erased by the construction of Napoleon’s military road in 1800–1805” (Jarvis 2001: 337). At Lake Thun, early in their time in Switzerland, Dorothy Wordsworth goes on an evening walk with William and Mary on pathways in a private estate and comes across a memorial to Aloys Reding, a Captain in the Swiss Forces, who had died in 1808 defending Switzerland against Buonaparte’s invasion dedicated by “a friend”. Wordsworth’s description of the memorial brings together landscape, memory and politics: Wherever you find a stone seat or memorial inscription it is in harmony with tender, elevated, or devotional feelings, – the musings upon time and eternity which must visit but the most unthinking minds in a solitude like this, surrounded by objects so sublime. (1952 II: 106) Wordsworth cites the poem, “Memorial, Near the Lake of Thun”, which her brother was inspired to write by this scene. Stanzas four and five of the poem detail the effect of the setting sun and how “he tempts the patriot Swiss/Within the grove to linger”. Wordsworth’s journal then notes that she is prompted to stay alone in the spot to watch a sublime sunset herself: “I returned to my open station to watch the setting sun and remained long after the glowing hues had faded from those chosen summits that were touched by his beams” (1952: II 107). The beauty of nature is for Wordsworth fused in this site of remembrance to recent patriotic loss. Later in Wordsworth’s journal, leaving Switzerland for Italy and approaching Ticino through the Val Vedro, the party come across an “immense” granite column which had been intended as triumphal arch for Napoleon Bonaparte in Milan and now lay discarded in the mountain valley. “His bitterest foe could scarcely contrive a more impressive record of disappointed vanity and 51

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ambition” is Wordsworth’s vitriolic response, her views on the actions of the leader made clear (1952: II 256–257). The granite, having been excavated from the landscape to stand in commemoration of human endeavour, was now once again being absorbed into a wild mountainous place, covered by foliage. As in her account of the swallows surrounding the decaying cathedral at Ghent, Wordsworth here again emphasises that human endeavour will eventually be superseded by the natural world.

Conclusion: the Swiss landscape, a focus for change Completed in 1822, Dorothy Wordsworth’s travel journals came at a turning point in travel to the region. After the peace which followed the re-opening of the European continent to visitors, new types of travels and travellers were encountering Switzerland. The first regular cross-channel steam ship made accessing the continent safer and more predictable and the railways in Switzerland began to be constructed from the 1850s (Ring 2011: 32). Later in the century, nature continued to be an important focus in the itineraries of these new travellers, but rather than linked to a sense of a Swiss political mythology, it was increasingly a site for interest in new activities such as mountaineering, Alpine skiing and winter sports. In spite of their differing political outlooks, for example Williams’ revolutionary politics versus Wordsworth’s more conservative views, all three writers present a challenge to the work of their male contemporaries. Williams, Shelley and Wordsworth captured in their writing a sense of the political significance of the natural landscape of Switzerland and the way in which it came to symbolise a Swiss myth of democratic government during a “Golden Age”. In their anticipation of going into the mountains, these women writers asserted the primacy of environment in the formation of human character. Once there and experiencing physical encounters with the natural world and reflecting on their meetings with local people and their actions more broadly in relation to the tempestuous events following the French Revolution, this connection between landscape and political action is more muted and the Swiss landscape comes to provide its own solace. The foregrounding of the impact of the natural surroundings of Switzerland on her political history in their texts heralds perhaps a nascent ecofeminist tradition, one which identifies human actions as interdependent with the natural world, rather than seeking to dominate it.

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An ecofeminist reading of the Swiss landscape Felkestam, Kristina (2014) “En-Gendering the Sublime: Aesthetics and Politics in the Eighteenth Century,” NORA, 22(1): 20–32. Godwin, William (1992 [1805]). Fleetwood, edited by Pamela Clemit, London: Pickering and Chatto. Heafford, Michael (2006) “Between Grand Tour and Tourism: British Travellers to Switzerland in a Period of Transition, 1814–1860,” Journal of Transport History, 27(1): 25–47. Hentschel, Uwe (2002) Mythos Schweiz: Zum Deutschen Literatischen Philhelvetismus zwischen 1700 und 1850, Tübingen: Niemeyer. Hogle, Jerrold E. (2020) “The Environments of Frankenstein,” Huntingdon Literary Quarterly, 83(4): 643–661. Holland, Patrick and Graham Huggan (1998) Tourists with Typewriters: Critical Reflections on Contemporary Travel Writing, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Homans, Margaret (1986) Women Writers and Poetic Identity: Dorothy Wordsworth, Emily Brontë and Emily Dickenson, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hutchings, Kevin (2007) “Ecocriticism in British Romantic Studies,” Literature Compass, 4(1): 172–202. Jarvis, Robin. (2001) “The Wages of Travel: Wordsworth’s Memorial Tour of 1820,” Studies in Romanticism, 40(3): 321–343. Jones, Chris (1989) “Helen Maria Williams and Radical Sensibility,” Prose Studies, 12(1): 3–24. Kelley, Theresa (1988) Wordsworth’s Revolutionary Aesthetics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kelly, Gary (1993) Women, Writing, and Revolution 1790–1827, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Kennedy, Deborah (2002) Helen Maria Williams and the Age of Revolution, London: Associated University Press. Kinsley, Zoë (2008) Women Writing the Home Tour, 1682–1812, Ashgate: Aldershot. Landry, Donna (2000) “Green Languages?: Women Poets as Naturalists in 1653 and 1807,” Huntingdon Library Quarterly, 63(4): 467–489. Lerner, Marc H. (2012) A Laboratory of Learning. The Transformation of Political Culture in Republican Switzerland, 1750–1848, Leiden: Brill. Levin, Susan (2009 [1987]) Dorothy Wordsworth and Romanticism, Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company. Mayer, Jed (2018) “The Weird Ecologies of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein,” Science Fiction Studies, 45(2): 229–243. Mellor, Anne K. (1993) Romanticism and Gender, New York: Routledge. Mellor, Anne K. (2017) “Frankenstein, Gender and Mother Nature,” in D. H. Guston et al. (eds.) Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. Annotated for Scientists, Engineers, and Creators of All Kinds, Cambridge: MIT Press, pp. 239–246. Mills, Sara (1993) Discourses of Difference: An Analysis of Women’s Travel Writing and Colonialism, ­London: Routledge. Milne, Anne (2008) “Lactilla tends her Fav”rite Cow”: Ecocritical Readings of Animals and Women in Eighteenth-Century British Laboring-Class Women’s Poetry, Lewisburg, PA: Bucknall UP. Moskal, Jeanne (1995) “Gender, Nationality, and Textual Authority in Lady Morgan’s Travel Books,” in Paula R. Feldman and Theresa M. Kelley (eds.) Romantic Women Writers, Voices and Countervoices, Hanover and London: University Press of New England, pp. 171–193. Moskal, Jeanne (2000) “‘To Speak in Sanchean Phrase’: Cervantes and the Politics of Mary Shelley’s History of a Six Weeks’ Tour,” in B. Bennett and S. Curran (eds.) Mary Shelley in Her Times, Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, pp. 17–37. Nersessian, Anahid (2018) “Romantic Ecocriticism Lately,” Literature Compass, 15(1): 1–16. Oerlemans, Onno (2002) Romanticism and the Materiality of Nature, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Ożarska, Magdalena (2010) “Dorothy Wordsworth as Travel Writer: The 1798 ‘Hamburgh Journal’,” Theatrum Historiae, 7: 179–187. Ozturk, Anthony (2011) “Interlude Geo-Poetics: The Alpine Sublime in Art and Literature, 1779–1860,” in S. Irelton and C. Schaumann (eds.) Heights of Reflection. Mountains in the German Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Twenty-First Century, London: Boydell and Brewer, Camden House, pp. 77–97. Phillips, Bill (2006) “Mary Shelley’s ‘Wet Ungenial Summer,’” Atlantis, 28(2): 56–68. Ring, Jim (2011) How the English Made the Alps, London: Faber and Faber. Rossington, Michael (2008) “Rousseau and Tacitus: Republican Inflections in the Shelley’s History of a Six Weeks Tour,” European Romantic Review, 19(4): 321–333 Schiller Friedrich von (1804) Wilhelm Tell in Samtliche Werke, Leipzig: Der Tempel. Seymour, Miranda (2001) Mary Shelley, London: Picador.

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Kathryn Walchester Shelley, Mary (1817) History of a Six Weeks’ Tour through Part of France, Switzerland, Germany and Holland with Letters Descriptive of a Sail Round the Lake of Geneva and the Glaciers of Chamouni, London: T. Hookham. Shiva, Vandana, et al. (1993) Ecofeminism, London: Zed Books. Smethurst, Paul and Julia Kuehn (2009) Travel Writing, Form and Empire, London: Routledge. Taylor, George (2004) The French Revolution and the English Stage. 1789–1805, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tedeschi, Stephen (2016) “Mediation and Progress in Mary Shelley’s History of a Six Weeks’ Tour,” The Keats-Shelley Review, 30(1): 29–42. Williams, Helen Maria (1798) A Tour in Switzerland; or, A View of the Present State of the Government and Manners of those Cantons: With Comparative Sketches of the Present State of Paris, 2 vols. London: G. G. and J. Robinson. Woof, Pamela (1991) “Dorothy Wordsworth and the Pleasures of Recognition: An Approach to the Travel Journals,” The Wordsworth Circle, 22(3): 150–160. Wordsworth, Dorothy (1897 [1820)]) “Journal of a Tour on the Continent,” in William Knight (ed.) Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, London: Macmillan. Wordsworth, Dorothy (1995) The Continental Journals, edited by and intro. by Helen Boden, London: Thoemmes Continuum. Wordsworth, William (1805 / 1850) The Prelude or Growth of a Poet’s Mind. An Autobiographical Poem, London: Moxon. Zurbuchen, Simone (2004) “Review: Switzerland in the Eighteenth Century: Myth and Reality in Eighteenth Century Studies,” Artistic Interactions, 37(4): 692–694.

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3 FEMINISM AND ANIMAL ADVOCACY IN THE LONG NINETEENTH CENTURY Anne Brontë and the ‘abuses of society’ Helena Habibi Let it not be imagined […] that I consider myself competent to reform the errors and abuses of society, but only that I would fain contribute my humble quota towards so good an aim. (Brontë 2008/1847: 3) In this, her prefatory remarks to the second edition of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), Anne Brontë states her intention to engage in contemporary discourse on social reform. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall has been read as a critique of the legal (non)position of married women, with regard to divorce, property law, and child custody. What is less remarked upon is the novel’s concern with the similarly precarious (non)legal status of nonhuman animals, an area of contemporary public debate that was likewise seeking to challenge and redefine the position of marginalised bodies in opposition to gendered, speciesist legislation. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall depicts Helen’s marriage to Arthur Huntington, a rake whose legally sanctioned misconduct towards his wife would now be deemed domestic abuse. His incessant slaughter of nonhuman animals throughout the period of their courtship and marriage is also sanctioned by law under hunting legislation that persists today. In Brontë’s other novel, Agnes Grey (1847), the titular heroine seeks independence by working as a governess only to find herself under the authority of men whose abuses of power, to which they are legally entitled, reveal the precarious position of women and animals. Both novels are deeply concerned with the interconnected nature of speciesist and gendered oppression. In this chapter, I contextualise Brontë’s two novels, Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, within various strands of inter-related historical and philosophical contexts: Mary Wollstonecraft’s legacy of Enlightenment Feminism, the emerging animal rights movement in the eighteenth century, Victorian women’s role in animal advocacy, and subsequent theorising by twentieth-century vegetarian feminists, such as Carol J. Adams (1990), about the interconnected nature of women’s and nonhuman animals’ oppression. Finally, I examine the ways in which Brontë engages with these issues in her fiction by confronting the ‘abuses of society’ (Brontë 2008: 3) to which women and animals were subjected.



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DOI: 10.4324/9781003429951-5

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Animal rights and women’s role in animal advocacy Philosophical discourse on the status of animals has ancient roots, but it was under the climate of political upheaval during the French Revolution in the late eighteenth century, when extensions to human rights were being urged, and in the aftermath of this at the turn of the nineteenth century, that a plethora of vegetarian treatises appeared.1 These vegetarian treatises were concerned with the same three tenets that necessitate veganism in our own time: the eradication of nonhuman animal suffering, the betterment of human health, and the recovery of animal-rearing-related environmental degradation. Crucially, these early vegetarian polemics transposed the language of ‘rights’ onto the nonhuman subject. Debates about animal welfare in Parliament began in 1800 with Sir William Pulteney’s call for an end to bullbaiting. This sparked decades of debate about the appropriateness of governmental intervention in the protection of nonhuman animals, who were considered property and thus not entitled to legal rights. In 1822, the ‘Act to Prevent the Cruel and Improper Treatment of Cattle’, known as Martin’s Act, was passed, which made it, ‘for the first time in Britain […] an offence punishable by fines and imprisonment to wantonly and cruelly “beat, abuse, or ill-treat any horse, mare, gelding, mule, ass, ox, cow, heifer, steer, sheep or other cattle”’ (Kean 1998: 34). As Hilda Kean points out, with this Act, ‘the state was intervening in “domestic relations” decades before it would do so on behalf of children or of adult women’ (Kean 1998: 34). In 1824, two years after the act which bore his name, Richard Martin founded with William Wilberforce and Reverend Arthur Broome the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Thus, in the masculine realms of philosophy, politics, and polemics, men led discourse and hdebates on animal welfare and rights. Given the lack of opportunity for women to contribute to these public spheres, women’s thinking on the question of animals can be found in their fiction, although much of this is yet to be adequately acknowledged by literary critics. One such example is the influential Gothic novelist, Ann Radcliffe, who was writing during the same politically radical period as Wollstonecraft around the time of the French Revolution in the 1790s. Radcliffe’s novels, which are ostensibly about heroines vying to free themselves from patriarchal oppression, reveal anti-hunting sentiment, and lament the maltreatment of mules. In 1818, Mary Shelley created one of literature’s most iconic figures – Frankenstein’s creature – and made him vegetarian. Shelley’s Frankenstein is deeply concerned with issues of animal sentience, scientific experimentation, and the atrocities of the slaughterhouse. In Brontë’s own generation, her sisters Charlotte and Emily similarly wove thinking on the consumption and treatment of nonhuman animals into their fiction. These are merely the most prominent examples of women’s fictional concerns for nonhuman animals in the period preceding the publication of Brontë’s novels; they indicate that women were thinking about the question of animals as deeply as their more socially privileged male counterparts decades before they were in a position to seek political and public-facing roles. Three forms of masculinist cultures of animal cruelty in particular face damning scrutiny in Brontë’s fiction: hunting, meat-eating, and avian annihilation. Significantly, Martin’s Act did not impede the large-scale abuse inflicted upon nonhuman animal victims of the hunt. Despite objections by Radcliffe and her fellow middle-class, radical male contemporaries, hunting, which was by and large an upper-class pursuit, continued to be endorsed by Parliament. By 1831, the Game Act made it illegal to shoot game birds outside of the official hunting season, which typically ran from Autumn to Spring. Far from impeding the cruelties of the hunt, however, the Game Act assisted the upper-class hunting fraternity by preserving stocks of game to ensure an abundance of shooting targets during the autumn–winter season. Hunting was defended on the basis that it trained English men in the art of war, since it hardened them to violence and bloodshed, a mindset 56

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necessary for Empire building. Hunting was thus intended to display ideas about English masculinity, vigour, valour, and nobility. In the nineteenth century, interest in hunting showed no signs of abating. The Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope included extended passages venerating hunting in his novels and produced a series of eight sympathetic hunting sketches that were printed in the Pall Mall Gazette in 1865. In 1869, he was drawn into a public debate in defence of fox hunting. He declared that ‘nothing has ever been allowed to stand in the way of hunting – neither the writing of books […] nor other pleasures’ (Trollope 1996: 3). Critics of the hunt, including radical literary intellectuals such as eighteenth-century poets, Cowper and Beattie, and later, Shelley and Byron, highlighted the ‘barbarism’ of the sport and its attendant animal cruelty. However, the antihunting sentiments espoused by women writers, such as Radcliffe and Brontë, which offer unique insights into gendered dimensions, are generally absent from histories of literary animal rights. Like hunting, meat-eating, and particularly the consumption of beef, was hailed as a symbol of the Englishman’s prowess, which harked back to ideas about the roast beef and ale of merry old England. Britain was the biggest meat consumer in Europe, and this, as with hunting, was connected to notions of English wealth, power, and Empire (Gregory 2007: 13). Naturalists and ornithologists established the British Ornithologists’ Union in 1858 to ratify their project of wide-scale avian destruction in the name of ‘scientific progress’ and the ‘pursuit of knowledge’. John Gould, the British ornithologist who published his highly successful The Birds of Australia in serial form between 1840 and 1848, the year Agnes Grey was published, was one such ‘man of science’ (Smith 2007: 579). Revered ornithologists, such as Gould, Thomas Bewick, and John James Audubon, who bragged about the large-scale bird-murdering upon which their works were predicated, were celebrated, while women writers like Brontë, who wrote damning appraisals of such cultures of avian annihilation, were deemed ‘coarse’ (Allott 1974: 263; Brontë 2008: 3).2 Notwithstanding this double-standard, masculine cultures of violence were being combated by women who instigated efforts to preserve avian and other nonhuman lives. In the period following Brontë’s publication of Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, alliances between feminism and animal advocacy gained momentum. The 1830s and 1840s saw a resurgence in vegetarian activism (Kean 1998: 53). Unlike the earlier, male-authored vegetarian treatises outlined above, the nineteenth-century vegetarian movement was connected to gendered political and social reform that characterised the ‘restless 1840s’ (Bolt 1993: 113). During this period, the pioneering social reformer and prominent vegetarian, William Thompson, co-authored the feminist treatise, Appeal of One Half of the Human Race, Women (1825), with women’s rights advocate, Anna Wheeler. The Vegetarian Society, which was founded in the year that Brontë published Agnes Grey in 1847, stated clearly in its manifesto that humans did not have the right to kill a nonhuman animal for food (Gregory 2007: 89). The presence of women at the Society’s opening assembly is testament that, alongside men, women were now publicly invested in the political reformatory potential of vegetarianism and its concern for animal welfare. Vegetarians were commonly concerned with broader areas of social reform and, although women’s involvement did not necessarily equate to advocacy of feminism at this stage, the public political involvement of women in the vegetarian movement from the 1840s, and broader animal welfare movement since the 1820s, is an important stage in women’s later concomitant agitation for their own rights alongside those of nonhuman animals. As the nineteenth century progressed, women’s role in agitation for the welfare of other animals would become increasingly public and central. Women sought public roles in animal advocacy and a significant number of women-led anti-cruelty organisations appeared. Angela Burdett-Coutts was a prominent trailblazer: she was a principal member of the Ladies’ Section of the RSPCA established in 1840 (originally the SPCA, founded two years after Martin’s Act of 1822), president 57

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of the Bee-Keepers Association, and a munificent financial supporter of the Metropolitan Drinking Fountain and Cattle Trough Association, which worked to provide drinking water to relieve the suffering of exploited animals in transit (Kean 1998: 55). In the Animal Friends’ Society, a Ladies’ Association was established, and the Ladies’ Kennel Club was formed with the specific objective of preventing cruelty (Kean 1998: 66, 82). In 1860, Mary Tealby founded the Battersea Dogs’ Home; its committee consisted of women-only patrons. Anna Sewell published Black Beauty in 1877, a novel that argues against animal cruelty and implicitly carries feminist concerns. In 1889, Emily Williamson, Margaretta Louisa Lemon, and Eliza Philips founded the Society for the Protection of Birds and enlisted Queen Victoria in their campaign to prevent the extinction of egrets, whose feathers had become prized commodities (Gates 2007: 544). Women’s efforts on behalf of nonhuman animals would, in turn, catalyse the burgeoning, and interconnected, women’s movement. By the latter part of the nineteenth century, strong links between feminist activists, antivivisectionists, and vegetarian advocacy had been forged. Many key figures were active participants in more than one of these spheres. Feminist journals such as Shafts and Home Links advocated vegetarianism for the emancipated ‘New Woman’. Alexandrine Veigelé, a member of the Women’s Progressive Society and honorary secretary of the Woman’s International Progressive Union, established the Women’s Vegetarian Union (Gregory 2007: 166). Emily Massingberd, leader of the feminist women’s Pioneer Club, was vegetarian, and the Club stated its alliance with vegetarianism and antivivisectionism. After decades of agitation on behalf of abused women and animals, Frances Power Cobbe founded the National Anti-Vivisection Society in 1895. The Anti-Vivisection movement of the latter half of the nineteenth century was dominated by feminist activists such as Power Cobbe and Anna Kingsford, a women’s rights campaigner and vegetarian who published anti-flesh consumption treatises. The feminist Sarah Grand published The Beth Book in 1897, a novel about sexual inequality and vivisection. This brief survey confirms what Brontë had anticipated ahead of her time – a perception that the oppression of women and animals is interconnected. It is within the context of this dynamic feminist-led animal advocacy movement that I analyse Brontë’s novels.

From Enlightenment speciesism to feminist-vegetarian interruptions In addition to engaging with contemporary debates about women and animals, Brontë was looking forward to later developments in women’s involvement in animal advocacy and vegetarianism, such as twentieth-century ecofeminist’s critique of carnivorism, as well as looking back to a speciesist feminism espoused by Wollstonecraft. Brontë aligns herself with Wollstonecraft’s warning against the dangers to women of ‘touching a silly novel’ (Wollstonecraft 2008: 273), stating that: If I can gain the public ear at all, I would rather whisper a few wholesome truths therein than much soft nonsense […] and when I feel it my duty to speak an unpalatable truth, […] I will speak it. (Brontë 2008: 3–4, emphasis in original) Alert to the reputational hazards of speaking the ‘unpalatable truth’ (Brontë 2008: 4) as a woman writer, Brontë positions herself, not as a sentimental novelist perpetuating notion of female impotence, but as the novelist agitating for social reform in the tradition of Wollstonecraft, whose own novels interrogate gendered oppression. However, Brontë’s debt to Wollstonecraft’s radical feminism is problematised by the latter’s Enlightenment speciesist thinking, defined by Singer as ‘a prejudice or attitude of bias in favour 58

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of the interests of members of one’s own species against those of members of another species’ (Singer 2015: 6). The dualistic mode of Enlightenment philosophy espoused by Emanual Kant and René Descartes gave rise to the prevailing mode of conceptualising entities as binary opposites: man/woman, human/animal, human/nature, reason/feeling.3 This Cartesian dualism supports hierarchical thinking that upholds the dominance of one while it endorses the oppression of the other. By championing ‘reason’ as the characteristic that differentiates humans from other animals and denying that the latter have reasoning powers at all, as Descartes does (Descartes 2006: 47–48), Enlightenment thinking elevates man above other animals and provides justification for oppression and exploitation. Wollstonecraft’s feminism assumes that women can only achieve equality with men by abandoning their fellow subjugated, ‘non-reasoning’ beings – nonhuman animals. By advocating that women should be educated to develop greater reasoning powers than their meagre education allowed, Wollstonecraft was aiming to raise women from the lower rungs of ‘animality’ and elevate them to the position of reasoning man. This aspect of Wollstonecraft’s feminism is deeply problematic; it perpetuates the speciesism that supports human tyranny over other animals. Much of Wollstonecraft’s argument and imagery in her Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) rests upon setting nonhuman animals, or ‘the brute creation’ (Wollstonecraft 2008: 72), in relief to reasoning humans, thus perpetuating the Cartesian dualist model that supports the exploitation of nonhuman animals. Throughout her treatise, the imagery of avian objectification characterises women before they rise to ‘the grand light of human creatures’ (Wollstonecraft 2008: 72) as being like birds: ‘confined then in cages like the feathered race, women have nothing to do but to plume themselves, and stalk with mock majesty from perch to perch’ (Wollstonecraft 2008: 125). Wollstonecraft’s speciesist feminism appropriates the sufferings of other animals to address the plight of women while the sufferings of animals go unchallenged. As I shall demonstrate, Wollstonecraft’s speciesist feminism resurfaces in Brontë’s fiction. However, this chapter also examines the extent to which Brontë’s novels challenge Wollstonecraft’s speciesist thinking and move beyond this mode to countenance an emerging feminist-vegetarian consciousness. As outlined in the previous section, the period following the publication of Brontë’s novels saw women campaigning for social justice increasingly conjoin the plights of women and other animals. Twentieth-century ecofeminist writers and activists made the links between these two oppressions explicit and sought to disrupt the inequalities arising from carnivorism. In Carol J. Adams’ seminal 1990 study on the sexual politics of meat-eating, she identifies several ­twentieth-century women’s novels – including Mary McCarthy’s Birds of America (1971) and Isabel Colegate’s The Shooting Party (1980) – that employ a literary technique she calls ‘interruption’. Adams’ conceptualisation of narrative interruption draws attention to overlooked textual incidents in which women interact with the bodies of dead nonhuman animals in ways that reveal ‘the gender issues embedded in the eating of animals’ (Adams 2010: 29) and, specifically, the interdependence of the oppression of women and other animals. For this reason, I refine Adams’ concept of narrative interruption as ‘feminist-vegetarian interruption’. In a feminist-vegetarian interruption, attention is drawn to a commodified animal’s body in such a way that it is recognised for what it is: the murdered corpse of a once living being on the protagonist’s plate. A feminist-vegetarian interruption is a moment in the narrative when the question of eating animals raises questions about the interconnected oppressions of women and nonhuman animals. While Adams asserts that ‘novelists and individuals inscribe profound feminist statements within a vegetarian context’ (Adams 2010: 217), she identifies ‘the failure among literary critics to remark on this sensitivity’ (Adams 2010: 186) and ‘the tendency of many scholars to ignore the signs of alliance between feminism and vegetarianism’ (Adams 2010: 192). The seeming 59

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invisibility of vegetarian moments in (feminist) literary criticism is symptomatic of vegetarianism itself: bowdlerised by the dominant discourse that favours androcentric meat-eating, it is marginalised, suppressed, and deemed a private, inconsequential matter or a faddish act. Vegetarian moments in women’s fiction resist this dominant tradition. If meat-eating is a trope of women’s and other animals’ oppression, then vegetarianism becomes an act of dissent that breaks the silence. When a restless heroine realises that she is ‘a trapped animal eating a dead animal’ (Piercy 1972: 41), she can be said to gain a consciousness that animals’ and women’s oppressions are linked. Once she ‘intuits her link to other [oppressed] animals’, ‘her body take[s] an ethical stand’ (Adams 2010: 175). This feminist-vegetarian consciousness is manifest in a rejection of meat or revulsion towards consuming the flesh of exploited and murdered animals. Adams’ approach enables the recognition of recurring tropes embedded within Brontë’s fiction that articulate a shared oppression between women and other animals. Adams’ theory of feminist-vegetarian interruption is a useful tool with which to read scenes that relate to the question of consuming (or refusing to eat) animals. I extend Adams’ framework to encompass narrative incidents that draw attention to animals as victims of human violence and exploitation in its myriad forms. Thus, in addition to scenes in which the question of animal flesh consumption arises, I also focus on scenes concerned with the interconnected masculinist cultures of hunting and avian annihilation that similarly haunt Brontë’s fiction.

Hunted animals and abused wives in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall In her introduction to The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Josephine McDonagh highlights the ‘subdued narrative of wife abuse’ (McDonagh 2008: ix). There is also, I argue, a subdued feminist-­ vegetarianism that permeates both of Brontë’s novels. Brontë weaves into her fiction an implicit vegetarianism through her presentation of ‘vicious [male] characters’ (Brontë 2008: 4). In The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, the corrupt Reverend Michael Millward had: never been known to preach a sermon without previously swallowing a raw egg [and was] a patron of […] bacon and eggs, ham, hung beef, and other strong meats, which [he] confidently recommended to the most delicate convalescents […] and if they complained of inconvenient results therefrom, were assured it was all fancy. (Brontë 2008: 18) In this critically neglected passage, Brontë interrupts the narrative to ‘focus on food and eating habits’ according to Adams’ theory (Adams 2010: 182). Brontë signals disapproval of Millward’s enforcement of animal eating by associating it with a despised character. What is taken for granted by the dominating voice of carnivorism is here called into question. In case the reader should be in doubt, Brontë reveals her alliance to dissenting ideas – such as vegetarianism – when she presents the meat-obsessed Millward as: a man of fixed principals, strong prejudices, and regular habits, – intolerant of dissent in any shape, acting under a firm conviction that his opinions were always right, and whoever differed from them, must be, either most deplorably ignorant, or wilfully blind. (Brontë 2008: 17, emphasis in original) Millward’s critique of flesh abstention as ‘all fancy’, ‘deplorably ignorant, or wilfully blind’ (Brontë 2008: 17–18) emphasises that doctrines of carnivorism are bigoted ‘opinions’ (Brontë 60

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2008: 17) rather than universal truths about a great chain of beings. As such, Brontë creates a space in which to undermine such notions and question their veracity; she creates a space for vegetarianism. Brontë also presents male characters whose animal exploitation is explicitly connected to their relationships with entrapped women. Helen Graham is attracted to violent men who seek to ‘crush’ (Brontë 2008: 106) women and violate other animals. We learn of Gilbert Markham’s hunting and capacity for violence in the first chapter of the novel. Gilbert is ‘a gentleman farmer’ (Brontë 2008: 10) who has been ‘breaking in the grey colt’ (Brontë 2008; 12), and he revels in his younger brother’s relish for badger-baiting. Brontë elaborates upon the kinds of activities this ‘gentleman farmer’ (Brontë 2008: 10) partakes in: I was out with my dog and gun, in pursuit of such game as I could find within the territory of Linden-car, but finding none at all, I turned my arms against the hawks and carrion crows, whose depredations, as I suspected, had deprived me of better prey. (Brontë 2008: 20) Gilbert is stalking prey when he makes his way towards Wildfell Hall to spy on its new tenant, Helen. Gilbert’s first encounter with this victim of domestic abuse, whom he will tirelessly pursue against her emphatic remonstrances, occurs in a climate of animal annihilation: ‘I had succeeded in killing a hawk and two crows when I came within sight of the mansion’ (Brontë 2008: 21). As Gilbert casts his murderous gaze upon Helen’s sanctuary from marital maltreatment, he stands leaning on the phallic instrument of destructive power – his bludgeoned hunting gun. The culturally endorsed destruction of animals tells its own story about speciesist cultures of masculinist violence; its repeated occurrence within novels addressing the ‘woman question’ reveals their interconnectedness in the consciousness of women writers such as Brontë. Critics have interpreted Gilbert’s violent outrage towards Helen’s brother, Frederick, as suggesting a capacity for domestic abuse in the heroine’s choice of second husband. What has been less remarked upon is that Gilbert’s violence is clearly exhibited in his mistreatment of nonhuman animals. Gilbert’s attack on Frederick is delivered using the apparatus of humanity’s violence towards other animals: ‘I had seized my whip by the small end, and – swift and sudden as a flash of lightening – brought the other down upon his head. It was not without a feeling of savage satisfaction’ (Brontë 2008: 98). Gilbert’s whip is ordinarily applied to nonhuman animals to enforce compliance. Here, Brontë demonstrates that the violence applied to nonhuman animals ventures into the human realm. It is thus inaccurate of Gilbert to ‘animalise’ his all-too-human savagery. Although it is another man upon whom Gilbert unleashes violence, this scene is a pivotal feminist-vegetarian interruption in which Brontë makes it explicit that Helen’s future partner is a violent, animal murdering farmer whose ability to conduct a mutually respectful relationship with a woman looks increasingly unlikely. Brontë confronts both the extent of the violence (that men are capable of inflicting upon nonhuman animals and others) and the process of disassociation that enables much of the violence routinely inflicted upon nonhuman animals to go unmarked by critics. Gilbert reflects that ‘it must have been a powerful blow; but half the credit – or the blame of it (which you please) must be attributed to the whip, which was garnished with a massive horse’s head of plated metal’ (Brontë 2008: 99, emphasis added). Later, Gilbert’s weapon becomes ‘that villainous whip-handle’ (Brontë 2008: 101). Gilbert’s characteristic self-acquittal extends to his sense of diminished culpability for the violence he unleashes upon Helen’s brother. If the whip is at fault when Gilbert attacks humans, it is no great leap to see how Gilbert’s habitual violence towards other animals is likewise 61

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‘attributed to the whip’ (Brontë 2008: 99). If the reader struggles to connect Gilbert’s violence towards animals, or any man who appears to hinder his access to Helen, with his capacity for wife abuse, Brontë spells it out by having him declare: ‘I can crush [Helen’s] bold spirit […] But while I secretly exulted in my power, I felt disposed to dally with my victim like a cat’ (Brontë 2008: 106–107, emphasis added). Gilbert conceives of Helen as one of his many animal victims. The reader will recall that, earlier in the novel, when Gilbert converses with a woman he despises (with whom he nevertheless considers a union), his animosity towards cats (and ‘old maids’) is brought forward (Brontë 2008: 24). When she remarks that Gilbert ‘hates cats’, he agrees that it is ‘natural for [men] to dislike the creatures’ (Brontë 2008: 24). Gilbert’s double dislike of unmarried women and cats – the animal he later associates with Helen – reveals connections between his speciesism and his misogyny. Later in the novel, Helen challenges Gilbert’s mitigation of human wrongdoing when she insists that he confronts his capacity for violence. Under Helen’s influence, Gilbert concedes: Yes, yes I remember it all: nobody can blame me more than I blame myself in my own heart – at any rate, nobody can regret more sincerely than I do the result of my brutality as you rightly term it. (Brontë 2008: 348, emphasis in original) Helen’s intervention brings about a shift in Gilbert’s sense of culpability. The novel’s primary perpetrator of animal slaughter, aptly named Arthur Huntingdon, penetrates Helen’s life during a gentlemen’s shooting party. It is in the figure of Arthur that the novel’s commentary on the interconnectivity of hunting animals and abusing women is most explicit. Whilst the gentlemen ‘sailed forth with their guns’, ‘on their expedition against the hapless partridges’ (Brontë 2008: 134), Helen sets to work on a painting depicting ‘an amorous pair of turtle doves’ (Brontë 2008: 135). In the midst of this occupation, Helen notes the sportsmen passing by the window before Arthur appears and makes conceited comments about her image of avian courtship. When Helen refuses Arthur access to the rest of her portfolio, Arthur conveys his desire to seize her pictures in language that evokes the imagery of the hunting man’s assumed right to dismember and possess the animal body when he declares, with ‘his insulting, gleeful laugh’, ‘let me have its bowels then’ (Brontë 2008: 136). After humiliating Helen and receiving her terse rebuke, Arthur stalks off in a sulk, declaring that he will ‘go and shoot now’, ‘[taking] up his gun and walk[ing] away’ (Brontë 2008: 137). On his return, Arthur is ‘all spattered and splashed […] and stained with the blood of his prey’ (Brontë 2008: 137) – a foreshadowing of his impending mistreatment of his soon-to-be-wife, Helen. Violence against birds is highlighted and a retrograde sexual politics is implicated. Brontë makes clear the interconnections between entrapped wives and hunted birds that twentieth and twenty-first century ecofeminists articulate. Marti Kheel, recognising the hunt in Western cultures as ‘a standard rite of passage […] into the masculine realm’, posits that ‘sexual overtones, both subtle and explicit, can be found throughout many’ hunting narratives; this is ‘predicated on the notion of restraining […] aggressive, sexual energy’ (Kheel 1995: 90, 91, 96). Kheel goes on to assert that ‘hunting itself is seen as an appropriate means of directing this erotic, aggressive drive, toward an acceptable target – namely, a nonhuman animal – rather than a human being’ (Kheel 1995: 91). Thus, hunting narratives in Western cultures display masculinity as dependent upon sexual violence against women and the torturing and murdering of other animals. Leaving the reader in no doubt as to the interconnected subjectification of women and the birds killed by Arthur and his coterie, Brontë has another character, Helen’s uncle, make this explicit by 62

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posing the question: ‘Are you too busy making love to my niece, to make war with the pheasants? – First of October remember!’ (Brontë 2008: 156). Arthur’s response confirms the connection: ‘I’ll shew you what I can do to-day, however, […] I’ll murder your birds by wholesale, just for keeping me away from [Helen]’ (Brontë 2008: 156). If the men are denied access to the women of the estate, then they are sure to compensate by annihilating its birds. Indeed, Helen reports that ‘Arthur Huntingdon [has] of late, almost daily neglected the shooting excursions to accompany [us] in our various rides and rambles’ (Brontë 2008: 156–157). Similarly, Hattersley, one of Arthur’s hunting cronies, who later subjects his wife, ‘who lies down like a spaniel at [his] feet’ (Brontë 2008: 246) to physical abuse, is ‘too busy billing and cooing with his bride to have much time to spare for guns and dogs, at present’ (Brontë 2008: 192). Throughout the rest of the novel, hunting continues to pervade Helen and Arthur’s relationship and Brontë clearly sets up the latter’s animal murder as an indicator of his misogyny. Helen’s diary, which is ostensibly about her unfolding courtship with Arthur, frequently opens with reference to the progress of the hunting season: ‘FEB. 18th, 1822. Early this morning, Arthur mounted his hunter and set off in high glee to meet the – hounds. He will be away all day’ (Brontë 2008: 171). The following entry in Helen’s diary reveals that Arthur ‘never reads anything but newspapers and sporting magazines’ (Brontë 2008: 175). She later notes that he will find occupation enough in the pursuit and destruction of the partridges and pheasants; we have no grouse, or he might have been similarly occupied at this moment, instead of lying under the acacia tree pulling poor Dash’s ears. (Brontë 1848: 191) Helen refers to Arthur’s hunting a further eleven times throughout the rest of her diary entries covering the period of their courtship. Helen’s relationship with Arthur begins and ends with hunting animals. She discovers that the illness that precipitates Arthur’s final demise and eventual death is ‘the consequence of a fall from his horse in hunting’ (Brontë 2008: 359). The death that releases Helen from her imprisoning marriage to Arthur suggests that destructive and death-dealing masculinist cultures not only harm women and nonhuman animals; these violent practices are, in the case of Arthur, effectively rendered punishable by death in the poetic justice enacted in the novel. After Arthur’s death, Helen renounces the name Huntingdon simultaneously disassociating herself from two oppressive institutions: marriage and the hunt. Instead, Helen assumes her mother’s surname and inherits the family estate upon the insistence of her aunt until her son Arthur comes of age. With this suggestion of matrilineal naming and inheritance, patriarchal control is interrupted. Under her uncle’s and then her husband, Arthur’s, power, the estate had become the site of relentless mass animal annihilation. Brontë particularly points out that, upon the death of her husband, Helen is ‘left the full control and management of the estate […] and all them woods – […] lots of game’ (Brontë 2008: 400–401). Helen is now in control of the fate of the birds. The implication is that with Helen’s guardianship comes an end to the hunt. As a middle-class British woman, Brontë found herself culturally ensconced in the politics of the hunt – and the related practice of carnivorism – and implicitly attributes to it a sexual politics that finds expression in her fiction. The Game Act of 1831 is mobilised in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall to comment upon fraught sexual politics. For example, Helen’s narrative begins on 1 June 1821, ten years prior to the Act, and her diary entry opens with ‘to-day is the first of September; but my uncle has ordered the gamekeeper to spare the partridges till the gentlemen come’ (Brontë 2008: 129). This apparent aside implies that Brontë was aware of the hunting fraternity’s interests, 63

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which had been sanctioned by the Game Act over a decade before the publication of her novel: it was concerned with preserving avian prey during the hunting season, not with preserving the lives of birds. Brontë selects this historical moment to comment obliquely upon the ills of her own generation: the maltreatment of women and animals. Brontë was no stranger to the depravity of animal exploitation as exemplified in the dissipated life of her brother, Branwell Brontë, generally thought to be a source of inspiration for the animalabusing character of Arthur Huntingdon in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. In Branwell’s self-portrait, known as The Gun Group, it is noteworthy that he alone faces the viewer; the presence of his three sisters – Charlotte, Emily, and Anne – seems at variance with the focal subject of the image – the bird-hunting prowess of their brother.4 Maggie Berg has observed of this image that Branwell’s persona is strongly delineated through his hunting accoutrements (Berg 2002: 181–182). This image reveals to us that Anne and her sisters, with their gazes averted from the scene of avian annihilation before them, were at odds with their close proximity to the ‘spoils’ of the hunt – a symbolic disassociation from the image of the dead bird and its implied murderer, Branwell. In mid-Victorian responses to Brontë’s novels, there is a compulsion to locate the atrocities of Huntington and his animal hunting coterie safely within the period of ‘the earlier part of George the Third’s reign’ (Allott 1974: 250) – an attempt to create temporal disassociation from the harsh truths that Brontë presents about her own generation. Brontë does set the action of her novel in the 1820s, significantly ‘the decade that would first witness legislation against animal cruelty’ (Kean 1998: 26), but she makes it clear in her preface that ‘I know such characters do exist’ (Brontë 2008: 4, emphasis added). Brontë’s present tense insists that the abuses of women and animals depicted in her novels persist in her own time. The reviewer’s dissatisfaction that Brontë ‘paints them as contemporary’ (Allott 1974: 250) signals the root of the anxiety that her fiction incites: an exposure of the ills of English society in the 1830s and 1840s. It is this that troubles her earliest reviewers and reveals a reluctance to come to terms with the political debates of the day: amongst them, the ‘woman’ and ‘animal’ questions at the heart of her narratives.

Bird murderers and ‘helpless’ women in Agnes Grey These gendered avian issues are also explored in Agnes Grey. At the beginning of the novel, Agnes is depicted as a bird-woman – confined to the home and in commune with her fellow domesticated avian companions. Agnes is ‘the pet of the family’ (Brontë 2010: 6), and she demonstrates proximity to her ‘pet pigeons’ by bestowing ‘a farewell stroke to all their silky backs as they crowded in my lap’ (Brontë 2010: 13). From the outset, the heroine of the novel is associated with the exploited, domesticated bird. The fact that Agnes and her family ‘had tamed them to peck their food from our hands’ suggests the nature of domesticated subservience inflicted upon ‘pretty creatures’ (Brontë 2010: 13), which is not unlike Agnes’ own situation. Agnes considers how delightful it would be […] to go out into the world; to enter upon a new life; to act for myself; to exercise my unused faculties; to try my unknown powers; to earn my own maintenance […] to convince mama and [my sister] Mary that I was not quite the helpless, thoughtless being they supposed. (Brontë 2010: 12) As the ‘pet’ of the family, Agnes’ freedom is curtailed as long as she continues to submit to the stifling expectations of her guardians. If Agnes is associated with a domesticated ‘pet’ pigeon,

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rendered docile, ‘helpless […] thoughtless’ (Brontë 2010: 12), she intends to assert agency and freedom from the limits imposed upon her. At Wellwood, where Agnes works as governess for the Bloomfield family, animal cruelty and misogyny are intrinsically connected. Tom Bloomfield asserts his dominance over women and nonhuman animals simultaneously, striking terror in his sister by ‘lift[ing] his fist with a menacing gesture’ (Brontë 2010: 19) as he simulates the maltreatment that he will subject his horse to. When Tom, who sets traps for birds, threatens to roast his next avian victim alive ‘to see what it will taste like’ (Brontë 2010: 22), Agnes sets in motion a feminist-vegetarian interruption by attempting to impress upon him the birds’ sentience. In a syntactical sleight of hand, Brontë covertly suggests a capacity long-contested in Enlightenment accounts of human superiority – that what distinguishes humans from other animals is his (and it is always his, since women, like nonhuman animals, were not considered to possess this faculty) ability to reason: ‘remember, the birds can feel as well as you, and think, how would you like it yourself?’ (Brontë 2010: 20, emphasis added). The ambiguity of this sentence creates a narrative space in which to contemplate the possibility of a bird’s capacity for thinking as well as feeling.5 Agnes is either urging Tom to re-‘think’ his cruel intentions, or asserting that birds, contrary to Tom’s speciesist behaviour, can think as well as feel. Either way, it is useful to read this scene as a feminist-vegetarian interruption since it contains a challenge to speciesist assumptions about nonhuman animals while it makes explicit the interconnected subjugations imposed upon women and birds. On these terms, Brontë’s vision moves beyond Wollstonecraft’s speciesist feminism. Later in the novel, Brontë is more explicit about the sentience of nonhuman animals while challenging the assumption that humans are reasoning creatures. Crucially, it is the humans who inflict violence upon nonhuman animals whose status as reasoning human is questioned. Another remarkable aspect of Agnes’ exchange with Tom is the focus on bird consumption with the boy’s intention to taste his avian victim once roasted alive. Agnes’ feminist-vegetarian interruption is juxtaposed, with jarring effect, in the following scene, in which Tom’s father, a prototype for his son, demands to know from his wife, whom he proceeds to verbally abuse, what will be served for dinner: ‘“Turkey and grouse” was the concise reply’ (Brontë 2010: 25). In fact, as soon as Agnes arrives at Wellwood, the narrative turns to the question of animal consumption. She is expected to partake of meat-eating which invokes ‘distress’ (Brontë 1847: 17). She admits that ‘I would have gladly eaten the potatoes and let the meat alone, but having got a large piece of the latter on my plate, I could not be so impolite as to leave it’ (Brontë 1847: 17). What follows is a lengthy passage in which Agnes details the violent effort required of her to render the meat edible. She recalls that ‘after many awkward and unsuccessful attempts to cut […] tear […] or pull it asunder’ she employs her fists ‘and fell to work’ (Brontë 1874: 17). This dwelling on the gruesome details of carnivorism highlights the violence of meat-eating and reformulates the normative practice as strange. Agnes’ difficulty in dealing with the meat recalls the arguments of eighteenth and early nineteenth-century vegetarian treatises that point out the convoluted lengths humans must go to in order to make flesh palatable. In the following chapter, Agnes interrupts the narrative once again to present the politics of meat. Mr Bloomfield is introduced as the hunting, beef-eating Englishman – a veritable tyrant whose conspicuous carnivorism Brontë once again displays as an unambiguous indicator of his moral repugnance. Damning depictions of the hunting Bloomfields pervade the novel. When Agnes takes on a new governess position at Horton Lodge, hunting is likewise depicted as a pervading and integral aspect of the Murray family’s cruel treatment of those creatures, including Agnes herself, whom they consider beneath them on a hierarchy of beings.

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Connections between women and birds are brought into sharp focus with the arrival of ‘The Uncle’, Mr Robson, ‘the scorner of the female sex’ (Brontë 2010: 41), whose primary project is to train his nephew, Tom, to become a misogynist, speciesist aficionado in his own image. This programme relies chiefly on the exploitation of birds, namely hunting and shooting, and ‘a-birdnesting with the children’ (Brontë 2010: 42). Agnes’ continued efforts to impede this curriculum of avian cruelty amounts to a sustained feminist-vegetarian interruption, which reaches a shocking climax when she crushes a nest of birds to avert the prolonged torture threatened by Tom. Agnes’ defiant act of agency, her ‘daring outrage’ (Brontë 2010: 43), must come at the cost of the birds’ life and liberty; she ‘dropped the stone upon [Tom’s] intended victims, and crushed them flat beneath it’ (Brontë 2010: 43). Agnes’ act of bird murder is a feminist-vegetarian interruption since her purpose in doing so is to interrupt, and thereby prevent, the prolonged suffering that the birds would endure at the hands of Tom, whose violent threats are vocalised – ‘you shall see me fettle ‘em off. My word, but I will wallop ‘em!’ (Brontë 2010: 42, emphasis in original) – as Agnes deals a swift deliverance. This explicit and problematic account of avian cruelty jolts the reader into contemplating the novel’s concern with the interconnected oppressions of women and birds. It is important to note that feminist-vegetarian interruptions are – as the above examples from Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall demonstrate – often fraught with ambivalent implications regarding the humancentric concerns that underpin such incidents. While Agnes is keen to prevent the suffering that the birds endure at the hands of Tom and his adult birdmurdering role models, her primary concern is located in her ambition to educate the child to a moral standard that would ‘humanise’ an otherwise ‘brutish’ (Brontë 2010: 78) child, who was ‘as rough as a young bear’ (Brontë 2010: 60).6 This project is in turn a means by which Agnes can assert a level of agency that she lacks at the beginning of the novel when she sets up her affinity with the pigeons. Although Agnes and the birds’ status are aligned at the beginning of the novel, the birds do not achieve liberation from their subjugation. As Agnes achieves a relative agency, she leaves the impotent pigeons behind. This indicates the extent to which instances of nonhuman animal cruelty function as vehicles through which to comment on the oppressive consequences of a violent, masculinist culture on women, rather than on other animals. Crucially, when Helen in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall renounces the hunt, she attaches herself to the bird-murdering Gilbert.

Conclusion When reading feminist texts – whether fiction or political treatise – it is necessary to question the extent to which nonhuman animal exploitation is co-opted as a metaphor for the plight of women, thus rendering nonhuman animals absent referents, to use Adams’ term, in the depiction of their sufferings, as is the case with Wollstonecraft’s Vindication. When, if at all, does the suffering of other-than-human animals become the focus of a feminist-vegetarian interruption? Can feministvegetarian interruptions serve both women and nonhuman animal-centred concerns, or do they inevitably perpetuate a humancentric, speciesist ideology? In other words, what are the implications of aligning subjugated women with exploited nonhuman animals, and what becomes of hunted and consumed animals if women move beyond their own entrapment? The gendered ramifications of animal cruelty – specifically hunting, flesh consumption, and animal torture – pervade Brontë’s fiction. Feminist-vegetarian interruptions demonstrate their potential ‘as a political act of resistance’ (Adams 2010: 19) against dominant narratives and interpretations that marginalise and oppress women and other animals. I read as potential feminist-vegetarian 66

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interruptions scenes in which women encounter, counter, and become complicit in these forms of animal exploitation, because they demonstrate the extent to which interspecies relationships of cruelty are culturally embedded and co-dependent upon other forms of exploitative power. Regardless of whether Brontë was a vegetarian, or whether she was consciously writing for animal welfare, analysis of feminist-vegetarian incidents in her fiction reveals the extent to which she intuits these connected subjugations and comments on them in ambivalent, and sometimes critical, ways. Brontë was publishing novels in the context of an emerging feminist-led animal advocacy movement in Western culture. This analysis of Brontë’s two novels demonstrates the range of interconnecting issues that would characterise later feminist-animal welfare activism, fiction, and critical theory. With her fictional concerns for the gendered dimensions of the torture of nonhuman animals, Brontë can be said to anticipate this later feminist-animal welfare movement. As Adams’ work has suggested, women writers of feminist fiction continue to critique masculinist cultures of nonhuman animal cruelty that prevail in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and there is much work to be done by literary critics to recover this. An analysis of Brontë’s fictional critiques of hunting, meat-eating, and animal torture demonstrates the extent to which she was engaging with male-dominated debates about human’s exploitative use of nonhuman animals before women’s gradual emancipation facilitated their public participation. Her radical thinking about the marginalisation of women and nonhuman animals speaks profoundly to the continued social inequalities that prevail today as we navigate the perils of the animal-annihilating Anthropocene.

Notes 1 Some of the most notable examples include: John Oswald’s The Cry of Nature; or an Appeal to Mercy and to Justice, on Behalf of the Persecuted Animals (1791), John Frank Newton’s The Return to nature, or, A Defence of the Vegetable Regimen (1811), and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s A Vindication of Natural Diet (1813). 2 So damning were some of the reviews of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall that Brontë’s sister, Charlotte, felt it necessary to publicly disclaim the work: ‘the choice of subject was an entire mistake’ (Allott 1974: 274). 3 This dualistic thinking can be traced back to Aristotle’s Politics (c384–322 BC), in which he positions ‘master and slave, husband and wife, parent and child’ (Aristotle 2009: 12) as the correct power relations of the household. Aristotle justifies man’s exploitation of other animals through a mind/body dualism, stating that ‘man alone of the animals is furnished with the faculty of language’ (Aristotle 2009: 10–11). In this, we see the ancient roots of Enlightenment anthropocentrism. 4 What remains of this painting is an engraving made for Joseph Horsfall Turner’s Haworth – Past and Present: A History of Haworth, Stanbury and Oxenhope. This engraving is copied from a photograph (made before 1879) of Branwell Brontë’s original group portrait, now lost, known as ‘The Gun Group’ (Alexander and Sellars 1995: 307–310). 5 It is now accepted that, as with other nonhuman animals, birds, contrary to Enlightenment thinkers (most notably René Descartes), do indeed possess complex reasoning faculties – the ability to ‘think’. The multidisciplinary journal, Animal Sentience, founded in 2016, is testament to the mounting evidence that contests the Cartesian tradition of disregarding nonhuman animals’ faculty for feeling. Brontë engages with this debate, pitting Agnes, with her Benthamite recognition of ‘sentient creatures’ (Brontë 2010: 44), against Bloomfield’s Cartesian disregard for the ‘welfare of a soulless brute’ (Brontë 2010: 44). 6 Agnes often states her project ‘to bring [the children in her charge] to some general sense of justice and humanity’ (Brontë 2010: 42). Her intention is that the children will ‘become more humanized’ (Brontë 2010: 31). In Agnes Grey, as Sally Shuttleworth posits in her introduction, abstinence from animal cruelty is an indicator of a humans’ moral training; animal welfare or suffering are mere by-products (Shuttleworth 2010: pp. ix–xxviii).

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Works Cited Adams, Carol J. (2010/1990) The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory, London: Continuum. Alexander, Christine and Jane Sellars (1995) The Art of the Brontës, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Allott, Miriam (1974) The Brontës: The Critical Heritage, London: Routledge. Aristotle (2009) Politics, edited by R. F. Stalley, trans. E. Barker, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Berg, Maggie (2002) “‘Hapless Dependents’: Women and Animals in Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey,” Studies in the Novel, 34(2): 177–197. Bewick, Thomas (2015/1797) A History of British Birds Volume One: Containing the History and Description of Land Birds, London: Forgotten Books. Bolt, Christine (1993) The Women’s Movements in the United States and Britain from the 1790s to the 1920s, Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Brontë, Anne (2008/1848) The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, edited by H. Rosengarten, J. McDonagh, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brontë, Anne (2010/1847) Agnes Grey, edited by R. Inglesfield, H. Marsden, S. Shuttleworth, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brontë, Charlotte (2008/1847) Jane Eyre, edited by M. Smith, S. Shuttleworth, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Descartes, René (2006/1633) A Discourse on the Method of Correctly Conducting One’s Reason and Seeking Truth in the Sciences, edited by and trans. I. Maclean, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gates, Barbara T. (2007) “Introduction: Why Victorian Natural History?,” Victorian Literature and Culture, 35(2): 539–549. Gregory, James (2007) On Victorians and Vegetarians: The Vegetarian Movement in Nineteenth-Century, Britain and London: Taurus. Kean, Hilda (1998) Animal Rights: Political and Social Change in Britain Since 1800, London: Reaktion Books. Kheel, Marti (1995) “License to Kill: An Ecofeminist Critique of Hunters’ Discourse,” in C. Adams and J. Donovan (eds.) Animals and Women: Feminist Theoretical Explorations, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 85–125. Newton, John Frank (1811) The Return to Nature, or, A Defence of the Vegetable Regimen, London: ­Forgotten Books. Oswald, John (1791) The Cry of Nature, or An Appeal to Mercy and to Justice, on Behalf of the Persecuted Animals, London: J. Johnson. Piercy, Marge (1972) Small Changes, Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Shelley, Mary (2018/1818) Frankenstein, edited by N. Groom, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Shelley, Percy Bysshe (2009/1813) “A Vindication of Natural Diet,” in Z. Leader and M. O’Neill (eds.) The Major Works, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Shuttleworth, Sally (2010) “Introduction” to Anne Brontë, in R. Inglesfield, H. Marsden, S. Shuttleworth (eds.) Agnes Grey, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. ix–xxviii. Singer, Peter (2015/1975) Animal Liberation, London: Bodley Head. Smith, Jonathan (2007) “Gender, Royalty, and Sexuality in John Gould’s Birds of Australia,” Victorian Literature and Culture, 35(2): 569–587. Thompson, William and Anna Wheeler (1983/1825) Appeal of One Half of the Human Race, Women, Against the Pretentions of the Other, Men, to Retain Them in Political, and Hence in Civil and Domestic, Slavery, London: Virago Press. Trollope, Anthony (1996) Hunting Sketches, intro. Alistair Grant. London: Omnium Publishing. Turner, J. Horsfall (2010/1879) Haworth – Past and Present: A History of Haworth, Stanbury and Oxenhope, Whitefish, MT: Kissinger Publishing. Wollstonecraft, Mary (2008/1792) A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, J. Todd (ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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4 “THEY ALL REVOLVED ABOUT HER” Disability, femininity, and power in mid-Victorian women’s writing Clare Walker Gore Introduction Disability and gender are inextricably intertwined concepts, so mutually dependent that it is impossible adequately to analyse either one without considering the other. From Aristotle to Freud, femaleness has been not incidentally but essentially cast as a state of abnormality and inadequacy, so that in Sami Schalk’s words, “rhetorics of gender difference are simultaneously rhetorics of disability” (2017: 171). Conversely, as Rosemarie Garland-Thomson points out, “the non-­normate status accorded disability feminizes all disabled figures” (1997: 9). The vital insight offered by David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder that disability “has been attributed to all ‘deviant’ biologies as a discrediting feature, while also serving as the material marker of inferiority itself” (2000: 3) is also true for femaleness: those declared inferior on the ground of race, class, religion, or according to almost any other category of social organisation, have routinely been cast as in some sense ‘feminine’. The Victorian novel illustrates this paradigm especially clearly and, for this reason, offers particularly fertile ground for scholars of feminist disability studies. Perhaps because this was the period in which the modern category of disability began to emerge in its present form (see Davis 1995), and in which what was then called ‘the Woman Question’1 was omnipresent, both systems are foregrounded by the plotting of novels throughout this period. Such plots vary widely, but almost universally rest on the assumptions that femaleness is a kind of disability and that disability is feminising. So absolute was the identification between disability and femininity that when characterising Dinah Craik’s A Noble Life (1866), a novel with a disabled male protagonist, one reviewer suggested that the focus on disability was itself feminine. Craik’s hero, he said, “remind[s] one of a type of character that has latterly dropped out of fiction” but used to be “a favourite creation of our lady-novelists of the pre-Braddonian period”2: the “angelic being with a weak spine, who, from her sofa, directed with mild wisdom the affairs of the family or the parish” (“Novels, Past and Present” 438). Intriguingly, the reviewer argues that this figure has been important to ‘ladynovelists’ in particular because their depiction of virtuous disabled characters has enabled them to



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DOI: 10.4324/9781003429951-6

Clare Walker Gore

depict femininity itself as powerful. These novelists’ interest in the figure of “a disabled aunt or invalid sister”, he suggests, expressed two of the most creditable feminine instincts – the instinct to improve the world by means of those moral teachings which may be conveniently conveyed through some such mouthpiece, and the instinct to admire moral, as distinct from material, power. Although the reviewer casts this trope as laudably feminine, he also suggests that it is in some sense feminist, as well: “It is quite natural that women of talent and refinement should feel a pleasure in propounding a view which tends in some degree to redress the balance of power between the sexes” (“Novels, Past and Present” 439). This last claim might seem counter-intuitive, given the long tradition of perceiving the mid-­ Victorian fascination with female invalids as inherently anti-feminist. For many First-Wave feminists, the idea that women had a natural tendency to invalidism was a pernicious stumbling block to social progress. The activist Frances Power Cobbe railed against “the lingering survival amongst us of the notion that there is something peculiarly ‘lady-like’ in invalidism” (quoted in Frawley 2004: 49). Such ‘notions’ had practical ramifications as well as broader cultural sway: those resistant to secondary education for girls and higher education for women, for instance, often quoted doctors’ claims that the female constitution was simply too frail for the rigours of strenuous study (Burstyn 1980: 79). As Linda Nead argues, “the morbid cult of ‘female invalidism’” was symptomatic of the way that “[f]emale dependency was reproduced and guaranteed by the belief that respectable women were inherently weak and delicate, and were in a perpetual state of sickness” (1988: 29). Defined not by any particular condition or physical experience but by a set of behaviours, invalids essentially embodied an extreme version of bourgeois femininity. They might be ‘crippled’ by an accident, weakened by chronic pain, or suffering from long-term illness, but what defined their ‘invalid’ state was recumbency and retirement. Whatever the cause of his or her physical condition, the invalid did not move around freely, was largely confined to domestic, interior spaces (and often to a sickroom within them), and physically withdrew from public life. As Diane Price Herndl succinctly puts it, “invalidism, which could be described as the extreme of patriarchal definitions of woman, is one of the roles against which feminism historically has had to struggle” (1993: 2). Yet if the invalid embodied a certain kind of feminine powerlessness, real and fictional invalids’ “manipulation of that powerlessness” could be, in Herndl’s words, “a strategy of subversion” (1993: 2–3). As Maria Frawley notes, the life writing of Victorian invalids clearly shows that they were “enabled within (or by) the sickroom space […] to manipulate ideologies of gender, health, and Christian identity to create for themselves what Ian Hacking would call ‘possibilities for personhood’” (2004: 199). The same is true of fictional invalids, and most particularly of the invalidism plots deployed by women writers. The Saturday Review critic’s sense that invalidism was depicted by “lady-novelists of the pre-Braddonian period” in such a way as “to redress the balance of power between the sexes” is more than borne out by the domestic realist fiction towards which he gestures – although this fiction also addresses, in ways that he does not, the complexities and limitations of this mode of ‘redress’. In this chapter, I want to examine how the trope of disability as feminising was used by midVictorian women novelists to explore the proper scope and limits of women’s power, using two examples of once popular but now relatively neglected texts. Elizabeth Gaskell’s The Moorland Cottage (1995/1850) and Charlotte M. Yonge’s The Clever Woman of the Family (1985/1865), while very different in plotting and style, both prominently feature the particular kind of disabled figure mentioned in the review above, the exemplary female invalid. Moreover, both are 70

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structured by what I will call the ‘instructive invalidism’ plot, in which the exemplary invalid mentors the heroine and teaches her something essential about femininity. In both texts, the exemplary invalid shows the heroine how to reconcile herself to domesticity and how to wield power in that sphere, but the terms on which she might do so, and the rewards she might thereby enjoy, are represented as highly fraught. In Gaskell’s novella, the unjust and damaging structure of the patriarchal family is exposed, and the happy ending won by the heroine, Maggie, significantly tainted by this unresolved injustice. The saintly invalid’s teachings serve to make Maggie more rather than less resistant to male power, and while her influence does see Maggie ascend to the pinnacle of feminine success – making an advantageous and happy marriage – her ideals also put Maggie at odds with the community in which she actually lives. Yonge, on the other hand, uses invalidism to expand the feminine sphere in response to contemporary feminist challenges; using ‘the Invalid’ as a pen name, the heroine’s mentor Ermine Williams is able to participate in public debate while retaining her feminine retirement and preserving her feminine delicacy. However, without disability to square the circle of femininity and participation in public life, our flawed heroine Rachel is unable fully to imitate the ideal invalid. She has to accept that while Ermine is ‘the clever woman of the family’, she herself must resign her pretensions to cleverness – and our sense that there is something unsatisfactory in this is kept alive even through the supposedly ‘happy’ ending. Before turning to these subtly subversive versions of the instructive invalidism plot, however, it will be helpful briefly to consider how this plot typically works. Susan Coolidge’s perennially popular coming-of-age novel What Katy Did (2009/1872) offers a particularly clear example of the instructive invalidism plot in its most schematic form. The narrative sees the attractively lively but problematically wilful and active heroine, Katy, make the transition from a girl who “tore her dress every day, hated sewing, and didn’t care a button about being called ‘good’” (Coolidge 2009/1872: 4) to an ideally feminine woman who capably manages the household and is its emotional lynchpin, “the centre and the sun” of her younger siblings’ lives (211). This transformation comes about not as a matter of course, but through her experience of disability; after she suffers a dramatic fall from a swing and becomes paraplegic, she is taught by her saintly Cousin Helen how to make use of the “splendid chance” invalidism offers her to become “the heart of the house” (141), by learning the requisite skills in what Helen calls “the School of Pain” (133) – that is, via her experience of disability. Before her accident, twelve-year-old Katy has struggled to accept the domestic responsibilities her father has urged upon her, torn between her desire to take her late mother’s place in the household and her desire “to do something grand” beyond the domestic sphere, to “go and nurse in the hospital […] head a crusade […] paint pictures, or sing, or […] make figures in marble” (20, emphasis in original). Disability resolves this tension between feminine and unfeminine ambition, between acceptance of domestic responsibility and the longing for a life beyond them. Once Katy shares Cousin Helen’s recumbent state, she is able to imitate her virtues – and once these are acquired, she is allowed to make a full recovery, now imbued with all the qualities she needs – “the womanly look, the pleasant voice […] the tact in advising the others without seeming to advise” – to succeed as a domestic angel in the house. Her success explicitly gives her power in the family: her younger siblings, we are told, “all revolved about her, and trusted her for everything” (211). As Elizabeth Hale argues, disability plays an “ambiguous” role in the novel: “both crippling and empowering”, it “symbolizes the ambiguities of transition from girlhood to womanhood” (2010: 344). I would go further, and argue that disability acts in the novel as an education in womanhood, so that adult femininity and disability are actually made synonymous. Essentially a jauntier American re-working of domestic fiction like Gaskell’s and Yonge’s, Coolidge’s novel is aimed at a young readership – but one that she tellingly assumes will already 71

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be familiar with the image of the idealised invalid. Before they meet Cousin Helen, the Carr children have definite ideas about what she will be like, worrying that she will “want us to say hymns to her all the time”, predicting that she will look like a character from “Mrs Sherwood’s story”,3 and that she will “keep her hands clasped so all the time […] and lie on the sofa perfectly still, and never smile, but just look patient” (Coolidge 2009/1872: 94, emphasis in original). While this naïve faith in the truth of fiction is held up for the reader’s amusement, it is fundamentally borne out by Helen’s extreme goodness. She may not be the “saintly invalid” of Katy’s imagination (96), but she is, as Dr Carr says, “an example to us all” (105). The image of the invalid that Coolidge draws on here, and with which she implicitly assumes her young readers to be familiar, is the one Gaskell and Yonge both work with. The ideal invalid, in their versions of the plot, is also defined by her gentleness, her patience, her tact, and her wisdom. However, as I hope to demonstrate, Coolidge’s version of the instructive invalidism plot – far and away, the best known version of it today, as What Katy Did remains a popular children’s classic – irons out the subversive elements present in earlier iterations. In Gaskell and Yonge’s hands, the implications of wanting to be “the centre and the sun” about whom the family “revolve” (211) – in other words, of the longing for recognition and authority and, ultimately, power – are drawn out in far more complex ways than in Coolidge’s didactic narrative. The idea that disability serves a symbolic function in domestic fiction is certainly not a new one. In her path-breaking study of women’s writing, A Literature of Their Own (1977), Elaine Showalter argued that “the repression in which the feminine novel was situated also forced women to find innovative and covert ways to dramatize the inner life, and led to a fiction that was intense, compact, symbolic, and profound”, and singled out as an example of such symbolism the disabled heroine of Dinah Craik’s 1850 novel Olive, “whose deformity represents her very womanhood” (28–29). Sally Mitchell developed this argument further, suggesting that in Craik’s fiction, “[p] hysical incapacity codifies the pain of helplessness, the lack of power and social position and financial ability and legal right to control the circumstances of one’s life” (1983: 112). In this essay, I too treat disability in mid-Victorian domestic fiction as a vehicle for exploring contemporary constructions of femininity. However, I argue that in Gaskell and Yonge’s texts, disability dramatises not so much the pain of helplessness as the manipulation of that condition – in other words, that it codifies the struggle to find acceptable ways of wielding power, not the pain of abdicating it. I have argued elsewhere that mid-Victorian women novelists working in the domestic realist tradition situated their disabled characters more centrally and powerfully than more canonical novelists of the same period (Gore 2019: 116–172); here, I want to make the specific case for the power of the angelic invalid in domestic fiction by women. Since the advent of disability studies, the critical tendency to treat disability in fiction simply and solely as metaphorical has rightly been treated with suspicion. For readers such as myself, the assumption that a disabled character is always being encountered by a non-disabled reader, and that disability is a literary symbol rather than a lived experience – socially constructed, yes, but also, for many of us, pertaining to our insistently real bodies – will always strike a false note. My argument here is based on the recognition that Gaskell and Yonge are far less interested in realistically representing the lived experience of disabled people than in drawing on the symbolic power of disabled figures to shape their exploration of femininity, which is centred in both cases on non-disabled heroines. However, as I argue at the end of the chapter, their construction of the angelic invalid as powerful has ramifications for the self-image of the disabled as well as the nondisabled reader; its implications are purely conservative only from a point of view which discounts the former perspective.

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“Meekly content to be”: the power of passivity in Gaskell’s The Moorland Cottage Where Coolidge treats the gendered structure and expectations of the Carr family as so unremarkable as to require no justification, Gaskell’s 1850 novella The Moorland Cottage draws attention to the injuriously inequitable treatment of the son and daughter of her fictional Browne family. Published as one of Chapman and Hall’s Christmas books, and offering some of the cosy sentimentality and easy pathos associated with the genre, The Moorland Cottage also contains a biting critique on the effects of a social system which encourages boys to consider themselves the superiors of their sisters. The story opens when Maggie and Edward are children, growing up in straitened circumstances after the death of their father. Their widowed mother – an unimaginative, repressively conventional woman – chooses to keep them almost entirely secluded from society, but she recreates in microcosm the social structures of the outside world. Where Maggie is made to fill her days with household tasks, and can barely squeeze in her lessons, Edward is encouraged to consider himself above domestic labour: Ned, who prided himself considerably on his sex, had been sitting all the morning, in his father’s arm-chair, in the little book-room, ‘studying’, as he chose to call it. […] “You see, Maggie, a man must be educated to be a gentleman. Now, if a woman knows how to keep a house, that’s all that is wanted from her. So my time is of more consequence than yours”. (Gaskell 1995/1850: 5–6) Unsurprisingly, their inequitable treatment in childhood encourages Ned’s tendencies towards selfishness and arrogance, and initially leads Maggie to “wish [she] was not a woman” (6). Naturally sweet and gentle, Maggie is already feminine in a way that Katy Carr is not, but her mother’s insensitivity and triviality mean that she is, like Katy, without a model for adult ­femininity – until she meets an inspiring female invalid. As in Coolidge’s story, is it at this point that the novella’s disability plot becomes a crucial part of our heroine’s bildung. In this case, however, Mrs Buxton does not so much teach Maggie how to be ‘the heart of the house’ – impossible in a family as dysfunctional as hers – as how to survive her neglect; not so much how to submit to the restrictions of life as a woman, but how to psychologically withstand them. Moreover, the result of Mrs Buxton’s moral education is not to purge Maggie of inappropriate ambition or unfeminine boisterousness, but to teach her how to withstand others’ bullying, and even how to wield power herself. Mrs Buxton’s key intervention is to re-cast femininity as both valuable and powerful. Confined to her room by illness, Mrs Buxton embodies a far more extreme version of the retirement and stillness that Mrs Browne has tried to impose on Maggie. But whereas Mrs Browne is obsessed with observing social niceties without offering her guests real sympathy, and with teaching Maggie to keep house without apparently attributing any real value to the endeavour, Mrs Buxton offers a superior, worthwhile version of these duties. Her dressing room serves as an ideally feminine space, in which Maggie’s torn dress is mended and her anxieties soothed. The feminine rituals of afternoon tea and shared sewing become occasions for meaningful, healing conversation, and Maggie realises that she has found the sympathising friend she has long needed: “Something in [Maggie] was so much in harmony with Mrs Buxton’s sweet resigned gentleness, that it answered like an echo” (18–19). Over time, their close relationship becomes instructive, with Maggie deriving from her “occasional hours” with Mrs Buxton “all the knowledge, and most of the strength of her character” (25). Gaskell has already made it clear that Maggie does not need to acquire the “sweet

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resigned gentleness” by which Mrs Buxton is defined, since she already shares this quality; what Mrs Buxton teaches her is how to assert herself in the face of male tyranny and resist false appeals to feminine docility. We see the effect of this teaching in her dealings with the increasingly dishonest Edward, when he comes home for the school holidays and orders her around. Maggie’s “conscience […] would not allow her to be so utterly obedient as formerly”, her new “habits of pious aspiring thought” making her resistant to his less worthy instructions (29). Unmoved by his insistence that “obedient […] is what a woman has to be” (29), Maggie passively asserts herself by refusing to act as he wishes. This turns out to be a rehearsal for the moral crisis of the novella’s plot, in which her fate turns on her ability to withstand wrongly exerted moral pressure. Having indirectly brought together her spiritual protégée, Maggie and her beloved son, Frank, Mrs Buxton dies before they become engaged, and the ambitious Mr Buxton is greatly displeased by the prospect of a match between his heir and the impecunious curate’s daughter. Maggie urges Frank to be patient with his father, but in the meantime, Edward is found to have defrauded Mr Buxton of a great deal of money. In spite of her brother’s bullying and her mother’s pleading, Maggie refuses to comply with Mr Buxton’s offer to refrain from prosecuting Edward for fraud if she will break off her engagement to Frank without telling him why. Rejecting their appeals to the feminine duty of self-sacrifice, Maggie holds firm, and by doing so, manages to save her brother without betraying her lover. Edward is allowed to escape to America, and Maggie proves her sisterly devotion by offering to accompany him. Her intended sacrifice of her own happiness is averted when the ship carrying them to America catches fire, cowardly Edward is conveniently drowned, and Maggie is rescued by Frank (who has fortunately shadowed her in secret), who she bravely allows to throw her overboard.4 For Romona Lumpkin, this resolution-by-rescue represents a betrayal of Maggie’s otherwise active character, “transform[ing] Maggie into an entirely passive creature […] as if on a symbolic level Maggie is prepared for marriage by a radical submersion of her own will from which she emerges to take her place as Frank’s wife” (1991: 439). I agree that it is highly significant that at the climax of the plot, Maggie can save herself only by keeping still. Far from being out of keeping with the rest of the novella, however, I see this as entirely consistent with the particular model of feminine virtue that Mrs Buxton has embodied and then imparted to her protégée. Apart from offering to accompany Edward to America, Maggie’s self-assertions and acts of self-preservation have all, effectively, been negative: refraining from reproaching her mother; ­refusing to act as Edward wishes; refusing to marry Frank rashly without his father’s consent; refusing to write to break her engagement. Gaskell plots the text in such a way that the virtues Mrs Buxton and then Maggie embody – patience, kindness, wisdom – are consistently made manifest through Maggie’s not doing or saying certain things. Even giving up her place in the lifeboat – the act to which Lumpkin points as an example of active heroism – is actually about not doing something (getting into the lifeboat), in favour of keeping still. This reflects Maggie’s commitment to following Mrs Buxton’s example, to which her identity as an invalid was central. Never leaving the house and seldom her room, Mrs Buxton is depicted as too weak for any activity, “cheerful” when she tells Maggie that she will “never be able to go out again”, and not even taking an active part in the sewing bee she superintends (Gaskell 1995/1850: 18–19). Her instruction, too, is depicted as in some sense passive, since she does not “make a set labour of teaching” nor even “thought of doing or saying anything with a latent idea of its indirect effect upon the little girls”, but trusts entirely to being “simply, herself” in their presence (25–26). In a phrase which neatly obscures Mrs Buxton’s role as a speaker and teacher, and turns her instead into a kind of vessel for speech, we are assured that “her life, in its uneventful hours and days, spoke many homilies” (26). When the narrator sums up that life, in the closing lines, she is described as “one who could 74

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do little”, but was “meekly content to be gentle, holy, patient, and undefiled […] the invalid Mrs. Buxton” (100, emphasis in original). The idea that an invalid is defined by ‘being’ rather than ‘doing’ takes on greater significance when we relate it to the contemporary idea that ‘being’ was feminine and ‘doing’ masculine. John Ruskin memorably expressed this opposition in his influential lecture (later a popular prize book for schoolgirls) “Of Queens’ Gardens”, published some fifteen years after The Moorland Cottage and amounting to a paean to mid-Victorian domestic ideology. The man, he said, was “eminently the doer”, his power “active, progressive, defensive”, while “the woman’s power is for rule, not for battle […] she enters into no contest, but infallibly adjudges the crown of contest” (Ruskin 1865/2004: 158). Only by a certain kind of inactivity, he argued, could she fulfil this vital role: only by sequestering herself from the “open world” could she keep herself sufficiently pure to create a home that is “the place of Peace; the shelter […] from all terror, doubt, and division” (158). He might have been describing Mrs Buxton’s dressing room. Moreover, his claim that despite being completely withdrawn from the world, the ideally feminine woman could yet shape it through her influence (171) is one that Gaskell’s plotting fulsomely bears out. While Mrs Buxton is alive, her influence restrains her husband from the worldly ambition and quick temper which briefly overwhelm his judgement after her death; even then, when Maggie’s “accents and words” recall his wife’s memory, he is sufficiently influenced to change his course of action (Gaskell 1995/1850: 78–79). From beyond the grave, Mrs Buxton is able to change the course of the story; such is the power of passivity that she can bring about Maggie’s happy ending without taking any action at all. Yet the terms of that happy ending surely give the reader pause for thought, and temper what might otherwise seem a purely celebratory version of the instructive invalidism plot. While I disagree with Lumpkin’s view of Maggie’s rescue, I strongly share her sense that the conclusion “holds disturbing overtones” (1991: 439). I would locate the source of the readers’ discontent, however, not in being reminded of Mrs Buxton’s invalid state, but in the penultimate paragraph, which stresses that all Maggie’s worldly success and unworldly virtue, all her daughterly devotion and almost superhuman patience, do nothing to comfort her grief-stricken mother: Mrs Browne looked round, and saw Maggie. She did not get up from her place by his head; nor did she long avert her gaze from his poor face. […] And to this day it is the same. She prizes her dead son more than a thousand living daughters, happy and prosperous as is Maggie now, – rich in the love of many. If Maggie did not show such reverence to her mother’s faithful sorrows, others might wonder at her refusal to be comforted by that sweet daughter. But Maggie treats her with such tender sympathy, never thinking of herself or her own claims, that Frank, Erminia, Mr Buxton, Nancy, and all, are reverent and sympathizing too. (Gaskell 1995/1850: 100) This, then, is the reward for Maggie’s unwavering goodness. Her supreme patience with her mother keeps others from recognising the unreasonableness of her behaviour, and succeeds in making their family and wider community accept Mrs Browne’s ongoing inability properly to value her. It is from this depressing picture that Gaskell turns to make her closing paean to Mrs Buxton’s memory and to the lasting influence of an invalid who was “meekly content to be patient, holy, patient, and undefiled” (100, emphasis in original). Instead of laying the emphasis on Maggie’s happy marriage or enviable place at the pinnacle of her fictional community – wife of the local landowner, romantic choice of the handsome hero – Gaskell chooses to stress the cruelly inequitable family structure which persists even after Edward’s death, as if taking us, nightmarishly, back to where we started. 75

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What Mrs Buxton has taught Maggie is not how to change, but how to live with an unfair reality – how to survive the emotional neglect that arises from a much wider societal injustice, captured in microcosm in the Browne family. In this version of the instructive invalidism plot, the saintly invalid teaches the heroine how to live within an unjust system – in this case, familial – but does not really reconcile us to it. Rather, her virtues illuminate the shortcomings of the novella’s inadequate male authority figures, who must be resisted at every turn. Moreover, Gaskell chooses to end the text by juxtaposing a cruel example of the limits of the invalid’s influence with that last assertion of her power, while the closing image of the prize Maggie ultimately wins is bound to make us question whether it was really worth keeping still long enough to win it.

“A real engine for independence and usefulness”: women’s work in Yonge’s The Clever Woman of the Family Charlotte Yonge’s The Clever Woman of the Family is more explicitly concerned with ‘the Woman Question’ than either Coolidge or Gaskell’s text, and despite being more overtly anti-feminist, in having its heroine espouse and then recant the most radical feminist ideas of her day, it actually offers a far more active and ambitious image of female invalidism than either of these earlier and later versions. Yonge’s novel introduces us to a fundamentally sympathetic but also deeply flawed heroine: ambitious, tactless Rachel Curtis, a well-to-do young woman living with her widowed mother and sister, characterised by “redundance and vigour” and longing above all for something to do: “here am I, able and willing, only longing to task myself to the uttermost, yet tethered down to the merest mockery of usefulness by conventionalities!” (Yonge 1985/1865: 2, 3). Seriousminded but unaware of her own pomposity, well-intentioned but unknowingly absurd, Rachel is contrasted with the novel’s ideal ‘clever woman’, the invalid Ermine Williams, whom she meets early on in the story. Also fatherless and living with her sister, but unlike Rachel forced to work to support herself and her niece since her brother’s disgrace and bankruptcy, Ermine is held up as a model of feminine virtue, from whom Rachel has everything to learn, if only she knew it. Like The Moorland Cottage, The Clever Woman of the Family also ends with a paean to the virtues of its exemplary invalid, who is recognised in the closing line of the novel as the true “Clever Woman of the Family”, and a fitting model for the heroine’s clever daughter: And yet there is one whose real working talent has been more than that of any of us, who has made it effective for herself and others, and has let it do her only good, not harm. You are right. If we are to show Una how intellect and brilliant power can be no snares, but only blessings helping the spirits in infirmity and trouble, serving as a real engine for independence and usefulness, winning love and influence for good, genuine talents in the highest sense of the word, then commend me to such a Clever Woman of the family as Ermine Keith. (Yonge 1985/1865: 367) While this ending closely parallels Gaskell’s conclusion, however, Yonge’s novel has a very different basic structure from Gaskell’s. Where The Moorland Cottage moves towards its heroine’s recognition and reward for her many virtues (as ambivalently as we may come to feel about that reward), there is a decidedly punitive element to the plotting of The Clever Woman of the Family, the title of which is in one respect cruelly ironic. The novel’s heroine begins by believing that she herself fills this role, and that she needs a larger scope for her talents and energies than she finds in her 76

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quiet domestic life as an unmarried young lady. She seems to be inspired in this by contemporary feminist ideas: the name the ill-fated charity she sets up, the Female Union for Englishwoman’s Employment, echoes that of the liberal feminist Langham Place Group’s organisation, the Society for the Promotion of Employment for Women, while their publication, the Englishwoman’s Journal, also seems a likely model for the progressive magazine Rachel hopes to write for, “the Englishwoman’s Hobby-horse” (89). Her attempt to fund and direct an ambitious philanthropic project, however, ends in disgrace and disaster – in direct consequence, she recognises, of her resistance to advice. Much humbled, she is rescued from misery by marriage to an army officer, Alick Keith. Having intended to set an example of female independence and industry, she finally declares herself “not fit to be anything but an ordinary married woman” (345), and her recognition that she over-estimated her own abilities and is not the ‘Clever Woman’ she once thought herself adds a melancholy note to a conventionally happy ending (Yonge 1985/1865: 365). The novel is not as straightforwardly anti-feminist, however, as this bald plot summary might suggest. For one thing, Rachel’s desire for work beyond the domestic sphere is not treated ­unsympathetically – on the contrary, her longing for meaningful, useful activity, and her frustration at being “able to do nothing, nothing” in the face of the “wretchedness and crime” that surrounds her, are vividly depicted (3, emphasis in original). Although we are clearly shown that she is led astray by the secular, liberal tendency of her reading and thinking, and she has to be led back to religious orthodoxy before she can enjoy success in her endeavours, her frustration with ladylike idleness is not, in itself, shown to be unreasonable. As June Sturrock argues, Yonge may be deeply conservative, but she “indicates that Rachel’s plight is real and […] that the problem of women and work is a real problem” (1995: 63). When he proposes marriage, Alick reassures Rachel that he has no idea of her “surrendering” her judgement (“indeed, I want you to aid mine”), and that she “need not be wasted” as an officer’s wife, since the regiment’s “women and children want so much done for them […] Will you not come and help me?” (Yonge 1985/1865: 269, 275–276). It is a proposal which reflects Alick’s acceptance of the desire for useful activity outside of one’s own domestic circle as a valid and indeed admirable one, and should complicate any sense that Yonge is antipathetic to middle-class women’s desire for meaningful work. Moreover, Yonge’s treatment of her exemplary invalid Ermine is consistent with this sympathy for intellectual ambition and activity in women. Whereas Gaskell praises Mrs Buxton at the end of The Moorland Cottage for her acceptance of inactivity, it is Ermine’s use of her exceptionally keen abilities – her “real working talent” – which is praised in the last lines of Yonge’s novel, as having been “a real engine for independence and usefulness […] and influence for good” (367). Ermine has not simply had ‘influence’ through being good herself, but through her work as a published writer, book reviewer, and essayist for a widely read periodical. While Rachel has to resign her ambitions for a public career, Ermine embodies the possibility of a truly feminine woman taking an active part in intellectual debate, earning her own living, and enjoying it. As Ermine tells her long-lost lover Colin Keith, when they are reunited after his long absence in the army, her work as a writer has been “pleasant and improving, not to say profitable” (62). Colin is clearly appalled that she has had to earn her own living – “Little did I think you were in such straits!” – but she is adamant that having to work has actually been a blessing to her sister and herself, and made them both happier, suggesting that Rachel is not wrong to think that meaningful work is in fact a balm for the discontents of young ladyhood (66). Moreover, while Rachel’s writing is embarrassingly clumsy, we are given every reason to think that Ermine’s is both genuinely ‘feminine’ and intellectually ambitious. Praised by other characters in the novel, before they know the secret of Ermine’s authorship, the ‘Letters’ she writes under the pseudonym ‘the Invalid’ are variously declared to be sharply funny, touchingly sweet, and morally profound. 77

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Ermine is therefore endowed with all qualities of a conventional angelic invalid like Mrs Buxton – wise, patient, possessed of “sunshiny content and cheerfulness” (36) – without being entirely confined to the domestic sphere. Her parlour is not only a place of rest, like Mrs Buxton’s dressing room, but also of remunerative employment and intellectual activity: “Rachel […] found that what was new to her was already well known in that little parlour” (45). Moreover, while Ermine keeps the secret of her authorship from the wider community in the first part of the novel, and her decision to publish pseudonymously is treated as praiseworthy, there is no suggestion that Ermine intends to stop publishing once the secret is out. Nor does she give up writing after her marriage. In the final scene, in which she is a wife and adoptive mother, Colin’s casual reference to “[w]hen the Invalid has time for another essay” suggests that she remains a published writer as well (365). Ermine’s example seems to suggest that a woman can combine domestic excellence, maternity, marriage, and the work for which she is best suited, and that multiple, conventionally distinct roles can be ably played by one woman. The novel’s plotting, however, suggests that this is possible only for a disabled woman. In one respect, certainly, Rachel is allowed to imitate Ermine: she, too, is happily married by the novel’s conclusion, and her marriage is closely modelled on Ermine’s. As Talia Schaffer has convincingly argued, disability comes to seem not an obstacle to but a precondition for romantic happiness (2016: 181–190): not only is Ermine’s relationship with Colin held up as ideal, but Rachel’s own happy marriage is to an army officer, Alick, who has long experience of illness and is himself physically disabled. Having lost several fingers in an act of military heroism, Alick has also survived a spell of invalidism which has rendered him an expert nurse; when Rachel falls ill after the distressing failure of her philanthropic endeavour, he is the only one who understands how to look after her: “‘Thank you! How do you know so well?’ she said with a long breath of satisfaction. ‘By long trial’, he said, very quietly seating himself beside her couch” (Yonge 1985/1865: 275). Rachel is still being described as an invalid at the time of their marriage and regains her health only gradually (and at the same time as her religious faith) during their residence with Alick’s uncle, the saintly clergyman Mr Clare – himself, tellingly, blind. Although Rachel has fully recovered her physical strength by the end of the novel, she and Alick ultimately put their energies into a home for convalescent soldiers, so the nursing of invalids continues to be central to their relationship. As Martha Stoddard Holmes points out: “Mutual weakness and mutual nursing […] characterize all the happy relationships in the book” (2004: 52). If Rachel is allowed to marry on similar terms to Ermine, however, she is not thereby allowed to occupy her multiplicity of roles. Unable to pick up Ermine’s valuable literary hints and improve her writing, Rachel is also unable to realise her philanthropic ambitions in the way that she wanted: although after her marriage, she does realise her dream of doing good with her property, on which the home for convalescent soldiers is established, her direct involvement appears minimal. Yonge seems to want to assure us that Rachel has finally managed to combine her extra-domestic ambitions with marriage and motherhood – but Ermine’s generous celebration of her success as “a thorough wife and mother, all the more so for her being awake to larger interests, and […] for being the Clever Woman of the family”, is offset by Rachel’s admission in the same scene, “I really do not think I ever was such a Clever Woman”, and Alick’s agreement (Yonge 1985/1865: 365–367). Rachel herself attributes her inability to realise her ambitions firmly to her own inadequacies. Immediately after her marriage, when she visits London, she is introduced to “a lady who had devoted herself to the care of poor girls to be trained as servants”, and is both encouraged and chastened: If I had been sensible, I might have come to something like this! […] I am not fit to be anything but an ordinary married woman, with an Alick to take care of me; but I am glad some people can be what I meant to be. (345) 78

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We do not, however, see this woman in action or learn anything else about her; the idea that a nondisabled woman could enjoy a wider sphere of activity and yet remain feminine is not fleshed out by further contact with this character. Only Ermine herself seems able to expand the sphere of women’s work without endangering her ideal femininity – and, as we have seen, she chooses to publish under the pseudonym ‘the Invalid’. The implication, I would suggest, is that disability acts as a kind of guarantor of ­femininity – what Holmes calls “a liberating force, that which frees women from stultifying social roles without making them pay for the privilege” (2004: 53). The problem with Ermine as an instructive invalid, therefore, is that non-disabled women are not actually able to emulate her example. The instructive invalidism plot succeeds, in the sense that the wayward heroine fully acquiesces in the invalid’s world view by the end of the novel – and it actually expands the scope for women’s power and influence, by suggesting that from their own homes, they might take part in public debate, and have rich intellectual lives. But it fails in the sense that the heroine cannot occupy the invalid’s role in the family, the wider community, or the world at large, and therefore cannot profit from her example.

Conclusion I do not wish to claim either The Moorland Cottage or The Clever Woman of the Family as feminist texts in any straightforward sense. Both base their narratives on the idea that a woman’s true calling is domestic excellence, and both see their heroines aspire to specifically feminine virtues, using their plotting and characterisation to advocate for modesty, patience, tact, and piety. However, both texts do ultimately uphold these virtues as superior to those inculcated by masculine education or valued by the masculine world: in Gaskell’s text by contrasting Maggie with her worthless brother, who has been corrupted by male pride and, in Yonge’s, by having her most sympathetic male characters embody the same virtues she prescribes for her heroines. As Elizabeth C. Juckett argues, Yonge’s plotting ends up being less “gender prescriptive” than we might expect, “so intently does she valorise religiously motivated self-effacement and self-discipline for both male and female characters” (2009: 118–119). June Sturrock sums up the potential radicalism of this hyper-conservative standpoint: Rather than undercutting domestic ideology, [Yonge] actually extends it far beyond its conventional limitations and represents the domestic – and by implication, the feminine – as morally, spiritually, and culturally central for male as well as female. She moralizes and thus universalizes the home. (2009: 23) Gaskell, by contrast, upholds feminine virtues and activities as superior to masculine ones, but inculcates dissatisfaction in her reader by drawing our attention to their general undervaluing, as captured by the undervaluing of her superlatively dutiful heroine. In the person of the less-loved daughter, we are encouraged to recognise the injustice of the wider social arrangements which would subordinate Maggie to Edward, and Mrs Buxton to her husband. In these ways, it seems to me that these texts espouse a kind of conservative feminism, a worldview embodied by the exemplary invalid. But where does this leave the invalid herself? So far in this essay, I have taken it for granted that the invalid’s role in these novels is to teach the non-disabled heroine, standing as an example to her and to the non-disabled reader. Her own development is not the subject of the narrative. As 79

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we have seen, Yonge’s invalid is in fact allowed to marry, to become an adoptive mother, and to pursue a rewarding career, but the same cannot be said for Mrs Buxton – who conveniently fades away to leave Maggie centre-stage – nor for Coolidge’s Cousin Helen, the archetypal instructive invalid, who appears and reappears only to counsel, caution, and praise our heroine. She has given up her fiancé upon becoming disabled and, we are assured, is only too happy to live next-door to him and his wife and children, because she is “half an angel, and loves other people better than herself” (Coolidge 2009/1872: 105). What might a disabled reader, whose situation more closely matched Helen’s than Katy’s, make of such statements? My own experience of encountering this novel as a child is that it is not only alienating, as might be expected. However cloying her goodness might be, and however intangible her reward, Cousin Helen is allowed to succeed on the terms of the text; she is the acknowledged heroine and exemplar. Cousin Helen might be confined to her couch, but at least she wields power from that position; disability might be treated didactically, but it is at least seen as potentially productive, useful, even ideal. Returning to the wider field of Victorian fiction, domestic novels by women writers such as Yonge and Gaskell consistently invest power and dignity in their female invalids; when their particular kind of conservative feminism was rejected by more radical New Woman thinkers and subsequent feminists, even this restricted role for disabled women was stripped away. Disability becomes, in the modernist novel, a sign of abjection, of corruption, of all that is moribund and backward and expendable. As the equation between disability and femininity was successfully resisted, the metaphorical meaning of disability which had put the instructive invalid on her pedestal ceased to function. For some readers, the gain might outweigh the loss, but for disabled women who could now find themselves nowhere at all in fiction, not even on unsustainably high pedestals, I would argue that the gain was uncertain indeed.

Notes 1 ‘The Woman Question’ refers to the debate that raged throughout the Victorian period about women’s proper role in society, against a backdrop of gathering agitation for women’s civil and political rights and the expansion of women’s access to education and employment. 2 Mary Elizabeth Braddon was a best-selling author associated with the trend for ‘sensation’ in the 1860s. 3 Mary Martha Sherwood’s series of morally instructive children’s books, The Fairchild Family (1818– 1847), was extremely popular and influential, although its lugubrious tone was often parodied in later Victorian children’s books. 4 For discussion of how George Eliot re-works this plot, and the significance of her contrasting (though equally watery) finale, see Lumpkin (1991: 439) and Gore (2019: 173–187).

Works Cited Burstyn, Joan N. (1980) Victorian Education and the Ideal of Womanhood, London: Croom Helm. Coolidge, Susan (2009/1872) What Katy Did, London: Puffin Books. Davis, Lennard J. (1995) Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body, London: Verso. Frawley, Maria H. (2004) Invalidism and Identity in Nineteenth-Century Britain, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie (1997) Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American ­Culture and Literature, New York: Columbia University Press. Gaskell, Elizabeth (1995/1850) “The Moorland Cottage,” Suzanne Lewis (ed.) The Moorland Cottage and Other Stories, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gore, Clare Walker (2019) Plotting Disability in the Nineteenth-Century Novel, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Hale, Elizabeth (2010) “Disability and the Individual Talent: Adolescent Girlhood in The Pillars of the House and What Katy Did,” Women’s Writing, 17(2): 343–360.

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Disability, femininity & power in mid-Victorian women’s writing Herndl, Diane Price (1993) Invalid Women: Figuring Feminine Illness in American Fiction and Culture, 1840–1940, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Holmes, Martha Stoddard (2004) Fictions of Affliction: Physical Disability in Victorian Culture, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Juckett, Elizabeth C. (2009) “Cross-Gendering the Underwoods: Christian Subjection in Charlotte Yonge’s The Pillars of the House,” in Tamara S. Wagner (ed.) Antifeminism and the Victorian Novel: Rereading Nineteenth-Century Women Writers, Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, pp.117–136. Lumpkin, Ramona (1991) “(Re) Visions of Virtue: Elizabeth Gaskell’s ‘Moorland Cottage’ and George ­Eliot’s ‘the Mill on the Floss,’” Studies in the Novel, 23(4): 432–442. Mitchell, David T., and Sharon L. Snyder (2000) Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Mitchell, Sally (1983) Dinah Mulock Craik, Woodbridge, CT: Twayne Publishers. Nead, Lynda (1988) Myths of Sexuality: Representations of Women in Victorian Britain, Oxford: Basil Blackwell. “Novels, Past and Present.” (1866) Saturday Review, 21(546): 438–440. Ruskin, John. (1865/2004) “Of Queens’ Gardens,” in Dinah Birch (ed.) Selected Writings, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schaffer, Talia (2016) Romance’s Rival: Familiar Marriage in Victorian Fiction, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schalk, Sami (2017) “Disability and Women’s Writing,” in Clare Barker and Stuart Murray (eds.) The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Disability, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ­ pp. 170–184. Showalter, Elaine (1977) A Literature of Their Own: From Charlotte Brontë to Doris Lessing, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Sturrock, June (1995) “Heaven and Home”: Charlotte M. Yonge’s Domestic Fiction and the Victorian Debate Over Women, University of Victoria Press. Yonge, Charlotte M. (1865/1985) The Clever Woman of the Family. London: Virago.

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5 THE “QUEST FOR HARMONY”? Utopia, matriarchal communities, and feminist self-critique Kaye Mitchell

Utopian literature has long been identified as a generative site for feminist writers and thinkers. If the function of ideology is to naturalise (and institutionalise) a given reality (such as the patriarchal ‘reality’ in which men are held to be ‘naturally’ superior, more rational, and stronger than women), then a utopia can reveal this reality to be a construction, can denaturalise it, by positing some other, quite different (post- or anti-patriarchal) reality, by arguing for the possibility of change, and by foregrounding the desire for change. The vital role that imagination plays in bringing about sociopolitical change means that literature would seem to be ideally suited to the task of allowing us to anticipate, and speculatively situate ourselves in, this imagined, better future. In this chapter, I will first trace, in finer detail, the shifting relationship between utopian literature, feminism, and utopianism (as a mode of thinking), considering why and how utopian literature has been useful for feminist writers and considering also the extent to which feminism itself (as a set of beliefs and a political movement intent upon systemic social transformation) might be viewed as utopian. What I will proceed to do, thereafter, is to assess the extent to which feminist utopian literature might be engaged not only in offering a critique of patriarchal structures and societies, but also, in a more fraught endeavour, in looking inwards, at the question of what ‘feminism’ itself is, what its aims are, and how it might (or might not) function. To do this, I will analyse selected examples of utopian literature by women that have at their centre single-sex and/or matriarchal communities: Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland (1915), Joanna Russ’ The Female Man (1975), and Sarah Hall’s The Carhullan Army (2007). These examples, I will suggest, show how feminist utopian literature facilitates the testing out of different versions of feminism, opens for feminism a space of self-narration and perhaps self-criticism, and brings to light, often, the internal fissures and tensions of a movement whose premises, methods, and goals remain perpetually (and necessarily) up for negotiation. Although there are various literary utopias and dystopias by British authors, the vast majority of single-sex and/or matriarchal communities are found in literature by American authors – other examples include Mary E. Bradley Lane’s Mizora (1880–1881), James Tiptree Jr’s “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” (1976) (Tiptree is a pseudonym of Alice Sheldon), and Suzy McKee Charnas’ Walk to the End of the World (1974) and Motherlines (1978). In this chapter, I am working towards an analysis of the meta commentary on single-sex feminist utopias offered by (British author) Sarah Hall’s novel, The Carhullan Army; in order to do so, however, I first want to suggest that even the ‘classic’ examples of Herland and The Female Man can be read as displaying DOI: 10.4324/9781003429951-7

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an interest in the complex internal dynamics of feminism and as engaged in processes of feminist self-critique. The inclusion of these earlier, American literary examples thus serves both to complicate a narrative of increasing disaffection with the concept of utopia over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries – suggesting that doubt and disharmony are present even in earlier utopias – and to demonstrate the take-up of ideas of feminist utopianism across national boundaries, positioning Hall’s novel as a response to these earlier, American texts.

Utopia, utopianism, and feminism Darko Suvin offers a seemingly straightforward definition of utopia, describing it as “the verbal construction of a particular quasi-human community where sociopolitical institutions, norms, and individual relationships are organized according to a more perfect principle than in the author’s community” (Suvin 1979: 49). In his introduction to Demand the Impossible, Tom Moylan claims that “utopian writing”: is, at heart, rooted in the unfulfilled needs and wants of specific classes, groups, and individuals in their unique historical contexts. Produced through the fantasizing powers of the imagination, utopia opposes the affirmative culture maintained by dominant ideology. Utopia negates the contradictions in a social system by forging visions of what is not yet realized either in theory or in practice. In generating such figures of hope, utopia contributes to the open space of opposition. (Moylan 2014: 1) We might notice here, in particular: the focus on institutions, norms, and community; an origin in “unfulfilled needs and wants”; the role of fantasy and/or imagination; the oppositional or contestatory nature of utopia, and, in Moylan’s account, the persistence of hope. All of these qualities suggest the utility of utopian writing for feminist authors and thinkers. Yet utopian writing is also, Moylan asserts, “complex and contradictory” (1), and the very word ‘utopia’ famously invokes both ‘outopos’ (the no place – the place that does not exist) and ‘eutopos’ (the better place); many literary utopias play on this tension, including Thomas More’s original Utopia, published in 1516 (Sargent 2010: 2). As Lyman Tower Sargent cautions, then, “Utopia should be considered an ‘essentially contested concept,’ or a concept about which there is fundamental disagreement” (Sargent 2008: 351–352). One major source of disagreement within utopian studies has been the extent to which a posited utopia should or should not be viewed as a blueprint for a ‘perfect’ or ideal society. Thus Fredric Jameson, for whom utopia remains a key concept in his Marxist method, argues that: “It is a mistake to approach Utopias with positive expectations, as though they offered visions of happy worlds, spaces of fulfillment and cooperation”; instead, he claims, they should be seen as “diagnostic interventions […] which, like those of the great revolutionaries, always aim at the alleviation and elimination of the sources of exploitation and suffering, rather than at the composition of blueprints for bourgeois comfort” (Jameson 2005: 12). This, to my mind, explains exactly how utopia (as a literary genre) or utopianism (as a political philosophy) might be useful for feminism: not as a means of composing “blueprints for bourgeois comfort”, pictures of some happy, static, post-patriarchal world; but rather, as operating in a mode of critique, offering a “diagnostic intervention”, and one that looks inwards as well as outwards. We might also think, then, that it is a mistake to approach ‘feminism’ with these particular kinds of “positive expectations”, and that feminism should do more than compose “blueprints for bourgeois comfort”; in the examples that I consider in this chapter, their production of discomfort is, I contend, their notable strength. 83

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The blueprint utopias of the late nineteenth century fell out of favour for their seeming rigidity, and their tendencies towards the uniform or totalitarian, only to be replaced in the 1960s and 1970s by a revitalised conception of utopia as more “kinetic”,1 open-ended, and less prescriptive. ­Feminism too, particularly since the Second Wave, has had to work through accusations of exclusivity, narrowness, and dogmatism, to embrace difference and abandon a monolithic (invariably white, middle class) feminism, singular, in favour of a more malleable, less prescriptive idea of feminisms, plural. The timescales do not line up – as Angelika Bammer notes, “At the very time that the dream of utopia was being pronounced dead [in the 1960s and 1970s], it was vibrantly alive in the emergent American and western European women’s movements” – but the trajectories bear comparison (Bammer 1991: 1). The feminist utopia, in its various literary incarnations, illuminates the ways in which feminists have, in different eras, conceived of the feminist project itself. It is the self-reflexivity of utopia – its increasingly evident self-critical capacity – that comprises its utility for feminist thinking, I suggest. The earliest text I focus on here is Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland, first published in 1915; but we can trace the literary genre of the feminist utopia as far back as Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World in 1666, in which the narrator declares that: although I have neither power, time nor occasion to conquer the world as Alexander and Caesar did; yet rather than not to be mistress of one, since Fortune and the Fates would give me none, I have made a world of my own: for which no body, I hope, will blame me, since it is in every one’s power to do the like. (Cavendish 1666/1992: 124) Other pre-twentieth century feminist utopias include the benevolent bluestocking feminism of Sarah Scott’s Millenium Hall (1762), Mary E. Bradley Lane’s eugenics-influenced Mizora (published serially in 1880–1881 and in book form in 1890), and Elizabeth Corbett’s New Amazonia (1889), which imagines a society governed by women. Rokeya Sakhawat Hussain’s “Sultana’s Dream”, a rare early example of a feminist utopia by a writer of colour, first appeared in The Indian Ladies’ Magazine in 1905; if the narrower literary category of the “feminist utopia” seems dominated by white writers, then this is countered by the acclaimed works of speculative fiction, science fiction, Afrofuturism, and Africanfuturism, by writers such as Octavia Butler, N.K. Jemisin, Nalo Hopkinson, and Nnedi Okorafor, which make up a broader category of futuristic fiction in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The later flourishing of feminist utopian writing and feminist science fiction occurs in the 1970s, and it occurs primarily in the work of American authors such as Ursula Le Guin (The Dispossessed, 1974), Joanna Russ (The Female Man, 1975, which I will discuss later), Marge Piercy (Woman on the Edge of Time, 1976), and Sally Miller Gearhart (The Wanderground, 1978); it is this American canon to which Hall is responding in The Carhullan Army. Across their pages, these feminist utopias consider issues around desire and the possibility of change; community, collectivity, and governance; family, kinship, marriage, and motherhood; the distribution of power within a society; gender roles (and their possible reimagination); technology and the relative merits of industrialism versus the rural, agrarian, or pastoral. Anne Mellor, whose 1982 Women’s Studies article “On Feminist Utopias” is a key critical reference point, divides feminist utopias into those depicting all-female societies, biological androgyny, and egalitarian two-sex societies. The texts that I discuss in this chapter include representations of all-female societies (even while extending beyond these) and in doing so, I argue, evince most starkly the possibility of self-critique latent within feminist utopian literature. 84

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If the feminist utopia has, as I have outlined, enjoyed popularity in different periods, ­utopianism has also proved to be a frequent, though not-uncontroversial, reference point within feminist theory since the 1970s. Thus, Frances Bartkowski claims that “Utopian thinking is crucial to feminism, a movement that could only be produced and challenged by and in a patriarchal world” (Bartkowski 1989: 9, 12); Mellor argues that “Feminist theory is inherently utopian” (Mellor 1982: 243), and Bammer outlines how “the various feminisms that took shape in the 1970s called for new ways of seeing, thinking, and feeling, new ways of living, loving and working, new ways of experiencing the body, using language, and defining power”, and demanded, therefore, “a complete transformation of the very reality that the erstwhile dreamers of the 1960s were supposedly learning to accept” (Bammer 1991: 1–2); for Bammer, feminism is “not only revolutionary but radically utopian” (Bammer 1991: 2). Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron’s landmark 1980 anthology, New French Feminisms, includes a “Utopias” section, with excerpts from works by Simone de Beauvoir, Marguerite Duras, Julia Kristeva, and Hélène Cixous, among others; as the editors explain, “This section communicates the vision of the new worlds to which feminist thought and action are dedicated” (Marks and de Courtivron 1980: 231). As these and other critics have pointed out, both feminism and utopianism are future-oriented, but grounded in the present, offer alternatives to the present order, see present society (and even present reality) as a construction that is, in principle and perhaps also in practice, alterable, and acknowledge that this requires the changing of attitudes and beliefs (and languages, concepts, cultural paradigms) just as much as the changing of actions, behaviours, and societal structures. However, the utility of utopianism for feminism has been questioned and qualified in more recent theorisations of utopia. “Feminists love a utopia”, writes Sally Kitch – an assertion that Lise Shapiro Sanders borrows for the title of her chapter (subtitled “Collaboration, Conflict and the Futures of Feminism”) in Third Wave Feminism (Kitch 2000: 1). Both acknowledge that “the discourse of utopianism has deeply informed feminism” (Sanders 2007: 3), but while Kitch proceeds, in Higher Ground, to argue that feminists need to move from utopianism to realism, Sanders maintains that a utopia that “resists the impulse towards stasis” can “be productive for feminism” (Sanders 2007: 10). In recent assessments of utopia and utopianism, feminist critics have questioned whether we can have “a utopianism that is not marked by closure and finality of end”, and “a feminism that is not universalizing or exclusive” (Sargisson 1996: 97), and whether we can avoid the accusation of fantasy (that is, the characterisation of utopia as the nowhere-place, an impossible dream). Kitch acknowledges that “feminism’s varied and contentious history may help explain the attraction of utopianism, which seems to offer harmony among the myriad positions that have characterized feminist thought and theory over the years”, but she asks: is harmony the highest goal? Doesn’t the quest for harmony itself indicate a utopian mindset in its automatic distrust of conflict, dialect and debate? How do we know that feminism is better off with a unified rather than a cacophonous voice? How do we know that internal dissension is not feminism’s greatest strength? (Kitch 2000: 107) The texts I analyse in this chapter, however, suggest that “internal dissension” may be present even in works that reveal a persistent desire for utopia, and that utopia need not necessarily offer (or represent) “harmony” or unity. Even classic feminist utopias such as Herland showcase what Sanders advocates – an “expanded conception of utopian thinking”, which “[allows] for the productive expression and negotiation of conflict” (Sanders 2007: 12). As the readings that follow will show, the foregrounding of debate, disharmony, and even conflict becomes more pronounced as 85

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the twentieth century advances; nevertheless, these texts suggest that the utopia remains a viable – albeit malleable – concept for feminist writers into the twenty-first century.

Herland, “sister-love”, and the fantasy of female harmony Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland (first published in serial form, in Gilman’s magazine, The Forerunner, in 1915) relates the story of three male explorers arriving in a remote land occupied only by women, and gradually discovering the workings of this parthenogenetic community in which motherhood has become a kind of first principle and religion. Beyond its wry presentation of the men’s bafflement, the undoing of their stereotypical prejudices, and the sly denaturalisation of the patriarchal society in which they have been raised, Herland foregrounds a fantasy of female unity, harmony, and “reasonableness”; I will go on to suggest that it does so strategically, rather than as an endorsement of the fantasy. As blustering chauvinist Terry asserts, prior to their arrival in Herland, in a society comprising only women, “They would fight among themselves. […] Women always do. We mustn’t look to find any sort of order and organization” (Gilman 1915/1979: 8). While Jeff, with his (equally misplaced) romantic reverence towards women, counters that they will find “a peaceful, harmonious sisterhood”, Vandyck Jennings, the novel’s narrator and the story’s moral centre (or, in his own terms, holder of the “middle ground, highly scientific, of course”) disputes both predictions, yet notes that “These are just women, and mothers, and where there’s motherhood you don’t find sisterhood – not much” (Gilman 1915/1979: 8). What they discover, though, is precisely a community exclusively comprising the equable and calm: They had the evenest tempers, the most perfect patience and good nature – one of the things most impressive about them all was the absence of irritability. So far we had only this group to study, but afterward I found it a common trait. (Gilman1915/1979: 46) They are “inconveniently reasonable” (Gilman 1915/1979: 55), these women, and their society is governed by “mother-love […] raised to its highest power” (Gilman 1915/1979: 57); for Van, more surprising is the ubiquity of “a sister-love which, even while recognizing the actual relationship, we found it hard to credit” (Gilman 1915/1979: 58). The notion of a non-hierarchical sisterhood-withoutconflict is repeated endlessly: “They had no enemies; they themselves were all sisters and friends” (Gilman 1915/1979: 59); “they had no wars. They had had no kings, and no priests, and no aristocracies. They were sisters, and as they grew, they grew together – not by competition, but by united action” (Gilman 1915/1979: 60). “Here we have Human Motherhood – in full working use”, explains one of their guides, Moadine, “Nothing else except the literal sisterhood of our origin, and the far higher and deeper union of our social growth” (Gilman 1915/1979: 66); “the evident unanimity of these women” is described by Van as “the most conspicuous feature of their whole culture” (Gilman 1915/1979: 67); “Mother-love” practised as “a religion” includes “that limitless feeling of sisterhood, that wide unity in service, which was so difficult for us to grasp” (Gilman 1915/1979: 68, 69). The repetition alone bespeaks an awareness on Gilman’s part that a society of women might not be either equable or equitable; if the men’s preconceptions and misgivings are largely eradicated, are the readers’ also? And indeed, within the depiction of Herland, various faultlines begin to appear that reveal the conditions of this “harmony” and the methods of its implementation. Primary among these are the allusions to a eugenic policy of “breeding out” what one guide calls “the lowest types” (Gilman 1915/1979: 82);2 as well as the existence of an implicitly hierarchical stratification of society 86

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such that education of children (child-rearing, effectively) is assigned only to “the most highly competent”, while the mother deprived of this task “honors [the] real superiority” of this more competent educator (Gilman 1915/1979: 83). More subtly, though, the text hints at the problems of a static utopia (and a correspondingly static feminism) such as this appears to be, and in these moments the fantasy of harmony is punctured – or rather is revealed as precisely that: a fantasy, albeit an instructive one.3 When Terry complains that, “I like Something Doing. Here it’s all done”, Van concedes: There was something to this criticism. The years of pioneering lay far behind them. Theirs was a civilization in which the initial difficulties had long since been overcome. The untroubled peace, the unmeasured plenty, the steady health, the large good will and smooth management which ordered everything, left nothing to overcome. It was like a pleasant family in an old established, perfectly run country place. (Gilman 1915/1979: 99) In this way, Gilman makes it clear that the society of Herland is not the goal, but is rather indicative of a process that remains, still, incomplete. The novel thereby asks questions about the limitations of a feminism that has “nothing left to overcome”, or a feminism whose goals are so static that their realisation renders the movement itself redundant. Is harmony the goal of feminism? Or might harmony be a threat to a feminism conceived on the basis of a more evolutionary (or at least responsive, flexible) understanding? Must a revolutionary movement be more than or other than a “pleasant family”? Herland, on my reading, implies that it must, and this is one reason why ultimately the women of Herland seek, not only to incorporate their male visitors (with the exception of the troublesome Terry), but actually to move towards the re-establishment of a two-sex society. As Val Gough notes (following a more general critical trend in Gilman scholarship), “the fictional utopia in Herland functions not primarily as blueprint but as a narrative strategy to facilitate social critique” (Gough 1998: 130), and that critique, I suggest, also crucially has a reflexive aspect to it.

The Female Man’s multivocal feminism(s) Of the three texts discussed in this chapter, Russ’ 1975 novel The Female Man is the most directly and self-consciously engaged with contemporaneous feminist debates – often playing these out in a comedic, parodic way. Thus, we are presented with party conversations in which men pontificate: “Well, Janet, I’ll tell you what I think of the new feminism. I think it’s a mistake” (Russ 1975/2002: 43, emphasis in original), or jest: “Burned any bras lately har har twinkle twinkle A pretty girl like you doesn’t need to be liberated twinkle har Don’t listen to those hysterical bitches twinkle twinkle twinkle” (Russ 1975/2002: 49). Meanwhile, politically unenlightened wives (given names like “Lamentissa” and “Wailissa”) compete with each other and bemoan their useless husbands (Russ 1975/2002: 35), and teenager Laura (daughter of the “typical family” with whom utopian visitor Janet lodges) earnestly declares, “I’m a victim of penis envy […] so I can’t ever be happy or lead a normal life” (Russ 1975/2002: 57, 65). One of the protagonists, Joanna, explains “how I turned into a man” – “First I had to turn into a woman” (Russ 1975/2002: 133): I knew beyond the shadow of a hope that to be female is to be [for a man] mirror and honeypot, servant and judge, the terrible Rhadamanthus for whom he must perform but whose judgement is not human and whose services are at anyone’s command, the vagina dentata and the stuffed teddy-bear he gets if he passes the test. (Russ 1975/2002: 134) 87

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This description, evidently, plays out the internal contradictions of “femininity” in a patriarchal society. Elsewhere, Joanna muses on her irreconcilable “incarnation” as both a compliant patriarchal subject, who enjoys housework and flirts with men, and an “enraged” feminist (Russ 1975/2002: 110). Amanda Boulter argues that, while “many women’s texts of the 1970s present speculative futures which draw from contemporary feminist analyses of society and work them through in a fictive context”, others “went further and used the fantastic to reflect back upon the theoretical to expose the conceptual contradictions within feminism” (Boulter 1999: 154–155). The Female Man, I suggest, does both, via its meditation on, and enactment of, the science fictional idea of “an infinite number of possible universes” (Russ 1975/2002: 6–7). Russ’ novel builds on her earlier short story, “When it Changed” (1972), but while the story situates itself firmly within the utopian world of “Whileaway”, the novel branches out in multiple directions. The primary way it does this is through the juxtaposition of narrative perspectives from four protagonists: Janet, a visitor from a utopian, women-only world (Whileaway); Jeannine, an inhabitant of an alternative America (one in which World War Two has not happened, and women have fewer rights or opportunities); Joanna, the inhabitant of a more recognisable present-day – i.e. 1960s – America (and also, sometimes, clearly a mouthpiece for the author herself); and the assassin Jael, a visitor from a more dystopian world in which “Womanland” and “Manland” are at war. Through these protagonists, the novel “strategically interlaces four distinct genres – ­Utopia, science fiction, alternative history, and ‘mainstream’ postmodern autobiographical writing” (Cortiel 2005: 501). Through the four protagonists, it also posits different stages and versions of feminism: from Jeannine’s depressed false consciousness to Joanna’s burgeoning awareness of gender politics, to the post-gender world of Janet’s Whileaway, and from the relative peace and innocence of that utopian society to the conflict and aggression of Jael’s world. The radical multiplying of the “I”s in the text, and the abrupt shifts from one to the other, are handled with a wry self-consciousness: “As I have said before, I (not the one above, please)…” (Russ 1975/2002: 19). In this way, through what Boulter describes as an “anarchic structure” (though it is actually a lot more controlled and crafted than that description implies), The Female Man “[articulates] the contradictions within and between feminist perspectives without then reconciling them in a linear narrative”, thereby generating “a series of contradictions which remain deliberately unresolved” (Boulter 1999: 155). So while the novel wears its feminist credentials on its sleeve, it also offers different possible interpretations of what form that feminism might take. The text shifts dizzyingly between multiple voices and viewpoints, including anticipated antifeminist reviews (“Shrill … vituperative … […] selfish femlib … needs a good lay … this shapeless book … […] twisted, neurotic” [Russ 1975/2002: 140–141]), digs at feminist orthodoxy (e.g. in Joanna’s parody of “feminine” writing as “all very female and deep and full of essences, […] very primitive and full of ‘and’s,’ it is called ‘run-on sentences’” (Russ 1975/2002: 137)), and increasingly frequent metafictional asides to the reader. Jeanne Cortiel claims that The Female Man “introduces a new version of utopianism that is not centred on a monologic critique of society, but rests on uncertainty, speaking with many different voices from a variety of vantage points” (Cortiel 2005: 504). For Tom Moylan, this is what makes the novel a paradigmatic “critical utopia” (such texts notably “focus on the continuing presence of difference and imperfection within utopian society itself and thus render more recognizable and dynamic alternatives”) (Moylan 2014: 10). Moylan sees The Female Man as employing a kind of “montage” technique (a term more usually employed of photography or film) which “negates the rigid instrumental fetishism and the authoritarian and hierarchical efficiency of modern capitalism and phallocentrism as much as it negates the complementary linear, dogmatic politics of

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vanguard parties” (Moylan 2014: 79). These statements might equally be applied to its “version” of feminism – non-monologic, non-totalising, multiple, open-ended, self-critical. In its depictions of strife, envy, and disagreement between women, The Female Man identifies a key obstacle to – but also an inevitable, integral element of – feminism, conceived monolithically.4 This is a generative disharmony, however, for both feminism and utopianism, and one which uses irony as its primary method. Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor notes “utopia’s own profound relationship to the ironical mode, interested as utopia is in the kind of discontinuities, in the simultaneous double-vision, that the ironic mode is so good at bringing forward” (Wagner-Lawlor 2002: 114, emphasis added). The primary ideological tension in The Female Man is between the peace of Whileaway and the conflict of Jael’s world, but towards the end of the novel, Jael asserts that Janet’s version of Whileawayan history is a false one: Whileaway’s plague [which, it is claimed, killed all of the men centuries before] is a big lie. Your ancestors lied about it. It is I who gave you your ‘plague,’ my dear, about which you can now pietize and moralize to your heart’s content; I, I, I, I am the plague, Janet Evason. I and the war I fought built your world for you, I and those like me, we gave you a thousand years of peace and love and the Whileawayan flowers nourish themselves on the bones of the men we have slain. (Russ 1975/2002: 211) If this is true, then Jael’s world is not an alternative to Janet’s, but rather a stage in its emergence. The novel lets the reader ponder the viability of these routes to feminist revolution, these different belief systems (“I don’t believe”, Janet says of Jael’s allegation) (Russ 1975/2002: 212), and while Jeannine and Joanna indicate their willingness to help Jael in the continuing wars between Womanland and Manland, Janet refuses. Sidelined as she (and her version of feminism) appears to be by the end of the novel, Janet remains, the narrator tells us, a vital source of hope: “Goodbye to Janet, whom we don’t believe in and whom we deride, but who is in secret our savior from utter despair” (Russ 1975/2002: 212–213).

The Carhullan Army: looking backwards to feminism and utopianism By the late twentieth century, utopia appears again to have fallen out of favour, with feminist utopianism of the kind that Bammer discusses also subject to scepticism – within feminist theory and literature. One stark example of the scepticism towards utopia in literature of the late twentieth century is Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel, The Handmaid’s Tale. Fiona Tolan, who positions the novel as a kind of critical dystopia, explains how: Against a backdrop of postmodernist debate, the mid-1980s became a period of evaluation and reinvention for feminism, as a second generation of feminists inherited the second wave. The Handmaid’s Tale uses this moment of transition to evaluate the motives and means of what was becoming an increasingly theorized feminism. (Tolan 2005: 19) In Atwood’s novel, Tolan suggests, the utopian vision of a world free from male violence, a world that is “safe” for women, mutates into the decidedly dystopian society of Gilead; Atwood “exposes the tyranny of Gilead’s utopianism”, without, on Tolan’s reading, succumbing to a kind of

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anti-utopianism either (2005: 20). As Tolan shows, the critique (or perhaps satirising) of feminist utopianism is most evident in the pronouncements of the Aunts: For the women that come after, Aunt Lydia said, it will be so much better. The women will live in harmony together … There can be bonds of real affection … Women united for a common end! Helping one another in their daily chores as they walk the path of life together. (Atwood 1996: 171) But while The Handmaid’s Tale ultimately shows the source of tyranny to be a patriarchal subversion/exploitation of this feminist desire for “harmony” and safety – albeit with the assistance of pseudo-feminist figures such as the Aunts – Sarah Hall’s 2007 novel The Carhullan Army, which I turn to now, appears to locate the potential for tyranny and violence within the community of women itself. The Carhullan Army arguably bears the influence of The Handmaid’s Tale (among other progenitors), in its concern with questions of harmony, sisterhood, and feminist utopianism.5 Both novels are structured by a narrative of “loss”,6 exhibiting a desire for utopia (and for the versions of harmony and sisterhood that, seemingly, it represents) as well as a keen awareness of its susceptibility to totalitarian appropriation. In my analysis of The Carhullan Army, I will concentrate on the ways in which the novel looks backwards – its ‘retro-feminism’ – even while seemingly providing a vision of the future (thereby offering a reflection on the legacies of the Second Wave and on the utility – or not – of Second-Wave strategies for the navigation of future challenges), and on its presentation of disharmony (as contrasted with more harmonious images of sisterhood), the politics of power and militancy. The preceding discussions of Herland and The Female Man serve to exemplify the feminist utopianism to which Hall is responding, to show the different forms that a feminist utopia might take, and to suggest that even the classic or model feminist utopias carry the seeds of disharmony and anticipation of disappointment that are found more overtly in The Carhullan Army. The Carhullan Army comprises the statement of a “female prisoner detained under Section 4(b) of the ‘Insurgency Prevention (Unrestricted Powers) Act’”, in a dystopian Britain suffering climate breakdown, food and fuel shortages, and ruled by an authoritarian regime known simply as “The Authority” (Hall 2007: prelims). The protagonist-narrator, who identifies herself as “Sister” (“This is the name that was given me three years ago. It is what the others called me. It is what I call myself”), escapes the regime and goes in search of a group of women living outside the system, in the Cumbrian hills (Hall 2007: 5). As she makes the perilous journey to Carhullan, Sister reflects both on her own aspirations for this community – “When I got to the farm everything would be better. The women would see to that” (Hall 2007: 14) – and on the more critical views of the farm to be found in the wider community: for the man who gives her a lift part of the way, the women of Carhullan are “like a gang of terrorists”, and Sister thinks “There were other choice words, no doubt, perched on his tongue, […] and I had heard them all before. Cult. Faction. Coven” (Hall 2007: 18, 19). For the locals in her market town, when Sister was a teenager, the Carhullan women were “nuns, religious freaks, communists, convicts. They were child-deserters, men-haters, cuntlickers, or celibates. They were, just as they had been hundreds of years ago, witches, up to no good in the sticks” (Hall 2007: 48). In this way, the novel gestures to a history of all-women ­communities – religious, political, or otherwise – and to their diverse reception, mythologisation, and persecution; for the narrator, this combined mistrust and mythologisation seems part of the appeal of Carhullan.7 In the media articles on Carhullan, years before the current national crisis, 90

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“The place sounded utopian, martial or monastic, depending on which publication was interviewing, and what angle they wanted to push”, and in Sister’s account of her time there the boundaries ­between these categories (utopian, martial, monastic) are shown to be problematically blurred (Hall 2007: 48–49). Importantly, the Carhullan community and the values it espouses are presented from the outset as “retro” and this is a novel that looks backwards as intently and interrogatively as it does forwards: Jackie and Vee, the original founders, are described as “retro feminists” and Jackie’s press statements echo a version of 1970s feminism in their language and focus: It’s still all about body and sexuality for us […]. We are controlled through those things; psychologically, financially, eternally. We endorse the manmade competition between ourselves that disunites us, stripping us of our true ability. […] It’s time for a new society. (Hall 2007: 50, 51) Daniel Lea muses that “the novel’s gender politics may seem a little dated” (Lea 2017: 171), proceeding to argue that “Sister’s journey to Carhullan is motivated as much by nostalgia as it is by a desire to escape” her life with her husband under the rule of the Authority, and that “her adventure is retrogressive” because it takes her back to an older (pre-technological) kind of “subsistence living” (Lea 2017: 173).8 Certainly, the Carhullan community is repeatedly associated with the past – the narrator’s past (her memories of encountering the women years before), but also a national and political past: There was something better out there. I knew what it was and where to find it. Even if it meant looking behind me, to a venue that had long been forgotten in the aftermath of catastrophe, and the desperate rush to subsist. […] It was of another age […].

(Hall 2007: 54, emphasis added)

My suggestion is that the novel is deliberately “dated” in the version of feminism that it depicts, because it is invoking a particular period of feminist utopianism. Emilie Walezak notes that “Hall’s depiction of a retro-feminist commune reminiscent of the 1970s is perfectly coherent with her choice of the feminist utopian genre that emerged at the same period in response to the political struggles for equality” (Walezak 2019: 71), thereby implicitly positioning The Carhullan Army alongside earlier texts by the likes of Russ, Piercy, and Le Guin – and even Gilman, given that Herland’s reputation mainly stems from its publication as a standalone novel in 1979.9 Hall’s novel is also deliberately “dated” in the version of feminism that it depicts because it is offering a critique of the vision of woman, nature, and power/peace promulgated by that movement and those novels; what Walezak describes as its “post-pastoralism”, its refusal to idealise the natural world, functions as a key element of its interrogation of past eco-feminisms (Walezak 2019: 70). And yet, it is not only a critique – The Carhullan Army also exhibits a nostalgia for that vision of the intentional, independent, matriarchal-feminist community and an awe for the challenging landscape in which it has evolved. Nevertheless, as Iain Robinson shows, “From the moment Sister arrives at Carhullan Farm, the community is presented as a flawed or failing utopia” and “the longer that Sister remains at Carhullan the clearer the flaws in the utopia become” (Robinson 2013: 201). In fact, even before she has properly arrived at Carhullan, spurred on by her “hope” (“it was hope that nourished 91

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me day after day”), doubts begin to creep in (Hall 2007: 14). Sister is ambushed by several of the women, pushed roughly to the floor, then escorted at gunpoint to the building; she thinks how “It was not the reception I’d played out in my mind so many times when thinking about Carhullan. […] I’d imagined an immediate sense of unity” (Hall 2007: 62). Later, she does experience something like this “sense of unity” in her work with the other women, asserting that “There was a camaraderie on the moors and in the dormitories that I had never experienced before” (Hall 2007: 131). But before this can happen, as her initiation into the community, she is shut in the metal “dog box” for three days. Among the dreams and hallucinations that torment her during this imprisonment in the dark and (her own) filth, she dreams that I was in the mouth of an iron woman. Her teeth were closed around me, and she was carrying me back to her den of wrecked metal in the mountains. I heard the creaking of her legs as she strode, like panels of metal beating in the wind. (Hall 2007: 73) – an image both threatening and maternal, industrial and (somehow) of the landscape; its tensions bespeaking those of the community of which she is now part. When Sister enters the dining hall for the first time, the women there begin banging their knives on the tables. The description of this cacophony provokes a range of (bodily and psychological) responses and feelings in her: The sound rang through me as if I were made of glass and might shatter if it continued, so brittle and thin was my spirit. […]   I knew then that I was nothing; that I was void to the core. To get here I had committed a kind of suicide. My old life was over. I was now an unmade person. […] [T]he only heartbeat I had was the pulse these women were beating through me. (Hall 2007: 94) Only when, one by one, the women begin approaching her and kissing her on the mouth, does she understand that this “was not a clamour intended to drive me out or to let me know I bore some kind of stigma. It was the sign of acceptance I had been waiting for. It was applause” (Hall 2007: 94). The fact, however, that this “applause” is so formidable, so seemingly threatening, the fact that it “unmakes” her, gives some indication of what this “acceptance” entails. The Carhullan Army, then, remains ambiguous on the point of whether the “new society” that the women create really is (or could be) “better”, and it exhibits also a striking ambivalence about the implications of “sisterhood” and community belonging, and about the wider legacies of Second-Wave feminist utopianism. Thus, when Jackie welcomes her to “Shangri-La”, it is, Sister later reflects, “with a note of irony”, for “she [Jackie] did not try to describe Carhullan as any kind of Utopia” (Hall 2007: 78, 100). Indeed, Sister realises early on that “there were old areas of conflict, matters that had been worried at again and again by the inhabitants without resolution” (Hall 2007: 111). By the time the community begins to split over the question of whether to launch military-style action against the Authority – Jackie’s plan – and the debates that facilitated their previous decision-making have been suspended, Sister concedes that: “I knew we were as guilty of failure and disunity as any other human society. I knew we were as defective” (Hall 2007: 178). The denouement of the novel keeps in play a series of tensions: between the natural world and human militarism (conflated in the imagery of the “fresh red field” with its “flowers of war”), and between Sister as defiant

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heroine of the liberation struggle and Sister as murderous “Fury”, with the “anatomy of a fanatic” (Hall 2007: 204). Critical responses to The Carhullan Army reveal the divergent interpretations of its oblique political stance. Walezak reads the novel as a “critical dystopia” (Walezak 2019: 70), but for Anna Cottrell, “the brutality with which the women fight and kill” does not “suggest that Carhullan’s project is fatally flawed; on the contrary, the violence is exhilarating – and crucial to the novel’s feminism” – indeed, she views The Carhullan Army as “an homage to second-wave feminism” (Cottrell 2019: 686). Robinson, meanwhile, interprets Jackie’s claims “that ‘one day in the future, the land would be used again’ and that ‘people would learn to use the earth well’” as “leaving the door open for a return to the hope embodied by the utopian possibilities offered by the Carhullan model of society” (Robinson 2013: 209). This is an optimistic reading, but it elides the context of these utterances (Jackie is seeking to reassure those suspicious of her strategy of “martial resistance”) and downplays the ways in which Hall’s novel, in paralleling the authoritarianism of the Authority and the feudal structures of Carhullan, reveals the tendencies towards tyranny and fundamentalism in both.

Conclusion In her discussion of feminist utopias, Bartkowski notes a shift within the women’s movement: from an assumption “that the contaminating effects of power were tied to the work, world, and politics of men”, to an awareness of “the struggles among and inside women’s groups”, and an acknowledgement “that splits and fractures among women could not be denied if the movement was to continue to develop” (Bartkowski 1989: 6). In the three literary examples I have analysed in this chapter, we see a persistent attention to questions of (dis)harmony and a burgeoning awareness of the divisions internal to feminism; such an awareness need not, however, require the abandonment of the idea of utopia or hamper us in our feminist goals. Kitch contends that utopia requires “a discourse of harmony and perfection”, “a world without conflict”, and she maintains that “such a world can hardly exist” (Kitch 2000: 59–60). The feminist uses of utopian literature, however, suggest that utopia can admit or incorporate disharmony as part of its “diagnostic intervention” in the patriarchal world and as part of its diagnostic self-scrutiny. As Sanders explains: [U]topia is only viable if it is left permanently open, contested, in contradiction with itself, if it is never put into practice as a static, codified entity, but remains a shifting landscape of possibility. Utopia’s potential lies in its transformative nature, but this transformative quality must be brought to bear on the very meaning of the term for it to be significant in the future. (Sanders 2007: 4) Feminism – or rather, feminisms, plural – must also remain “permanently open, contested, in contradiction with itself”, “a shifting landscape of possibility”, rather than a fixed dogma. Literature’s reliance on ambiguity and affect, its openness to interpretation – as evidenced by the contradictory readings of The Carhullan Army – arguably works against this idea of the static and codified; literary texts are, on my analysis, “shifting landscape[s]” of semantic and ideological “possibility” and they therefore function as an ideal site for reflecting on the shifting ideas of both feminism and utopianism.

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Notes 1 This term “kinetic” is actually used as early as 1905, by H.G. Wells in A Modern Utopia: “the Modern Utopia must be not static but kinetic, must shape not as a permanent state but as a hopeful stage, leading to a long ascent of stages” (Wells 2005: 11). He also states here that, “In a modern Utopia there will, indeed, be no perfection; in Utopia there must also be friction, conflicts and waste, but the waste will be enormously less than in our world” (Wells 2005: 176). 2 Gilman’s apparent endorsement of both negative and positive varieties of eugenics is one of the more problematic elements of her philosophy. For discussions of Gilman, eugenics and reproductive health, see, for example: Dana Seitler, “Unnatural Selection: Mothers, Eugenic Feminism and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Regeneration Narratives”, American Quarterly 55.1 (2003): 61–88; Stephanie Peebles Tavera, “Her Body, Herland: Reproductive Health and Dis/topian Satire in Charlotte Perkins Gilman”, Utopian Studies 29.1 (2018): 1–20; and Catherine J. Golden and Joanna Schneider Zangrando (eds.), The Mixed Legacy of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2000). 3 We might also conclude that the utopian’s society’s reproduction through a parthenogenetic system in which women can will themselves (or not will themselves) to become pregnant, along with what Val Gough calls Herland’s “impossible geographical isolation”, anchors the text firmly in the realm of fantasy. This, Gough claims, makes Herland quite different to its precursor, Moving the Mountain, in which Gilman aimed “to portray a pragmatopia, one which she saw as a realistic proposition or blueprint for future social change” (Gough 1998: 140). 4 See, for example, ‘The Great Happiness Contest’, a parodic play script in which women compete over who is happiest – those who are married with children or those who work (Russ 1985: 116–117). 5 In an article for The Guardian, Hall discusses Robert O’Brien’s 1970s dystopian novel, Z for Zachariah and its influence on her writing of The Carhullan Army. “The Survivor’s Tale”, Saturday 1 December 2007. 6 For an account of the “stories” told “about Western feminist theory’s recent past” – a “series of interlocking narratives of progress, loss, and return” – see Clare Hemmings, Why Stories Matter: The Political Grammar of Feminist Theory (Duke UP, 2011), pp. 3ff. 7 See Nina Auerbach’s Communities of Women on single sex communities in literature as “[feeding] dreams of a world beyond the normal” (1978: 5). In a more recent novel with matriarchal communities – and the panicked patriarchal response to them – at its heart, Alice Albinia’s Cwen, the narrator wryly notes that: “Of course, everybody knows how hard it is to countenance the idea of women-only gatherings, womenonly groups. The mere sight of women assembling en masse makes certain people, women as well as men, feel uneasy” (Albinia 2021: 12). 8 This return to a “pre-technological” world is characteristic of a certain strand of utopian writing – not only the feminist kind. Examples include Sally Miller Gearheart’s The Wanderground (1978), with its depiction of the “hill women”, and William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890), with its return to a medievalstyle agrarian culture. 9 Herland was first published by Gilman in 1915 in her radical magazine, The Forerunner, made available in 1968 by Greenwood reprints as a facsimile reprint of the magazine, and finally published in book form in 1979 (by Pantheon in the US and The Women’s Press in the UK).

Works Cited Albinia, Alice (2021) Cwen, London: Serpent’s Tail. Atwood, Margaret (1996) The Handmaid’s Tale [1985], London: Vintage. Auerbach, Nina (1978) Communities of Women, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bammer, Angelika (1991) Partial Visions: Feminism and Utopianism in the 1970s, London: Routledge. Bartkowski, Frances (1989) Feminist Utopias, Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Boulter, Amanda (1999) “Unnatural Acts: American Feminism and Joanna Russ’s The Female Man,” Women: A Cultural Review, 10(2): 151–166. Cavendish, Margaret (1666/1992) “The Blazing World [1666],” in Kate Lilley (ed.) The Blazing World and Other Writings, London: Penguin. Cortiel, Jeanne (2005) “Joanne Russ: The Female Man,” in D. Seed (ed.) A Companion to Science Fiction, Oxford: Wiley, pp. 500–511. Cottrell, Anna (2019) “The Power of Love: From Feminist Utopia to the Politics of Imperceptibility in Sarah Hall’s Fiction,” Textual Practice, 33(4): 679–693.

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Utopia, matriarchal communities & feminist self-critique Gilman, Charlotte Perkins (1915/1979) Herland, London: The Women’s Press. Golden, Catherine J. and Joanna Schneider Zangrando (eds.) (2000) The Mixed Legacy of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Newark: University of Delaware Press. Gough, Val (1998) “‘In the Twinkling of an Eye’: Gilman’s Utopian Imagination,” in Gough and J. Rudd (eds.) A Very Different Story: Studies on the Fiction of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, pp. 129–143. Hall, Sarah (2007) The Carhullan Army, London: Faber. Hemmings, Clare (2011) Why Stories Matter: The Political Grammar of Feminist Theory, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Jameson, Fredric (2005) Archaeologies of the Future, London: Verso. Kitch, Sally L. (2000) Higher Ground: From Utopianism to Realism in American Feminist Thought and Theory, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Lea, Daniel (2017) Twenty-First Century Fiction: Contemporary British Voices, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Marks, Elaine and Isabelle de Courtivron (eds.) (1980) New French Feminisms: An Anthology, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Mellor, Anne K. (1982) “On Feminist Utopias,” Women’s Studies, 9: 241–262. Moylan, Tom (2014) Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination [1986], New York: Peter Lang. Robinson, Iain (2013) “‘You Just Know When the World Is about to Break Apart’: Utopia, Dystopia and New Global Uncertainties in Sarah Hall’s The Carhullan Army,” in Siân Adiseshiah and Rupert Hildyard (eds.) Twenty-First Century Fiction: What Happens Now, Basingstoke: Palgrave, pp. 197–211. Russ, Joanna (2002) The Female Man [1975], London: The Women’s Press. Sanders, L. Shapiro (2007) “‘Feminists Love a Utopia’: Collaboration, Conflict and the Futures of ­Feminism,” in Stacy Gillis, Gill Howie and Rebecca Munford (eds.) Third Wave Feminism (2nd ed.), Basingstoke: Palgrave, pp. 3–15. Sargent, Lyman Tower (2008) “Review of Exploring the Utopian Impulse,” Utopian Studies, 19(2): 349–352. Sargent, Lyman Tower (2010) Utopianism: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sargisson, Lucy (1996) Contemporary Feminist Utopianism, London: Routledge. Seitler, Dana (2003) “Unnatural Selection: Mothers, Eugenic Feminism and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ­Regeneration Narratives,” American Quarterly, 55(1): 61–88. Suvin, Darko (1979) Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Tavera, Stephanie Peebles (2018) “Her Body, Herland: Reproductive Health and Dis/topian Satire in ­Charlotte Perkins Gilman,” Utopian Studies, 29(1): 1–20. Tolan, Fiona (2005) “Feminist Utopias and Questions of Liberty: Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale as Critique of Second Wave Feminism,” Women: A Cultural Review, 16(1): 18–32. Wagner-Lawlor, Jennifer A. (2002) “The Play of Irony: Theatricality and Utopian Transformation in Contemporary Women’s Speculative Fiction,” Utopian Studies, 13(1): 114–134. Walezak, Emilie (2019) “Landscape and Identity: Utopian/Dystopian Cumbria in Sarah Hall’s The Carhullan Army,” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 60(1): 67–74. Wells, H.G. (2005) A Modern Utopia [1905], London: Penguin.

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6 JAN MORRIS  AND THE  TERRITORY BETWEEN Interrogating nation and normality in contemporary Welsh trans writing Gina Gwenffrewi The life of Jan Morris (1926–2020) can be characterized by a series of notable periods of creative output and personal transformations. Prior to her coming out as a transgender woman circa 1972, she was well established as a journalist and travel writer of international fame, with her most celebrated travel writing ‘Venice’ (1960) typifying her lifelong fascination with city-states as crucibles and liberations of individualism and culture. Just as famous, however, is Morris’ memoir Conundrum (1974 [2001]), which describes her struggle with gender dysphoria and her eventual reassignment surgery in Morocco. The memoir would become part of a canon of trans women’s writing in the Anglophone Global North of the twentieth century, along with those by Lili Elbe (1933) and Christine Jorgensen (1967). As books designed for marketability with non-transgender publics, their qualities of middle-class respectability and gender conformity have been much critiqued since. Sandy Stone’s analysis typifies this pattern within trans and queer scholarship that questions the genuineness of the carefully curated transgender ‘voice’ in these texts. She highlights the way trans female identity is reproduced as a caricature of female identity, arguably in reassurance to the readership that one can only be a man or a woman in the most identifiable terms and tropes: Lili Elbe faints at the sight of blood, Jan Morris, a world-class journalist who has been around the block a few times, still describes her sense of herself in relation to makeup and dress, of being on display, and is pleased when men open doors to her … They go from being unambiguous men, albeit unhappy men, to unambiguous women. There is no territory between. (2006: 224–225) The sense of there being “no territory between” is compounded by Morris’ own expressions of homophobia and transphobia, as well as misogyny, in Conundrum. Describing female identity as inherently passive, with such post-surgery reflections as “My body then was made to push and initiate, it is made now to yield and accept” (133), Morris also frames homosexuality as a wretchedly childless condition, “a void […] sterile and uncreative” (53–54), and other, gender-nonconforming trans people that she encounters – and misgenders – as pitiable (39; 142). Equally problematic, DOI: 10.4324/9781003429951-8

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Aren Aizura notes an Orientalizing tendency in both Morris’ travel writing and her account of gender reassignment in Morocco, via reference to Morris’ celebration of the British Empire in her three-part Pax Britannica. Aizura dismisses Morris’ written output overall and the notion of any positive legacy: “The language used to describe Casablanca in Conundrum mirrors Morris’ entire literary and historical oeuvre in its tacit articulation of a British colonial ideology” (2018: 74). Morris’ writing, according to this analysis, is simply one more badly aged twentieth-century relic of little value to twenty-first-century understandings of trans female identity. Were Morris’ writing to end in the 1970s, then Aizura’s conclusion might well be sufficient. However, Aizura’s sense of finality on Morris’ legacy is undermined by the development of two subsequent periods in Morris’ writing, namely her anti-imperial Welsh-nationalist writing in the 1980s and 1990s and then, in the early twenty-first century, her distancing from the concept of the nation state altogether (Gwenffrewi 2021). In particular, two works, Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere (2001) and her sci-fi creation Hav of the Myrmidons (2005), mark her third period of creative transformation, with Trieste being an especially profound meditation on belonging and alienation. Described as “that half-real, half-imagined seaport” (8), the Italian city of Trieste represents a departure from Morris’ venerated Wales and the ‘heteronationalism’ with which Morris frames the Welsh nation. To refer to Andil Gosine’s definition of the concept, heteronationalism combines the form of “Euro-American norms of family and sexual practice” with a procreationrelated rationale, in which “wombs were dangerous and required state regulation” (2009: 29). This combination of form and rationale is identifiable in Linda Colley’s historical analysis, which asserts that since its inception around the eighteenth century, the modern nation state has been founded on “the physical, intellectual, emotional and functional differences between men and women” (Colley 2014: 244). According to Colley’s thesis, national narratives have involved the confining of women to the private sphere, while liberating men to the public one with its greater opportunities for socio-economic and political independence. This analysis accurately conveys Morris’ historical depictions of Wales in her second-period output in the 1980s and 1990s, with the emphasis on princes and male artists and the general occlusion of women and queer identities (Gwenffrewi 2021), but with Trieste, we see a breaking away from this ideological connection between homeland and heteronormativity. Morris, for example, says of Trieste’s value as a site of antithesis to the nation state, “Trieste was of no decided country, no particular allegiance, no certain ideology” (107), and with the inference of gender and ethnicity, “The hybrid human is the norm in this city” (97). Morris projects upon Trieste a place of pilgrimage or refuge for those who fail to conform to monolithic, majoritarian narratives: There are people everywhere who form a Fourth World, or a diaspora of their own. They are the lordly ones. They come in all colours … They are exiles in their own communities, because they are always in a minority, but they form a mighty nation, if only they knew it. It is the nation of nowhere, and I have come to think that its natural capital is Trieste. (177) Morris in this passage avoids naming what makes her an exile in her own nation, or how she is “always in a minority.” The unspeakable, however, can be attributable at least partially to her transness, as suggested by the similarly vague reference to her previous struggle with gender dysphoria: “I write of exiles in Trieste, but I have generally felt myself an exile too. For years I felt an exile from normality” (186). While Morris again does not elaborate on this sense of exile, there is sufficient proof elsewhere of hostile reactions in Wales both to her transitioning in the 1970s and to LGBTQ + identities generally in the decades afterwards. In an uncanny echo of future comments 97

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by anti-trans polemicists Germaine Greer and Julie Bindel, the Welsh Labour politician Leo Abse describes Morris’ transitioning as being similarly founded on mutilation, false consciousness, and pathology: In a television debate … prompted by Jan Morris’s gender reassignment surgery, Abse questioned the possibility that Morris was in fact a woman, declaring, in effect, ‘just because you’ve had it chopped off, that doesn’t make you a woman’ … He pushed this view further in his review of Morris’s memoir Conundrum, published in the Spectator in April 1974 … ‘[Conundrum] is essentially proselytizing and, as such, in my judgment, immoral …to label a pathological condition … as magical or miraculous.’ (Leeworthy 2019: 106) Such reactions are absent from Morris’ account of both her transitioning and her accounts of contemporary Wales (Gwenffrewi 2021). Yet it is clear that the Wales of the 1980s and 1990s was little better, given the decades of Conservative Party rule (1979–1997) and their introduction of the much criticized Section 28 legislation (1988–2003). Daryl Leeworthy, for example, notes an enduringly hostile climate in the 1990s: In 1995, Stonewall published a report on homophobia in Britain, which noted that as many as one in three gay people living in Wales had suffered from violence and harassment. The recorded figure for young people under eighteen was more than 50 per cent. (128) Morris’ increasing pronouncements in the twenty-first century on the limits and failures of the nation state are an indication of the gap between ideal and lived experience. In this twenty-first-­ century position, Morris embraces Trieste as a hazily idealized safe space, connected to a veneration of self-actualization that is generally missing in her Welsh-nationalist writing. It is this pronounced affinity with conceptions of selfhood and personal liberty, set against the heteronationalist model of national identity, which connects Morris’ work with queer and trans scholarship. In particular, Paul Preciado’s essay ‘My People are the People of the Ill-Born’ (2019) similarly looks to a contemporary European situation with liberating possibilities: in this case, the potential independence of Catalonia from Spain. Writing on two pathways for Catalonia, involving either a reiteration of heteronationalist statehood or the queer-infused breaking of the mould, Preciado says: In the case of becoming-free-Catalonia, independence is either the ultimate goal of a political operation tending towards the imposition of a national identity and the crystallization of a map of power, or else, on the contrary, it is a process of social, subjective experimentation that involves calling into question all normative identity (national, class, gender, sexual, territorial, linguistic, racial, or bodily and cognitive difference). (111) In this weighing up of two pathways for an independent Catalonia, Preciado’s writing is explicitly inclusive of feminist, queer, and post-colonial positions, and a rejection of the heteronationalist state, evoking what Oscar Guardiola-Rivera calls the “moral politics of solidarity at the heart of Third World discourses of liberation” (2013: 381). In relation to Morris, Preciado’s more specific and intellectually informed writing on, and advocacy of, feminist, queer, and post-colonial possibilities offers a way of developing Morris’ more obscured expressions and aspirations about 98

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Trieste. What we have at the very least with Morris’ early third-period work is a conceptual shift away from heteronationalism and towards an idealistic re-territorialization, placing her ideas in greater proximity to the radical oeuvre of Preciado and his model of a Catalonia involving “experimentation” and the questioning of “all normative identities.” Morris’ declaration that Trieste represents a transnational site of refuge, for example, for people of a “Fourth World, or a diaspora of their own,” aligns with Preciado’s imagined minoritarian Catalonia: My people is that of the mules. Of the ill-born. Of the stateless … The silent bodies of the world who do not qualify even as a people. Those who bear the future on their backs and to whom no one concedes the legitimacy of the political subjects. (252) Like Morris with Trieste, Preciado sees himself as a citizen of such a place, formed from an emerging consciousness of alienation, though in Preciado’s case with a specific recognition of the damage done by the ideologies of cisheteropatriarchy and neocolonial structures that oppress migrants and minorities alike: The only status I understand is that of strangeness. To live wherever you were not born. To speak a language that is not your own and to make it vibrate with another accent, to make your words be grammatically correct, but phonetically deviant. (252) Preciado here cites “strangeness,” while Morris mentions in Trieste her lifelong failure to conform to “normality” (2001: 186). The heteronationalist state is evidently for both of these writers an oppressive construct for anyone failing to conform to a particular acceptable standard. Accordingly, the limits of the nation state make way for a more minoritarian conception. With queer implications, the anti-nation ideas imagined by Preciado and Morris provide poetic visions for an alternative form of statehood, an anti-nation nation set against the heteronationalist norm. As Morris says of Trieste, “To my mind this is an existentialist sort of place, and its purpose is to be itself” (177). The same might be said of Morris’ hazy vision of herself and a life imagined elsewhere, where she need not have waited until her forties before transitioning, and would not have suffered the distress and internalized, anti-LGBTQ+ revulsion that is evident in Conundrum. In this growing antipathy to the borders that have governed her life, Morris produces at the beginning of her third period of writing arguably the queerest, questioning writing of her career. It is in this context that Morris’ three final published works, namely In My Mind’s Eye (2018), Thinking Again (2020), and Allegorizings (2021) pose intriguing questions as to whether the works consolidate this third period and the yearning for an anti-nation nation.

Allegorizings: Welsh melancholy and the continued dreaming of elsewhere Although always intended to be published posthumously, Allegorizings predates Morris’ published diaries In My Mind’s Eye (2018) and Thinking Again (2020) by approximately a decade. An introductory note dates most of the writing prior to and including 2009, with a few exceptions dated in 2013. Sharper and more substantial than the final diaries, Allegorizings functions as a collection of final essays and represents the chronological and thematic continuation of Trieste (2001) and the satirical, anti-nationalist work of fiction Hav of the Myrmidons (2005). The essays reveal the similarities between Morris’ idealism and that of Preciado, but they also clarify 99

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some differences. In this latter case, we see a contrast between Preciado’s apparent disinterest in Catalonian political and cultural grievances over Spanish colonial authority, and Morris’ enduring post-colonial lament for the erasure of a Welsh nation and accompanying Welsh-language culture. This reflects the tensions in Morris’ writing especially in the second and third periods, in both cherishing Wales while recognizing the gaps between Wales-as-concept and Wales-as-livedexperience. Evident as two streams, one source of distress is community-based, and the other is more individualistic. On the community-based anguish at the erasure of Welsh culture, Morris says in Allegorizings: English policy was for centuries directed towards the absorption of Wales into England … The ancient Welsh culture, which is unique to itself, has been at one time or another almost overwhelmed by the sheer presence of its insatiable neighbour. (82) In this reflection and the reference to “ancient Welsh culture,” the gaps between revered concept and experience contribute to a communal anguish. Turning her attention to contemporary community attitudes, Morris confirms its ongoing nature by saying, “There are people in the Welshest parts of Wales who are made so profoundly unhappy by the whittling away of their language, their values and their ways of life that they are driven to alcoholism, driven to nervous breakdown” (83). Such a passage replicates Morris’ work particularly in the 1980s and 1990s, concerning the sense of real-time decline of a way of life. This surveillance reveals gaps not only between the concept and a bitter reality but also between desire and the overwhelming sense of being unable to satisfy the desire. In the 1990s, Morris attempts to fill this gap by producing a playful manifesto, A Machynlleth Triad (1993), which visualizes a thriving, Welsh-speaking Wales of the future. By the third period of her writing, such playful imaginings and solutions are absent. Arguably, Morris has been worn down by the sense of impossibility for her conception of Wales. Yet Morris’ writing in Allegorizings also captures her weariness with the gap between desire and lack in relation to Wales’ historic inability to cater for unnamed minorities. She has described herself, after all, as one of the “exiles in their own communities” in Trieste (177). While Morris characteristically avoids identifying why she feels alienation in Wales, in Allegorizings, she returns to the symbolic presence of Trieste to denote what is missing. In this segment, she toys with a notion of hybridity between that city and herself: “Every place I ever wrote about became more and more my own interpretation of it, more and more an aspect of myself, until in the end I determined that I was the city of Trieste, and Trieste was me” (91). With Trieste previously described by Morris as a “nation of nowhere,” the connection consolidates Morris’ depiction of her distance from the conventional nation state, including Wales, as an exile or a citizen disconnected from her state, much like “the stateless” in Preciado’s idealized Catalonia. With nationality as a site of resistance and of restrictions, as well as communal and individualized distress in Wales, it can be argued that Allegorizings is Morris’ starkest meditation on these contrasting tensions. With her output on the post-colonial mindset of Welsh-language communities already substantial, it is her writing on how Wales fails her which particularly fascinates here, including the uneven interaction with her affinity to Wales. It is here too that her work aligns more closely with Preciado and other trans scholars, such as Nael Bhanji, on the instability of language when conveying belonging and ‘home,’ a common trope within trans narratives involving journeys of transition. As Bhanji says, “the concept of home is fraught with psychical tensions and conflicts, because it is unhomely to begin with, there is almost never a definite

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arrival ‘at’ home” (2013: 514). In highlighting the failure of language to align with how home is experienced, Bhanji’s analysis is a useful reminder that we are discussing language and its limited, socially constructed ability to convey experience and satisfy desire, whether in relation to home or gender. To reference Jacques Lacan’s pronouncement on these limitations, “I always speak the truth. Not the whole truth, because there’s no way to say it all. Saying it all is materially impossible: words fail” (1987: 6). Yet to return to Bhanji, who is critiquing the ‘politics of transsexual citizenship’ and its investment “in metaphors of homecomings, borders, and boundaries” (517–518), it is important to highlight how in her third-period writing, Morris too is wrestling with these metaphors. There is in fact evidence that Morris has struggled with the limits of language to convey belonging for several decades. Her article about her visit to Kashmir in 1970 describes the vale of Kashmir as being “like a fourth dimension” (1986: 215), in which “I emancipated myself, and soared unimpeded beyond actuality, seldom quite sure where I was, or when, or even sometimes who – answering all questions with abandoned fancy, never seeking a reason or providing a cause” (210). Morris here appears to desire a space so removed from the baggage of Europe’s heteronational model as to represent a transcendental state of sensory bliss, or to some divine space free from material implications. This both echoes Preciado’s idealism, in the rejection of the constrictive demands of heteronationalist citizenship, while also indicating that Morris’ utopia is transcendental, in the sense that it “cannot be understood in ordinary words” (Cambridge Dictionary online), and by degrees, “relating to a spiritual realm” (Oxford Languages online). It is in recognition of this potentially transcendental discourse in Morris’ writing that we can also understand some differences between Morris’ idealized Trieste and Preciado’s Catalonia. On the one hand, there continues to be an overlap with Preciado’s humanitarian, solidarity-based conception of a nation of “the mules … the ill-born … the stateless … The silent bodies of the world,” with its connection to the “moral politics of solidarity at the heart of Third World discourses of liberation” (2013: 381). In Allegorizings, the minoritarian focus is there but the class element is not stated and the global power imbalances that divide the world are not mentioned. By degrees similar to Preciado, Morris describes herself in one essay as a “citizen of that conceptual nation,” formed by “a large, separate, inchoate, unrecognized community of our own. It is distributed throughout the globe, beyond sect or dogma, beyond nationalism, beyond chauvinism … generally recognizing one another by instinct when they meet” (182–183). In this statement, an “unrecognized community” is defined more by what it is not, with the rejection of “sect or dogma,” “nationalism” and “chauvinism.” A place without prejudice, in other words, which relates to Preciado’s vision but appears more centred in Morris’ own experience as a victim of chauvinism. Morris’ idealized haven, however, is also tied to private citizenship within a socially liberal setting rather than a solidarity-focused idealization of community. To be clear, this is not to associate Morris with the kind of right-wing libertarian utopia exemplified by Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, with its dictum “I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine” (1957/1996: 670–671). Her political manifesto A Machynlleth Triad, for example, articulates her belief in systems that enforce significant re-distributions of wealth with free healthcare as a basic human right (1993: 76, 80). Nevertheless, Morris’ social liberalism is at the fore with her anti-nation idealism. The element of individual liberation, rather than solidarity-based liberations for the “Third World” witnessed in Preciado’s writing, is further encapsulated in a “New Age” element in Morris’ idealism resonant of 1960s and 1970s hippy culture, particularly in the United States. Evoking a form of pilgrimage, Morris’ essay on the Californian village of Bolinas typifies her desire to

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reimagine a community as both a refuge from the norm as well as a blank canvas for individual liberty. It is a place that: had communally opted out of the world … Its citizens had removed their road signs, to dissuade uninvited and unsuitable visitors, and they had defiantly declared a kind of New Age separatism … It signified individuality challenging conformity, eccentricity cocking a snook at normality, Us defying Them, small against big. (47) There is much here that is also present in Morris’ writing on Trieste as a “nation of nowhere,” described in Trieste as a place “where artists, drop-outs, renegades, exiles and remittance-men can retreat and with luck be happy” (2001: 8). Morris evidently places herself among such types, for if Bolinas signifies “individuality challenging conformity, eccentricity cocking a snook at normality,” then Trieste similarly appeals to a writer who says, “For years I felt an exile from normality” (2001: 186, emphasis added). Like Trieste, Bolinas appears to represent a space for the divestment of heteronational norms, fused with the mysticism of the New Age, a world described in a JG Ballard novel or Pink Floyd soundtrack, but without the menace that accompanies. Sliding along a spectrum from the private spaces of Bolinas to a transcendental Otherness is a reference to another recurring landscape from Morris’ previous works, Chaurikharka. It is mentioned in a precursor to Allegorizings, the similarly essay-based Pleasures of a Tangled Life (1989), as the Kashmir-like location where reality and unreality briefly and ineffably blur together, with Morris in a state of fever. “I was in a baffled state of mind,” recounts Morris. This is partly because I was sick, but partly because I did not know then, as I do not know now, precisely where Chaurikharka was. It seemed in my fancy to be somewhere altogether alone in that wide and marvellous wilderness. (1989: 218) In Allegorizings, Morris returns to the location with a sense of spiritual closure, both finding its location on the map for the first time and describing it as “a purely imaginary enchantment, born by fever out of exhaustion. It was only the other day that, examining a new map of eastern Nepal, I discovered for certain … my momentary paradise” (71). The impression here is of an individual desiring not self-actualization but a transcendence of the self. Returning to a Lacanian analysis on the limits of language, it can be argued that Morris’ reliance on a discourse of transcendence reveals where language fails. Overall, the spectrum that emerges between Bolinas and Chaurikharka moves from an individualistic town to an ethereal paradise, in the latter case, a place almost without language, comforting and primal in equal measure. Here is, perhaps, a recognition that the anti-nation nation, with reference to Preciado’s nation “of the mules,” is for Morris a space of optimal personal freedom, but that even this space is never quite enough.

In My Mind’s Eye (2018) and Thinking Again (2020): melancholy for the world The final published texts written by Morris form a two-part ‘thought diary’ as Morris enters her nineties. They collectively comprise 318 days of daily reflections, with In My Mind’s Eye containing 188, and Thinking Again 130. The entries seldom cover more than one or two short pages, 102

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and capture Morris’ impressions of world events, of her daily life, as well as often nostalgic if conflicted reflections about the past. By notable contrast to her writing in the first decade of the twenty-first century, including Allegorizings, direct references to Trieste are absent in both diaries. This could be for a variety of reasons, but in terms of what replaces the vision of a different mode of existence in her writing, a new preoccupation concerns her own personal decline and that of her lifelong companion Elizabeth. Somewhat poignantly, this increasing focus highlights how Morris’ diaries provide a rare published narrative by a trans woman in significant old age who takes each day as it comes, her earthly horizons narrowed. An analysis of the frequency of key themes reveals the growing impression of the narrowing of horizons and the sense of individual and global decline. In both diaries, Morris devotes most of her writing to describing her daily life and her locality, with seventy-one chapters in In My Mind’s Eye and thirty-four in Thinking Again. In the earlier diary, the most common themes are respectively of global decline (20 chapters), Wales (18), animals (14), and personal decline (12). By the second diary, personal decline has become the second most common theme (11), followed by global decline (10), Wales (7), and the presidency of Donald Trump (4). Highlighting the way the different periods of her writing mesh together, the entries also consolidate some of the sentiments expressed in the earlier texts, concerning Wales and its place in the world. There is, for example, a pleasure in the environment she occupies and the experiences she has been able to continue enjoying, such as her daily walks, engaging with her neighbours, and satisfying her love of particular delicacies such as marmalade. There is also anger at the failure of the latest iteration of capitalism to create a better world. In effect, the two diaries capture her personal happiness amid a broader sense of decay and uncertainty at the failings of national and international systems of governance and finance. On the failure of the systems around her, Morris makes no claim to being a cultural or political theorist. She delivers one succinct self-observation in Allegorizings, saying “I am an impressionist, not an analyst” (2021: 98). More critically, she writes in her epilogue to the Hav series of novels a particularly excoriating reflection: “I blundered around the planet, groping for meanings but not often absolutely understanding them, and working only with an artist’s often misguided intuition” (2005: 299). With this context, Morris’ writing is never intended to provide an insightful analysis of particular crises. What continues in her nineties is a series of impressions, sometimes with a sense of foreboding, which nevertheless appear attuned to the increasing sense of crisis in the Anglophone Global North, with the landmark year of 2016 witnessing the shocking populist election of President Donald Trump in the United States and ‘Brexit’ in the United Kingdom (2018: 134, 2020: 70). In My Mind’s Eye captures these reactions from a figure sheltering from international crises in her Welsh community and the unstable sense of belonging she describes. She celebrates her home, for example, saying at one point, “Yesterday I realized that I lived in the best place on earth” (117). In typical contrast, she highlights both the ongoing importance of borders to her conception of home as well as the fragile, liminal nature of those borders that contribute to the tension between ideal and reality: but nowadays, whenever I walk that way, I feel alienated. The old, old magic of the place, the ancient inheritance of Einion and Lleuci, is abruptly switched off, and at the first glimpse of the new crazy paving in the cottage garden, and the holiday caravan parked beside its bank of the river, and the ornamental city street lamp, I turn on my heel and go home to Cymreictod … Is that racism? It probably is, but I’m not going to apologize, even in the language of Heaven. (2020: 36–37) 103

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In this passage, we see the reflections of an ageing member of a minority community ­perceiving the process of its own potential extinction happening in real time. Consistent with much of her writing in Allegorizings as well as her second-period output, the passage is a recognition of Welsh communities being replaced by more economically advantaged English immigration. As a tendency, Morris’ response also follows Allegorizings in the sense of fatefulness at this decline. No reference is made to political solutions, in spite of the Welsh assembly, the ‘Senedd,’ in existence since 1997. Yet politically, Morris’ broader liberal and social-democratic leanings do come to the fore in ways that remind us of her continuing hostility to neoliberal capitalism. Morris, for example, says: I’ve had enough of capitalism … Where is its morality? Any pious Quakers in those boardrooms? … The money-making champions of our time all too often seem to be show-off celebrities with glittery wives, vast offshore assets, mansions in Monaco or Jamaica, dubious financial records, shaky sexual reputations, enormous vulgar yachts and an apparently complicit readiness to be pictured in the pages of Hello! Magazine. (2018: 43) In this criticism of capitalism, the reference to Quaker morality is significant. In the follow-up ­diary, Morris proudly notes how her mother “was partly of Quaker stock” (2020: 1), before revealing her own identification with Quakerism: “there are Quaker strains in my own hybrid origins, and I have always admired the element of restrained mysticism in their religious attitudes” (2020: 47). The anti-capitalist passage also evokes a model of business that became a hallmark of the Quakers during a formative period in Morris’ life. As recorded in the records of Quaker Faith and Practice, following the Second World War, Quaker businesspeople are described “experimenting with democratic forms of economic enterprise” with the emphasis on “human dignity and service to others instead of sole economic performance” (Chapter 23, 23.57). In this description is a broader insight into the post-war order that Morris appears to have valued, one that gave way at the end of the 1970s to the neoliberal paradigm that Morris writes about with such despair in her final diaries. Consistent with this moral framework in the final diaries is Morris’ continuing recognition of the damage done by the British Empire. In In My Mind’s Eye, Morris says, “I enjoy the swank and glory of the old British Empire, but I know very well that it was founded upon fundamental injustice” (2018: 49). The dissonance between past loyalties and an increasing condemnation of imperialism are also evident in Thinking Again, with her admission: “for if I am proud of lots about the British Empire, of course I know there is much to be ashamed of too” (2020: 40). Elsewhere, Morris’ internationalism is evident in her criticism of the U.K. government’s enactment of Brexit (2020: 70, 178), and the political and economic failures of the Conservative government. Morris’ anti-neoliberal, social-democratic credentials are consolidated therefore, having been evident since at least her second period of writing in the 1980s and 1990s. In terms of solutions, and similarly characteristic of her idealization of Trieste, Morris’ antidote to capitalist crises appears less driven by economic and political perspectives than a moral one, reinforcing the increasing presence of a Quaker worldview. In Allegorizings, she suggests a potential political movement to be founded as a “Party of Kindness.” “I believe there to be,” Morris says, latent in kindness, a great conceptual weapon only waiting to be brandished: grander than mere religion, far nobler than greed, more convincing than any political creed … I wish I really could have seized the idea when I was young, and set out to change the world, but it’s too late now. (2022: 204) 104

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Overtones of a particular Quaker gathering, recorded in 1911, in which “the Way of Service” is described along with a “Way of Life that does not depend on the abundance of the things possessed” (Quaker Faith and Practice, 23.61), are evident in Morris’ proclamation: Worst of all, though, has been the way humanity has turned upon itself … But perhaps you will forgive me, on this wretched day, if I propagate an old thesis of my own once more. It is this: that the simplest and easiest of virtues, Kindness, can offer all of us not only a Way through the imbroglio, but a Destination too. (2020: 3–4) In addition to her call for a ‘Way’ defined by kindness, Morris’ reference to a social and international “imbroglio,” with its signification of violent confusion – not unlike the more moderate “conundrum” she uses to describe her gender – Morris reveals again her preference for poetic impressions, euphemisms, and allegories. She was never an analyst, but her sense of impending doom captures a particular mood of a post-2016 United Kingdom and broader Anglophone Global North: mankind has been unconsciously preparing itself for some immense renewal – in the elimination of sexual difference, for example, in the gradual abolition of the Nation-State, in the new command of cyberspace and, above all, in the terrific revolution that is artificial intelligence, our own fateful step towards Creation. These are portents more drastic by far than mere suggestions of a new zeitgeist … The very world seems so uncertain of itself, mired in discord great and petty, short of conviction or objective, lurching from headline to headline, rumorous, squabbling and variously timid and arrogant. Is some Second Coming coming? Where should I look? What should I hope for? Is there a God after all? (2018: 136, 140) In the anxious reference to “the elimination of sexual difference,” Morris’ affinity bears a resemblance to the dystopian pronouncements on the increasing visibility and rights-based activism of trans communities as warned darkly by Camille Paglia and Slavoj Žižek (Gwenffrewi 2022). It indicates Morris’ conservative perspective on gender to the last, and perhaps explains why, in the twenty-first century, only the fantasy of Trieste could rescue her from her own socially conditioned sense of exile.

Beyond Jan Morris: a twenty-first century trans-friendly Wales? There is a poignant irony to Morris’ pessimism about the world around her, as well as to her sense of being “an exile to normality,” in her third period as a writer. During this time, Wales undergoes a transformation in its recognition of the legitimacy of minoritarian identities, notably a broader embrace of the country’s LGBTQ+ community. Like any cultural shift experienced by a country, the reasons are complex, but in terms of milestones, studies by John Sam Jones (2016) and Daryl Leeworthy (2019) have highlighted a flurry of enduring pro-LGBT+ legislations, events, and community networks since the watershed date of 1997. In that year, a progressive U.K. Labour government came to power that would eventually remove Section 28. Following a referendum in the same year, Wales was given greater political autonomy in the shape of its national assembly, the Senedd, and has been marked by a cross-party campaign to protect and champion LGBTQ+ rights for over two decades since (Jones 2016). In alignment with broader social developments in 105

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the Global North that have followed the emergence of the Internet (Stryker 2008), it can be argued that the climate for trans people in Wales has transformed over two decades in ways unthinkable compared with the entire twentieth century. Embodying this shift in Wales’ relationship with trans identity is the Young-Adult novella ­Robyn, part of a series of five Young-Adult fiction books collectively called Y Pump (‘The Five’). Arranged in narrative sequence about a group of friends, each book centres on a teenager from a marginalized demographic at a fictional Welsh high school. The eponymous protagonist of the fourth book, Robyn, is initially queer-identifying before also coming out as trans. Unlike other, cis-authored Welsh texts about trans characters, Robyn is also notable for being a collaborative venture between the cis writer Iestyn Tyne and the story’s consultant Leo Drayton, at the time of its production a similarly teenage trans man. While Robyn remains a cis-authored text, therefore, the collaboration with Drayton at least reveals a new sensitivity in regard to a transgender voice and the issue of representation. In contrast to both the silencing mechanism of Section 28 as well as the twentieth-century reliance by the publishing industry on middle-age trans women’s voices – Jan Morris, like Lili Elbe (1933) and Christine Jorgensen (1967) before her, was in her forties when she wrote her memoir – the new cultural production that works with queer and trans voices is inclusive of trans youth. As a text, Robyn compares intriguingly with the literature of Morris generally and the focus on territory and belonging especially. In both the third-period works of Morris and the story of Robyn, the mutual desire for a haven is expressed, and so too a sense of transcendence or existence between norms. On multiple occasions, the main character in Robyn references a place almost between language. She often takes comfort in the “cocwn lyfli” (Trans. ‘lovely cocoon’) (9) of her shawls, and via photographic effects, she enacts a frame of “Dreamland” (13). Accentuating her place in between normative spaces, Robyn also sees herself according to her newly out female identity as she moves down the stairs of the family home: “ac ma hi yn y lle sydd ddim fatha rhan o’r ty ond ddim fatha’r byd go iawn tu allan chwaith” (Trans. ‘and she’s in a place that’s not exactly part of the house but not part of the real world outside either’) (83). Like Morris, a hazy awareness is conjured of existing between the gaps and slippages of language, a queer recognition here of the interaction between ideological and material constructions around her. Unlike Morris’ retreat into a symbolic, dream-like Trieste as capital of a Fourth World, the character of Robyn seeks and finds a materially existing safe space closer to home, namely an LGBTQ+ open-mic night at the story’s end. Robyn describes her feelings there accordingly: “Ma’r lle ‘ma’n llawn llawenydd a dwi’n llawn llawenydd” (Trans. ‘This place is full of joy, and so am I’) (93). As a poignant contrast, it is worth noting that Robyn exists in a time when, during formative periods such as adolescence, trans and broader LGBTQ+ communities exist to create a minoritarian ‘Trieste’ for exiles “from normality” in ways not available to Morris. In spite of this mutual recognition of a need for minoritarian havens, Robyn differs from Morris’ output in ways that feel less inhibited and self-policed. Most obviously, Robyn has been written in the Welsh language, something Morris never attempts across her published career in spite of her clear veneration of the language. Notably in Robyn, the Welsh being used also zig-zags across the liminal, difficult-to-define boundary separating a ‘pure’ Welsh wholly distinct from modern English and a vernacular Welsh that borrows from English for certain lexis. Such a ‘hybrid’ depiction of the Welsh language feels marked by its vitality and verisimilitude but, politically, also by a tension. As Morris’ own veneration of the “ancient” language indicates, the Welsh language has historically been acknowledged as a sign of difference from the colonizing language of English, its value epitomized by the final words of the Welsh national anthem, which Morris repeats in Thinking Again: “O Bydded I’r Hen Iaith Barhau” (‘O let the old language survive’) (2020: 191). 106

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This idea of Welsh as an “old language” is destabilized in Robyn in several ways, including how the story’s Gen-Z protagonists casually and frequently borrow from the English language that feels less like the enemy of the oppressor than an international lingua franca. The English lexis, in this contemporary setting, signifies U.S. culture as much as an English one, as highlighted by Y Pump’s frequent references to U.S. shows such as Queer Eye (Tim 2021: 17, 74), as well as social media text-based abbreviations used by the characters such as “obvs” (Robyn 2021: 7) and “tbh” (9). Another significant effect of this fluid use of English that contrasts with Morris’ output generally is the signification of queerness. As noted by Stephen Greer in his analysis of queer Welsh works such as the play Llwyth (2010), the end product of a Welsh vernacular depicted as borrowing from English can be “hybrid formulations of queer/Welsh and Welsh/queer identity” (2016: 209), in which: the absence of ‘fit’ may also register as a form of attachment, a way of belonging. In this, the figure of the hybrid is never resolved as a new, coherent subject but marks an ongoing, reflexive project of hybridization – hybridity, if you will, as performativity. (211) The hybrid nature of the Welsh language in these depictions can be seen to act as a liberating metaphor for the nature of identity more generally. It is here that we see how Preciado’s radical work on identity fits more easily than Morris’ with this treatment of language. Robyn can be said to evoke Preciado’s celebration of “a language that is not your own and to make it vibrate with another accent, to make your words be grammatically correct, but phonetically deviant” (2019: 252). In recollection of Morris’ veneration of Welsh, it is possible to see how language, like gender, can only be one thing or the other to Morris, with the blurring of lines producing a potential form of corruption. Typifying this discomfort around gender-blurring is Morris’ description in Conundrum of those who fail to conform to the binary: “I do not speak of all the poor castaways of intersex, the misguided homosexuals, the transvestites, the psychotic exhibitionists, who tumble through this half-world like painted clowns” (1974: 143). No such judgment is made about impure or hybrid forms of spoken Welsh, but it is noticeable that Morris describes her proficiency with the language in negative terms when conceding, “I have never mastered the language with any subtlety” (1989: 199). To refer back to Stone’s critique of Morris’ representation of her gender in Conundrum, when it comes to the use of language there is “no territory between.” By contrast, Robyn takes hybridity in relation to Welsh identity in a more radical direction: the very language that Morris views as sacrosanct to Welsh identity becomes a site of merging and blending. At the same time, the main character expressly values the function of language to affirm her queered identity. In a coming-out scene with a friend, in which female-identifying grammar is used in reference to her for the first time, Robyn says, “Dwi’n caru iaith a geiria yn yr eiliad yna; caru faint ma pob gair yn pwyso, faint ma jyst un dewis bach o air yn gallu newid y byd” (Trans. ‘In that second, I love language and words; I love how each word weighs, how just one small choice of a word can change the world’) (55). Also absent in Morris’ representation of Wales are the real-world consequences of existing with a transitioning, hybrid gender at high school as captured in Robyn. Robyn’s experience of experimentation not only involves uplifting moments but also intrusions of violence: territories marked by experimentation and crossing boundaries and conventions therefore create new threats and the need for new forms of safety. In a representation markedly different from the comfortable experience depicted by Morris as a middle-aged, economically advantaged trans woman in Llanystumdwy, and underscoring the more visceral, hyper-visible depiction of trans identity in relation to 107

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high-school life in Robyn, is the inclusion of scenes of harassment and bullying. This includes one particularly graphic assault in the school showers (16–21), as well as the suffering of verbal abuse (17), and more ambiguously, the main character’s constant drawing of people’s gazes: “Dwi ‘di arfar troi penna. Yn y dechra oedd o’n freakio fi alla” (‘I’ve got used to turning heads. In the beginning it would freak me out’) (10). In seeing Robyn perform hybridity, the depiction avoids either glamorizing or obscuring the experience of transness, and instead challenges and addresses modes of oppression. Paradoxically, by showing the ugliness of social reactions to trans identity in Wales, Robyn – to a greater degree than the testimonies by Morris – arguably contributes to a more direct discussion on improving the conditions of trans people and minorities in general in Wales through awareness raising. Yet where the writing diverges greatest is the open position of the respective writers, outside of the text. With the exception of Conundrum, Morris avoids discussing trans identity. Drayton sees it as a responsibility to do so, including in the introduction to Robyn. This difference underscores the shift of trans identity from an anomalous, pathologized identity in the twentieth century, to a political, rights-based identity in the twenty-first. Commenting on the importance of the trans voice, Drayton highlights the previous absence of trans voices in Welsh literature: Mae hi hefyd yn fraint cael bod yn rhan o brosiect sy’n cyflwyno cymeriad newydd I bobl sydd, efallai, heb ddod ar draws person fel Robyn. Mae’r nofel yma yn croesawu persbectif newydd i’r gymuned lenyddol Gymraeg, a fydd yn rhoi mewnwelediad ar sut brofiad yw hi i gwestiynu eich rhywedd neu’ch hunaniaeth. Mae cynrychioli yn hanfodol, yn enwedig ar gyfer cymunedau sy’n dal i wynebu rhagfarn heddiw. (Trans. It’s also a privilege to be part of a project that’s introducing a new character to people who, maybe, haven’t come across someone like Robyn. This novel welcomes a new perspective to the Welsh language community, and provides an insight into the experience of questioning one’s sexuality or identity. Representation is crucial, especially for communities that still face prejudice today). Where for Morris trans is an unspeakable identity, a conundrum in a binary world that has ‘no territory between,’ in this passage the politics of representation is addressed by Drayton. There are accordingly, in Robyn, no anomalous identities, only ones that are oppressed. What the story achieves, perhaps like never before in Wales, is exposure to the oppression experienced by trans people, while also giving way to an uplifting optimism that such identities need not be viewed as unspeakable but as embodiments of citizenship in modern Wales.

Conclusion Jan Morris’ final works, spanning a little over the final decade of her life, can be said to continue the themes that have preoccupied her regarding belonging and home, as well as their limitations. Morris’ constant is her love of Wales and the Welsh-language culture she both venerates and fears for. In Allegorizings, we also see the continuing fantasy she projects upon Trieste, as a site for those constricted by the norms of nation states such as Wales. The paradox is a useful one for Wales as it continues to develop its national institutions, with Paul Preciado’s vision being particularly valuable: what kind of state does Wales want to become, a copy of the heteronational eighteenth-century template, or an antidote to its historic restrictions and systemic oppressions? In her final diaries, Morris does not pretend to have many answers, beyond kindness as a moral imperative, and in this respect, Morris lives as she preaches. In her lament for a world perceived to 108

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be falling apart, Morris always punches up: her writings attack the elites that run the global economy, not the typical targets of conservative politicians and journalists: asylum seekers or those on welfare or marginalized communities. More broadly, Morris’ most important quality for trans identity in Wales, perhaps, is that in her occlusion of issues relating to misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia, Morris represents a trans narrative influenced by the prejudices of her formative experiences in the twentieth century. Her writing reveals a refusal to criticize her beloved country, but she nevertheless pines on occasion for another place where being different has no cost. The imperative then, is for Wales to support its minorities in ways that it failed to support Jan Morris.

Acknowledgements I would like to thank the editors and peer reviewers for their guidance in the shaping of this ­chapter. In addition, I would like to thank Dr Siwan Rosser at Cardiff University and Dr Leah Owen at Swansea University for their respective guidance and insight concerning the Welsh-language YA story Y Pump and information about the Quakers.

Works Cited Aizura, Aren (2018) Mobile Subjects: Transnational Imaginaries of Gender Reassignment. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bhanji, Nael (2006) “Trans/scriptions (Homing Desires, (Trans) Sexual Citizenship and Racialized Bodies,” in Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle (eds.) The Transgender Studies Reader, London: Routledge, pp. 157–175. Cambridge Dictionary Online. https://dictionary.cambridge.org. Colley, Linda (2014) Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837, London: Yale University Press. Elbe, Lili (1933/2004) Man into Woman: The First Sex Change – A Portrait of Lili Elbe, edited by Niels Hoyer, trans. H.J. Stenning, London: Blue Boat Books. Gosine, Andil (Mar 2009) “Monster, Womb, MSM: The Work of Sex in International Development,” ­Development, 52(1): 25–33. https://doi.org/10.1057/dev.2008.82 Greer, Stephen (2016) “Queer/Welsh and Welsh/Queer: Performing Hybrid Wales,” in Huw Osborne (ed.) Queer Wales, Cardiff: University of Wales Press, pp. 209–223. Guardiola-Rivera, Oscar (2013) Story of a Death Foretold: Pinochet, the CIA and the Coup against Salvador Allende, 11 September 1973, London: Bloomsbury, 2013. Gwenffrewi, Gina (2021) “Hiraethi Jan Morris,” Transgender Studies Quarterly, 8(3): 368–385. Gwenffrewi, Gina (2022) “Punk Mood, Junk Food: Portrayals of Transgender Apocalypse,” in Helen Gavin (ed.) Women and the Abuse of Power, Emerald Publishing, pp. 79–97. Jones, John Sam (2016) “Heb Addysg, Heb Ddawn (Without Education, Without Gift): LGBTQ Youth in Educational Setting in Wales,” in Huw Osborne (ed.) Queer Wales, Cardiff: University of Wales Press, pp. 177–191. Jorgenson, Christine (1967/2000). Christine Jorgenson: A Personal Autobiography. United States: Cleis Press. Lacan, Jacques (1987) “Television,” October, 40(Spring): 6–50. Leeworthy, Daryl (2019) A Little History of Wales, Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Morris, Jan (1960) Venice, London: Faber & Faber, 1974. Morris, Jan (1974) Conundrum, London: Faber & Faber, 1974. Morris, Jan (1984) The Matter of Wales: Epic views of a small country, London: Penguin Books, 1986b. Morris, Jan (1985) Among the Cities, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1986a. Morris, Jan (1989) Pleasures of a Tangled Life, London: Barrie & Jenkins Ltd. Morris, Jan (1993) A Machynlleth Triad, London: Penguin Books, 1995. Morris, Jan (2001) Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere, London: Faber & Faber. Morris, Jan (2005) Hav, London: Faber & Faber Morris, Jan (2018) In My Mind’s Eye: A Thought Diary, London: Faber & Faber. Morris, Jan (2020) Thinking Again, London: Faber and Faber. Morris, Jan (2021) Allegorizings, London: Faber and Faber.

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Gina Gwenffrewi Oxford Languages. https://languages.oup.com/google-dictionary-en/. Preciado, Paul B. (2019) An Apartment on Uranus, London: Fitzcarraldo Editions. Quaker Faith and Practice. 5th edition. https://qfp.quaker.org.uk. Rand, Ayn (1957/1996) Atlas Shrugged, New York: Signet. Robyn (2021) Iestyn Tyne Gyda Leo Drayton, Ceredigion: Lolfa. Stone, Sandy (2006) “The Transsexual Empire,” in Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle (eds.) The ­Transgender Studies Reader, London: Routledge, pp. 221–235. Stryker, Susan (2008), “Transgender History, Homonormativity, and Disciplinarity,” Radical History Review, 10: 145–157. Tim (2021) Y Pump. Elgan Rhys gyda Tomos Jones, Ceredigion: Lolfa.

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PART II

Networks

7 “MEN SHALL NOT MAKE US FOES” Charlotte Brontë’s letters and her female friendship networks Deborah Wynne Brontë’s novel Jane Eyre, an innovative female Bildungsroman, has long been considered ­significant in the history of feminism. As Elizabeth Bowen wrote in 1942, the protagonist Jane’s “proud, unhesitating” voice conveys her desire “for much more than love; she wants human fullness of life—the book voiced for the first time, women’s demand for this”; Bowen adds that Jane Eyre could be called “the first feminist novel” (Bowen 1942: 33–36). Jane asserts her right to an independent life at a time when women were denied access to higher education and the professions. The subversive power of Jane’s first-person narrative led some early reviewers of the novel, such as the conservative Elizabeth Rigby writing in the Quarterly Review, to suggest that the author was a dangerous radical (Allott 1974: 107). The novel’s expression of discontent with the conventional feminine roles available to women resonated with many Victorian readers, while the interior life of Brontë’s heroine, revealed through the telling of her own story, offered a new psychological depth to the novel as a form. Indeed, feminist critics from Virginia Woolf onwards have considered the publication of Jane Eyre and Brontë’s later novels Shirley and Villette as turning points in the tradition of women’s writing, largely because of their eloquent representations of women’s desires for independence (Woolf 2000: 68–71). All of these novels treat the topic of female autonomy, championing women’s rights to education and careers. Second-Wave feminist critics also foregrounded the importance of Brontë’s works, reading them as expressions of Victorian women’s discontent with their limited roles and arguing that her novels represented anger against the social and legal disabilities they endured (see Showalter 1982; Gilbert and Gubar 2000). Surprisingly, however, Brontë was not initially attracted to the use of the female voice, preferring to employ a male narrator in the stories she wrote as a child and young adult. These early tales were usually written in collaboration with her brother Branwell, focusing on their imaginary kingdom of Angria which was ruled by overpowering Byronic heroes, most of them military men (see Butcher 2019). Habituated to the notion of writing as a male-dominated activity, Brontë adopted for her Angrian stories and magazines several male pseudonyms, including “Captain ­Andrew Tree”, “Charles Thunder”, and “Charles Townsend” (Gaskell 2009: 150), and as an adult, she employed the gender-ambiguous pseudonym “Currer Bell” on first publishing her work. Many of the female characters created by Branwell and Charlotte were passive victims of powerful husbands,

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DOI: 10.4324/9781003429951-10

Deborah Wynne

lovers, and fathers (Ingham 2008: 79–80), far removed from the more assertive behaviour of the later heroines in the novels. Brontë continued to use a male narrative voice in her first attempts at novel writing, none of which found a publisher. Elizabeth Gaskell noted that the motherless Charlotte (she was five years old when her mother died) “grew up out of childhood into girlhood bereft, in a singular manner, of all such society as would have been natural to [her] age, sex, and station” (Gaskell 2009: 46). She went on to assert that this lack of female friends and mentors beyond the family circle, along with her reliance on the books, largely by male authors, in her clergyman father’s library, prompted her to “throw the colour of masculinity” over her early writings, a “squint” or distortion which did not serve her well (Nestor 1985: 127). The idea that women’s voices were unwelcome in the literary marketplace was reinforced in 1836, when Brontë was informed by the Poet Laureate Robert Southey, in response to her letter asking him for advice, that “Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life: & it ought not to be” (Letters I:166). His discouragement was later reinforced by reviewers’ hostility when they suspected Jane Eyre of being written by a woman. Charlotte Brontë was left in little doubt that women writers were perceived as anomalous and judged harshly if they deviated from what was considered “feminine”. Even when she was a wellknown novelist, she felt disadvantaged because of her sex; concerned that her novels were sometimes characterised as “coarse” (Weber 2012: 45). Brontë wrote, “I wish all reviewers believed ‘Currer Bell’ to be a man – they would be more just to him” (Letters II: 275). As a famous novelist, she expressed her frustration that she was unable to “penetrate where the very deepest political and social truths are to be learnt” (Letters II: 23), unlike her fellow authors Charles Dickens and William Thackeray who, as men, were free to explore all echelons of society (Pearson 2016: 358). The Victorian ideology decreeing separate roles for men and women (Weber 2012: 41), along with the traditional male bias embedded in the publishing industry, certainly played their parts in impeding Brontë’s attempts to find a female voice and articulate a feminist message. Nevertheless, despite the obstacles faced by women writers in the early Victorian period, Brontë went on to develop an effective feminist voice, a process which, I will argue, was initially aided by her involvement in a same-sex friendship network she encountered at school, and later reinforced by her friendships with other women writers. This chapter will focus in particular on the role played by two of her friends, fellow writers Mary Taylor, who first stimulated Brontë’s intellectual development at school, and Elizabeth Gaskell, who sustained Brontë as a professional novelist in the last four years of her life. Other friends included the school friend Ellen Nussey, who played a vital role in offering Brontë intimate companionship, their relationship being recorded in the numerous letters they exchanged. While this friendship was undoubtedly important to Charlotte’s wellbeing, it was her friendship with Taylor and Gaskell which shaped Brontë’s feminist views and supported her professional identity. Mary Taylor’s work is undeservedly overlooked today, despite her spirited contribution to the feminist movement in a series of essays on “The First Duty of Women” published in the Victoria Magazine, and her novel, Miss Miles, or, A Tale of Yorkshire Life 60 Years Ago, depicting the importance of female friendship and careers for women. I will discuss Taylor’s writings, as well as her relationship with Charlotte Brontë, in order to show how Taylor influenced the feminist discourse of Jane Eyre and the other novels. Elizabeth Gaskell’s friendship came later in Brontë’s life and when they met in 1850, both were well-known writers. Gaskell’s work includes her social problem novels, Mary Barton (1848), Ruth (1853) and North and South (1855), as well as her ground-breaking biography The Life of Charlotte Brontë which was published in 1857 two years after Brontë’s death. This chapter will show how both Taylor and Gaskell played significant roles in inspiring and sustaining Brontë by offering intellectual companionship and professional advice. 114

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Female friendship and the school community In Testament of Friendship (1940), Vera Brittain’s tribute to her close friend, the feminist novelist Winifred Holtby, she deplored the fact that female friendship has traditionally been “mocked, belittled and falsely interpreted” (Brittain 1980: 2). The myth of female rivalry for male attention obscures a long history of rich same-sex friendship networks through which women and girls achieved intellectual and emotional fulfilment, such networks often acting as “a vehicle of self-definition for women” (Abel 1981: 416). Before the twentieth century, women tended to be defined in relation to their husbands and fathers, having few legal rights and lacking social and educational opportunities (Wynne 2010: 21–27), and Victorian female friendship communities offered important support networks. Even the early Victorian author of conduct guides for women, Sarah Stickney Ellis, who now has a reputation for a conservative upholding of gender ideologies, emphasised in The Daughters of England: Their Social Duties and Domestic Habits (1842) the psychological importance of female friendship in women’s development, arguing that: In the circle of her private friends, as well as from her own heart, she learns what constitutes the happiness and the misery of women […] She learns to comprehend the deep mystery of that electric chain of feeling which ever vibrates through the heart of women, and which man, with all his philosophy, can never understand. (Ellis 1842: 281) According to Ellis, the emotional wellbeing of women, figured here in the sensuous and emotional language of the “heart”, “mystery”, “feeling”, and “vibrat[ion]”, depends on the communion they establish with their female friends, for she argues men “can never understand” women’s rich inner lives and needs. Sharon Marcus in her book Between Women: Friendship, Desire and Marriage in Victorian England has revealed that same-sex networks in the Victorian period were perceived as socially acceptable ways for girls to experience freedom from adult surveillance, providing “room to roam without radically changing the normative rules governing gender difference” (Marcus 2007: 27). Female friendship structures allowed for a physical, emotional, and spiritual intimacy between girls and women and while such networks may be perceived as a way of reinforcing conservative gender ideologies, evidence suggests that for many Victorian girls, they were helpful in introducing a knowledge of the world that enabled them to test (and sometimes push beyond) the boundaries of “proper” feminine behaviour. Within the private, female-only space of the friendship group, girls and women could discuss tabooed topics, such as sexuality, the body, religious beliefs and doubts, as well as express their needs and ambitions openly without facing male ridicule or disapproval, or find themselves chastised as “unladylike” by authority figures such as parents and teachers. Marcus’ study of Victorian women’s diaries and correspondence shows that Victorian feminism developed “as a powerful but marginal movement”, nurtured by means of the same-sex friendship networks developed in girls’ schools, extended family groups and local communities. Indeed, as Marcus reveals, “many [women] informally participated in politics” in their discussions with female friends, engaging in debates which raised their awareness of feminist issues (Marcus 2007: 38). For those young women who went on to become writers, as did Charlotte Brontë, experiences of “female solidarity” (Cosslett 1988: 1) initiated at school or within family networks helped to inform their representations of women’s friendships, which in turn provided friendship models for their readers. 115

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Brontë’s first experience of female solidarity was her close relationship with her sisters Emily and Anne, both of whom shared her ambitions to adopt a career as a professional author. The sisters formed a significant, albeit informal, female professional network: living in the same home, an isolated parsonage in the village of Haworth in Yorkshire, they paced the parlour together in the evenings after their father had gone to bed, to discuss their ideas, read each other’s work, and explore ways to realise their ambitions for financial independence (Gaskell 2009: 117). While the support of Emily and Anne was crucial to Charlotte’s development as a writer, the insularity of family life in a remote village was an impediment to her reaching her full potential in terms of finding her own voice as a novelist. The necessary stimulus came in 1831 when Charlotte attended Roe Head School as a boarder at the age of fourteen and was separated from all members of her family for the first time. This move from Haworth Parsonage to the small congenial girls’ school twenty miles away was a literal and metaphorical journey which brought her into contact with a very different sort of female network. The school was run by the intelligent and hard-working Wooler sisters, who taught their pupils “to think, to analyse, to reject, to appreciate” (Gaskell 2009: 85), providing her with a useful model of female professionalism which influenced her future career. Her fellow pupils were mostly the daughters of textile manufacturers, from homes where radical politics and religious dissent were the norm, and Brontë found their company challenging and stimulating. Brontë’s experience was a typical one for many middle-class Victorian women who encountered at school a female-only environment beyond their families for the first time, the separation of the sexes being the norm in the British educational system throughout the nineteenth century. The school environment is powerfully represented in Jane Eyre when the orphaned eight-yearold Jane is sent from her aunt’s uncongenial home to become a boarder at the distant Lowood School. Although her arrival at Lowood is inauspicious, and the school is poorly resourced, Jane swiftly perceives the benefits of an education and female society. On first acclimatising herself to her new environment, she simultaneously listens to the “gleeful tumult” of the schoolgirls in the classroom and to a storm raging outside the window; from the dual sounds of wild activity she “derived from both a strange excitement, and reckless and feverish [she] wished the wind to howl more wildly … and the confusion rise to clamour” (Brontë 2001: 46). At this moment of intense perception, Jane encompasses possibilities for freedom and action and “resolve[s] to pioneer [her] way through every difficulty” (Brontë 2001: 63). She swiftly makes friends with the intellectual and saintly Helen Burns (thought to be modelled on Maria, her eldest sister who died in 1825 at the age of ten). Helen “at all times and under all circumstances, evinced […] a quiet and faithful friendship” (Brontë 2001: 66), acting as a mentor to the younger girl. By contrast, Jane’s other friend, her lively “comrade” Mary Ann Wilson, entertains her with “a turn for narrative” (Brontë 2001: 66) which helps her to envisage life beyond the school and value the power of storytelling. Her teacher, Miss Temple, whose “friendship and society had been [a] continual solace” to Jane throughout her ten years at Lowood (Brontë 2001: 71), offers a model of professionalism which informs Jane’s subsequent career as a teacher. In the world of Lowood School, despite its privations and discipline, Jane realises “that the real world was wide” (Brontë 2001: 72), a realisation similar to that experienced by Brontë when she arrived at Roe Head and found that the Anglican and Tory views held by her family were capable of being challenged. School friendships afforded Brontë a valuable opportunity to express her opinions freely, and in time, she learned to think beyond the masculine “squint” which had characterised her early writing and the culture of her home. Belonging to a school community aided her in her formative years to become an author whose feminist ideas continue to resonate today (see Ingham 2008:

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81). Jane Eyre refuses her lover Rochester’s assertion that she is like a bird when he asks her to be his mistress, responding with the words, “I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being with an independent will, which I now exert to leave you” (Brontë 2001: 216). This has become a popular quotation, today printed on a range of Brontë merchandise, including mugs, T-shirts, mobile phone cases, bookmarks, and pillowcases. Indeed, it has also been used for the title of a feminist documentary, I Am No Bird (Baker 2019), which explores contemporary women’s ideas of freedom in marriage, and it is significant that Mary Taylor, one of Charlotte’s earliest friends, should describe female independence in terms of stepping “outside the cage” (Letters I: 293).

Mary Taylor: life “outside the cage” The intellectual and ambitious Mary Taylor offered the greatest challenge to Charlotte Brontë’s views when she arrived at Roe Head School. A feminist from an early age, Mary appeared to Brontë to embody concepts of difference and autonomy which she had not encountered before. Brontë and her sisters were daughters of a clergyman who was a staunch royalist, an admirer of the military, and held a strong allegiance to the Established Church. Mary Taylor’s upbringing was very different: she came from a family of radicals, republicans, and dissenters, and she was as well informed about politics as Brontë herself, who had from childhood been an avid consumer of newspapers (Gaskell 2009: 83). Unsurprisingly, the girls engaged in lively discussions: as Mary Taylor said, “we were furious politicians” (qt in Gaskell 2009: 82) who frequently debated the pros and cons of the political and social reforms that were dominating parliament at this time. Their shared interest in the big political questions of the day initially brought them together, for at this time Britain was divided on the issue of reform, with two Reform Bills being rejected in 1831 before the first Reform Act, ushering in a degree of political and social modernisation, was passed in 1832 (Gaskell 2009: 82). Charlotte Brontë visited Mary Taylor’s home on a number of occasions, finding herself “in a minority of one in [this] house of violent Dissent and Radicalism” (Gaskell 2009: 121), a situation she found intellectually stimulating. Mary Taylor also helped Brontë to develop a feminist voice; her view that women had the right to live an active independent life was both insistent and invigorating. After leaving school, Taylor continued her education in Brussels, before going on to teach in a German boys’ school (Stevens 1972). Her strong sense of adventure later prompted her to emigrate to New Zealand, where she set up her own shop in Wellington and wrote feminist articles on “The First Duty of Women” and a novel, Miss Miles. Mary’s example of enterprise and independence fuelled Brontë’s ambition to achieve financial independence and ultimately professional status as a writer. Writing to their mutual friend, Ellen Nussey (who had also been a pupil at Roe Head School), Charlotte stated that “It is vain to limit a character like [Mary’s] within ordinary boundaries, she will overstep them” (quoted in Stevens 1972: 18) to set up her own business. Although Charlotte was less willing to “overstep” all of the domestic obstacles she encountered in life, largely because of her strong sense of duty towards her father, she came to understand how, with Mary’s example before her, in her fiction, she could represent female characters who choose to act, rather than passively wait. Her heroines, Jane Eyre, Shirley Keeldar, and Lucy Snowe take responsibility for their own destinies, moving beyond the passive roles assigned to most middle-class Victorian women as they take risks to seek employment opportunities far from home.

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In 1841, Charlotte Brontë wrote that Mary has made up her mind she can not and will not be a governess, a teacher, a milliner, a bonnet-make nor housemaid. She sees no means of obtaining employment she would like in England, so she is leaving it. (quoted in Stevens 1972: 19) This prompted Brontë to review her own prospects as she became aware of her feelings of frustrated ambition and discontent, which she poignantly expressed to Ellen Nussey: I hardly know what swelled in my throat as I read [Mary’s] letter – such a vehement impatience of restraint and steady work such a strong wish for wings – wings such as wealth can furnish – such an urgent thirst to see – to know – to learn […] I was tantalized with the consciousness of faculties unexercised. (Letters I: 266) Mary had “kindled” a fire within her, and “cast oil on the flames […] and in her own strong energetic language heartened me on” (quoted in Stevens 1972: 24). This reaction to her enterprising friend’s willingness to travel in search of congenial work resulted in Charlotte Brontë and her sister Emily following Mary’s example, and in 1842, the sisters enrolled as pupil teachers in the Pensionnat Heger in Brussels, learning French and German in exchange for giving lessons in English and music. This was a formative experience for Charlotte and it is doubtful whether her “strong wish for wings” would have emerged so powerfully without the pioneering Mary Taylor’s example. Certainly, Taylor strengthened Charlotte Brontë’s determination to pursue a career, an aspect of her life which she believed sustained her through many hardships and difficulties, particularly following the deaths of her siblings: she wrote: “Lonely as I am – how should I be if Providence had never given me courage to adopt a career?” (Letters II: 227). Mary Taylor left Britain for New Zealand in 1845 and Brontë wistfully wrote to Ellen Nussey, “Mary Taylor finds herself free – and on that path for adventure and exertion which she has so long been seeking admission” (Letters I: 388). Taylor’s lively letters to Charlotte and Ellen from New Zealand describe her delight in freedom from the rigid social and gender constraints which had so annoyed her in Britain. Brontë paid homage to her friend by using her as a model for one of her female characters, the twelve-year-old Rose Yorke in Shirley (Stevens 1972: 97). Rose informs her mother, who is training her to be a conventional woman: “I long to travel […] I am resolved that my life shall be a life”, adding that it is “[b]etter to try all things and find all empty, than to try nothing and leave your life a blank” (Brontë 2008: 335–336). Mary Taylor certainly took more risks than most middle-class Victorian women, and her exercise of her skills in establishing an independent and financially viable life far from her family’s roots proved that it was possible to resist the “cult of self-sacrifice” (Rudig 2017: 65) imposed on women. As Stefanie Rudig has shown, “Taylor enlarged conceptions of femininity, exploring wider levels of influence and activity for women” through her writings (Rudig 2017: 61). Taylor made her views clear: There are no means for a woman to live in England but by teaching, sewing or washing. The last is the best. The best paid the least unhealthy and the most free. But it is not paid well enough to live by. (qtd in Stevens 1972: 80–81) 118

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Her view that women should be active, autonomous, and financially productive underpinned her belief that all literature should convey a feminist message. She wrote to Brontë on reading Jane Eyre, “You are very different from me in having no doctrine to preach. […] Has the world gone so well with you that you have no protest to make against its absurdities?” (Letters I: 251). Ironically, while Taylor believed that her friend’s feminist message was not forceful enough, most reviewers of Jane Eyre believed the opposite, condemning the novel for its assertive, protesting heroine who railed against the restrictions of women’s lives. For example, in Chapter 12, Jane does protest against the limits imposed on women when she describes climbing onto the roof of Thornfield Hall, where she works as a governess, and looks out at the distant horizon: [T]hen I longed for a power of vision which might overpass that limit; which might reach the busy world, towns, regions full of life I had heard of but never seen: that then I desired more of practical experience than I possessed […]. Who blames me? Many no doubt; and I shall be called discontented. I could not help it: the restlessness was in my nature […]. Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. (Brontë 2001: 93) This famous assertion of a woman’s right to self-development, travel, and freedom attracted considerable criticism in the 1840s; nevertheless, Mary Taylor continued to believe that her friend’s novel could have been more assertive, objecting to the conventional denouement of the marriage between Jane and Rochester. Because she had a shop to run, Taylor found that her own writing projects progressed slowly and none of her essays or stories were published in Brontë’s lifetime. The articles in the feminist Victoria Magazine appeared from 1865 onwards while Miss Miles was published in 1890 when Taylor was seventy-six years old, although she began writing it in the 1840s; she explained to Brontë that her novel was focused on representations of “poverty, disputing, politics, and original views of life” (qtd. in Stevens 1972: 147). Her essay, “Redundant Women” in Victoria Magazine, an example of Taylor’s willingness to contribute to contemporary debates, constituted a spirited response to W.R. Greg’s notorious 1862 article in the National Review, “Why are Women Redundant?”, in which he proposes that the “redundant” unmarried women of Britain should emigrate to the colonies to find husbands in order to pursue their “natural” roles as wives and mothers, thus avoiding what he considered to be the degradation of having to work for pay (Greg 1869: 5). Taylor’s riposte insists that it is seeking a husband for financial support which degrades women, going on to assert that many prefer to work to support themselves and lead independent life. Taylor’s objection is that society places many obstacles in the way of women earning a decent living (Taylor 1970: 25). Indeed, Miss Miles throws light on Taylor’s belief in the importance of women’s rights and female friendship and was written in the hope that it would “revolutionize society” (Letters II: 199). Certainly, if Miss Miles had been published earlier in the nineteenth century it would have made more of an impact than it did, but its long gestation led to it appearing when the New Woman novel was at the height of its popularity, a genre focusing on contemporary stories of emancipated, sexually knowledgeable women. In this climate, a novel set in the 1830s based on women’s 119

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early struggles for freedom seemed old-fashioned, resulting in its failure to be acknowledged as a valuable feminist text, “which in content as well as form, embraces unconventionality” (Rudig 2017: 62). With its large cast of female characters, Miss Miles emphasises the importance of female friendship and solidarity. It is set in a fictional Yorkshire village and presents several interconnecting female characters of different classes, including Sarah Miles, a grocer’s daughter who wants an education and is attracted to radical politics, and Maria Bell, the middle-class daughter of a clergyman, who succeeds in her ambitions to defy her father and become a teacher. Despite her advocacy of careers for women, Taylor does not dismiss those women who choose a domestic life; indeed one of her characters, Harriet Sykes, decides to act as a housekeeper for her father and brother before marrying and becoming a mother. Harriet is Sarah’s best friend, and their friendship is sustained in spite of the different paths they choose. Harriet’s work in the domestic sphere is presented as valid labour because it is useful work she chooses and is able to do (Taylor 1990). Taylor’s target for criticism is the idleness of wealthy ladies who view each other as rivals for men’s attention. Their rejection of female solidarity is, for Taylor, the height of foolishness for, as Rudig suggests, this novel presents, “homosocial relationships as a source of power and consolation among women” (Rudig 2017: 70). Homosocial relationships are also foregrounded in Brontë’s second novel Shirley (see Wynne 2013), which according to Pauline Nestor constitutes a “positive statement about the possibilities for friendship between women”, and is Brontë’s most “explicitly feminist novel” (Nestor 1985: 112). Tess Cosslett also asserts that Shirley is “radically different” from other Victorian novels because “female friendship is central” to the plot; its protagonists, Shirley and Caroline, contemplate “a peaceful, manless, female world of Nature […] discover[ing] an asocial position of strength from which they can make subversive criticisms of the social and cultural oppression of women” (Cosslett 1988: 111). “Nature” in the novel is represented by Nunnwood, which contains “the ruins of a nunnery” the friends plan to visit without “the presence of gentlemen” (Brontë 2008: 179). Cosslett sees Nunnwood as invoking a “nostalgia” for a “female time” (Cosslett 1988: 112). However, Brontë also suggests in Shirley that obstacles are put in the way of female friendship, and the novel ends conventionally, with both Shirley and Caroline getting married. However, as Nestor has argued, there is an echo of Twelfth Night in these hasty marriages which offer “a comedy-like resolution”, rather than a realistic ending (Nestor 1985: 124). The nunnery imagined in Shirley, like the girls’ schools in Jane Eyre and Villette, powerfully suggests the female-only environment of Roe Head School, which was sited close to the remains of an ancient convent (Gaskell 2009: 77). It was here that Brontë first began to formulate a female narrative voice through which she could articulate women’s experience in her novels.

Elizabeth Gaskell: testament of friendship When Charlotte Brontë became a well-known author, following the international success of Jane Eyre, she met and corresponded with a number of other women writers, including Harriet Martineau, Julia Kavanagh, and Catherine Gore. However, after the deaths of her sisters, the only new intimate friendship she forged was with fellow novelist Elizabeth Gaskell who, by the time they met in August 1850, had published a social problem novel depicting Manchester working-class life, Mary Barton (1848). When they met, Brontë was thirty-four years old and Gaskell nearly forty and they swiftly became close friends and mutually supportive colleagues, their friendship ending only with Brontë’s premature death in March 1855. As writers with considerable domestic duties, Brontë caring for her elderly father and Gaskell for her four young daughters, they shared a bond which made each precious to the other, despite the fact that they were “physical and social 120

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opposite[s]” (Chapple and Smith 1995: 161). The robust and energetic Gaskell lived in Manchester with her husband, a Unitarian minister, and their young daughters and she was well acquainted with the problems faced by the working class in this industrial city through her work to alleviate the conditions of underprivileged women and girls (Uglow 1999: 246–247). Gaskell had a talent for friendship which enabled her to maintain a large circle of female friends; according to Jenny Uglow, she “could only talk and write freely to other women”, appreciating the close “sensual, touching and embracing” which characterised female friendship in the Victorian period (Uglow 1999: 164; see also Marcus 2007). Gaskell’s copious correspondence with women friends afforded welcome opportunities for her to “share the minutiae of life”, including domestic events and the problems and pleasures of motherhood (Uglow 1999: 166). Her friendship with Charlotte Brontë offered Gaskell something more than this, however, for the two women confided with each other about their new literary projects and experiences as professional writers. Gaskell and Brontë were “congenial spirits [and] faithful and intellectual friends”, to quote Brontë’s father (Letters III: 193), despite the differences in their backgrounds and situations: “Charlotte wrote in solitude in the wild isolation of the moors, while [Gaskell] scribbled amid the chaos of family life in the heart of a city” (Uglow 1993: 249). Both women produced novels which attracted controversy; while Jane Eyre was considered by some readers to be the work of a woman with dangerous ideas about female ambition, Gaskell’s Ruth (1853), focusing on the life of an unmarried mother, was also condemned for its sympathetic representation of female sexuality, its protagonist being a “fallen woman” (see Baker 2018). Brontë delayed the publication of her 1853 novel Villette to avoid what she feared would be a “discourteous clashing” with Ruth’s publication (Letters III: 110–111). She wrote to Gaskell to say that despite the delay, “I dare say, arrange as we may, we shall not be able wholly to prevent comparisons; it is the nature of some critics to be invidious; but we need not care: we can set them at defiance” (Letters III: 104). Brontë appreciated having an ally in Elizabeth Gaskell for since the deaths of Emily and Anne, and with Mary Taylor so far away in New Zealand, she had had few opportunities to confide in another female writer. The two women visited each other’s homes: when Gaskell stayed with her friend in Haworth for four days in September 1853, she recorded, “We were so happy together; we were so full of interest in each other’s subjects. The day seemed only too short for what we had to say and to hear” (Gaskell 2009: 440). They discussed the books they had read and their plans for new writing projects. Their letters not only reveal their literary interests, but also their views on feminist issues. Both read two articles on the “Woman Question” which had appeared in the radical magazine The Westminster Review in January 1850 and July 1851. The first was a review of Sarah Lewis’ book, Woman’s Mission (1849), which referred to an increase of British women working as artists, teachers, and writers (Letters III: 458, n.4), which Brontë celebrated, telling Gaskell that she thought Lewis’ views were “just and sensible” (Letters II: 457). The second article they discussed was by the feminist Harriet Taylor (although it appeared anonymously) called “Enfranchisement of Women”. Charlotte Brontë found this piece “notable”, “logical”, and “well-argued”, but had reservations about what she considered “the writer forget[ting] there is such a thing as self-sacrificing love and disinterested devotion” (Letters II: 695). She added that she appreciated the author’s assertion that all careers should be open to women, who need “a fair chance” to prove their abilities (Letters II: 696). Both Brontë and Gaskell were aware that in the early 1850s, when women had few legal rights, Victorian society was unprepared for the radical social and legal changes necessary for female emancipation. Harriet Taylor’s demand for women’s rights in the pages of a radical periodical seemed too forceful to Brontë and Gaskell, both of whom had faced opprobrium for their radical representations of transgressive women. Aware of the price to be paid for the “gender crime” (Weber 2012: 59) of asserting women’s rights, both authors realised that Harriet 121

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Taylor’s radical feminism would be difficult for the majority of Victorians to accept (see Hughes and Lund 1999: 139). A more gradual approach to social change was, they believed, necessary at a time when resistance to women’s full rights as citizens was strong. Indeed, the fact that women over twenty-one were only accorded the right to vote in 1928 suggests that the barriers Victorian women faced were particularly difficult to break down. Charlotte Brontë died of complications in pregnancy in 1855, shortly after her marriage to Arthur Bell Nicholls, and Gaskell spent nearly two years researching her remarkable biography The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857). Even today this book can be read as ground-breaking, for not only was it one of the first biographies of a professional woman to be published, but it constitutes a remarkable act of love and homage to a friend. In the nineteenth century, conceptions of the “genius” were almost invariably associated with the “characteristics and life histories of ‘great men’” (Higgins 2012: 1), yet Gaskell in the Life unequivocally asserted its subject’s genius by “brilliantly establish[ing] a continuum between professional and domestic propriety” (Hughes and Lund 1999: 148), a strategy which she knew would reconcile readers to the idea that female genius and femininity could co-exist. Brenda Weber argues that the biography “took the teeth out of a good deal of contemporary literary criticism that either attacked or patronized female authors from the vantage point of their sex first and their books second”, by “reformulating gender/sex paradigms” (Weber 2012: 40, 42). This was achieved by presenting Charlotte Brontë as an amalgam of literary professionalism and domestic femininity, a tactic which suggested that “female authorship posed no threat to feminine virtue” (Hughes and Lund 1999: 136). While this may seem a cop-out to some later readers, many of whom have criticised Gaskell’s Life for its presentation of Brontë as a selfless daughter who concerned herself with domestic matters, recent feminist critics have tended to put Gaskell’s tactic into a wider context, demonstrating how she successfully championed the idea of female genius when, only twenty years earlier, Brontë had been told that “Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life”. Gaskell demonstrated that “the writing woman [could be seen] as simultaneously fully feminine and deservedly famous” (Weber 2012: 37; see also Wynne 2017). Nevertheless, Gaskell’s biography also highlights the problems that Victorian women writers faced when she shows how Brontë’s life was divided into two parallel currents — her life as Currer Bell, the author; her life as Charlotte Brontë, the woman. There were separate duties belonging to each character — not opposing each other; not impossible, but difficult to be reconciled. When a man becomes an author, it is probably merely a change of employment to him. She adds that the female author is usually unable to “drop the domestic charges devolving on her as an individual, for the exercise of the most splendid talents that were ever bestowed” (Gaskell 2009: 271–272). Life being divided into “parallel currents” was also Gaskell’s experience as she sat at the dining table in her house in Plymouth Grove, Manchester, writing novels while constantly interrupted by daughters, husband, servants, and visitors (see Uglow 1999: 151–152). The Life of Charlotte Brontë, while emphasising Brontë as a dutiful daughter engaged in an apparently endless round of domestic tasks, also showed that this life was not incompatible with the labour of a professional writer who achieved international renown.

Conclusion As this chapter has shown, female friendships supported Charlotte Brontë throughout her career and helped her to develop her signature “voice” in the female Bildungsroman she introduced to 122

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Victorian literary culture. In the nineteenth century, as Nestor has shown, “an extraordinary public debate raged over women’s capacities for friendship and communal activity” (Nestor 1985: 7). Male writers often expressed doubts that women were capable of maintaining friendships with each other because they believed they could not prevent themselves competing for men (Nestor 1985: 12). Charlotte Brontë, Mary Taylor, and Elizabeth Gaskell, along with numerous other female writers, showed in their writings and in their lives that this was a male myth. In a poignant letter from New Zealand, Taylor expressed her longing for the companionship of her two best friends in England, Charlotte Brontë and Ellen Nussey, and to Brontë she indicated her strong need to talk with her face to face, even if only “for half a day”, about their writing projects (Stevens 1972: 84–85). A similar expression of female solidarity was made by Brontë when she wrote to Gaskell stating that men “shall not make us foes: they shall not mingle with our mutual feelings one taint of jealousy: there is my hand on that: I know you will give it clasp for clasp” (Letters III: 104).

Works cited Abel, Elizabeth (1981) “(E)merging Identities: The Dynamics of Female Friendship in Contemporary Fiction by Women,” Signs, 6(3): 413–435. Allott, Miriam (1974) The Brontës: The Critical Heritage, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Baker, Em. (Director) (2019) I Am No Bird (Potential Films). Baker, Katie (2018) From Fallen Woman to Businesswoman: The Radical Voices of Elizabeth Gaskell and Margaret Oliphant, University of Chester, unpublished PhD thesis. Bowen, Elizabeth (1942) English Novelists, London: William Collins. Brittain, Vera (1980) Testament of Friendship, London: Virago Press. Brontë, Charlotte (1995–2004) The Letters of Charlotte Brontë, edited by M. Smith (3 vols), Oxford: Clarendon Press. Brontë, Charlotte (2001) Jane Eyre, edited by R.J. Dunn, New York: Norton. Brontë, Charlotte (2008) Shirley, edited by H. Rosengarten and M. Smith, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Butcher, Emma (2019) The Brontës and War: Fantasy and Conflict in Charlotte and Branwell Brontës Youthful Writings, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Chapple, J. A. V. and Margaret Smith (1995) “Charlotte Brontë and Elizabeth Gaskell in Society,” Brontë Studies, 21(5): 161–167. Cosslett, Tess (1988) Woman to Woman: Female Friendship in Victorian Fiction, Atlantic Highland, NJ: Humanities Press International. Ellis, Sarah Stickney (1842) The Daughters of England: Their Social and Domestic Habits, London: Fisher, Sons & Co. Gaskell, Elizabeth (2009) The Life of Charlotte Brontë, edited by A. Easson, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gilbert, Sandra and Susan Gubar (2000) The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the NineteenthCentury Literary Imagination, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Greg, W. R. (1869) Why Are Women Redundant?, London: N. Trübner & Co. Higgins, David (2012) Romantic Genius and the Literary Magazine: Biography, Celebrity and Politics, London: Routledge. Hughes Linda K. and Michael Lund (1999) Victorian Publishing and Mrs Gaskell’s Work, Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia. Ingham, Patricia (2008) The Brontës, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Marcus, Sharon (2007) Between Women: Friendship, Desire and Marriage in Victorian England, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Nestor, Pauline (1985) Female Friendships and Communities: Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot and Elizabeth Gaskell, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Pearson, Sarah L. (2016) “Charlotte Brontë: A Bicentenary Bibliography,” Dickens Studies Annual, 47: 353–388. Rudig, Stefanie (2017) “Miles Away: Miss Miles, a Female Bildungsroman by a ‘Friend of Charlotte Brontë,’” Brontë Studies, 42(1): 60–73. Showalter, Elaine (1982) A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing, ­London: Virago.

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Deborah Wynne Stevens, Joan (1972) Mary Taylor, Friend of Charlotte Brontë: Letters from New Zealand and Elsewhere, Aukland and Oxford: Aukland University Press and Oxford University Press. Taylor, Mary (1970) The First Duty of Women: A Series of Articles Reprinted from the Victoria Magazine, 1854–1870, London: Victoria Press. Taylor, Mary (1990) Miss Miles, or, A Tale of Yorkshire 60 Years Ago, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Uglow, Jenny (1999) Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories, London: Faber and Faber. Weber, Brenda R. (2012) Women and Literary Celebrity in the Nineteenth Century: The Transatlantic Production of Fame and Gender, Farnham: Ashgate. Woolf, Virginia (2000) A Room of One’s Own, London: Penguin. Wynne, Deborah (2010) Women and Personal Property in the Victorian Novel, Farnham: Ashgate. Wynne, Deborah (2013) “Charlotte Brontë’s Frocks and Shirley’s Queer Textiles,” in J. Harrison and J. Shears (eds.) Literary Bric-a-Brac and the Victorians: From Commodities to Oddities, Farnham: Ashgate, pp. 147–162. Wynne, Deborah (2017) “The Charlotte Cult: Writing the Literary Pilgrimage from Gaskell to Woolf, in Amber K. Regis and Deborah Wynne (eds.) Charlotte Brontë: Legacies and Afterlives, Manchester: ­Manchester University Press, pp. 43–57.

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8 TRANSATLANTIC  FEMINISM  AND ANTISLAVERY ACTIVISM Women’s networks, letter writing, and literature in the long nineteenth century Clare Frances Elliott Symmetries across emancipation movements in the turbulent years of the 1840s and 1850s were fostered in the Atlantic world by activists representing several distinct campaigns. Women and men, Black and white, and of different national identities, connected with other radical social movements and, in some cases, consciously sought to create bonds. Transatlantic activists separated by a vast body of water were connected by a common ethical goal of social equality. Debates about women’s rights and other forms of activism did not respect national borders. Instead, nineteenth-century political action crossed the Atlantic, either in the form of live lectures and book tours, where speakers travelled, or through the circulation of ideas in print, as emancipatory campaigns cut across colour lines and gender lines at important intersections. A symbiotic relationship between British feminism and U.S. antislavery is notable in literature and print culture crisscrossing the Atlantic in the mid-nineteenth century. This Anglo-American relationship produced a transatlantic outpouring of creative writing, letters, illustration and photographs, lectures, and journalism, to list a few repositories for the yields of these movements (O’Neill & Lloyd 2017; Gough 2018). The dynamics of nineteenth-century activism moved across borders of gender, nationhood, and race in related exchanges and campaigns. My argument here focuses on this Atlantic “double-cross” of emancipatory debate and the crosscurrents of those movements (Weisbuch 1986). This chapter is particularly interested in letters that crossed the Atlantic back and forth; nineteenth-century letters written and received by British and American women provide examples of political writing available to ordinary people that managed to affect real change. I will consider letters written by British women in support of antislavery and by the American author Harriet Beecher Stowe in response to those women. This chapter offers a transatlantic reading of the connections between the women’s rights movement and antislavery in the long nineteenth century and, in doing so, it examines transatlantic women’s networks, letter writing, abolition orations, and the intersections between these examples of equality activism. I examine also Douglass’s relation to transatlantic women’s emancipatory work through personal connections and through his writing and journalism, and I uncover interwoven histories of female activists. In this analysis of emancipatory groups communing in the Atlantic world, I consider the African American slave poet Phillis Wheatley, U.S. feminist campaigners Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucrecia Mott, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. I read their poetry, fiction, and activism alongside everyday British women authoring letters of protest, and the

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creative writing, journalism, and letters of British women’s rights leaders, Amelia Opie, Elizabeth Heyrick, Harriet Martineau, Julia Griffiths, and Anna and Ellen Richardson and I consider Hannah More’s interest in antislavery alongside her incongruous anti-feminist thinking. Focusing upon a series of personal networks highlights the intersections between different liberation movements at the time, while also demonstrating how those campaigns were strengthened precisely because they were able to surpass the boundaries of the nation.

Transatlantic motherhood and an appeal to feeling Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) was an extraordinary bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic. It created a sensation known as “Uncle Tom mania”, and encouraged female antislavery campaigners, who were “accused of feminism” by some journalists who linked their feminism to antislavery explicitly (Meer 2005: 222). The novel was so popular in Britain that it inspired a petition signed by hundreds of thousands of British women addressed to “the Women of the United States of America” demanding an end to U.S. slavery (Earl of Shaftesbury, 1852). The petition was generated by the Duchess of Sutherland, Harriet Sutherland-Leveson-Gower (1806–1868), and it was the largest antislavery petition up to that point. The Duchess of Sutherland was a philanthropist with considerable influence in England, given her close friendship with Queen Victoria, and she served as the senior lady in the royal household. Her antislavery work was remarkable given her position in royal society. As well as the petition, her efforts included hosting antislavery campaigners including the once enslaved author Harriet Jacobs, who met with the Duchess on her second visit to London in 1858 (Salenius 2017: 185). It was Stowe who had brought the subject of U.S. slavery to the forefront of the Duchess’s attention earlier and the petition was drafted to present to Stowe directly, when the Duchess, Leveson-Gower hosted the American novelist in 1853, in order to show British women’s support in the antislavery cause (Lasser 2011: 128). The full title of the petition was “An Affectionate and Christian Address of Many Thousands of Women of Great Britain and Ireland to Their Sisters the Women of the United States of America”, and it was signed by 576,000 women in 1852 and presented to Stowe at the Duchess’s Stafford House, on 7 May 1853. The address was accompanied by the rather grotesque gift of a gold bangle in the design of a slave’s shackle, given by Leveson-Gower to Stowe as a memento mori (Newman 2002: 28). Problematic though the gift of the gold bangle was – the slave shackle adornment represented the appropriation, by wealthy white women, of Black suffering – the fact that Harriet Jacobs was welcomed at Stafford House in 1858 in order to try to help Jacobs to secure a British publisher for Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) speaks to a significant cross-racial and transatlantic sisterhood, at a time when U.S. slavery in the Southern states was still very much in operation. Clare Midgley has written on a cross-racial sisterhood that motivated British feminist antislavery campaigning for Black women in the Southern United States. According to Midgley, “it is evident that at the root of the [British] women’s anti-slavery commitment lay their concern for other women, a gender-based sympathy that was believed to cross lines of race and class” (Midgley 1993: 353). Indeed, such transatlantic sisterly appeal crossed intriguing intersections. The women signing Levenson-Gower’s petition, presented to Stowe, appealed only to female readers, as if extending Stowe’s novel’s popular connection with women in the first place. A work of sentimental fiction, Uncle Tom’s Cabin asked women readers – primarily – to empathise across the colour line through imaginative involvement with Black female characters who were based on fugitive slaves Stowe had sheltered from across the border in her own life in Ohio. Its appeal was specific to women in part because the narrative asked that they empathise, or at least sympathise, with the plight of Black mothers. British female readers were horrified by the prospect of the removal of children 126

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from their mothers, an experience presented with such affecting force in Stowe’s novel when Eliza carries her child Harry across the frozen Ohio River to safe passage. Eliza’s plight, or the plight of the women she represented, was taken up again by English women who appealed once more to their sisters in America to do something about the real female pain and suffering that Stowe’s novel fictionally presented and that Jacob’s life was testament to, as Incidents would show. Half a million British women put their names to the following lines: “We appeal to you, then, as sisters, as wives, and as mothers, to raise your voices to your fellow citizens and your prayers to God for the removal of this affliction and disgrace from the Christian world” (Anon. 1868: 120). Stowe’s novel’s appeal to motherhood had hit a nerve when she exposed slaveholding’s collective delusion about the stunted feelings of Black mothers. It included, for example, these lines from the slave mistress Marie St. Clare: [Augustine] St. Clare really has talked to me as if keeping Mammy from her husband was like keeping me from mine. There’s no comparing in this way. Mammy couldn’t have the feelings that I should. It’s a different thing altogether. (Stowe 2008: 181) Inequality is articulated here as differences in the capacity for feeling; Marie St. Clare could believe that a female slave would not feel for her husband – and, therefore, for her children too – in the way that she felt for her own loved ones. The truth of maternal feeling then surfaces again in the language used by the British women in their transatlantic call to action: it is as “wives and mothers”, they insist, that American women should feel the plight of their Black sisters. In 1863, with the Civil War underway and the end of slavery in sight, Stowe responded to the Sutherland address and petition with a plea of her own. Her complaint was that so-called antislavery Britain had not helped the North in the war and there was more to be done before it could finally end. The Atlantic Monthly published both the original letter and Stowe’s reply some five years later testifying to the inequalities that endured as direct legacies of slavery well into the Reconstruction period. In her reply, Stowe turned the appeal back onto British women: “Sisters, what have you done, and what do you mean to do?” (Stowe 1868a: 120). Her letter rewards detailed attention. In it, African American slaves and American and British white readers meet at the point of a shared religiosity, for Stowe incorporates Black spirituals to appeal to British women’s Christian faith. Readers learn that the spirituals – “now forbidden to be sung on Southern plantations” – are especially powerful for silenced singers. Inverting the terms of the original letter, she asks whether “our sisters in England [will] feel no heart-beat” at the North’s struggles against slave power. The letter closes by quoting the original petition back to the British women: “We appeal to you, then, as sisters, as wives, and as mothers, to raise your voices to your fellow citizens and your prayers to God for the removal of this affliction and disgrace from the Christian world” (Stowe 1868a: 120). In this transatlantic appeal to sisterhood, which transcends divisions of nation, class, and race, Stowe, reaffirms the value of “sisters”, “wives”, and “mothers” as actors in the fight to end the enslavement of Black women and all enslaved people in the Southern states. As Michelle Wallace records, by the late 1840s neither the traditional authority of religion nor Republican ideology was effective any longer in exposing the evils of slavery to the opposition. In their place, Stowe substituted the moral power of sentimentality and domesticity, the authority of the human heart, which couldn’t be swayed by rational analysis and argumentation. (Wallace 2000: 142) 127

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Stowe first did this in her novel and later in her reply to British women campaigners who similarly invoked the authority of the human heart and the radical potential of feeling. Frederick Douglass’ Paper was preoccupied with Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and its literary reviews became overtly political as Douglass published work that he knew could do cultural labour for the antislavery cause (Gordon 2019: 13). In 1851, Stowe wrote a letter to Douglass noting that she was regularly receiving his newspaper and “read it with great interest” (Stowe 1851). She went on to describe giving practical support for fugitive slaves at the Ohio border: As for myself and husband we have lived on the border of a slave state for years & we have never for years shrunk from the fugitives – we have helped them with all we had to give – I have received the children of liberated slaves into a family school & taught them with my own children. (Stowe 1851) These remarks directed Douglass’s attention towards fugitive children and, by extension, to motherhood and female experience: Stowe taught these children as though they were her own, extending to them commonplace maternal affection, as if to underscore the role of sympathy in driving support for abolition. Such feeling had wider currency. During the transatlantic “Uncle Tom ­mania”, women and children were specifically targeted in the sale of merchandise and adaptations of the novel. As well as nursery wallpaper featuring scenes from the novel, there was abolition stationery with envelopes featuring illustrative cycles composed of all the most popular scenes; there were Uncle Tom’s Cabin jigsaw puzzles and even board and card games in which players represented characters from the novel and had to decide how to act at key moments in the plot. (Wood 2000: 146–147) Female sympathy, on both sides of the Atlantic, was harnessed not just by antislavery campaigners but by publishers, shopkeepers, and manufacturers too. Douglass would have been alert to this second-hand sale of the story of slavery through Stowe’s book and through her white gaze and the commodification of enslaved people’s stories as related merchandise, not to mention the gifted gold-shackle-bangle. But her support, and the attention that the novel and associated paraphernalia generated, were welcomed and harnessed by him. This was as necessary to the cause as the commodification of his own body had become on the abolitionist circuit, particularly in Britain and Ireland where there was a special fascination with Black slaves as foreign and other. This was a fascination that white abolitionist leaders like William Lloyd Garrison played to when using Douglass as an example of Black capability to further the abolitionist cause – a manipulative objectification that troubled Douglass deeply. In her fiction, Stowe moved beyond a basic recording of the facts of slavery – something that Garrison wanted Douglass to adhere to on his tours – to an appeal to an imaginative sympathy where those facts could be transformed into feelings that could be experienced by female readers in particular. One year after the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Stowe felt it necessary to produce a single volume appendix of sorts to the novel that enclosed slave narratives, letters, and other factual first-hand accounts of the lives of enslaved people on Southern plantations. These texts were collated in Stowe’s book, A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1853), in an effort to “prove” that the horrifying details in her novel were based on real current events. The realities of slavery would be stored up in this book, providing room in her novel to focus on cross-racial relationships, debates about the North and South, 128

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and that all important sentimentality that encouraged readers to engage with the other’s predicaments. This book became influential in its own right, with Solomon Northup dedicating his slave narrative Twelve Years a Slave (1853) to Stowe (a text made famous by Steve McQueen’s film adaptation in 2013), and in doing so offering another key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin. For Stowe, motherhood was the connecting point where readers might sympathise with Black and female struggles. She would publish her largely forgotten later novel The Chimney Corner (1868b) under the pen name Christopher Crowfield, seemingly in order to safely air a debate on the question of the rights of women. Writing as Crowfield, she devoted one chapter to “The Woman Question: Or, What Will You Do With Her?” and offered another on “The Woman’s Sphere”. There she announced, “This question of Woman and her Sphere is now, perhaps, the greatest of the age” (Stowe 1868b: 29). And, in a later novel, My Wife and I (1871): “The woman question of our day, as I understand it, is this - Shall MOTHERHOOD ever be felt in the public administration of the affairs of state” (Stowe 1871: 5). Motherhood, female liberation, and antislavery were intrinsically tied together for Stowe. Possibly more importantly, Stowe’s repeated appeal was that readers might feel with mothers – or as mothers, regardless of racial identity – in order to sympathise with them.

Female activism in Britain In Britain, the appeal to feeling that Stowe cultivated in her fiction and correspondence was mirrored in the antislavery writing of female activists. And, as with Stowe, motherhood, female emancipation, and antislavery met at intersections in their writing and campaigns. Somewhat ironically, it was women’s exclusion from the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London, in 1840, that seems to have cemented connections between women’s liberation and the antislavery cause for many female activists. The convention at Seneca Falls, New York attended by Douglass and 300 other women and men – Douglass was one of only 32 men to attend the conference, and the only ­African American – sprang from the experiences of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott. These women had been denied full participation in the London event, and in response set off to form a similar conference for women. In other words, women’s suffrage grew out of British antislavery at this significant crossing. Mott recorded in her diary her bemusement at the fact that much of the first day of the conference was taken up with protracted debates over whether she and other American women ought to be allowed to take their seats and attend the proceedings. It was decided by the gentlemen gathered to discuss antislavery that the female delegates should not be permitted to stay for the conference but instead be hidden behind a curtain at the back of the room (Tolles 1952: 22–25; Ware 1992: 82). In her important study of the connections between race and gender and the transatlantic relations and issues arising from these junctures, Beyond the Pale, Vron Ware deals with the activism of British women. She considers 1826 to be a significant solidifying moment between these causes when the Birmingham Ladies Negroes’ Friend Society converted the famous “Am I Not a Man and a Brother?” pendant and used its feminised version, “Am I Not a Woman and a Sister?” for its own emblem, demonstrating the crossovers between female activism, Black activism, and Black female activism (Ware 1992: 71). However, the connections between the women’s rights movement in Britain and transatlantic antislavery, always overt, were not always recognised by women activists themselves. Many British women writing and campaigning fervently against U.S. slavery were, in fact, not entirely feminist in their thinking. Hannah More, poet and acquaintance of William Wilberforce, is a good example of an antislavery activist who was not entirely sure of her own rights to liberty. More famously claimed not to have read Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1790), anticipating that there could be nothing notable in it (Ware 1992: 71). But More was a strong advocate for antislavery in London social and political circles. 129

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Unlike More, who appears to have disregarded the disenfranchisement of her own female experience while foregrounding the antislavery cause, the British female antislavery campaigner Amelia Opie mirrored the sentimental work that Stowe was doing by appealing to female feeling and motherhood, directly connecting the slave’s experience to the subjugation of women. Her poem “The Negro Boy’s Tale, a Poem Addressed to Children” (1824) attempts to teach children and their caregivers to feel for the abolitionist cause. In the poem, in which Opie appropriates the voice of a slave boy, she connects the powerlessness of her female speaker to the boy’s entrapment, as Anna “cannot grant thy suit” but promises to clasp her father’s knees and not rise until he hears her pleas on behalf of the boy. Likewise, Opie’s children’s book, The Black Man’s Lament: Or How to Make Sugar (1826) also has two speakers, one white, one Black, with a white voice ventriloquising the Black slave. In this case, a white abolitionist giving voice to the enslaved Black man describes to children precisely how the sugar that British people enjoy reaches their parents’ pantries. Similarly, Elizabeth Heyrick appealed to those buying sugar in British shops to consider the true human cost of their purchases. Heyrick, a member of the Birmingham Female Society, had a major impact on antislavery in Britain. Her pamphlet “On the Reasons for Immediate Not Gradual Emancipation; Or, an Inquiry into the Shortest, Safest, and Most Effectual Means of Getting Rid of West Indian Slavery” (1824) was published at a time when Wilberforce and others were trying to temper their approach to antislavery by calling for gradual abolition as a way of distancing themselves from more radical movements that promoted violent insurrection. Heyrick’s call for immediate emancipation was powerful coming from a woman’s pen because her approach encouraged consumer boycotts (Ware 1992: 71). Women might find themselves denied direct entry to the political scene of antislavery activism in Britain, as Mott and Stanton had discovered to their dismay, but consumer power was power nonetheless, and Heyrick’s call to other women to stop buying slave produce was one of many effective consumer boycotts in Britain, led by women, to deny plantation produce. British women could contribute to the abolition of U.S. slavery by feeling across lines of race and class as Stowe and Leveson-Gower had shown. They could support the antislavery cause by reading literature and signing petitions in response to the feeling that literature elicited. And, as the gender most responsible for undertaking or overseeing domestic chores, depending on class status, women could directly support antislavery by boycotting the goods produced by slave labour.

Harriet Martineau, Julia Griffiths, and female activism in Northern Britain In the Northern coastal town of Blyth, Northumberland, the slave poet Phillis Wheatley featured in the Blyth Weekly News on Saturday 28 January 1882.1 Under the heading ‘Intelligent Negroes’, the newspaper printed a column covering Wheatley’s remarkable life story from slave to poet (Anon. 1882). Wheatley, the first African American writer to publish a book of poems, produced most of her creative work while she was the “property” of the Wheatley family from Boston, Massachusetts. Much like Douglass, who won his manumission in Britain, Wheatley’s experiences abroad shaped the course of her life, as her book tour in Britain in 1773 put pressure on the Wheatleys to free her, and she was released upon returning to the United States. Here was a Black woman who made two significant sea voyages in her life: one as a slave transported on the brig from which she would take her name, the Phillis, and the second as a celebrity poet travelling to London to promote her writing. Like Douglass, Wheatley was manumitted precisely because of the enthusiastic British reaction to her writing. Had Wheatley travelled to Blyth, when she was in England in 1773, she would have enjoyed a sea-view much like the one that Harriet Martineau knew. The address where Martineau resided from 1840 to 1845, 57 Front Street, in Tynemouth, North Tyneside, was 130

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a house with dramatic coastal views; today, it has a blue plaque marking Martineau’s antislavery activism. The Victorian intellectual was an important activist for antislavery and women’s rights, and she published in periodicals on both topics. Her sociological work on early feminism and antislavery, and on the intersections between these campaigns, made her a significant emancipatory figure in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world. Martineau travelled in the United States in the 1830s and recorded her experiences there in Society in America (1837), which criticised the U.S. South for its dependence on slave labour but also commented on the incongruous relationship that Christian Americans had with a system that enslaved people. Martineau’s own Christian religiosity was part of the driving force behind her antislavery activism. Having observed that it was often women who were at the front of antislavery campaigning, through letter writing, petitions, consumer boycotts, and women’s networks, Martineau began to write about the connections between female servitude and Black enslavement. Martineau was a regular contributor to the gift book, the Liberty Bell. While gift books are now recognised as belonging to a literary genre in their own right, their practical purpose was to raise money and awareness for equality causes (Fritz and Fee 2013: 60). The Liberty Bell, edited by Maria Weston Chapman, was one of the two most significant gift books for antislavery. The second was Autographs for Freedom, edited by the Englishwoman Julia Griffiths. Both were sold to support the American Anti-Slavery Society, and, in particular, its National Anti-Slavery Standard and Frederick Douglass’ Newspaper. Griffiths prepared two volumes of Autographs for Freedom and Douglass contributed his novella ‘The Heroic Slave’ (1853). She met Douglass in Newcastle upon Tyne, where she originally resided, and later she became the co-editor of Frederick Douglass’ Paper. Very little has been written on her, yet she was a key figure in Douglass’s working life, moving to New York in 1849 to join him as his editor and co-founding the influential Rochester Ladies Anti-Slavery Society. She is a significant figure when considering the junctures between female agitation groups, transatlantic causes, and cross-racial collaborations. Her work with Douglass took her to New York but she travelled back and forth across the Atlantic, returning to London in 1855. From London, she continued to write columns for Douglass and to raise funds for the Rochester Ladies Anti-Slavery Sewing Society. Griffiths had a reputation as an energetic campaigner. As well as working with Douglass in the United States, she also was instrumental in locating Frederick Douglass’ Paper at the centre of transatlantic abolitionist journalism. On her return to Britain in 1855, she became a prolific letter-writer, corresponding with Douglass, his printers, sympathisers, and friends. Sarah Meer has noticed that Griffiths’ regular column in Frederick Douglass’ Paper was written in the form of a letter, mimicking a personal correspondence in order to cultivate a community of antislavery campaigners reading from both sides of the Atlantic. It borrowed the tone of personal correspondence for a public form, cultivating antislavery friendships and maintaining its community of readers. After 1855, Griffiths began twenty new antislavery societies in Britain and continued to be involved in the Underground Railroad from afar (Meer 2012: 252–253). Her remarkable journey from her beginnings in Newcastle upon Tyne to the Underground Railroad illustrates how important women from the North of England were to the successes of antislavery in the United States. The support went both ways. While Griffiths was an influential figure in Douglass’s life, he was an ally to women’s rights throughout his years of activism. As well as being the only African American attendee at Seneca Falls, his final act was to attend a suffrage meeting of the National Council of Women in Washington, D.C., after which he collapsed and died, having suffered a suspected stroke. This work for the suffrage movement in his final hours is a powerful reminder of how committed Douglass was to women’s rights – and of just how closely related different emancipatory campaigns were. Following the Seneca Falls convention, on 28 July 1848, Douglass’s 131

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newspaper The North Star published an editorial on the intersection of women’s rights and abolitionist movements entitled “The Rights of Women”: A discussion of the rights of animals would be regarded with far more complacency by many of what are called the wise and good of our land, than would be a discussion of the rights of woman. It is, in their estimation, to be guilty of evil thoughts, to think that woman is entitled to rights equal with man. Many who have at last made the discovery that negroes have some rights as well as other members of the human family, have yet to be convinced that woman is entitled to any. (Anon. 1848a) The mention of animal rights packs a particular punch, given that enslaved people in the Southern states continued to be treated worse than livestock, and were regularly compared with animals in the dehumanising rhetoric of the period and inspected as cattle or swine might be on the auction block. This atrocious aspect of the institution of slavery, which Black writers continually return to as a way of processing the realities and legacies of such dehumanisation, appears in Douglass’s description of the auction block in his Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845): We were all ranked together at the valuation. Men and women, old and young, married and single, were ranked with horses, sheep, and swine. There were horses and men, cattle and women, pigs and children, all holding the same rank in the scale of being, and were all subjected to the same narrow examination. At this moment, I saw more clearly than ever the brutalizing effects of slavery upon both slave and slaveholder. (Douglass 2009: 48) The institution of slavery and the violence it enacted was made permissible by a hypocritical society that could tell itself lies about people of African descent. It was built on the lie that African Americans could and should be denied their humanity. Douglass highlights the absurdity and horror of this dehumanisation in his Narrative by repeatedly turning to animal imagery. As such, the choice of language in his editorial on “The Rights of Women” transfers the same rhetorical strategy to an adjacent emancipatory cause, sardonically linking them as radical critiques of historic structural disempowerment. Earlier, in February 1848, The North Star had published an appeal: “The Women of Scotland to the Free Women of the United States of America”. In 1846, in a series of speeches, Douglass had been vocal on the “Send Back the Money” campaign. In 1843, the Free Church of Scotland had accepted slaveholding sponsorship from the United States to establish their new independent sect. Douglass rallied Scottish support against this link between Scotland and slavery. As the Free Church did not send the money back, the controversy raged for many years and The North Star’s publication of a letter from Scottish Women in support of antislavery was further grist to the mill of this call (Saunders-Hastings 2021: 738). By calling from across the Atlantic for white American women to sympathise with Black female slaves, it made another important connection between female experience and enslaved experience. It shared Douglass’s conviction that female liberty was directly related to Black liberty, and across gender lines too. The Scottish letter spells out the risks of being complicit in a system that oppresses women and people of colour: Dear Sisters – Enjoying freedom ourselves, our desire is, that its blessings should be extended to every member of the human family […] We ask you to pause and reflect on this 132

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unseemly and wicked state of things; emancipate yourself from that bondage and custom, or prejudice, or interest, under which you may be laboring; contemplate the horrors of the slave system with an open and candid mind; realize as far as you can, an adequate conception of the realities of this evil; ascertain in what way you stand connected with it; and, looking at that connection in the light of a final reckoning, decide at once whether Slavery is in future to count upon you as friends or foes. (Anon. 1848b) In this letter, white American women are asked to emancipate themselves from the bondage of a patriarchal order that has enabled the institution of slavery to endure. Such sisterly calls back and forth across the Atlantic, much like Stowe’s transatlantic letters discussed above, show how readily women campaigners identified the antislavery cause with their own emancipatory ends. The demand for women to break free from the bondage of custom and to pose questions of a shared humanity for women and men, beyond race and nationality, echoes Douglass’s messages about Black freedom and women’s rights elsewhere. The letter recognises the barriers to empathy that the slave system erects: free women of the United States will have to strive for an open mind and strain to realise the realities of this evil. The bondage of custom has allowed them to live alongside slavery and in many cases turn a blind eye to suffering. To change that, the female reader – ­regardless of her social class – must look beyond her own position and acknowledge a connection to, and responsibility for, the other’s trauma. Like the previous extract from Douglass’s North Star, the letter lays stress on empathy across gender and colour lines. It also envisages its project of liberation as occurring in transatlantic space. Douglass witnessed Black female suffering and wrote about it extensively in his lectures and autobiographies. In the Narrative, the overseer on Captain Anthony’s plantation always went armed with a cowskin and a heavy cudgel [and was known] to cut and slash the women’s heads so horribly, that even master would be enraged at his cruelty, and would threaten to whip him if he did not mind himself. (Douglass 2009: 17–18) Violence perpetrated against women is relentless in Douglass’s autobiography. Directly after this description of women having their heads cut open, the reader encounters the infamous scene of Aunt Hester’s whipping, where the child Douglass watches as “soon the warm, red blood (amid heart-rending shrieks from her, and horrid oaths from him) came dripping to the floor” (Douglass 2009: 19). It is conceivable that witnessing the mistreatment of women at an early age prepared Douglass to campaign committedly for women’s rights later in life (Fought 2017: 22). Moreover, support was reciprocal. Female campaigners on both sides of the Atlantic were crucial figures in both Douglass’s life and the abolitionist movement as a whole (Quanquin 2021). Douglass met Elizabeth Cady Stanton in 1841 at the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society. He later recalled how Stanton had set before him “in a very strong light, the wrongs and injustices [of] woman’s exclusion from the right choice in the selection of the persons who should frame the laws, and thus shape the destiny of all the people, irrespective of sex” (Douglass qtd. in Fought 2017: 152). As Leigh Fought has shown, Stanton recognised Douglass as an inclusive figure who could shape Black civil rights as a movement for equality between men and women too. In Stanton’s retelling, he could bridge gaps between “a white-led antislavery movement, a male-­dominated black civil rights movement, and a women’s movement largely controlled by white women” (Fought 2017: 152). Fought argues convincingly that scholarship on U.S. abolition networks has mistakenly 133

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presented the movement as primarily a male club, yet women were responsible for antislavery networks across the Atlantic and “awareness of gender politics emerged from this feminine world of antislavery during the first six years of [Douglass’s] activism” (Fought 2017: 71). Feminism grew out of female support for antislavery which gained momentum through transatlantic travel and the circulation of print culture in journalism and private correspondence, generating fury over an oppressive patriarchal system that allowed brutality against Black slaves and women and denied full liberty for both people of colour and white women (Yellin & Van Horne 1994: 160–177).

Anna and Ellen Richardson in Newcastle Upon Tyne Women’s antislavery organisations were vibrant and active in Britain in the 1840s and 1850s. “Female groups in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Perth, Kircaldy, Cork, Belfast, Dublin, Bridgewater, ­Rochdale, and Carlisle supported and arranged meetings for visiting abolitionists such as ­Frederick Douglass” (Murray 2020: 201). By the early 1850s, “female antislavery societies in ­Britain were far more numerous than male organizations” (Midgley qtd in Murray 2020: 201). And Northern women played a large part in these campaigns as I have shown above. On his tour of Britain and Ireland, women’s groups sheltered and supported Douglass, and he realised that “even without official positions, women wielded a great deal of influence” (Fought 2017: 73). This he felt keenly through another Newcastle upon Tyne connection. As well as the Newcastleborn Griffiths, Douglass also knew the influential Newcastle upon Tyne sisters-in-law, the Richardsons. Douglass was invited to reside with the Richardson family, and it was through them that he met Griffiths. His manumission was secured there, thanks to Anna and Ellen Richardson who corresponded with Douglass’s master, Thomas Auld, and finally agreed a price for his freedom of £150 (Bernier & Taylor 2018: 7). The Richardson sisters-in-law were Quaker women famed for securing not only Douglass’s manumission in 1846 from their home in Summerhill Grove, Newcastle, but also for successfully fundraising to purchase the freedom for William Wells Brown in 1854. Anna ­Richardson, in particular, became a key figure in the British antislavery and peace movements, campaigning in Britain and producing activist periodicals (Midgley 1995: 130). In 1846, she founded the Ladies Free Produce Association, which boycotted goods produced using slave labour, and from 1847, she issued a newsletter, “Monthly Illustrations of American Slavery”, providing up-to-date information on the realities of slavery to newspaper editors. As Fionnghuala Sweeney notes, “by the 1850s she was considered a national leader of the free-produce movement and with her husband launched a periodical for that movement, the Slave, in January 1851” (Sweeney qtd in Finkelman 2006: 43). It was only on a return journey to Britain in 1886–1887 that Douglass learned that his freedom had been arranged for him by the Richardson women all those years ago. Vron Ware describes Ellen Richardson as having a flash of inspiration about planning Douglass’s freedom while on a trip with Douglass to show him the Northumberland coastline, when he resided in Newcastle during the first 1846–1847 visit (Ware 1992: 75). Richardson and Douglass would have been looking at the same sea-view that Martineau had been enjoying just a year earlier in Tynemouth. Douglass wrote in the Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1882) about his final opportunity to meet with people who helped to change the course of his life: Few who first received me in that country are now among the living. It was, however, my good fortune to meet once more Mrs. Anna Richardson and Miss Ellen Richardson, the two members of the Society of Friends, both beyond three-score and ten, who, forty-five years before, opened a correspondence with my old master and raised seven hundred and fifty 134

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dollars with which to purchase my freedom. Mrs. Anna Richardson, having reached the good old age of eight-six years, her life marvelously filled up with good works for her hand was never idle and her heart and brain were always active in the cause of peace and benevolence, a few days before this writing passed away. Miss Ellen Richardson, now over eighty, still lives and continues to take a lively interest in the career of the man whose freedom she was instrumental in procuring. (Douglass 1882: 222) These emancipatory campaigns that included antislavery and women’s rights were united by a stimulating transatlantic space that connected agitators and reformers across gender and race, sending constant messages of support back and forth to each other and calls to action. Given the intersections of these freedom struggles in the 1840s and beyond, it seems fitting that Anna Richardson survived into old age and was able to meet with Douglass one more time before passing away some days later. A blue plaque now sits on the wall of the house where her sister-in-law and brother once lived and where Douglass stayed when the funds were raised by these women to secure his freedom. Douglass’s networks of transatlantic women helped to free him from the limitations of white male abolitionists in the United States who made specific requirements of Douglass in order to, as they saw it, convince Americans of the urgency of the abolitionist cause. As Murray and McKivigan have shown, Garrison and his peers in the United States wanted Douglass merely to repeat the facts of his life to audiences in order to “prove” the horrors of slavery and to display the intellectual capacity of Black Americans. Frustrated by Garrison’s methods, Douglass was able to reshape “his ideology through a transatlantic lens, [as he] completely rejected the white constraints of his Garrisonian peers” (Murray & McKivigan 2021). That transatlantic dimension allowed Douglass to reshape his thinking outside of national conversations about the dehumanisation of African Americans and their exclusion from the rights afforded other men by the U.S. Constitution (Elliott 2022: 50). That purposeful exclusion of Black men from the promise of the “Declaration of Independence”, that “all men are created equal”, allowed for the continued exploitation of Black labour in the South long after slavery was abolished (Tsesis 2012: 203–206). His transatlantic experiences enabled Douglass to look beyond the white limitations of Garrison’s vision for Black Americans and his female networks helped Douglass specifically to move beyond a masculine heroism for the cause of antislavery and instead forge his demands for the emancipation of enslaved African Americans to the transatlantic movement for women’s rights. The expansive and inclusive cause of women’s rights that Douglass supported reverberated through communication networks across the Atlantic world in enduring systems of organised women, from ordinary British and American households to renowned authors, and it shaped his vision of what the U.S. abolition movement could achieve. By expanding his reach beyond the United States and beyond a masculine vision of equality for enslaved people, Douglass was able to convince thousands of people on both sides of the Atlantic, Black and white, male and female, that antislavery was not just his cause but theirs too. In this analysis of transatlantic letters, poetry, novels, and addresses, I have read ordinary women authoring letters of protest alongside the creative writing, journalism, and letters of British women’s rights leaders, Amelia Opie, Elizabeth Heyrick, Harriet Martineau, Julia Griffiths, and the Richardson women. As the women’s rights movement and its intersections with antislavery had a transatlantic reach, I have shown how a perspective beyond national boundaries is needed to fully appreciate the experiences of women and people of colour in the nineteenth century, and how emancipatory campaigns influenced and modified each other in ways that crossed the Atlantic and 135

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crossed gender, race, and class. Everyday women corresponding with a famous American author, and Queen Victoria’s lady in waiting hosting a female slave author, and an ex-slave writer having his freedom bought for him by two Northern English Quaker women, are just a few examples of where feminist thinking helped to connect people, momentarily perhaps, yet with enduring legacies, across hard structural boundaries. This focus upon personal networks has highlighted the intersections between different mid-nineteenth-century liberation movements while also demonstrating how those campaigns were strengthened precisely because they were able to surpass the boundaries of nations and national cultures as well as crossing ideological boundaries of difference.

Note 1 Many thanks to Fionnghuala Sweeney for bringing this to my attention.

Works Cited Anon. (1848a). “The Rights of Women,” The North Star, Rochester, NY, 28 July, p. 1. Available at: https:// infoweb.newsbank.com/shibboleth (Accessed: 10 Oct 2022). Anon. (1848b). “The Women of Scotland to the Free Women of the United States of America,” The North Star, Rochester, NY, 11 February, p. 1. Available at: https://infoweb.newsbank.com/shibboleth (Accessed: 10 Oct 2022). Anon. (1868) qtd in “A Reply,” The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 63, p. 120. Available at: www.proquest.com (Accessed: 10 Oct 2022). Anon. (1882) “Intelligent Negroes,” The Blyth Weekly, Blyth, UK, 28 January, np. Available at: https://www. britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk (Accessed: 15 Nov 2022). Bernier Celeste-Marie and Andrew Taylor (eds.) (2018) If I Survive: Frederick Douglass and Family in the Walter O. Evans Collection, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Douglass, Frederick (1882) Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, Harford: Park Pub. Co. Douglass, Frederick (2009) Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, edited by Deborah McDowell, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Earl of Shaftesbury (1852) “The Affectionate and Christian Address of Many Thousands of the Women of England to Their Sisters, the Women of the United States of America,” Times (London) 9 November 1852: 3. Eastman, Mary Henderson (1852) Aunt Phillis’ Cabin Or, Southern Life As It Is, Philadelphia, PA: Lippincott, Grambo & Co. Available at: https://www.gutenberg.org (Accessed: 10 Oct 2022). Elliott, Clare Frances (2022) “Writing Across Lines: Frederick Douglass, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Charles Dickens in the Black Atlantic,” Journal of Transatlantic Studies, March Issue 1: 39–57. Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1995) “Address on Emancipation in the British West Indies,” August 1844 in L. Gougeon and J. Myerson (eds.) Emerson’s Anti-Slavery Writings, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Fenton, Laurence (2014) Frederick Douglass in Ireland: The Black O’Connell, Cork: The Collins Press. Fought, Leigh (2017) Women in the World of Frederick Douglass, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fritz, Meaghan M. and Frank Fee (2013) “To Give the Gift of Freedom: Gift Books and the War on Slavery,” American Periodicals, 23(1): 60–82. Gordon, Adam (2019) “Beyond the ‘Proper Notice’: Frederick Douglass, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and the Politics of Critical Reprinting,” American Literature, 91(1): 1–29. Gough, Kathleen M. (2018) Kinship and Performance in the Black and Green Atlantic: Haptic Allegories, London: Taylor & Francis. Griffiths, Julia (ed.) (1853–1854) Autographs for Freedom, Boston, MA: John P. Jewett and Company. Available at: https://heinonline.org (Accessed: 10 Oct 2022). Lasser, Carol (2011) “Immediatism, Dissent, and Gender: Women and the Sentimentalization of Transatlantic Anti-Slavery Appeals,” in E. J. Clapp and J. R. Jeffrey (eds.) Women, Dissent, and Anti-Slavery in Britain and America, 1790–1865, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 111–131. Meer, Sarah (2012) “Public and Personal Letters: Julia Griffiths and Frederick Douglass’ Paper,” Slavery & Abolition, 33(2): 251–264. Meer, Sarah (2005) Uncle Tom Mania: Slavery, Minstrelsy, and Transatlantic Culture in the 1850s, Athens: University of Georgia Press.

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9 FORGOTTEN FEMINIST FICTION Netta Syrett, New Woman writing, and women’s suffrage Lucy Ella Rose

What is known as the “Women’s Movement” was in the [eighteen] eighties already well recognised and in the [eighteen] nineties in full swing. […] educated girls of any character, all over the country, were asserting their right to independence. (Netta Syrett 1939: 6) Here Netta (Janet) Syrett (1865–1943), writing in her autobiography The Sheltering Tree (1939), acknowledges the rise of First-Wave feminism in the form of the women’s suffrage movement at the height of her literary career in the 1890s and its enablement of nation-wide female agency. Perceiving independence as a right that educated girls needed to actively assert in order to achieve greater freedom – a view which permeates her fiction – she conveys both the gaining momentum and her own advocation of fin-de-siècle feminism. Syrett echoes her more famous feminist contemporary Sarah Grand, who coined the term “New Woman”, when she wrote: “women generally are becoming conscious that some great change is taking place in their position” (Grand 1894: 707). Syrett was herself an archetypal New Woman: “a young woman from the upper or middle class concerned to reject many of the conventions of femininity and live and work on free and equal terms with the opposite sex” (Cherry 1993: 75). Born in Ramsgate, Kent, she was the daughter of a silk merchant and lived comfortably as one of thirteen children; her parents, unusually for the time, supported their daughters’ choice of higher education and creative careers. Syrett developed a successful literary career, never married, and – as this chapter aims to show – supported women’s suffrage in her work and networks. As a professional and prolific yet critically neglected New Woman writer of short stories, novels, and plays exploring “fallen” women and sexuality, conjugal bondage, and women’s rights, Syrett was both a product of, and participant in, the shifting socio-political climate and gender dynamics that mark the fin de siècle. Her work – spanning Victorian and Edwardian periods, the suffrage years and the interwar years – traces the radical redefinition of the role and self-representation of women over this time. Of the three Syrett sisters – Netta, Mabel, and Nellie – who contributed to the avant-garde periodical The Yellow Book (collectively, volumes 2, 7, 10, 11, 12, and 13, in either fiction or illustration), Netta Syrett is the most famous, and yet her vast literary oeuvre is little explored. Few studies dedicated to Syrett’s work exist, including articles by Netta Murray Goldsmith (2004), Jad Adams (2019), and Crescent Rainwater (2020). The traditional association of The Yellow Book DOI: 10.4324/9781003429951-12

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with decadence, and decadence with masculinist culture, has perhaps partly contributed to her neglect as a feminist. She has also been historically overshadowed by the dominant critical focus on her more famous female contemporaries. Syrett, marginalised in scholarship on nineteenth- and twentieth-century women’s writing, existed not on the periphery of a circle of female aesthetes (including Evelyn Sharp, Ella D’Arcy, and Olive Custance) and New Women writers (including Sarah Grand, Mona Caird, and Olive Schreiner) but at the hub of an emergent feminist network that challenged male dominance in literature, politics, and culture. This chapter explores Syrett’s connections to numerous pioneering women’s suffrage campaigners and politically active professional woman writers, offering a new perspective of Syrett as a suffrage writer and her role in a finde-siècle feminist literary community. The works discussed in this chapter self-referentially allude to contemporary feminist figures and societies, political events, and literary works, illuminating the importance of such networks for Syrett as well as her important role within them. Whilst Syrett’s 1890s short stories written for The Yellow Book show her incipient feminism, this chapter traces the increasing politicisation of her work in its focus on two almost entirely unexplored texts preoccupied with women’s suffrage: her recently published one-act suffrage play of 1909, titled Might is Right (Paxton 2018), on the subject of suffragette militancy, and her 1930 novel, Portrait of a Rebel, whose protagonist is passionate about women’s rights and emancipation. This critically neglected novel was her most profitable (Goldsmith 2004: 547) and was adapted into the famous film A Woman Rebels (1936), starring Katharine Hepburn and Elizabeth Allan. A contemporary film review claims that it “appeal[led] to all who [had] views upon the important question of woman’s emancipation”, tracing a girl’s “burning ambition to obtain personal freedom at a period when a woman was regarded as a chattel” (The Wiltshire Times, 21 August 1937: 5). Despite the fact that Might is Right is a play text and Portrait of a Rebel is a novel, and they were published almost two decades apart, I argue that these texts can be read as companion pieces. They are Syrett’s most overtly feminist, pro-suffrage works, both centred on female rebellion, using theatrical comedy and narrative tragedy respectively as feminist strategies to appeal to her audiences. Might is Right, set in “the Future” (Syrett 2018: 2), envisions suffragette victory almost a decade before women’s suffrage was partially won with the Representation of the People Act of 1918. Portrait of a Rebel – set in the Victorian past but published two years after women’s suffrage was finally won with the Equal Franchise Act of 1928 – tells the life story of a pioneering women’s rights activist and orator, encouraging younger generations’ appreciation of Victorian founders of feminism. These texts centre on women’s experiences and perspectives, reflect and promote the greater socio-political emancipation of women, and dialogise with early feminist discourse on the education, marriage, and professionalisation of women, thus entering into contentious public debates. An analysis of these two texts offers insight into Syrett’s understudied works and reveals her authorial evolution over the course of her career in response to the women’s suffrage campaign. Sally Ledger notes the “considerable interplay between the New Woman fiction and drama of the period”, using Netta Syrett, George Egerton, Sarah Grand, and Victoria Cross as examples of popular New Woman novelists who turned to playwriting later in their careers (Ledger 2006: 51). In fin-de-siècle Britain, the theatre was used as a public platform for suffrage oratory and propaganda, staging feminist speeches and struggles, whilst novels offered women a discursive space to critique gender roles and express feminist voices. The recent Methuen Drama volume of Suffrage Plays (Paxton 2018), the first to transcribe and publish the original script of Syrett’s Might is Right over a century after production, presents it as the opening “performance piece” in a body of “performative suffrage propaganda” (Paxton 2018: v) alongside works by Cicely Hamilton, George Bernard Shaw, and Lawrence Housman. Several women’s organisations were formed in 139

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the lead up to the play’s production in 1909, including the Actresses’ Franchise League (AFL) and the Women Writers’ Suffrage League (WWSL), both in 1908. The original cast for Syrett’s play included members and supporters of the AFL, including Gillian Scaif, Doris Lytton, Ada Palmer, Sydney Fairbrother, and Amy Brandon Thomas. Literature, visual art, theatre, and performance were an “important, effective and influential part of the campaign for Votes for Women in the years preceding the First World War” (Paxton 2018: iv), and Naomi Paxton highlights connections between the AFL and the WWSL whose members and supporters experimented with writing for the stage and created new material to promote the cause. With the exception of Paxton, Syrett’s relation to suffrage is invariably overlooked and even disavowed by critics. Ann Ardis, for example, claims that “Syrett was never an activist for women’s suffrage. In fact, the references to organized feminism in her fiction are […] negative. […] Nor does suffrage activism capture the imagination of Syrett’s heroines” (Ardis 2002: 130). Echoing Ardis, Charlotte Vanhecke claims that “although Netta Syrett’s views on gender were undeniably modern, she never adopted any radically feminist discourse in her fiction” which reflects her “non-revolutionary views on emancipation” (Vanhecke 2009: 34). This chapter challenges Vanhecke’s claim in its focus on the explicit, radically feminist discourse and revolutionary views on women’s liberation in Might is Right and Portrait of a Rebel. It contests Ardis’ claim in showing how suffrage activism motivates Syrett’s protagonists in both texts, focusing on their plethora of positive and impassioned references to organised feminism, and their celebration of the communal power of women in the suffrage campaign. For Syrett, writing was an act of political engagement, communicating her own – and communicating with – early feminist ideas. Might is Right and Portrait of a Rebel are evidently overlooked by Ardis and Vanhecke, possibly due to their obscurity and lack of accessibility – that is, the former was unpublished until recently, and the latter is an undigitised rare book. This illuminates the ways in which limited and changing access to primary sources affect the study and historicisation of women writers. Building on Paxton’s work, this chapter analyses Might is Right in unprecedented depth, both in relation to Portrait of a Rebel and as part of her neglected literary oeuvre, in order to further illuminate Syrett’s important contribution to early feminist literature. Syrett’s support of women’s rights and culture is evidenced by her active involvement in various women’s groups, societies, and events. A newspaper reports her presence “among many remarkable women, interesting to each other and to the English reading world at large” at the “Women Writers’ Dinner” of 1902 (The Queen 1902: 101). These included many influential early feminist authors and activists, suffragists, and suffragettes, comprising a community of progressive women with whom Syrett interacted. In attendance were: Sarah Grand; feminist novelist and WWSL founder Violet Hunt; founding member of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) Beatrice Harraden, who was also a WWSL member; suffragist writer Jane Maria Strachey, a member of the executive committee of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS); and suffragist writer May Sinclair, a member of the Femina Vie Hereuse Society (1919–1940). Syrett was on this society’s all-female Prize Committee along with the likes of Elizabeth Robins, Cicely Hamilton, and Violet Hunt. In this role, Syrett supported women’s writing and literary careers whilst furthering her own. She was also chairwoman of the International Lyceum Club for Women Artists and Writers (1906), mixing with a circle of notable women writers and playwrights, including Constance Smedley (who founded the club in 1904) and Beatrice Harraden. Mabel Dearmer – a writer and illustrator for The Yellow Book as well as of children’s stories by Evelyn Sharp and Laurence Housman – documents her partnership with Syrett in NUWSS journal the Common Cause of 1913, promoting their co-management of The Children’s Theatre and showing Syrett’s relevance to a feminist readership (12 December 1913: 676). Reflecting her international influence, Votes 140

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for Women articles of 1917 show that Syrett delivered at least one “interesting lecture” to the U.S. Women’s Club (4 May 1917: 262). Such details show Syrett’s growing personal interest in forging new feminist alliances, revealing her prestigious position in creative feminist circles of her day. Syrett’s autobiography, The Sheltering Tree, republished in Routledge’s New Woman Fiction, 1881–1899 (Cregan-Reid 2016), takes its title from a poem by S. T. Coleridge: “friendship is a sheltering tree” (“Youth and Age”, 1823). While Vanhecke argues that “the relative silence concerning gender issues in her autobiography tells us that she did not likely have a particularly political agenda” (2009: 35), I argue that Syrett therein maps her close friendships and professional relationships with pioneering feminist writers, publicly recording her own integral yet largely unrecognised place in London’s feminist literary community at the fin de siècle. It details how Syrett was introduced by her sister Mabel to writer and suffragist Alice Meynell, a vice-president of the WWSL, whose spirituality and “rare” poetry Syrett admired (Syrett 1939: 94, 157). It documents how actress Ellen Terry – a prominent member of the AFL – praised Syrett’s dramatic work (Syrett 1939: 217–218). Syrett also recalls living unchaperoned next door to esteemed Yellow Book contributor, novelist, and prominent early feminist Evelyn Sharp at the New Victorian Club (founded 1893) in modest accommodation for professional ladies. Sharp was an active member of the WWSL (along with Alice Meynell and Sarah Grand) and in 1912, became editor of the WSPU’s official newspaper Votes for Women. Syrett writes, long ago at that little club she and I used to have a great deal of fun in those attic rooms, whose windows were so close together that a great deal of conversation went on in the open air when we put our heads out of them to talk to our neighbours. (Syrett 1939: 89) Though their living arrangements were regarded by some as a “slightly dangerous innovation” (Syrett 1939: 66), Syrett and Sharp “normalize[d] new urban living for working women” (Gavin and Oulton: 106). Given their relationship as friends and neighbours who exchanged ideas, Sharp may well have influenced Syrett’s socio-political views. Indeed, the increasingly radical stance seen in Sharp’s career (in her shift in affiliation from the constitutional NUWSS to the militant WSPU) is also detectable in Syrett’s fiction which, as this chapter shows, became more politically engaged over the course of her career.

Might is Right: Syrett’s suffrage play As a playwright, Syrett’s work provoked and contributed to debates about the role of woman both on- and off-stage, gaining recognition and admiration among fellow New Women and suffrage supporters. Syrett won the London Playgoers’ Club competition for best new play with her first full-length dramatic work The Finding of Nancy (1902), the prize being its production by George Alexander at the St James Theatre. It was hailed by one contemporary newspaper as a “theatrical and literary event” (The Queen 1902: 101). With its middle-class heroine assuming roles of working woman, “fallen” woman, and New Woman, it has been celebrated by more recent critics as the “most affirmative […] female-authored New Woman [play] of the fin de siècle” (Ledger 2006: 57). Yet at the time it sparked outrage among influential critics for its controversial social and sexual realism, interrogation of marriage, unorthodox celebration of extra-marital love, and female ­perspective – being “by a lady […] for ladies” (The Times qtd. in Powell 1997: 145). The play was immediately discontinued and Syrett was even dismissed from her teaching post after a reviewer suggested the play was autobiographical; “I couldn’t go on writing for the stage”, Syrett writes in 141

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her autobiography (1939: 126). Kerry Powell laments Syrett’s unfulfilled potential as a playwright after this play (she claims) put an end to her career as a dramatist (1997: 146), and Ledger similarly concludes that ultimately Syrett “failed as a playwright” (2006: 59). Yet undeterred, Syrett’s subsequent writing and staging of Might is Right and other plays disproves her own claim as well as those of critics. Whilst The Finding of Nancy explores issues around gender, morality, and marriage, Might is Right deals directly with the women’s suffrage campaign. The play’s production after such critical hostility stands testimony to Syrett’s defiance of (predominantly male) critics’ and producers’ views, to her continued ambition as a playwright, and her resilience as a woman writer. Might is Right, produced seven years after The Finding of Nancy, was born out of an even more turbulent socio-political climate, apparently driven by Syrett’s more radical feminist stance, as well as perhaps by her recognition of a commercial opportunity due to the increased public and media interest in women’s suffrage around this time. This is registered in the play’s self-reflexive allusions to contemporary newspapers as the suffragettes revel in the idea of “get[ting] into the papers” (12) and making headlines in the “Daily Budget”, “The Liberal Times”, the “Morning News” (19), “The Sketch”, and “The Graphic” (20). Whilst the play is principally comedic, Syrett’s writing and production of a suffrage play at this time reflects her self-fashioning as a suffrage playwright, working within a women’s suffrage tradition and network at the fin de siècle. Might is Right, first performed at London’s reputable Haymarket Theatre on 13 November 1909, marks Syrett’s most explicit engagement with early feminism in the form of the women’s suffrage campaign and its increasing militancy at the time of the play’s production. Its title was a contemporary phrase consistently used in suffrage publications to refer to an outdated and unjust theory of male supremacy. A Votes for Women article, published soon after the production of Syrett’s play, claimed that “‘might is right’ is practically the motto of unregenerate man” (24 ­December 1909: 194). This phrase appears throughout a lecture given by suffragist writer Laurence Housman, in which he said, “the Nation open to the justice of Woman Suffrage could not base its policy on the unjust doctrine that Might is Right” (The Vote, 16 October 1914: 350). Showing the phrase’s persistence into the 1920s, The Vote calls on British women to insist that the Government should alter its attitude towards women who have “suffered too long under the masculine theory that Might is Right” (28 July 1922: 236). Syrett’s title also alludes to the notoriously masculinist volume Might Is Right or The Survival of the Fittest (1896), by Ragnar Redbeard (Arthur Desmond), which perceives women as the property of men. An awareness of this discourse would undoubtedly have informed Syrett’s play and its reception. Her play subverts the original connotations of its title in its staging of women’s literal and communal “might” which secures their “right” to vote, setting the playful tone of the comedy whilst signalling its more serious contribution to political debate. Syrett’s choice of this controversial title for a play about the abduction, detainment, and extortion of the Prime Minister by suffragettes, who thereby successfully win votes for women, apparently advocates, or at least suggests her sympathy towards, militancy. Indeed, the WSPU features in her novel The Jam Queen (1914) and she alludes positively to its leaders in Portrait of a Rebel. She also indirectly financially supported the suffragettes’ campaign, since the proceeds from a performance of her play The Dream Lady, among other acts at the Strand’s Rehearsal Theatre, were donated to the WSPU (Drummers’ Union leaflet, 15 January 1910). In Syrett’s Might is Right, the “Secret Society for Women’s Suffrage” (SSS) members work collectively to kidnap the Prime Minister and keep him under house arrest, guarded by armed suffragettes who refuse to release him until he agrees to give women the vote. The suffragettes thus disprove the Prime Minister’s conviction that women are “essentially helpless” (31) and challenge this ideology in wider society. The men in the play are forced to admit that the women are “clever”, 142

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“superior tacticians”, “more than a match for [them] in cunning”, and even “first rate shot[s]” armed with loaded pistols (17), subverting Victorian notions of submissive femininity. The imprisonment and coercion of a patriarchal figure by women presents a radical reconfiguration of power relations between the sexes and a challenge to masculine power. This gender-role inversion is reinforced by the suffragettes’ confiscation of the Prime Minister’s clothes, forcing him to wear a “loosely flowered and lace trimmed dressing gown” (16). This cross-dressing has comedic value but also highlights the performativity and instability of gender roles, suggesting their potential for reconstruction. While Syrett employs and plays with stereotypes of both suffragettes (as violent) and their opponents (as unenlightened), the play predominantly satirises and exposes the “regrettable weaknesses” (4), “the cheek” (13), the “unscrupulous[ness]” (30), and “utter selfishness of men” (25). The Prime Minister, who apparently recognises his reduction under the women’s power to a “beaten” (35) “well-fed sacrificial victim” (27), becomes an “ardent” “convert” to the cause by the end of the play, announcing that “might is right” – giving the well-known phrase a radically new meaning – and hailing women as “the conquerors” (35). Contemporary debates about the place of women are central in the play, which stages a dialogue between feminine and feminist discourses in its spectrum of eight female voices ranging from militant to moderate, but all “burning with a sense of wrong and injustice” (10) that drives the action. SSS President Miss Tracy reasons that “ladylike behaviour” (9) is incompatible with achieving the women’s goal (the franchise) and therefore must be “sacrifice[d] […] to the cause” (10), echoing Christabel Pankhurst’s public incitements to disruptive action and appealing to suffrage supporters in the audience. Though militant suffragette and pamphlet writer Miss Finch is a comic stereotype, she is determined to educate the Prime Minister and hopes to “convert him through discussion and reasoned argument” (Paxton 2018: vii), appealing to suffrage sceptics in the audience. Despite their differences, the suffragettes conspire successfully to achieve their shared aim through deeds as well as words. The play celebrates the successful leadership and collaboration of women willing to “go to prison […] very cheerfully” (27) for what they believe in. While the romantic comedy resolution makes the piece more palatable for an Edwardian audience familiar with popular theatre and novel narratives concluding conveniently in marriage, the Prime Minister’s sudden proposal of marriage to Miss Tracy is unconvincing and even farcical. However, Miss Tracy’s acceptance of it can be read as woman’s final strategic move in an arsenal of resourceful tactics to secure the suffrage deal. This is suggested by her insistence that the sentimental Prime Minister sign “the marriage contract”, which omits any mention of marriage but requires him to endorse a Bill immediately extending the franchise to women on the same terms as men; she appeases him by saying their marriage “can be arranged out of court” (32). The energy of Syrett’s play text lies not in its happy union of man and woman but in its demonstration of the power of female unity and feminist community. Despite being from different social, economic, and professional backgrounds, the women are brought together by a shared cause, reflecting the sororal bonds that drove the success of the suffrage campaign. Women’s “collectivity and collective action” is presented by Syrett as an “antidote” to female disempowerment (Gale 2020: 193). The play celebrates women’s ingenuity in the face of injustice and the successful outcome of direct action, where the ends justify the means, prefiguring the press-worthy “violent direct action by the militant societies” (Paxton 2018: v) in the 1910s. While Ardis argues that Syrett’s fiction focuses on “individualised engagement” rather than “collective activism”, and that Syrett objects to “feminist collectivism” (Ardis 2002: 130–132), I argue instead that Might is Right and Portrait of a Rebel demonstrate, celebrate, and advocate collective feminist activism as a tool for socio-political change. Indeed, contemporary reviews of Might is Right reveal its influence on, and generation of, feminist debate: some recognise the play’s political merit, while others dismiss any 143

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serious message on the grounds of its humour. The Sketch refers to Syrett’s “suffragette play” as an “amusing little farce, and no more” (24 November 1909: 202), and another review of Syrett’s play claims “the cause of Women’s Suffrage will hardly be advanced” by it; it is “too fantastic to be regarded as a serious plea” and “it was obviously meant to be” a “joke” (20 November 1909: 744). Yet Syrett used comedy strategically to political ends. Her ostensibly light-hearted “ensemble comedy” (Paxton 2018: vi) on the subject of suffragette militancy was a publicly permissible way of staging, enacting, and mobilising contentious socio-political debates on the “Woman Question” as well as placing marginalised, working-class women’s voices (in cockney dialogue) centre stage. This demonstrates how, for Edwardian women writers, comedy could be charged with sharp socio-political commentary and used as a vehicle for the expression of serious feminist ideas. A Votes for Women review points out the radicalism and wide-reaching promotional potential of Syrett’s popular play: The chief point of interest […] is the fact that a play dealing with very militant suffragettes (they even kidnap the Prime Minister!) should be played nightly at an important London theatre. This is one of many signs of the prominent place which the militant suffrage movement holds in the public mind at the present time. The motto “Votes for Women” adorns the wall of the room in which the play is acted; purple, white, and green flags are in evidence; the women’s Marseillaise is played during the piece, and it ends with the war cry, shouted by all the players, of “Votes for Women.” So that, although written farcically to please the public, it cannot do other than good to the suffrage cause. (“Militant Suffrage on the Stage”, Votes for Women, 19 November 1909: 117) Whilst the success of the play’s promotional strategy is unquantifiable, this account reveals details about its production that support a reading of it as powerful political propaganda. It illuminates Syrett’s influential role as a suffrage playwright and her important contribution to early twentiethcentury feminist literature and visual culture, and specifically the women’s suffrage campaign.

Portrait of a Rebel: Syrett’s suffrage novel Syrett’s novel Portrait of a Rebel tells the life story of Pamela, who rebels against Victorian norms of femininity in character, career, and lifestyle; she disobeys her father, refuses to marry, and becomes a suffrage orator. The novel’s title, recalling The Portrait of a Lady (1881) by Syrett’s Yellow Book contemporary Henry James, as well as Evelyn Sharp’s collection of suffrage stories Rebel Women (1910), signals its exploration of the heroine’s personal and political rebellion. A contemporary review of Syrett’s novel titled “A Victorian Lady – Who Did” (The Yorkshire Evening Post, 11 December 1929: 5) alludes to its controversial literary context whilst highlighting her development of New Woman fiction. Syrett’s famous uncle Grant Allen, a Canadian science writer and novelist sympathetic to the feminist cause, helped popularise the New Woman in his highly successful but scandalous “famous anti-marriage novel” (Williams 1984: 31) The Woman Who Did (1895). This and Syrett’s first novel, Nobody’s Fault (1896), were published by John Lane’s famous Keynotes Series of New Woman fictions, inviting comparison. The heroine’s suicide in Allen’s novel has been seen as both feminist and anti-feminist. NUWSS leader Millicent Fawcett attacked his story of unmarried motherhood as “antagonis[tic] to the women’s cause” (Bush 2007: 82), showing the influence of popular fiction on the feminist movement at the fin de siècle. Writer Margaret Oliphant also unfavourably reviewed its “idealisation of free love” which benefitted men but meant social ruin for Victorian women (Williams 1984: 31); this double 144

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standard of Victorian sexual morality is directly addressed by Syrett in Portrait of a Rebel. “‘The Woman Who –’ quickly became a catchpenny phrase”, and the irony of a male author advocating women’s rights was parodied by Punch using caricatures and parodic versions of Allen’s scenes (Warne and Colligan 2005: 21). This sense of irony was perhaps compounded by Allen’s sensational earlier article titled “Plain Words on the Woman Question” in the Fortnightly Review (1889), which argued for the social benefit of women becoming wives and mothers, suggesting that the issue of women’s rights would be a dangerous distraction. Syrett’s female-authored texts with New Woman protagonists respond differently to the Woman Question, directly promoting women’s suffrage, rights, and liberation. Syrett’s novel Rose Cottingham Married (1916) – published two years prior to the partial achievement of votes for women in 1918 – traces Rose’s “gradual disenchantment with all forms of organized politics” (Ardis 2002: 130). Yet her later novel Portrait of a Rebel (1930) – published two years after votes for women were granted on equal terms as men in 1928 – traces Pamela’s increasing dedication to the Victorian-Edwardian women’s movement as she evolves from private supporter to influential leader. A textual comparison shows how Syrett’s novels responded to the shifting socio-political climate. In contrast to Rose’s “political quietism” (Ardis 2002: 131) and refusal to commit to the suffrage movement, Pamela is a pioneering supporter of women’s rights, at the forefront of the emergent movement in the narrative. Whilst Portrait of a Rebel was published post female enfranchisement – which perhaps partly accounts for its omission from scholarship on suffrage literature – it evidently had a feminist agenda and can be read as a kind of retrospective suffrage propaganda, since the “antagonism toward women having the license to vote remained for many years after the franchise was awarded” (Gale 2020: 193). An extension of the suffrage literature genre allows for a wider inclusion of women writers and recovery of such understudied, culturally important texts. In girlhood, Syrett’s New Woman protagonist, Pamela, is “irrepressible”, “high-spirited, mocking, [and] headstrong”; she is a “volcano of a girl apparently bent upon destroying the ordered peace of a comfortable existence” (Syrett 1930: 25, 240, 142) – or rather what Pamela saw as the enforced “mental and physical idleness” of women “doomed to inactivity” (200–201). With her “dark burning red” hair, “flaming cheeks”, and brilliant “glowing dark” eyes, she subverts the Victorian ideal of passive, submissive “ultra-femininity” and of a conventional Victorian heroine: “she conveyed a sense of power, of domination, of vitality so strong as to be overwhelming” (67, 139). She receives a “considerable amount of adverse criticism” from other characters for being “too self-assured” (58) and a “very modern” girl with “advanced ideas” (61; original emphasis). As a child, the “‘works’ of the great masters of literature left her cold” (29) and, hungry for education, she “took books out of the library in defiance of [her] governess’s prohibition” (43). Pamela rebels against both pervasive patriarchal ideology and the repressive paternal authority which kept her a “prisoner in her father’s house […] like a young captive lioness” railing against the “bars of her cage” (37); her childhood home was “surrounded by a high wall, and for Pamela that wall was symbolic” (6). This echoes and engages with much early feminist discourse critiquing female captivity, and shows how the novel form was for Syrett, as for other New Woman writers, a site of female rebellion and feminist resistance. Instead of succumbing to “self-destruction” (102) out of her deep secret shame for having sex and a child out of wedlock in her youth after being betrayed by her lover – a “hideous nightmare” (103) for a woman in the 1860s that made her an “outcast” (110) – Pamela carves out a different destiny for herself. Able to support herself with a small fortune from her late aunt and her own income from the bookshop she establishes, she pours her energy into the “Women’s Rights movement” (224). Syrett alludes to historical feminist events and figures throughout the novel, imbuing 145

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it with a realism that encourages readers’ recollection of, and engagement with, this past. For example, Pamela’s suffrage-supporting bohemian Chelsea circle organises the first women’s suffrage petition that their champion John Stuart Mill presents to Parliament in 1866 (176). For Pamela, the personal is the political, since her political engagement is driven by the injustice she personally experiences at the hands of the Victorian double standard of sexual morality. She acknowledges, in surprisingly modern terms that reflect her advanced ideas in the context of bourgeois Victorian society, “perhaps if I hadn’t suffered myself from the idiotic system that still prevails I should never have bothered to work for my sex” (222). The description of Pamela’s leading role in the women’s suffrage movement is enlivened by historical details recognisable to her readership: From her first efforts in debate at the Kensington Society, Pamela had been hailed by the leaders of the Emancipation of Women – to quote the phrase of the time – as a valuable asset to the Cause. Eager ladies implored her to speak on this or that platform in favour of the suffrage, of better education for girls, on the subject of adequate pay and more extended opportunities for women’s general work in the world. (195) The Kensington Society (later renamed the London National Society for Women’s Suffrage, part of the network of societies that formed the NUWSS) was a women’s discussion society of 1865– 1868. It became a group of notable, intelligent, politically active, and mostly unmarried Victorian women, including Barbara Bodichon, Emily Davies, and Elizabeth Garret Anderson – all historical figures named in Syrett’s novel (171, 174) – who organised the first campaigns for women’s suffrage, higher education, and property ownership. Pamela, strategically positioning herself as an ardent suffragist, is “as impatient of the cranks and extremists in the [women’s suffrage] movement” as she is of the submissive Victorian woman content to be a “simpering slave” (170). With her widely admired beauty and charm, she subverts sensationalist stereotypes of both spinsters as dowdy and asexual, and of suffrage activists as “violent, inarticulate, ugly man-haters” – an image used in popular culture to “ridicule the campaign and belittle campaigners” (Paxton 2018: v) – making her contemporary readers more sympathetic to “the [suffrage] crowd” (301). In contrast to Syrett’s pro-suffrage and pro-militant play, her pro-suffrage but ostensibly anti-militant novel gave the work wider appeal. Syrett’s fiction appealed to both “the large public of the old order” in its romantic plotlines and social scandals, ensuring its commercial success, as well as the smaller but growing “public of newer ideas” (“The Woman Who Works”, 7 February 1913: 276) in its increasingly feminist focus and serious, sustained arguments for female emancipation. The crescendo of impassioned political discourse over the course of the novel reveals the feminist agenda at its core. It reflects Pamela’s “increasingly important position in that section of feminine society out for reform in the social status of womanhood” (262) and how “the greater part of [Pamela’s] life has been spent in helping to get freedom for women” (305), representing the increasing politicisation of Syrett’s work over the course of her career. Syrett’s novel traces and promotes the professionalisation of woman through its protagonist’s development of her own unconventional career as a bookseller. Pamela proves herself a “born businesswoman” and intellectual with ownership and management of a bookshop which “in her day, represented the height of daring and audacity”; this is characteristic of her “defiance of all accepted conventions and proprieties of the period” (148). Pamela determines to live an independent life, perceiving that “in law a wife had no existence, was her husband’s chattel, and […] might be treated as such” (152). Echoing early feminist Mona Caird’s extensive critique of marriage being instituted on the foundation of bondage (1905), Syrett’s novel presents marriage as an impediment 146

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to a woman’s career and liberty (316). Like Pamela, Syrett herself was perhaps “too independent for matrimony” (237), prioritising professionalisation over partnership. As a tradesperson with detailed knowledge of the literary marketplace, Pamela’s “flair for the acquisition of rare books and first editions” (163) draws erudite scholars to her famous Chelsea bookshop where she sells the latest books by writers including George Eliot, A. C. Swinburne, and William Morris (149) – whose fashionable designs furnish her shop interior. The novel’s literary allusions and intertextual references reveal Syrett’s own literary expertise and place in a wider intellectual circle. These literary allusions also comment on the relationship between literature and anti/feminism. Outdated patriarchal Victorian views of women are ridiculed and challenged throughout the novel, with the “epidemic of manuals” and Victorian conduct books offering “guidance for girls” (64) and “insisting upon [women’s] natural inferiority” (176) being a subject of particular derision. Pamela mockingly and indignantly reads swathes of the “disgusting rubbish” (65) aloud to her sister Fanny in private and later in public to an amused bohemian audience. One author is “that idiot” Sarah Stickney Ellis and her book The Daughters of England (1842), guiding young women to behave virtuously and submissively. Pamela calls Ellis’ idea that “women exist solely for men, and not for themselves or their own lives at all” the “most sickening and degrading nonsense” (66). The vehemence of Pamela’s language conveys her strong disgust for the deeply ingrained, internalised sexism she finds in such Victorian women’s writing, to which Syrett directly responds in her novel. Echoing George Eliot’s essay “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists” (1856), Pamela indicts “women’s silliness” as much as “men’s prejudices” for the lack of progress towards gender equality, blaming a repressive upbringing and pervasive patriarchal ideology. This is also acknowledged as a class issue in Syrett’s text, since wealthy women “[suffer] from having nothing to do from morning till night but read sentimental trash […] and pay visits to other women whose lives were as idle and useless as [their] own” (225). The energy and space given to these detailed diatribes in the novel suggest that Syrett used Pamela as a mouthpiece to voice her own passionate feminist views on literature, gender, and society. Pamela assumes the role of “leader among the people who were […] very advanced” and she “used to speak in public – brilliantly” on the subjects of “the need for better education of women, the throwing open to them of various professions, the alteration of the marriage laws, [and] the suffrage” (312–313). She proves herself to be a talented feminist orator, and “in the exercise of her own power of speech, found the excitement she craved” (195) whilst “train[ing] public opinion” (247), giving her a distinguished position “among leaders of the women workers” (264). In her dying delirium towards the end of the novel, an elderly Pamela relives one of her public speeches on women’s rights: “on a platform overlooking a hall crowded with people. […] She was talking about something, conscious of exhilaration, of excitement, of triumph…” (325). That this is one of the final flashbacks at the end of her life, recalled with great pride, suggests the deep emotional and psychological impact of the campaign on the heroine, who is described like a suffrage martyr. Pamela’s work for the women’s cause “helped to win most of the reforms” over her lifetime; for example, “the recent passing of the Married Women’s Property Act owed something at least to her power of speech in public – and she had rejoiced” (263–264). This refutes Ardis’ claims that Syrett’s “references to organized feminism in her fiction are […] negative” and that “suffrage activism [does not] capture the imagination of Syrett’s heroines” (2002: 130), instead showing Syrett’s feminist agenda in placing women’s suffrage at the heart of her novel.

Writing feminism for the future Portrait of a Rebel advocates a cross-century, intergenerational understanding of feminism as an ongoing historical process of collective contestation and re/negotiation; it operates as such both 147

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within the narrative itself and across the time between its setting and publication. In an impassioned private speech, Pamela explains the past struggle for the “present freedom[s]” that she personally experienced and that her granddaughter “take[s] for granted” (313). These freedoms include being unchaperoned, taking motor drives, and travelling alone, choosing a profession and going to college, and going to a polling station to vote. She concludes, “the whole status of our sex has been revolutionised since I was a girl. We are represented in almost every profession, and I’ve lived to see women in Parliament” (313–314). She explains that these advances are thanks to “a long and brave fight of pioneers now for the most part dead and practically forgotten […] or as good as dead, because forgotten” (313–314). This call for a remembrance and appreciation of the forgotten founders of feminism as far back as the early nineteenth century not only jolts her granddaughter into an earnest resolution never to forget her grandmother’s work but also implores a contemporary 1930s readership to remember the feminist pioneers – suffrage fighters and votewinners – of the “Victorian Age” (321) who were “considered shockingly ‘advanced’ in [their] day” (301) but seen by “modern” women as “frightfully dull” (2). Pamela laments, “the rebels of yesterday are the retrograde old ladies of today – like me” (313), highlighting how the magnitude of the struggle and the bravery of campaigners are lost and dismissed in fast-shifting times, relegated to an unfashionable past century of “stuffy Victorian ideas” (303). Syrett, in dedicating over 300 pages to telling Pamela’s story, ensures that the First-Wave feminism she represents is not forgotten by contemporary readers, and that the suffrage campaigners’ “works live after them” (314). Indeed, contemporary newspaper reviews note the historical significance and informative potential of Syrett’s Portrait of a Rebel. One review commends as “no small achievement” Syrett’s inclusion of “the social history of eighty of the most quickly changing years in British history” (Dundee Evening Telegraph, 10 January 1930: 8). Another review applauds the novel as a “convincing […] vivid picture of the times” as well as of the life and development of the heroine, who cared nothing for convention and did some things that would even “shock the society of to-day”. It praises Syrett’s portrayal of the “appalling effect the repression of the age had upon other young women”, calling her novel an “illuminating study” that complemented Rae Strachey’s then recently published history The Cause (1928) – an “authoritative account of the woman’s movement in the nineteenth century” (Scotsman, 20 January 1930: 2). This followed earlier examples such as Helen Blackburn’s Women’s Suffrage: a Record of the Women’s Suffrage Movement in the British Isles (1902) and Millicent Fawcett’s Women’s Suffrage: A Short History of a Great Movement (1889). Syrett’s novel can be viewed as part of a broader impulse by women writers to document and revisit living memories of the suffrage struggle in fact and fiction, testifying to the feminist function of literature. This chapter’s discussion of Syrett’s forgotten feminist fiction – exploring individual and collective female experience, rebellion, education, and marriage – traces her developing feminist aesthetic and encourages a reassessment of the origins and evolution of feminism. It shows how Syrett was an important part of an emergent and growing feminist community, how she contributed to women’s culture and how she promoted female emancipation in her work, which was a site of socio-political struggle. An exploration of Syrett’s neglected work contributes to a wider understanding of the role of women writers in the suffrage movement, showing how popular fiction in the form of novels and plays were used as vehicles for feminist thought, propaganda, and reflection, recruiting support for the cause during key suffrage years and ensuring its legacy after women won the right to vote. In its focus on connections between texts, figures, circles, and centuries, this chapter offers a more nuanced and comprehensive understanding of the relationships between women, women and writing, and women’s writing and women’s rights over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. 148

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Works cited Adams, Jad (2019) “Netta Syrett: A Yellow Book Survivor,” English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920, 62(2): 206–243. Ardis, Ann L. (2002) Modernism and Cultural Conflict, 1880–1922, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bush, Julia (2007) Women Against the Vote: Female Anti-Suffragism in Britain, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Caird, Mona (1905) “The Duel of the Sexes – a Comment,” Fortnightly Review, 78: 109–122. Cherry, Deborah (1993) Painting Women: Victorian Women Artists, London: Routledge. Cregan-Reid, Vybarr (ed.) (2016) New Woman Fiction, 1881–1899, Part II vol 6. General ed. Carolyn Oulton, Adrienne Gavin, SueAnn Schatz, Oxon: Routledge. Gale, Maggie B. (2020) A Social History of British Performance Cultures 1900–1939: Citizenship, Surveillance and the Body, Abingdon: Routledge. Grand, Sarah (1894) “The Modern Girl”, The North American Review, 158:451, June, 706–714. Ledger, Sally (2006) “New Women Drama,” in M. Luckhurst (ed.) A Companion to Modern British and Irish Drama 1880–2005, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 48–60. Murray Goldsmith, Netta (2004) “Netta Syrett’s Lesbian Heroine,” Women’s History Review, 13(4): 541–557. https://doi.org/10.1080/09612020400200410 Paxton, Naomi (2018) The Methuen Drama Book of Suffrage Plays: Taking the Stage, London: Bloomsbury. Powell, Kerry (1997) Women and Victorian Theatre, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rainwater, Crescent (2020) “Netta Syrett, Nobody’s Fault, and Female Decadence: The Story of a Wagnerite,” Journal of Victorian Culture, 25(2): 185–199. https://doi.org/10.1093/jvcult/vcz057 Stickney Ellis, Sarah (1842) The Daughters of England: Their Position in Society, Character and Responsibilities, New York: D. Appleton and Company. Syrett, Netta (1909) “Might Is Right,” in N. Paxton (ed. 2018) The Methuen Drama Book of Suffrage Plays: Taking the Stage, London: Bloomsbury, pp. 1–38. For play manuscript, see Lord Chamberlain’s Plays Collection, British Library, LCP 1909/24. Syrett, Netta (1916) Rose Cottingham Married, London: Unwin. Syrett, Netta (1930) Portrait of a Rebel, London: Geoffrey Bles. Syrett, Netta (1939) The Sheltering Tree. London: Geoffrey Bles. Vanhecke, Charlotte (2009) Quietly Unconventional: Analysis of Netta Syrett’s Early Short Fiction in The Yellow Book and The Dorothy (unpublished master’s dissertation), Ghent University. Retrieved from https:// lib.ugent.be/fulltxt/RUG01/001/366/198/RUG01-001366198_2010_0001_AC.pdf Warne, Vanessa, and Colligan, Collette (2005) “The Man Who Wrote a New Woman Novel: Grant Allen’s “The Woman Who Did” and the Gendering of New Woman Authorship,” Victorian Literature and Culture, 33(1): 21–46. Williams, Merryn (1984) Women in the English Novel 1800–1900, London: Macmillan Press.

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10 “IT WAS LITTLE MORE THAN A DINING CLUB” Examining the epistolary networks of Willa Muir and Helen B. Cruickshank in the founding of Scottish PEN Emily L. Pickard In 1921, the novelist and poet Catharine Amy Dawson-Scott (1865–1934) held the first meeting of the Tomorrow Club. According to Hermon Ould, the General Secretary of PEN (1926–1951), in his short history of the organisation, this dinner club “in a Cornish cottage” was the beginning of PEN (Poets, Playwrights, Editors, Essayists, Novelists) International, as it would become in 1923 (Ould Acc. 8560/8 n.d.). This club “was a modest attempt to provide a vehicle” for “friendliness and tolerance” after World War One (Ould Acc. 8560/8 n.d.). Dawson-Scott and others within the original club were “overwhelmed by the misery and hate generated during the Great War and shared in the prevailing conviction that the horrors of 1914–1918 must not be experienced again” (Ould Acc. 8560/8 n.d.). Dawson-Scott, who remained active in the club she had founded until her death, did not live to see how, within a decade, her original convictions would become even more important, as PEN’s apolitical nature and pacifism were tested with the start of the Second World War. At this time, PEN’s international centres would have to decide whether the German centres, which had not universally condemned book burning and the Nazis’ exiling of writers, could remain within the organisation. Much like Dawson-Scott’s earlier work to achieve full gender equality in each of PEN’s centres across the globe, this dilemma appears to have been detached from any question of national politics in the context of PEN’s fundamental valuing of human rights and international cooperation. At its core then, PEN does not appear to equate the quest for gender equality with national political agendas, and this has allowed some of its women members to seek the fulfilment of feminist mandates within the club on national and international scales without breaking the organisation’s apolitical stance. Indeed, at the 1928 International Congress of PEN, Dawson-Scott set forth a resolution that all “women shall be considered eligible for membership of the P.E.N., if writers” (Dawson-Scott 1928 as cited in PEN 2018). Dawson-Scott laid the foundation for gender equality in the club, which PEN has since expanded upon with its 2018 Women’s Manifesto. Evidently, gender equality and women writers have always been at the core of PEN’s mission. Women have undoubtedly played an integral part in writers’ congresses, and PEN attracted well-known women writers and feminists from the outset. Early members of the English PEN

DOI: 10.4324/9781003429951-13

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Club included Rebecca West, May Sinclair, Mary Webb, Violet Hunt, and Radclyffe Hall. Despite the contributions of these women, little research has been conducted on the effect of women on the foundation of PEN centres around the globe during the interwar period. Given its history, founded as it was by Dawson-Scott, this is a significant gap. Paying particular attention to the role of Willa Muir (1890–1970) and Helen B. Cruickshank (1886–1975), this chapter begins to fill this lacuna and argues that women’s letters offer insights into their roles within PEN and similar institutions, specifically their creation of literary networks through hosting and organising events. As Rachel Potter notes, “Both [CA Dawson] Scott and [John] Galsworthy were well-connected playwrights and novelists whose literary contacts were important to the initial success of the organisation” (Potter 2013: 71). Yet when describing the Tomorrow Club, as it then was, meeting in the home of Dawson-Scott, Ould writes: “At first it was little more than a dining club: its members met monthly and entertained writers from abroad” (Ould Acc. 8560/8 n.d.). After Galsworthy is attracted to this “dining club”, and becomes its first president, Ould appears to see this as a major turning point from a social gathering to something of cultural significance – all due to Galsworthy’s fame: “the later growth of the P.E.N.”, he suggests, “was in great measure due to Galsworthy’s enthusiasm, astuteness, kindliness, and idealism” (Ould Acc. 8560/8 n.d.). Dawson-Scott is not mentioned again after the first paragraph of Ould’s short history and her essential role in corresponding with writers around the world, bringing them to England, and entertaining them, is not acknowledged as a crucial element in the initial success of this organisation. Regardless of Ould’s perspective, Potter makes clear that Dawson-Scott was essential for PEN’s growth. Entertainment – dining clubs and music nights – has remained at the heart of PEN throughout its hundred-year history; PEN’s International Congresses, for instance, usually include some aspect of cultural exploration in the host country. When the Congress was held in Scotland in 1934, “evening functions”, “day excursions”, and “Scottish drama, music, dances, and other national features” for attendees were included in the programme and funding requests (HP4.88.471 1932). Similarly, the women discussed in this chapter understood the importance of cultural gatherings. Cruickshank, who was foundational in raising funding and creating the programme for the 1934 Congress, was famous for hosting writers and “evening functions” in her home; Muir’s memoir Belonging (1968) makes clear that she was always entertaining writers in her homes across Europe and the United Kingdom; and PEN would not exist without the dinner party that Dawson-Scott hosted to bring writers together in friendship after the fragmentation and chaos of the First World War. These gatherings were places to network and to respectfully discuss topics that affected civilians. But most importantly, they were reminders of the value of human connection, and in this way, they bolstered empathy, so that when Hitler took power, years before the Second World War broke out, it was PEN that stepped forward to find homes and funding for exiled writers. PEN’s global activism has continued, and, thanks to the precedent set by Dawson-Scott, promoting women writers and gender equality and speaking out against oppression are some of its central concerns. Nearly a century later, PEN continues to reinforce the original values outlined by DawsonScott, and her desire to achieve gender equality is reflected in their Women’s Manifesto. This document outlines PEN’s commitment to ending gendered oppression across the globe, particularly as it manifests in violence against women and girls. In so doing, it seeks to acknowledge, encourage, and provide a platform for the voices of women and girls: For women to have free speech, the right to read, the right to write, they need to have the right to roam physically, socially and intellectually. […] PEN believes that the act of silencing a person is to deny their existence (PEN 2018) 151

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Building upon this initiative, this chapter seeks to re-examine the correspondence of Muir and Cruickshank – both early Scottish PEN members – in order to amplify the voices of women writers in the Scottish Renaissance, the movement of the early to mid-twentieth century that sought to celebrate Scotland’s culture and the Scots language through music, art, and literature. As all of Scottish PEN’s founding members were intrinsic to the Renaissance, a study of PEN in this period requires discussion of that movement in order to understand the multiple (and sometimes conflicting) goals of each writer involved and their reasons for membership of PEN. The different priorities of Muir and Cruickshank were fundamental to the diversity and success of both PEN and the Renaissance. As Christianson notes: Cruickshank, Muir’s correspondent then, and F. Marian McNeill are among women writers who lived and worked in Scotland, certainly feminist but perhaps prioritising things Scottish whereas Muir’s commitment is always to the importance of gender as a reality that underwrites everything. (Christianson 2007: 120) Cruickshank was a feminist and suffragette, and therefore highly valued her female counterparts, but her goal was also nation-building, and as such she promoted women writers within the context of the Renaissance and in PEN. By contrast, Muir’s work for PEN appears to have been incidental to her relationship with other writers of the period. In a letter to McNeill, for instance, she begins to explain her second novel, Mrs Ritchie (1933), a frightening bildungsroman that examines the monstrous outcomes of restrictive gender norms and sexual shame in Northeast Scotland. In it, she insists to ‘Flos’ that she “needn’t look for Nationalism with a big N in it” but that “what I want to do more than anything else is to write a great book, and if I succeed I shall have served Scotland too” (Muir as cited in McCulloch 2004: 209). Despite these differences in priority and intention, both women did indeed serve Scotland and, in the process, promoted gender equality and the importance of women’s relationships in both PEN and the Renaissance. PEN opened its Scottish centres in Edinburgh and Glasgow in 1927, including sections for Gaelic writers. These centres sought to promote the unique and independent identity of ­Scotland’s languages and literatures. Despite its strictly apolitical stance, Hugh MacDiarmid, one of the founders of ­Scottish PEN, used this branch as an arm of the Scottish Renaissance in the interwar period. The nationalist agenda within the Renaissance, particularly the agenda of MacDiarmid himself, departed from the generally non-national(ist) approach of International PEN. While MacDiarmid focused on ­nation-building, women like Muir and Cruickshank arguably provided emotional scaffolding for male writers who otherwise would not have been as prolific, but also used PEN to expand their own correspondence networks, albeit to strikingly different ends (see Pickard 2022). While Cruickshank took her opportunity to support other writers in the community, Muir made her name as a European feminist, speaking up about women’s rights and building connections on the continent. Both contributed to gaining Scotland a reputation as a cultural centre using more practical, foundational modes than their male counterparts – in other words, building formal and informal cultural infrastructures by cultivating international networks. Their correspondence with each other and other women reveals their contributions to Scottish PEN and to the Renaissance, and thus their letters are the foundational literary sources for this chapter. These letters provide evidence for the ways in which friendship allowed these women to organise delegations and events and to fund the writers involved in these organisations, including a fund for Rebecca Middleton, the widow of PEN member Lewis Grassic Gibbon, and her child after his death. Though Muir was fundamentally more suspicious of what she saw as the male-dominated Renaissance than Cruickshank, her interwar letters to Cruickshank show a deep 152

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desire for connection with those who shared her background: in other words, Scottish women. This meant that, though her goal was not nation-building to the same extent as Cruickshank, she readily joined the movement for a brief period in the 1930s, seemingly in large part because of the relationships she had formed with her female contemporaries. Rather than focusing on other work (namely, her lucrative translation projects) while Edwin contributed to this organisation, Muir actively took part in building networks with Cruickshank and other women writers of PEN and in this way helped to grow Scottish PEN in its early days. Muir and Cruickshank’s letters to each other and to other women reveal how these women’s emotional bonds and epistolary networks are core components in the success of Scottish PEN and the recognition of Scotland’s voice on the international stage.

A shared background Although they hailed from the same region of Scotland, Muir and Cruickshank led drastically different adult lives. However, the decisions that both made to play supporting roles in other writers’ literary careers, especially men’s, could have arisen from their mutual upbringing in a rigidly patriarchal, Calvinist region in Northeast Scotland which retained traditional expectations of women as supporters, rather than career-seekers (see Muir 1968). Their shared birthplace meant also that both were familiar with the same Scots language dialect. Born just three years apart in Angus – Muir in Montrose and Cruickshank in Hillside – both attended Montrose Academy as children. Cruickshank’s family could not afford for her to attend university, so, at fifteen, she sat exams for the civil service, moving to London in 1903 to work for the Post Office in West Kensington. Here, she “went to concerts and plays and galleries, and walked around London in a spirit of curiosity and appreciation” (Calder 2020). It was here also that she joined the Women’s Social and Political Union. In later years, she worked to actively promote and support women, becoming acquainted with not just the famous male writers of the interwar years but also regularly corresponding with their wives and other women writers. At the age of 26, just two years before the outbreak of the First World War, Cruickshank returned to Scotland as a civil servant in Edinburgh. She lived initially in a studio flat “in what was in effect an artists’ colony off Shandwick Place where friends gathered for musical and literary evenings” (Calder 2020). She met MacDiarmid, and her writing career began with his support and encouragement. After her father died in 1924, Cruickshank was left with the care of her mother. She left her studio flat and bought a “semi-detached villa in Corstorphine” called Dinnieduff on Hillview ­Terrace (Calder 2020). The financial responsibilities which fell to Cruickshank following her father’s death brought about the end of a seven-year-long romantic relationship and any dreams of marriage, as the civil service had a marriage bar for women (see Cruickshank’s Octobiography 1976). With her mother to support, she could not afford to leave the civil service to marry or to pursue writing full time. Nevertheless, Cruickshank published in a variety of periodicals throughout her career, and her first volume of poetry, Up the Noran Water, was published in 1934. This was followed by Sea Buckthorn (1954), The Ponnage Pool (1968), Collected Poems (1971), and two posthumous works, Octobiography (1976) and More Collected Poems (1978). Many of her poems were written in Scots and inspired by her connection with the Scottish landscape, particularly her summer holidays in Glenesk. As honorary secretary, she initiated a second home for Scottish PEN in Dinnieduff, which “was a frequent location of meetings, formal and informal” and was “a magnet for many of Scotland’s most significant writers” (Calder 2020). These included Douglas Young, Grassic Gibbon, Nan Shepherd, McNeill (who resided there with Cruickshank and her mother for a period later in life), Catherine and Donald Carswell, MacDiarmid (for whom she provided financial and administrative support at various points in his life), Marion C. Lochhead, and Willa and Edwin Muir. 153

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Muir, while also a poet in her spare time, often in Scots, mostly published prose fiction and nonfiction. These included her feminist polemics, Women: An Inquiry (1925), “Women in Scotland” (1936), and Mrs Grundy in Scotland (1936), her novels Imagined Corners (1931) and Mrs Ritchie (1933), a book on ballads that focuses quite closely on gender, Living with Ballads (1965), her memoir, Belonging, and her final book, the privately published Laconics Jingles and Other Verses (1969). She was born Wilhelmina Anderson, and, after the death of her father, left the private school she had attended and entered the local primary. She was later accepted into Montrose Academy on a bursary, before attending the University of St Andrews, also on a bursary, where she met and became engaged to rugby-playing medical student, Cecil Wilmot Morrison. After completing her undergraduate and postgraduate degrees, she moved to London, where she taught Bryant and May Factory girls in Canning Town, East London, before taking a position as Vice Principal and Lecturer in English, Psychology, and Education at Gypsy Hill Teacher Training College in 1918 in the final months of World War One. However, after two years of Cecil’s “recurrent peccadilloes with other girls after [she] had gone away to England”, she ended the engagement (Muir 1968: 12). She felt she had “been cured of falling in love” and focused on her teaching work (Muir 1968: 12). However, the same month she started at Gypsy Hill, she met Edwin Muir while visiting Glasgow, and married him next June. Although Muir’s job allowed her to marry (unlike Cruickshank who did not have this right as a civil servant), Edwin’s ‘atheism’ proved distasteful to the principal and patron and Muir resigned rather than end her engagement. This was to be a serendipitous decision for Muir, for it was her involvement with Edwin – and his involvement with her – that would allow them both to embark upon decades-long careers in writing and translation. In August of 1921, the year of the Tomorrow Club’s founding, the Muirs left for Prague and spent the next three decades travelling through Europe and to America, making a name for themselves as the translators of Kafka, Broch, Feuchtwanger, Asch, and others. These experiences offered Muir insight into the creative communities in continental Europe and gave her the opportunity to hone international connections through constant correspondence and engagement. Yet, though their relationship is often viewed as one of equals and partners in creative collaboration, her letters and her unpublished novel, “Mrs Muttoe and the Top Storey” (1938–1940), make clear that translation (for which she took increasing responsibility) and domestic duties occupied more of Muir’s time than Edwin’s and hindered her ability to publish more prolifically (see Pickard 2022). Muir’s travels around Europe meant that, though she contributed to publications like The Modern Scot, and was friends with the likes of Cruickshank, Eric Linklater, F. Marian McNeill, Catherine Carswell, Grassic Gibbon, and James Whyte, Muir rarely resided in Scotland, and therefore often stood on the periphery of the Renaissance. In contrast, Cruickshank, or ‘HBC’ as she referred to herself in her correspondence, was viewed as the preeminent authority on the Scottish Renaissance and interwar PEN, sought out by biographers like Peter Butter for information on Muir’s husband, Edwin, and Louis Simpson for information about MacDiarmid. Her role as co-founder of both Scottish PEN and the Saltire Society no doubt contributed to her wealth of knowledge and invaluable literary contacts. Scholarship on these women to date has focused on their associations with the Renaissance and, though the organisation was invariably and inescapably connected to that movement, have not offered as much insight into their roles in Scottish PEN.

Co-founders of Scottish PEN? Cruickshank’s support of and work for PEN is more widely recognised and makes a more significant appearance in her papers and correspondence than in Muir’s. The brief, anonymously written history, “The Urgent Present: the 1930s”, notes MacDiarmid as the first president and 154

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acknowledges his national and international impact, but attributes far more of the credit for the daily functioning and success of the branch to Cruickshank than to any other founding member. In this brief overview, the author notes that Cruickshank “played a crucial role in strengthening Scottish PEN. […] Her hospitality, and often her financial support, helped to keep the organisation going. MacDiarmid […] described her as a ‘catalyst’ to the Scottish Renaissance” (PEN undated). Muir’s involvement, on the other hand, is tougher to track, though she is listed as a co-founder on present-day Scottish PEN’s website (Scottish PEN 2022). Belonging offers some insight into her experience with PEN; at the very least, it hints at how she viewed her time as a member of this organisation. In it she tells the story of her and Edwin’s journey to Budapest for the International Congress in 1932. This narrative is the only detailed account that she provides regarding her activities with PEN. It paints an unhappy picture of nationalism in Europe and, even, of nationalism in Scotland: Europe was indeed getting ready to break up. This revelation came as a shock to us in ­ udapest, at the 1932 International Congress of the P.E.N., an organization of Poets, EssayB ists and Novelists. The Scottish branch of P.E.N. had begged us to represent them as official delegates to the Congress, and the prospect of meeting imaginative writers from all over Europe allured us, so that we agreed to go. (Muir 1968: 152–153) This was, she makes clear, her first proper interaction with an International Congress of PEN, though she and Edwin had taken part in events in London and Edinburgh previously: “As official delegates with all expenses paid, we set off for Budapest in happy expectancy, never having attended a P.E.N. Congress before” (Muir 1968: 153). Muir’s perspective on PEN focuses on its ability to introduce her to European – not Scottish – writers. It contributes to her sense of herself as a European-Scot and to her ability to pursue her European identity, expanding her experience outside of Scotland – a nation she later saw as insular. Muir’s perception of Scotland and focus on Europe did not hinder her contact with Scottish writers, but Muir’s reference to this event in her memoir – mentioning PEN as infrequently as she does – reveals her desire to prove that PEN and the Renaissance needed her and Edwin more than they needed those organisations. As Scottish PEN was heavily interconnected with the Renaissance, there is a sense that Muir equates the two. She is keen to emphasise that “Edwin and I were never members of the Scottish Nationalist Party” and her references to both the Renaissance and PEN are often limited to the well-known male figures and fleeting mentions of ‘Cathy Carswell’ (Muir 1968: 165). Despite her regular correspondence with both McNeill and Cruickshank, neither are mentioned in her memoir, and Carswell is mentioned in passing just four times. This may have been because the memoir focuses on her time with Edwin, and, arguably, Muir’s individual relationships with women were more personal for her. Yet, her memoir reflects how Muir saw the Renaissance as a male-dominated sphere, with MacDiarmid at the centre; a perspective that is emphasised in “Clock-a-doodle-doo” (1934) – a short satirical story about an unnamed woman who cares for male clocks, which draws attention to these men’s reliance on women for their basic needs and emotional support, while poking fun at their inflated sense of intellect and value. Muir’s representation of the Renaissance and of PEN in her memoir, however, arguably – and likely unconsciously – fails to acknowledge the crucial role played by her female correspondent and friend, Cruickshank, in bolstering the Renaissance through outlets such as PEN and the correspondence networks that this organisation and the Renaissance encouraged. The higher valuation of men’s contributions to the Renaissance that Muir despised was further perpetuated by early 155

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investigations of the period, which Palmer McCulloch argues were “defined by its male contributors alone” (Palmer McCulloch 2004: xvi). This has only changed in recent years, thanks to the work of scholars such as McCulloch herself, whose collection of source texts, Modernism and Nationalism (2004), showcases and highlights women’s work alongside men’s. Muir’s desire to distance herself from the Renaissance is emphasised again in one of her only other recollections of PEN: Ever since attending a P.E.N. Congress in Edinburgh, in 1933, the year after Budapest, we had been urged to return to Scotland, on the flattering plea that Scotland needed us. We had certainly proved useful during that Congress; having discovered that ‘drinks’ at all receptions were hidden in speak-easies tucked away round corners at the end of corridors or at the very top of a building, to be reached only by a lift, we had devoted ourselves to guiding bemused foreigners away from the main display of tea and coffee urns, flanked by mineral waters, towards the beer and whisky so furtively sequestered. (Muir 1968: 179–180) Here again, Muir expresses a slightly scoffing portrait of the stuffiness and repression of Edinburgh artistic culture (something that is outlined in extensive detail in Edwin’s 1935 Scottish Journey). She presents interwar Scotland as insular and difficult to comprehend by foreigners (particularly Europeans) who needed a Euro-Scottish mediator, and as obsessed with asserting its own national identity in the face of an economically dominant nation in the south. Furthermore, this anecdote in Belonging, unfortunately, downplays the work put into the Congress of 1934 (not, as Muir says, 1933) by her friend Cruickshank. Evidently, at the time of writing, Muir had forgotten the importance of her bonds with Cruickshank and the support and encouragement they provided for each other in the 1930s, writing in a 1953 journal that Cruickshank and Lochhead were “dim, well-meaning, intense & serious women” (Muir as cited in Christianson 2007: 159). This change in opinion may have stemmed from her disappointment with Scotland and the nationalist movement, and certainly led to her exclusion of these women from her memoir. She and Edwin did indeed return to Scotland, only to find themselves unhappy in St Andrews, falling out with MacDiarmid, ending their membership with Scottish PEN, and yearning to leave Scotland once more. Regarding the Congress in Budapest, which was, by her account, “being used as a cover for political intrigues”, Muir writes: Our instructions enjoined us to prevent the English P.E.N. from claiming the Scottish P.E.N. as one of their regional off-shoots; we had to insist on the separate national identity of the Scottish P.E.N. This part of our official duty we faithfully performed. I do not know the Hungarian language, but I have never forgotten the sentence drilled into me: Nem Angol vodyok, Skōt vodyok; I am not English, I am Scottish. (Muir 1968: 153) However, her letter to Cruickshank at the time represents this trip in a rather different vein, showing more sympathy with the Scottish cause than this later account, which creates an image of Scottish nationalism as a would-be militant organisation, headed by a faceless commander giving “instructions”. This did not match the representation of this Congress that she gave in contemporary letters, nor the acknowledgement of Cruickshank’s role in organising their delegation. Her

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neglect to represent Cruickshank or any of her female friends in this era (such as McNeill, Lochhead, or Carswell) in her memoir belies the deep connections she apparently had with them, which is visible in her letters from that time.

Living through letters Women’s relationships were an essential component of Scottish interwar artistic communities. Not only do their letters offer significant contributions to Scotland’s literary output, but these correspondence networks ensured the functioning of both the administrative and emotional aspects of the writing community. It is generally agreed among scholars that, like many women writers of the time, Cruickshank and Muir sacrificed more prolific publication careers in order to support those of other, usually male, writers. Yet their personal archives are testament to their personal output. Both women were immensely active correspondents, writing to and about some of the most well-known writers of the day. Significantly, they wrote to each other and to other women of the era, many of whom were actively involved in PEN, including McNeill, Lochhead, and Carswell. Cruickshank’s correspondence in particular is a positive ‘who’s who’ of the Scottish literary scene of the twentieth century. For Muir scholars, these letters show the contradiction with which Muir regularly struggled in her practical desire for gender equality and her later reframing in her diaries and memoirs of the vital correspondence networks that supported this desire. For instance, regarding her time in Budapest for the PEN Congress, Muir writes: “When all the delegations were presented to Admiral Horthy, the Scottish delegation of two was presented separately, quite independently of the much larger English delegation” (Muir 1968: 153). However, in her 1932 letter to Cruickshank following their return from the Congress in Budapest, Muir sent a “private, unofficial account of many things which [she did] not care to put into an official report” and explains how they had to fight to be presented separately (Muir Acc. 13634/27 1932b). This letter and Cruickshank go unmentioned in her anecdote about the Budapest Congress in Belonging. Instead, the anecdote focuses on the “young idealists”, the politics of Hungary, the “atmosphere of Nazi intrigue and political conspiracy between Austrians and Germans”, “Nazi supporters” among the Germans, and even a brief mention of an unnamed “ubiquitous […] stocky, tweed-clad Lesbian, with a von in her name” (Muir 1968: 153–154). This final description, combined with her neglect to mention the women with whom she interacted at this time, shows the contradictory nature of Muir’s feminism: her desire to challenge and even break patriarchal gender codes, while maintaining viewpoints that fit comfortably within them. (Her stereotypical description is also at odds with the more nuanced awareness of queer women’s relationships that she undoubtedly had at this time, having translated Christa Winsloe’s The Child Manuela [1934], a German novel, play, and film that offers an early depiction of lesbianism, and having written a subtly queer narrative in her own first novel, Imagined Corners [1931] [see Pickard 2022]). Muir names very few individuals who were present at that Congress, none of whom are women, and often only with an explanation that these were the people with whom they “took refuge” (Muir 1968: 155). Of these was Ould, whom they met daily for lunch “at a restaurant in a quiet square, where wine and food were excellent and not too dear and where we could escape from the Congress ill-will” (Muir 1968: 155). In contrast, Muir’s private letter to Cruickshank underscores the fear and anxiety caused by this trip. Moreover, the friendship between these women, and the trust and security Muir felt with Cruickshank, is also evident. She addresses Cruickshank as “My dearest Helen” and signs

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off the letter with “Much love”. She outlines how hard she and Edwin fought to be recognised as Scottish: we were treated as members of the English delegation […] In fact, we had to assert ourselves continuously as being at least on the same independent footing as the delegates from Esthonia (!). […] we had the satisfaction of making old Pekar hastily scribble us in in pencil on the typed list […] and Edwin, as the Head of the Delegation (wha!!! that was a story!) was separately presented to Horthy. All this made Edwin so nervous that he forgot to present me, I might say: and I had the dubious distinction of being the only person in the room who did not grab Horthy’s hand. (Muir Acc. 13634/27 1932b) She goes on: “It was for the sake of Scotland that we stuck out: it would have let down the whole Scottish PEN if we had not done so”, and she insists upon a Congress in Scotland in 1934 in order to “educate a vast mass of opinion throughout Europe” by standing “as an independent Scotland” with its own literature (Muir Acc. 13634/27 1932b). Here, unlike in her memoir, Muir’s commitment to the members of Scottish PEN becomes clearer. Rather than representing PEN as an ideologically militant vehicle of the Scottish Renaissance, Muir positions herself as a compassionate, important, and active arm of the organisation and its desire to promote Scotland as an independent literary producer. Yet, Christianson argues that her brief but passionate nationalist outburst was more to do with the organisers’ conflation of she and Edwin with the English than with any true adherence to national sentiment: “Muir only felt a need to assert Scottishness when she is away from Scotland in a situation when Scotland is being subsumed ignorantly into ‘England’” (Christianson 2007: 189). However, Muir’s letter makes clear that her connections to its members contribute to her sense of national duty: she does not want these writers and their work to be subsumed into England, and it is for their sake, as much as hers, that she asserts their shared national identity and the independence of Scottish PEN. Furthermore, her letter, addressed to “My dearest Helen”, implies not only Cruickshank’s professional status within PEN – as Cruickshank is the first member to receive a full report – but also Muir’s sense of security, personal comfort, and ease in disclosing the anxiety with which the politics and gender disparities within the Congress left her. Her parenthesis that Edwin was seen as the “Head of the Delegation” suggests an intention to tell this “story” to Cruickshank at a later date – perhaps in person in order to express (or find) humour in the assumption of the male organisers of the Congress that Muir’s quiet and reserved husband was the head of the delegation. Her “wha!!!” emphasises her shock at being treated as inferior to her male counterpart and reveals the negative impression with which this experience left her. Nonetheless, it is important to note that even in that era, Muir was represented as lending a much-needed European hand to PEN’s affairs. In a 1933 biographical article of Muir by another friend of Cruickshank’s, Marion C. Lochhead – another founder of Scottish PEN who, according to Christianson, “apparently did not know Muir at this time, although they later became friends” – wrote that Edwin and Willa, “London-Scots, settled in Hampstead”, “officially represented the Scottish PEN at the International Congress in Budapest, and by their valiant championship placed their fellow-members deeply in their debt” (Christianson 2007: 195; Lochhead as cited in Christianson 2007: 197). This article headlines Muir’s travels around Europe, her translations (showcasing her individual lesser-known translation of five songs from the Auvergnat into Scots, thereby firmly entrenching her as a Euro-Scot), her position as a “lass o’ pairts”, and her

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partnership with her husband (Lochhead as cited in Christianson 2007: 196). Here, the narrative of Muir as part of “The Muirs” begins in print form. Yet, Lochhead seemingly does this with an understanding of the time – that Muir will be paid greater attention to if discussed in relation to her husband and the work they produced together. She does this to Muir’s advantage and stresses the injustice of valuing Muir on her (and their) translations alone: “so many of our women writers of to-day are scholars, with their creative work solidly based on an intellectual heritage. Among them Willa Muir takes high place. Indeed, the full force of her intelligence is not yet felt, for even her best work, so far, hardly does her justice” (Lochhead as cited in Christianson 2007: 196). In the following sentence, she notes that Muir is best known for her (rather than her’s and Edwin’s) translation of Lion Feuchtwanger’s novel Jew Süss (1925), which is presumably the “best work” to which Lochhead had been referring and which Muir completed with Edwin (as Lochhead states later in the article). Yet, Lochhead is quick to reframe the narrative around Muir’s talent: “it is as an original writer that Mrs Muir chiefly counts, and as such she must be estimated” (Lochhead as cited in Christianson 2007: 196). Lochhead acknowledges the importance of Muir’s partnership with her husband by noting that her travels, work for PEN, and translations are conducted alongside Edwin – which Muir herself emphasised in her letter to Lochhead – while ensuring that her individual standing as an intellectual and a writer remains the central focus of the article. Lochhead had apparently tried to track Muir down via letter, which Muir originally did not answer. When Lochhead sent a postcard that read “like an S.O.S.”, Muir finally responded (Muir as cited in Christianson 2007: 192). Her style, though she did not yet know Lochhead, is comfortable and familiar: “You tempt me, you know, to give my imagination full rein, and to lead you to believe that never was there a woman so cultured, so clever, so handsome, so beloved as myself” (Muir as cited in Christianson 2007: 192). Muir seems ready to make easy friends with another Scottish woman. She has to suppress the urge to impress Lochhead and is open and honest in her account of her own virtues, accomplishments, and failings. In this sense, while Muir was acknowledged as a champion of PEN, of her husband’s writing, and of the male European writers whom she translates, her response to Scottish women shows her continued desire to bond with that community and the effect that this bond and her contributions to PEN had on Scotland at the time. That Muir’s focus is on women and gender oppression and that she respected her female contemporaries is clear in her letters and her own literary output. For instance, in a letter to McNeill in 1931, she explains that her focus in Imagined Corners was on Elise and Elizabeth, not “national sentiment” (Muir as cited in Palmer McCulloch 2004: 208). Her novels – published and ­unpublished – each focus on female protagonists who struggle with the gendered division of labour and constrictive gender expectations, and her first published work, Women: An Inquiry, is one of the earliest examples of feminist theory in Scotland. Her distaste for gender disparities is central even in her unpublished work. Her short poem about Nancy Brysson Morrison, for example, which alludes to Morrison’s novel The Gowk Storm (1933), lambasts what she saw as the Renaissance’s unsupportive response to women novelists: “N. BRYSSON MORRISON / is a gowk if there was ever one, / for instead of being a ranter and roarer / she writes good novels and so the Scots ignore her” (Muir as cited in Christianson 2007: 222). The poem alludes to the general leaning towards poetry in the Renaissance movement and to the strict conception of what constituted ‘Scottish literature’. Moreover, Muir suggests that Morrison’s status as a woman may also contribute to her being ‘ignored’ by the implicitly male ‘Scots’. As a woman writer, and a good one at that, Morrison poses a threat to male counterparts and to their male-dominated definition of what makes a good Scottish book. In contrast, PEN’s historical quest for gender equality

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and its balanced focus on novelists alongside poets and writers of non-fiction may have been another alluring factor for Muir. Nevertheless, Muir’s instances of support for women novelists in this period provide another contradiction, as her later writing’s omission of the women in her life in this period appears dismissive of their talent and of the roles these women played in PEN, the Renaissance, and in her own emotional development. Unlike Muir, Cruickshank appears never to have waivered in her support for and belief in the work of PEN and its associated writers, many of whom were important to the Renaissance. Indeed, her influence and importance in that organisation shine through in her correspondence in the later years especially. In letters to Margaret Fairweather Michie, held now at St Andrews University, Cruickshank laments the constant solicitation for information about these writers. In a letter in the 1950s, she wrote, with evident frustration: “I’m being pressured by brash young journalists who want spicy stories about the ‘Scottish Renaissance’. I think they’re afraid I’ll die before I lift the lid” (Cruickshank MS.37326 1958). Undoubtedly because of Cruickshank’s extensive correspondence record, thanks in part to her position as honorary secretary of PEN, Cruickshank is seen as the treasure-trove of knowledge and anecdotes about the major (male) players of the Renaissance (though the use of inverted commas in her letter suggest her disapproval of this term). Indeed, in Marie Muir’s obituary of Cruickshank, she praises the latter as “Always a mine of information for successive Hon. [Secretaries]” of Scottish PEN (M. Muir MS.26713.108–110 1975). This is evident in the volume of letters in her remaining papers, boasting correspondence from nearly every well-known artist and writer, as well as many of their partners and children. Her connections with the loved ones of the literati allowed her a thorough and empathetic knowledge of the movement and of these writers. Significantly, however, from what Cruickshank suggests in her letters to Michie, these young journalists appear to have been seeking information on her male counterparts – not on Cruickshank herself or any other woman writer of the period. Despite her own fame and reputation, Cruickshank was still seen later in life as fulfilling a largely administrative role for the male writers. Unsurprisingly, given these dismissive attitudes, very little research has been conducted on Cruickshank, and there are currently no monographs on her work. Cruikshank used her considerable influence and organisational skills to ensure events connected to the movement were funded and writers were taken care of, gaining respect and admiration among her peers in the process, as reflected in Marie Muir’s obituary. This meant, then, that she secured the funding of the writers and events of Scottish PEN, which MacDiarmid had ensured was closely entwined with the Renaissance even to this day in PEN’s account of this period (PEN undated). Cruickshank’s name is on the funding request letter for the 1934 PEN Congress in Scotland, and her archives are filled with letters thanking her for her support, including from Muir who, in 1932, thanked her for the loan of £5 to help her and Edwin on their journey from Budapest to Vienna to visit Broch and return home again: “That five quid was a positive inspiration!” (Muir Acc. 13634/27 1932c). A year later, Edwin wrote to Cruickshank: “Many thanks for the cheque, and all the particulars, and everything you have done for me” (E. Muir Acc. 13634/27 1933). He goes on: “Have you seen Mary Letchfield [sic] since she came to Edinburgh. She’s looking for work and badly needing it” (E. Muir Acc. 13634/27 1933). This suggests that Cruickshank often acted as a ‘fix-it’ woman for the problems of writers within PEN. His appreciation, too, for her sorting the “particulars” suggests that Cruickshank organised the minute details of Edwin’s trip to represent Scottish PEN, this time alone in Dubrovnik. In an early letter – just after, apparently, the Muirs met Cruickshank – both insist upon their gratitude for Cruickshank’s kindness and for the chance to know her. Both Muir and Edwin send

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love to Cruickshank’s mother and insist on a visit from Cruickshank – or at the very least that they will reconnect at the London PEN centre. Concerning Scotland, Muir writes: Scotland is no longer a dark spot in our lives. I cannot tell you how much your kindness has helped to clear it up. A Scotland that contains you and your mother, and all the pleasant people we met at your party, is our country. (Muir Acc. 13634/27 1932a, emphasis in original) This letter suggests that it was not just Scotland that needed Muir, but that Cruickshank brought Muir into an understanding of how much she missed and needed Scotland. Furthermore, Muir’s foregrounding of Cruickshank and her mother, and her inclusion of “the pleasant people we met at your party” as an afterthought, underscores an inherently gendered aspect of her return to Scotland – it is a network of Scottish women that she needs, perhaps more than the country itself. Regardless of her later disappointment with the country and subsequent shift in opinion about these women, in the 1930s, Muir prioritised her connections with women and the traditionally ‘female’ occupation of entertaining and hosting ‘dining clubs’ as attractions for her. Although she insisted to Cruickshank that “our gratitude to you is not merely temporary, but grows out of a real experience”, she writes in no uncertain terms: “This private confession won’t be made again” (Muir Acc. 13634/27 1932a). Her embarrassment at this “private confession” suggests that perhaps, despite her feminism, admitting a need for these women-centred networks and for the motherland that caused her such pain is too difficult in a society that continued to devalue both women and Scotland. Her emphasis in one of her earliest correspondences with Cruickshank that this confession is “private” also foreshadows the relationship that is suggested in her private report from her time as a PEN delegate in Budapest. Muir’s understanding of her epistolary relationship with Cruickshank is one of intimate and private virtues. These are letters in which she can provide “confessions” and express her feelings freely, without censorship, as she cannot do in her later published memoir. Muir’s altered opinions later in her life do not downgrade the importance of these relationships in the 1930s, nor subtract from the value they held in the growth of Scottish PEN, but represent further the importance of re-evaluating the development of and strains on these networks.

“Is this my LIFE?”: struggling to balance Scotland’s social networks and work Cruickshank and Muir’s correspondence represents the importance of women’s epistolary networks. Letters in later years from Cruickshank and Muir’s acquaintances from the interwar period that describe these women are similarly important. For example, Mary Drury Oeser, an Australian psychologist, noted the importance of her relationship with Muir after they met in St Andrews, but also how their letters, especially after Oeser moved back to Australia, were few and far between: Once I got to Australia, I did write to both of them [Edwin and Willa] now and again, but did not ever receive a reply, which Willa explained years later […]; they had not written over the years because there was no necessity for friends to write since real news would keep and trivialities were unimportant! (Oeser Acc. 13634/8 1963)

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In later years, upon finding out that Oeser’s husband had left her for another woman, Muir invited Oeser to move back to Britain and stay in her house in Swaffham Prior. Oeser explained in a letter to Butter: “I stayed with Mrs Muir in Swaffham Prior in 1961 and was full of admiration for her courage and independence” (Oeser Acc. 13634/8 1963). In the same letter, she insisted: All I know of Scottish literature I owe to Edwin and Willa Muir and to their sensitive perspicacious judgement. Hermann Brock [sic] I met when he was staying with them, and the poet, Stephen Spender, and Hugh MacDiarmid and a host of other Scots writers and journalists. (Oeser Acc. 13634/8 1963) Her letter emphasises the importance of women’s bonds from this era, but also the involvement of the Muirs in the European aspect of Scottish literature. Most significantly, it underscores how difficult it can be to track these women’s friendships. Unlike Edwin, whose letters about books, writing, and sharing poems between his friends are vast in number (see Butter 1974), Willa’s main correspondence was often motivated by necessity. These include questions to authors and editors about translations, organisational minutiae to friends about trips or events, or, in the instance of those letters to friends, details of her and Edwin’s health and wellbeing. This is not to say that her letters never focused on her art or worldly events, but these are fewer in number and shorter than Edwin’s. Moreover, while Edwin’s life and letters attracted the attention of biographers like Butter, few of Muir’s letters have been published and never in a collection of their own. She did not necessarily have time (or money) to send Oeser long letters about her day-to-day life and writing. In later years, this changed as her time began to free up – as it did for Cruickshank – but both women’s letters continue to abound with administrative particulars, interwoven into notes and mentions of close intimate relationships. In contrast to Edwin’s letters about literary theory, these accounts have not been viewed as noteworthy until recent academic interest in ‘the Everyday’. For Cruickshank, her correspondence often connected to some matter of the Renaissance and PEN. For Muir, her time to correspond with others was taken up also by “most of Edwin’s incidental correspondence”, freeing him to write the letters he truly desired to write (Oeser Acc. 13634/8 1963). This does not, however, detract from the value of the letters that can be found in Muir and Cruickshank’s archives. Despite the professional nature of many of these artefacts, it is clear that these women formed friendships through their networking. In later years, in a letter to Michie, Cruickshank questioned “Is this my LIFE?”, exploring the frustrations of feeling as if she can “never catch up on what I plan to do” (Cruickshank MS.37326 1963). This is the clearest indication of the balancing act with which these women were challenged – the frustrations of navigating domestic responsibilities with professional duties and social expectations. The form and style of these letters – their length or lack thereof, their hurried or patient script, the way they addressed one another, and what names or writers are left out of their exploration of events – tell as much about their lives as what is within the text. These qualities offer insight into these women’s busyness: the imperative to tackle administrative duties for themselves, the restrictive division of labour that meant they felt compelled to perform these duties for the men in their lives, and the need to track down the funding for creative endeavours – all the while yearning to find the time and energy for their own work. Interwoven within this is a genuine appreciation of and love for the women who shared these experiences. These letters beg further analysis. Further to this is the need to investigate the role of PEN outwith Europe and women’s roles within these global branches. For instance, Sophia Wadia, who founded PEN India in 1933, provides an excellent case study for an analysis of the women of PEN and their relationship with that

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organisation and with the ‘West’. Queer women, too, clearly held their place in PEN. In addition to the “stocky, tweed-clad Lesbian” Muir met in Budapest, Dawson-Scott herself wrote as ‘Mrs Sappho’ later in life, and Radclyffe Hall, author of The Well of Loneliness (1928), which was prosecuted for obscenity in the United Kingdom, was one of the most well-known lesbian novelists of the early twentieth century and a member of PEN (Muir 1968: 155). A lengthier investigation of the impact of women’s sexual and intimate relationships on PEN International would provide not only greater insight into writing communities more generally, but also the methods used by women of varying identities to influence the global network of writers in the interwar period. This aligns with Dawson-Scott’s original desire to “create not only an inclusive, but also an international organisation” based on “certain basic feminist principles” as seen in her 1928 resolution (Potter 2013: 71, 74). Her own letters with her daughter about the Tomorrow Club and PEN are another avenue for investigation. This chapter suggests the inseparable relationship between women’s epistolary networks and PEN in the interwar period, and, in a Scottish context, between the Renaissance and the formation of Scottish PEN. In so doing, it encourages an approach to the study of interwar women writers in connection not only to their contributions to the Renaissance, but to sister organisations like PEN. Using their life writing provides greater insight into Muir and Cruickshank’s (and undoubtedly other female members’ of PEN’s) output and on the cultural products of their relationships, while showing the love and support, as well as intellectual insight and wit, that allowed these pieces of correspondence to ‘hold their own’ among the broader definition of literature and hint towards the work that is still to be done.

Works cited Butter, Peter (ed.) (1974) Selected Letters of Edwin Muir, London: The Hogarth Press. Calder, Jenni (2020) “Helen Cruickshank: ‘Bide The Storm Ye Canna Hinder,’” The Bottle Imp 27. ­Available at: https://www.thebottleimp.org.uk/2020/12/helen-cruickshank-bide-the-storm-ye-canna-hinder/ (­Accessed: 18 Nov 2022). Christianson, Aileen (2007) Moving in Circles: Willa Muir’s Writings, Edinburgh: Word Power Books. Cruickshank, Helen B. (1958) [Letter to Margaret Fairweather Michie]. Letters from Helen Burness Cruickshank to Margaret Fairweather Michie, MS.37326/1, 1957–73. St Andrews: University of St Andrews Special Collections. Cruickshank, Helen B. (1963) [Letter to Margaret Fairweather Michie]. Letters from Helen Burness Cruickshank to Margaret Fairweather Michie, MS.37326/1, 1957–73. St Andrews: University of St Andrews Special Collections. Cruickshank, Helen B. (1976) Octobiography, Montrose: Standard Press. Cunninghame Graham, Robert B., Herbert J.C. Grierson, and Helen B. Cruickshank (1932) PEN Scottish Centre Proposed Congress of World Authors in Scotland, 1934. Miscellaneous Printed Items Donated from Marion C. Lochhead, HP4.88.471. Edinburgh: National Library of Scotland. McCulloch, Margery Palmer (ed.) (2004) Modernism and Nationalism: Literature and Society in Scotland 1918–1939, Source Documents for the Scottish Renaissance, Glasgow: The Association for Scottish Literary Studies. Muir, Edwin (1933) [Letter to Helen Cruickshank]. Correspondence and photocopies and transcripts of correspondence between Edwin and Willa Muir and various correspondents collected by Peter Butter, Acc.13634/27, box 16, file 2. Edinburgh: National Library of Scotland. Muir, Marie (1975) [Tribute to Helen Cruickshank]. Letter of C M Grieve to Marie Muir, concerning the funeral of Helen Cruickshank, with a typescript copy of a tribute to Helen Cruickshank by Marie Muir, MS.26713, ff. 108–110. Edinburgh: National Library of Scotland. Muir, Willa (1968) Belonging, London: The Hogarth Press. Muir, Willa (1932a) [Letter to Helen Cruickshank 1]. Correspondence and photocopies and transcripts of correspondence between Edwin and Willa Muir and various correspondents collected by Peter Butter, Acc.13634/27, box 16, file 2. Edinburgh: National Library of Scotland.

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Emily L. Pickard Muir, Willa (1932b) [Letter to Helen Cruickshank 2]. Correspondence and photocopies and transcripts of correspondence between Edwin and Willa Muir and various correspondents collected by Peter Butter, Acc.13634/27, box 16, file 2. Edinburgh: National Library of Scotland. Muir, Willa (1932c) [Letter to Helen Cruickshank 3]. Correspondence and photocopies and transcripts of correspondence between Edwin and Willa Muir and various correspondents collected by Peter Butter, Acc.13634/27, box 16, file 2. Edinburgh: National Library of Scotland. Oeser, Mary Drury (1963) [Letter to Peter Butter]. Correspondence between Peter Butter and family, friends and acquaintances of Edwin and Willa Muir; correspondence file “Scotland”, Acc.13634/8. Edinburgh: National Library of Scotland. Ould, Hermon (n.d.) “The P.E.N.”. Papers of the Scottish Centre of International PEN, Acc.8560/8. PEN International (2018) PEN International Women’s Manifesto. Available at: https://pen-international.org/ app/uploads/Womens-Manifesto-2018-FINAL-PDF.pdf (Accessed: 21 Nov 2022). Pickard, Emily L. (2022) The Other Muir: Willa Muir, Motherhood, and Writing. Unpublished: University of Glasgow. PhD. Potter, Rachel (2013) “Modernist Rights: International PEN 1921–1936,” Critical Quarterly, 55(2): 66–80. Scottish PEN (2022) History of Scottish PEN, The Urgent Present: The 1930s. Available at: https://scottishpen.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/History-of-Scottish-PEN-1930s.pdf (Accessed: 21 Nov 2022).

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11 “WHAT MEANS A FRONTIER?” Nancy Cunard, feminist internationalism, and the Spanish Civil War Eleanor Careless

“If feminism is truly to be internationalised it must have the flexibility to become a distinct but ­interconnected struggle within a wider and holistic movement toward social change and human freedom” (Bandarage 1987: 13). This pronouncement, made by Asoka Bandarage in Outwrite feminist newspaper in 1987, looks towards the possibility of a fully international feminism at the end of the twentieth century. Outwrite was itself an explicitly feminist-internationalist publication, and a longer version of Bandarage’s article was first published in the Indian magazine SANGHARSH. There is an echo, here, of Vera Brittain’s diagnosis in 1929 that “the future must see a great reawakening of international feminism if we do not want the women’s movement to founder” (93). Brittain was writing in another feminist publication, Time and Tide, the only woman-run interwar weekly which nonetheless worked to “distance itself from the feminist label” in order to reach a wider public (Clay 2017: 397). What happened to international feminism, between Brittain’s pronouncement and Bandarage’s? The end of the 1920s has been identified as a time of stagnation and ennui for the suffrage movement, its legislative goal achieved, and Time and Tide’s reluctance to identify itself as ‘feminist’ (in the suffrage sense) is typical of a resistance to overt expressions of gendered identity in the 1930s, shared by the coterie of activist women writers this chapter will discuss (Dowson 2002: 7; Delap 2007: 19). And yet, as Lucy Delap has shown (2007), it was out of the flourishing periodical publishing landscape of the early twentieth century that a newly avant-garde, transnational feminism emerged. What did happen after 1929 was the cataclysmic rise of fascism in Europe and, in 1936, the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, which quickly became a symbol of the growing worldwide struggle between democracy and fascism. Existing accounts of the British women writers and activists – from Sylvia Townsend Warner and Valentine Ackland to Nan Green – who supported the Republican side rightly redress the historic absence of these women from “the thousands of articles and books” about that war (Mangini 1991: 171; Nash 1995; Dowson 2002). In this chapter, I build on these accounts but turn instead to the more obscure inter-relation between activist women writers of the thirties who rarely identified themselves as ‘feminist’ and the twentieth-century feminist movements that bracketed their activism. By ‘feminist movements’, I refer both to the suffrage movement and the “feminist avant-garde” (Delap 2007) of the early twentieth century, and to the Women’s Liberation Movement, and associated feminisms, of the 1970s and 1980s, following



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DOI: 10.4324/9781003429951-14

Eleanor Careless

the “epochal shift” ushered in by the powerful Third Worldist internationalism of the 1960s and 1970s (Gago 2020: 196). With a focus on Nancy Cunard’s Spanish Civil War poetry, and her tireless reporting on the Spanish refugees held in French detention camps for Sylvia Pankhurst’s New Times, I explore both Sandeep Parmar’s insight that Cunard’s writing “blurs the personal and the political in a way that anticipates […] feminist poetry especially” (2016: xxi) and her early recognition of a ‘Fortress Europe’ (that is, the increasingly militarised and racialised enforcement of borders across Europe). As Cunard asks repeatedly in her “Sequences from a Long Epic on Spain”, a long poem which depicts Spanish refugees crossing by foot into France: “What was this frontier, tell me?” (2016: 151). By way of response to her biographer Jane Marcus’ contention that “­Cunard’s life is an interesting problem in the study of left internationalism, especially for feminists” (2020), this chapter contextualises her Spanish Civil War writing as part of a larger, international, and anti-colonial project. I argue that Cunard’s anti-fascist journalism and experimental poetry forms part of a long tradition of feminist internationalism which stretches from the Edwardian feminist avant-garde to activist-poets such as Muriel Rukeyser and Anna Mendelssohn and the overtly feminist-internationalist reportage of 1980s periodicals such as Outwrite. To uncover such a tradition is to challenge nationalistic or isolationist histories of feminism, and to demonstrate instead a diffuse, proto-feminist-internationalist genealogy that has long called for a more intersectional form of struggle. In the early 1930s, ‘feminism’ was a term in flux. The activist women writers of the ­Spanish Civil War, Cunard among them, were writing out of a unique aesthetic and political convergence between the ebbing of the ‘old’ suffrage movement and the ‘New Woman’ discourse of the 1890s, the emergence of ‘new’ women’s movements with a focus on birth control and childcare, and an ‘avant-garde feminism’ closely associated with the intellectual and artistic innovations of modernism (Delap 2007). Elements of these diverse feminisms are, unsurprisingly, discernible in women’s writing of this period. Warner’s poetic dramatisation of the “psychological and sexual autonomy of the New Woman” has been discussed by Jane Dowson (2002: 172), while Cunard’s increasingly experimental lyric combines elements of feminist avant-gardism with a commitment to social justice. Yet the modernist women writers of the thirties did not tend to align themselves with an explicitly feminist politics (even if, by 1959, Warner was giving a lecture titled “Women as Writers”). For Maureen Moynagh, Cunard’s effacement of her gender, race, and class – as a wealthy, white, privileged woman – generates a “panoptic gaze” that is complicit with imperialism (2008: 71). But as Dowson points out, such effacement also operates as an escape: the impersonality of modernist principles enabled women writers to slip the noose of gender identity (2002: 7). The very absence of gendered identity in women’s writing of the 1930s, in Dowson’s argument, signals a resistance to conventional markers of femininity (a quality Delap also associates with the feminist avant-garde) and constitutes an “inadvertent feminist participation in the politics of canonicity” (2002: 3). What was not inadvertent was the participation of activist women writers in the Spanish Civil War, and consequently in the international struggle against fascism – which was also a struggle against imperialism. Rather than retrospectively claiming these highly politicised women writers as ‘feminist’, this chapter seeks points of intersection and divergence with earlier and later international feminisms. Despite being labelled a ‘civil war’, the conflict in Spain involved major international powers from the start. German and Italian troops rapidly intervened to support the Nationalist side, and in the face of the non-interventionist stance adopted by non-fascist governments, the Republican side was swelled by the remarkable invention of that war, the International Brigades (and, later, by support from the Soviet Union). Over the course of the war, between 32,000 and 35,000 mostly working-­class volunteers from fifty-three different countries travelled to Spain to fight in the 166

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Brigades (Beevor 2006: 155). As Sally Alexander has rightly pointed out, “in Britain Spain was never a feminist issue” (Alexander and Fyrth 2008: 20). But to fight on the side of the Republicans was to be in coalition with a progressive alliance, the Spanish Popular Front, that promised and briefly delivered greater emancipation for women before being brutally crushed by Franco and the far-right (Nash 1995: 183). This aspect of the Spanish war is a short interlude of radical upheaval and almost immediate backlash. Initially, the war “seemed to promise an immediate change” and new roles for women traditionally confined to the private sphere, and milicianas or militiawomen were pictured on many war posters (Nash 1995: 49). Indeed, one of the most enduring images of the war is Gerda Taro’s striking photograph of a Republican militiawoman in training from 1936. Taken in profile, the miliciana – on one knee and pointing a revolver – is silhouetted against the Barcelona beach. Yet after only a few months, the milicianas were “ridiculed and discredited” and replaced with the “social image of combative motherhood and homefront heroine”, and conventional gender roles reinforced (Nash 1995: 110, 58). The foreign women writers and artists who travelled to Spain did access greater freedoms on its battlefields – Taro, who died on the frontline in 1937, is regarded as one of the first women war photographers – but at the same time, they “lacked status within their occupational field and were often reliant on the sponsorship and support of male colleagues and editors” (Deacon 2008: 79). As David Deacon observes, the tendency of women correspondents to focus on the ‘everyday’ impact of war was a consequence of these restrictions and “a case of making a virtue of necessity” (2008: 79). Women writers also faced the hostility of male peers, such as Stephen Spender, who mockingly referred to Warner and Ackland as “Communist lady” writers, and Ernest Hemingway, who accused Cunard of being a “war tourist”, as well as exclusion from the canon of Anglophone Spanish Civil War literature (Marcus 2020: 253–254).1 Why speak of a ‘canon’ of Spanish Civil War literature? The history of the Spanish war is an intensely literary as well as an international history, during which “fighting and writing became inseparable”; Upton Sinclair described the International Brigades as “probably the most literary brigade in the history of warfare” (Gordon 2007: 234). Some of the best-known English language texts of the period are George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia (1938) and W.H. Auden’s Spain (1939) but ‘lost’ works by women writers, such as Muriel Rukeyser’s novel Savage Coast (1937) and Nancy Cunard’s unpublished Spanish poems (2016) are now being retrieved, thanks to the scholarship of Rowena Kennedy-Epstein and Sandeep Parmar. These non-canonical texts “give us a more complex understanding […] of the political, artistic, and intellectual networks that shaped early twentieth-century global solidarities” (Kennedy-Epstein 2013), and mark a shift in the very borders that have historically demarcated the modernist canon. Cunard, whose many connections with the literati of the day are mapped out in the diagram ‘A Tangled Mesh of Modernists’ from Bonnie Kime Scott’s The Gender of Modernism: A Critical Anthology (1990), was a key coordinating figure within these global, if diffuse, literary-political networks. Cunard’s co-ordinating role can be seen most clearly in her pamphlet Authors Take Sides (1937), a survey of the attitudes of writers from Havelock Ellis to Mulk Raj Anand and Rebecca West towards the Spanish Civil War. This early example of an ‘open letter’, described by Marcus as a “collective manifesto” which “created and maintained international networks of like-minded people” (2020: 255), divided its respondents into ‘For’ (the Republicans), ‘Neutral’, and ‘Against’. Sylvia Pankhurst was “of course” ‘For’, writing that: The Spanish war is one sector of the international struggle between Fascism and Democracy. The author and the journalist are the first to whom the choice comes, either to stand for Fascism or against it. 167

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Vera Brittain, anti-fascist but a committed pacifist, falls into the ‘Neutral’ category, as does T.S. Eliot, who writes that “at least a few men of letters should remain isolated, and take no part in these collective activities” (Cunard 1937: n. pag.). Eliot’s isolationist position throws Cunard’s collective organising into high relief, and it is in this political commitment to collectivity and connectedness that Marcus detects a feminist element to Cunard’s literary activism (Marcus 2020: 256). In another sign of her commitment to fostering international solidarity, and despite her own later marginalisation from the anthological canon of Spanish Civil War poetry, Cunard was herself a keen maker of anthologies. In 1937 with the assistance of Pablo Neruda, she published the anthology Les poètes du monde défendent le peuple espagnol (Réanville: The Hours Press), which included poems by Tristan Tzara, Langston Hughes, Louis Aragon, and Auden, among others. But it is in Cunard’s own Spanish war poetry, as I will go on to discuss, that a more intimate, protofeminist internationalism is formulated. Although only one among many causes to which Cunard devoted her life, the ground zero of her political commitments was Spain. In the words of her close friend Solita Solano, “the greatest efforts and disillusions of her life were in the catastrophe of Spain” (Ford 1968: 76). And as Cunard writes in the 1964 poem “To Douglas Cooper”, which takes age and the passing of time as its subject: I shall go on, I think, writing always About the Spain of yore, wherein my days Burst into life, a-listen, and so thus saw What never again shall be no more, no more… (2016: 185) These lines retrospectively claim that it was in Spain that Cunard’s political life began. The phrase “burst into life” recalls John Lehmann’s description of how the Spanish war revitalised poetry “as if a rock had been struck and a spring leapt out of it” (Ford 1968: 171–172). Yet Cunard’s exaggeratedly archaic register, as Young has observed elsewhere, deliberately transgresses the high-­modernist tenets of Imagism (2013: 287) and pastiches a Prufrockian lyric defeatism. Here as elsewhere, Cunard cultivates an ironic imitativeness that undercuts the masculinist canon. Parodying Eliot’s famous poetic prognosis (“you think we’ll dribble to some ‘dying fall’ / The poet wrote of?”), Cunard insists on a more hopeful, durable afterlife for herself and her art critic friend Cooper: “we shan’t dribble into some ‘dying fall’” (2016: 184–185). Cunard’s tone is mocking but melancholic, unable to relinquish its lost object – the symbol of international struggle and global solidarity that is Spain. The 1930s marked a turning point in Cunard’s life: born into wealth and privilege, as the greatgranddaughter of the shipping magnate Samuel Cunard, she had by this time moved to Paris and exchanged the aristocracy for the avant-garde. Cunard is known for her dramatic self-cultivated image as an artist’s muse – her photograph was taken by Man Ray and Cecil Beaton; Brancusi named a sculpture after her – and for her famous lovers, Ezra Pound, Tzara, and Eliot among them. But she was also the “visionary founder” (Parmar 2016: xi) of the Hours Press, the first publisher of Samuel Beckett, and by the 1930s, the author of two poetry collections and the extraordinary high-modernist poem Parallax (1925), which anticipates the more activist poetics of the 1930s and later. In 1931, following the discovery of her relationship with the African-American jazz musician, Henry Crowder, she was disinherited by her mother and her lifelong involvement with international activism, from the American civil rights movement to the French resistance, began. This turn towards political activism combined with her literary energies to produce such artefacts as the massive Negro anthology (1934), an idealistic if problematic document of Black 168

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internationalism (for further discussion of Negro’s significance and highly controversial reception history, see Young 1998; Edwards 2003; Marcus 2004), Authors Take Sides, and what Sandeep Parmar terms a “fervent activist (at times anarchic) political poetry” which absorbed her experiences of the U.S. civil rights movement of the 1930s, the war in Spain, the plight of refugees, and the rise of fascism in Europe and Africa (2016: xv). Cunard’s involvement in Spain was as both “the author and the journalist”, to repeat Pankhurst’s phrase from Authors Take Sides, as well as an activist and editor. She sent reports to the Manchester Guardian, the Associated Negro Press and the New Times, raised funds for the Republican cause, and gave aid to Spanish refugees after the war had ended. Her most “historically significant reporting” followed Franco’s victory in 1939 when “very few journalists remained in Spain” (­Gordon 2007: 221). Cunard stayed on, and her detailed, urgent despatches on the French internment camps set up to receive the colossal numbers of fleeing Spanish Republicans exposed the desperate exodus and the abominable conditions at the camps themselves. As a New Times article from February 1939 opens: “This is all a NIGHTMARE. Has to be seen to be realised” (Cunard 1939a). A flurry of Cunard’s reports on the camps were composed in early 1939, as Franco’s victory became certain and the influx of refugees suddenly increased. The exodus of half a million Spaniards in 1939 remains one of Europe’s worst but least well-known refugee crises (Coward 2019). The chaotic scenes at the border are described by Cunard as “Dantesque”, and the camps as “not fit to receive human beings” (1939a: 6; 1939b: 15). The work of documenting these conditions was risky and extremely physically demanding: Cunard walked with the refugees to the border town of Perpignan, despite “persistent bombings overhead”, and “up to twenty miles each way to visit these camps” (Gordon 2007: 221, 228). Her commission to investigate the camps for Pankhurst’s New Times, one of the most important interwar print vehicles for an internationalist discourse (Srivastava 2021: 450) is perhaps one of the strongest – if still indirect – connections between her work and the organised women’s movement. The New Times and Ethiopia News, to give it its full title, was launched to continue and amplify Pankhurst’s campaign against Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia, but, as its launch edition of 5 May 1935 declared, “the cause of Ethiopia cannot be separated from the cause of international justice” (Holmes 2021: 684). Ten weeks later, when war broke out in Spain, the New Times ran the headline: “Two Victims of Fascism – Spain and Abyssinia” and from then on focused jointly on Ethiopia and Spain. For Pankhurst’s biographer, Rachel Holmes, this was an early sign of her understanding of the inseparability of anti-colonialism and anti-fascism – an understanding that Cunard shared (696; see Marcus 2020: 258). The preface to Authors Take Sides makes a direct link between the war in Spain and the Italian invasion of “the colonies” (Ethiopia); Cunard’s article “An Algerian Speaks Out” records how the Spanish fascist uprising began in Spanish Morocco (see Srivastava 2021); and the opening line of her long poem “Sequences from a Long Epic on Spain” records how “[i]t begins in Morocco, under the long-depressed Crescent…” (2016: 148). In Neelam Srivastava’s analysis, Pankhurst represents a form of “transnational partisanship […] anchored in a form of internationalism that breaches the colonial divide” (2021: 451). Srivastava’s understanding of the ‘partisan’ is derived from Carl Schmitt (1963) as one who does not fight on open terrain but forces their enemy into another space. That new space, for Pankhurst and Cunard, was the literary counterpublic of the New Times. While newspapers such as the Daily Mail “acted as a de facto London press bureau for Franco” (Deacon 2008: 61), the New Times actively resisted such reporting. The New Times certainly built, if tangentially, on Pankhurst’s experience of feminist campaigning, making use of publicity tactics which drew on suffragist literary counterpublics and through direct appeals to newly enfranchised British women. But most significantly for the development of feminist internationalism in this period, New Times was founded on Pankhurst’s 169

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“integrated understanding of the intersection of oppressions” (Holmes 2021: 682). The paper was published internationally in multiple languages, and its circulation expanded most rapidly in West Africa and the West Indies. Its publication of news and photographs of atrocities “suppressed or ignored by other news agencies” met with constant resistance both from British Foreign Office officials and Italian diplomats who tried – and failed – to get it shut down. Throughout the Spanish war and beyond, the New Times enabled and shaped the ‘partisan’ campaigning journalism of reporters such as Cunard. It is noticeable that Cunard’s articles in the Manchester Guardian omit some of the more emotive language and graphic details that are present in the drafts, and which do make their way into her equivalent articles for New Times. The printed version of “The Camp at Argelès” in the Guardian, for instance, omits details including the desperate lack of food, clean water, fuel, and sanitary arrangements, the fate of a group of Cuban volunteers (one of whom is in dire need of medical treatment), the French refusal to grant access to aid organisations, and a description of the interned Spanish “parked like cattle” (1939g). The reasons for such omissions can only be surmised: space restrictions, concerns over publishing unverified information, or the urgent haste with which Cunard was sending out her reports. Cunard’s articles for New Times are more candid and richer in detail – likely a reflection of what Pankhurst was prepared to publish. For example, from New Times articles, we learn more about the conditions of near starvation at the camps, and the refugees’ meagre rations: “a French long loaf to five men”, a “little rice”, “two sardines” (1939f). Another report, from April 1939, quotes at length from several letters Cunard received from desperate Spanish Republicans including a thirteen-year-old boy, separated from his mother during the exodus, who tells her that “they are trying to send us all back to Spain. I don’t want to go back, because that would mean going to matadero (the slaughter-house)” (Cunard 1939c: 8). There are frequent references to the increasing militarisation of the camp at Argelès, where around the “‘army’ of men behind barbed wire is another army, a real army with all its weapons – Mobile Guards, Soldiers, and Algerian Spahis on their horses with rifles on their backs” (1939d: 1). In a strange inversion, European refugees are guarded by Algerian soldiers who serve as stark reminders of French colonial power. Cunard also lays bare the intransigence of the French and British governments, who were (then as now) far from welcoming to the Spanish refugees (1939c: 1–2). Cunard and Pankhurst may well have been campaigning alongside each other on this issue. Pankhurst joined a women’s delegation with the aim of persuading the Foreign Office to grant asylum to Spanish refugees (Holmes 2021: 697), while Cunard reports that a delegation […] from England is trying to get the necessary permits to fetch some of the Spanish writers and artists out of the concentration camps […] (I hear that only 100 ­Spaniards so far are authorised to enter England by the Home Office). (1939d: 2) Here is an example of Bandarage’s “distinct but interconnected struggle” taking place both at home and abroad. The incidents Cunard witnessed as a journalist resurface in her poetry. Parmar draws attention to the frequent exchanges between Cunard’s war journalism and her poetry, and the “reportage quality” this lends her poems (2016: xxxi). The draft of an article written for the Manchester Guardian and the New Times on the camp of Argelès offers one such example. The draft reports on the fate of the Cuban International Brigade (international volunteers as well as Spanish Republicans were held in the camps), and details how Cunard was taken “to see a Cuban mulatto lying on a rigged-up iron bedstead who is almost unconscious from fever and who cannot speak. It is getting 170

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very cold already at 4.30” (1.8).2 This encounter never made it to print in the Guardian, and is mentioned only briefly in the New Times article ‘“Terrible Conditions at Perpignan” (1939e: 1). However, the Cuban “almost unconscious with fever” is reprised in an unpublished draft of a poem, “ARGELES”, held in Cunard’s archives, which recalls a Cuban “mulatto”, “deep in his fever-­ trance / The February gale raking the February shore. / The Cubans led me to see what it could be / Unconsciousness… I gazed a while on that unmoving form” (“ARGELES --- (after Consul) (THE CUBANS)” 2.7). The poem is dated January 1963, and its use of the (by then widely understood as offensive) term ‘mulatto’ is indicative of Cunard’s propensity to idealise or objectify “the other she seeks to represent” (Moynagh 1998: 71). It appears to be part of Cunard’s “Sequences from a Long Epic on Spain”, which she worked on into the last years of her life (part of which, although not “ARGELES”, is now published in her Selected Poems). However, a closer reading of other verses from “Sequences” reveals a more nuanced exploration of the ‘other’ ­Cunard’s poetry seeks to represent. It is in “Sequences” that questions such as “what was this frontier, tell me?”, “but the frontier –what is a frontier?” arise again and again, to which a Spanish refugee responds: “that is what this frontier means: a line at the end of starvation” (2016: 151–152; emphasis in original). The final lines of “Sequences”, haunted by wartime hunger, intersperse the poetic speaker’s recording refrain “I have seen I have seen” with the refugee voices (‘“We are looking for food at our feet”’) that surge up through her lines:   …We are looking for food at our feet. Have you seen anything one could eat? What should we do – ay, what shall we do?” I have seen I have seen All this poor woof and weave, this drapery of exodus With its avant-garde, broken lineation, alternating between very long and very short lines, ­irregular stanzas, and emphatic, unconventional punctuation, “Sequences” is strongly influenced by a futurist aesthetic. The phonetic transcription of a hand grenade as “Bmmmmm-p” shows this influence very clearly. The characteristic polyphonic play of voices, which fall in and out of colloquial free verse and bursts of anapaestic metre, marks constant shifts in perspective: the refugee echoes the speaker’s question “what means this ‘frontier?’”, the speaker echoes the refugee’s preoccupation with “no waste scrap of food” (2016: 152–153). In this way, the poem maintains the distinction between the ‘I’ and the ‘you’, while also evoking the empathetic proximity and material immediacy between them. In the final two lines, the poem zooms out to wider political vistas to ask: “­Is there pardon for France and Franco in this in a mile of centuries? […] A whole people has walked away”. Several drafts of poems held in Cunard’s archives draw on journalistic notes that date back to 1939. These poems are clearly unfinished, but they share the same preoccupation with the relationality between subject, speaker, and reader. In “ARGELES” there is the speaker’s speechless ‘gaze’, which maintains some distance between the observing speaker and the Cuban volunteer, although there is physical proximity here too; in “IN THE CAMPS”, the reader is contemptuously told that “to some profit you could get out your binoculars”, a statement which magnifies distance and implies war tourism on the part of the reader; and in “Exodus and Camps”, Cunard records how “I that mutely saw them have kept their words”, in a selfeffacing expression of witness that blurs the visual and the verbal (2.7). The use of the word ‘kept’, meaning to guard, protect, or save, recalls Carolyn Forché’s definition of poetic witness (following Levinas) as “a responsibility for the other” (2014: 19). The act of recording 171

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experiences and voices other than her own, first in the immediate form of journalism, later in the more meditative form of poetry, is characteristic of ­Cunard’s Spanish Civil War writing (see Donlon 2014: 202; Parmar 2016: xxxii). The affect-laden poetic inscriptions of the camps expand upon the journalistic accounts, and experiment with scales of proximity and distance. Cunard’s high-modernist lyric is relatively uninterested in ­introspection – one of the key characteristics, for Delap, of the Edwardian feminist avant-garde – and self-­ discovery. As she writes in Parallax, “the eyes look deep and see but the eyes again” (2016: 114). Instead, her ‘I’ is an itinerant marker of poetic voice that seeks to absorb and transmit shifting, interconnected, and plural perspectives. In their writing on Rukeyser’s feminist internationalism, Sam Huber introduces the figure of parataxis to elucidate Rukeyser’s poetry’s ability to “hold the disparate referents of political life alongside one another”, commensurate with Bandarage’s “distinct but interconnected struggle” (Huber 2021: 661). For Cunard, the figure of parallax, the title of her long modernist poem of the mid-twenties and a “particular form of intertextual composition, in which the perspective of both subject and object shifts in the very act of reading” (Ayers 2004: 34), frames her proto-feministinternationalist lyric. Here is an example of parallax at work in the closing section of Parallax, where the ‘I’ and ‘you’ are suspended, without fixed referent: I, shadow, Meet with you – I that have walked with recording eyes Through a rich bitter world… (2016: 115) Itinerancy and the shifting subject are Cunard’s answer to the question of poetic relationality. Subjects and objects are not fixed, but symbiotic, borders made porous, and permeable. The ‘shadow’ with which this poetic ‘I’ identifies is a trace or outline of a person, not their full self; ‘to shadow’ also implies to follow closely. These lyrical and activist border-crossings involve risk – such as ­Cunard’s well-documented willingness to overidentify with the displaced subjects of her activism – but also offer affordances of intersubjectivity, intimacy, and immediacy. As mentioned above, Parallax (1925) anticipates Cunard’s more political poetry of the 1930s and later. Published by ­Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press, the poem’s original cover image, a curved and distorted cityscape by Eugene McCowan, visualises the idea of parallax and shows the influence of the same futurist aesthetic apparent in Cunard’s Spanish war poems. Transposed into Cunard’s more activist poetics, the figure of parallax affords an interconnected, shifting lyric mode that veers away from a singular or static perspective. An astronomical term that denotes the “change in the apparent position or direction of an object as seen from two different points” (OED), that is, how perception shifts across distances, parallax becomes the technique by which Cunard’s poetry keeps its “recording eyes” wide open. The fluctuating distances between the realities of war and the speaking ‘I’ are vividly registered in “Yes, it is Spain”, a poem first published in Life and Letters Today in October 1938, but excluded from Spanish Civil War poetry anthologies: What is a bomb? Something I can’t yet believe. What is a tomb? Something I can’t yet see.

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And what is a wound in its wounding, And the shot cutting a vein and the blood coming Out of an eye, say, stabbed – are these things too for me? (2016: 141) In these lines, Cunard’s early poetic “jests” give way to “real things” (2016: 31). Invoking, through the suggestion of the stabbed eye, the infamous opening scene of Luis Buñuel’s and Salvador Dalí’s Un Chien Andalou (1929), the figurative violence of the surrealist act is transposed into the threat of non-abstract violence. Cunard knew Buñuel’s work well: she arranged a screening of his film L’Age d’Or (1930) in London after its banning in Paris (Giles 2020: 87). Her manipulation of the surrealist eye, her writing of wounds, shows how a change in position, from peacetime Paris to wartime Spain, precipitates a parallactic change of perception. Through the negative inscription of these signs of horror, the poetic speaker attempts to assimilate them, intellectually, visually, and viscerally – in other words, to close a relational gap and to register it. The gap between incredulity and the effects of war is narrowed in the next stanza through recourse to the last war Cunard lived through: the so-called ‘La-Der-des-Ders’, the war to end all wars. Presciently, the poem warns of “the present Flanders-Poppy flaunting ahead towards the next one”, situating the Spanish war as one of a long chain that reaches both backwards to the First World War and the Ethiopian crisis (which Cunard also covered as a frontline journalist [Gordon 2007: 222]), and forwards to the imminent Second World War: “You think this is something new?”, the now worldly speaker demands. “No; this too becomes Spain”. Thus the acutely impressionable if shadowy lyric ‘I’ rapidly shifts perspective, from cinematic close-ups to long-distance panoramas, from incredulous witness to hardened observer. Constant perspectival shifts are even more pronounced in “To Eat Today” (1938), one of two poems by Cunard published in Valentine Cunningham’s Penguin anthology of Spanish Civil War Verse (1980). “To Eat Today” recounts the terrible fatalities after an air-raid in Barcelona and evokes horror via the immediacy of the everyday: “[t]hey come without siren-song or any ushering / Over the usual street of man’s middle day” (2016: 143). A note above the poem tells the reader that “in Barcelona today’s air-raid came as we were sitting down to lunch after reading Hitler’s speech in Nuremburg”. The theme of eating is not limited to Cunard’s own interrupted lunch, or the woman who, along with her treasured small stock of “[s]alt and a half-pint of olive”, was obliterated by the bombing. The poem also wonders, of the bombers, “do you eat before you do these things, / Is it a cocktail or is it a pousse-café?” and ventriloquises an imagined bomb-pilot’s anxiety, while still airborne, over whether “we [are] going to eat today, teniente?” The poem returns at its end to the “simple earth” where there are “[f]ive mouths less to feed tonight in Barcelona”. The poem’s preoccupation with eating is rooted in the lived conditions of wartime Spain. Food shortages in Barcelona were acute by 1938. Beevor records that “[f]ood queues were worse than ever and women were killed and maimed during the bombing raids because they would not give up their places” and that by “1938 the death rate for children and the old had doubled” (2006: 331–332). Following her second visit to Barcelona, Cunard herself started a food campaign through the Manchester Guardian, News Chronicle, and Daily Herald (Dowson 2002: 52–53). In “To Eat Today” Cunard’s cumulative perspectival shifts, combined with her spare, unremitting language, convey the urgency of this present horror: “Europe’s nerve strung like catapult, the cataclysm roaring and swelling… / But in Spain no. Perhaps and Tomorrow – in Spain it is HERE”. In her poetry, as in her early newspaper reports, and in Authors Take Sides, Cunard “warned repeatedly that the events in Spain were a prelude

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to another world war. Spain today would become France tomorrow” (Gordon 2007: 222). The horrific event of aerial bombardment, in Cunard’s parallactic poetics, becomes not melancholic but mobilising (see Traverso 2017: 33). There is nothing new about war poetry that sets out to warn: Wilfred Owen wrote in 1918 that “all a poet can do to-day is to warn” (Spender 1939: 8). But as Cunard’s actions went beyond that of warning, so her poetry goes beyond the expression of warning and – in other Spanish war poems, which I will shortly discuss – inscribes a life of ongoing, partisan resistance. Cunard’s insistence on the here and the now, on an energised, politicised “Today”, might be read as a counter to poems such as Auden’s “Spain” (1937), and the dominant defeatist key of most Anglo-Spanish war poetry. “Spain” has been called “the most important poem in English on the Spanish Civil War” and was first published by Cunard’s own press as part of her Spanish Civil War poetry series (Gordon 2007: 230). Auden’s poem is tripartite, divided into “[y]esterday all the past”, “to-day the struggle”, and “[t]omorrow, perhaps the future […to]-morrow for the young the poets exploding like bombs” (Cunningham 1980: 97). An invocation of “the poor in their fireless lodgings” is far more mannered and distant than Cunard’s description of the woman with her “salt and half pint of olive”. Like Cunard, Auden ventriloquises a voice – the abstracted, totalising voice of a nation, rather than bombers, or dead writers – that arrogantly declares “Yes, I am Spain”. The poem ends, with desolate cynicism, “[t]o-day the deliberate increase in the chances of death”, “[t] oday the makeshift consolations”, and, finally, “[t]he stars are dead”. In Auden’s poem, ‘today’ is associated not with urgency and renewed political commitment, but with cynicism and despondency. Cunningham writes in his introduction to Spanish Civil War Verse of Auden’s “refusal to connect [that] amounts to a debilitatingly inhuman standoffishness” (1980: 69), although he balances his assessment with the acknowledgement that the poet’s lack of political commitment is symptomatic of a more general sense of failure and loss amongst the Left at the end of the thirties (1980: 73). Spender (a friend of Auden’s) was kinder, writing that “the poet has confined himself to an abstracted view” which makes for a “remarkable interpretation of the issues and implications of the struggle in Spain” (Cunningham 1980: 69). This “remarkable interpretation” was the vision of the war as a revolutionary situation – but Auden later repudiated the politics of the poem and prohibited its reprint for several years (Gordon 2007: 230). This is a poetics diametrically opposed to Cunard’s. “War is not abstract”, as she wrote to Pound in 1946 – and poetic immediacy is the counter to that reifying abstraction (Parmar 2016: xvii). Sylvia Townsend Warner, Cunard’s friend and contemporary, might explain the contrast between the immediacy of Cunard’s verse and the abstraction of Auden’s as a gendered distinction. In her 1959 lecture “Women as Writers” – described by Jennifer Nesbitt as “a midcentury rearticulation of and expansion of the principles of A Room [of One’s Own]” (Nesbitt 2005) – Warner argues powerfully that immediacy is a quality most frequently found in the work of women writers, not as an essentialising consequence of their gender, but of their social contexts. (Indeed, the shared impulse among women writers of the 1930s to move beyond gender-based identities is consistent with an anti-fascist politics, in accordance with Virginia Woolf’s argument in Three Guineas [1938] that the production of gendered subjects is essential to the production of fascist regimes [see Gättens 2001: 22]). For Warner, the very exceptionality of the woman writer, who “got into literature by the pantry window” rather than by the well-trodden road of literary tradition, generates the writerly quality of immediacy (1959: 383). Warner defines that quality as when the author vanishes, and “[o]ne is conscious of a happening, of something taking place under one’s very nose”, again invoking tropes of proximity and distance, and authorial self-effacement. Warner’s turn towards a more explicitly

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feminist politics expresses itself as a realignment of political priorities, evident in a letter she wrote to Cunard in 1944: The great civil war, Nancy, that will come and must come before the world can begin to grow up, will be fought out on this terrain of man and woman, and we must storm and hold Cape Turk before we talk of social justice. (Warner and Maxwell 2013: 85) (‘Cape Turk’ is a slang term referring to the tendency “to regard woman solely as an instrument of pleasure” [Partridge 1982: 181]). Warner’s pantry, with its elliptical connections to the scenes of eating and hunger in Cunard’s poetry and journalism, stands in for an ‘intimate’ present space from which scales of difference and distance can be navigated and accessed. These women writers’ everyday invocations of the “pantry window” and “salt and […] olive” resonate with Tamara Lea Spira’s concept of “intimate internationalisms”, that is, “feminist modes of poetic praxis that traverse […] scales of the intimate and geopolitical” in order to open up historical perspectives and generate solidarities (Lea Spira 2014: 121). Huber has argued that such a praxis is fully realised by feminist poets such as Rukeyser, whose “diagnostic largeness of vision” (Wechsler 2001: 226) accomplishes astonishing shifts from Vietnam War victims to the woman writing “in a New York room” (quoted in Huber 2021: 671). Cunard’s Spanish poems similarly and presciently perform deft, parallactic shifts between the intimate everyday and wider political landscapes. In the case of Cunard, her stylistic ‘immediacy’ is joined up not with an overt feminist politics but with continued political commitment to real rather than abstracted conditions. Rather than succumbing to disillusionment, or shifting political priorities, Cunard sustained her transnational partisanship, and worked for and supported the Spanish Republicans long after the end of the war. She travelled to Spain throughout the late 1940s and 1950s, rescuing prisoners and smuggling them to France, delivering clothes and money, and even engaged in guerrilla action herself, taking lessons in dynamiting and smuggling arms across the French-Spanish border (Gordon 2007: 310–311). She continued to work on “Sequences from a Long Epic on Spain” and a 1957 typescript of an untitled book on Spain, described as “written in a sort of ‘interval’ between past and future”, can be found in her archives (1.2). Her scrapbook, Cosas de Espana: 1936–46 (Things from Spain) documents through photos, notes, sketches, and poems the whole length of the war and the immediate aftermath. Anne Donlon sees Cunard’s scrapbook as “bracketing a decade that encompasses the war and Republican exile”, and a necessary corrective to what Jessica Berman diagnoses as “the rigid division of Civil War narratives into contemporaneous and retrospective” which can “keep us from seeing continuities and dialogues between and among these writings” (2011: 190; 2014: 200). Noting that the scrapbook ends with a postcard that reads “les amis de l’Espagne Republicaine aide a la Lutte Clandestine, Mai 1946” (the friends of Republican Spain help the Underground Struggle), Donlon concludes that this material object is “no melancholy reflection on the war[;] it presents the Republican effort as ongoing” (2014: 203). In a letter, Cunard herself writes, astonishingly, that amongst the hundreds of exhausted soldiers crossing the border in 1939, there was “no […] sense of defeat” (Gordon 2007: 248). Nan Green, in her memory of the war, recalls the “Spaniards and the men of the International Brigades who, though defeated, would not accept defeat and fought on” (Ford 1968: 171). To refuse defeat is to take up a position of mobilising melancholy (a phrase I adapt from Traverso’s analysis of left-wing melancholia [2017]), and sustain political commitment.

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The afterlife of the Spanish Civil War in Cunard’s later poetry is similarly not defeatist but guerrilla. Her 1942 poem “Spain”, part of a transnational series of unfinished poems called “Passport to Freedom”, announces that “Spain is guerrilla / Into the hills gone, where no guardia can follow” (2016: 190). “Spain” refigures defeat as hope through the metaphor of an underground river, prefaced by the imperative to write, to continue to bear witness: Write… of little water drops making a river And the river subterrene, the fuller for the damming. Write… of revolt and revenge, and waiting, Of planning and the sporadic golpe de mano on the mountain Golpe de mano refers to the surprise attacks mounted by Spanish guerrillas in Francoist Spain during and after the Second World War. Known as the Spanish Maquis, or members of the resistance, these civil war veterans fought with the French resistance and are celebrated in Cunard’s poem “Dordogne”, where “today the maquisards are on the causse” (a limestone plateau characteristic of the region), the “red heart turned into armed fists against […] Vichy […] Salut, best of peoples […] we shall meet again” (Cunard 2016: 171). The Maquis are celebrated again in Cunard’s “rousing battle cry” of a poem “Relève into Maquis” (Parmar 2016: xxxiv), a criticism of Vichy France’s ‘relève’ or exchange policy, a collaboration with Nazi-enforced deportations: “Into Maquis: a hidden camp of partisans, francs-tireurs, guerrillas / ‘Refractories to law and order’ Vichy calls them” (2016: 125). Cunard’s poems of partisanship acknowledge injury as well as indefatigable hope. Spain is “[s]cored over and over with pain”, a “palimpsest” of historic damage (190). “You will want to look back”, Cunard’s poetic speaker tells their interlocutor. But historic damage is perceived as continuous with the possibility of “rising again”, and the poem “Spain” articulates this continuity as “time is a train, / our train” (191; emphasis in original). For Cunard, Spain is ‘the past’ but also the present, ‘today’, ‘here’, an ongoing event. The political mood of mobilised melancholy finds expression in her Spanish war poems, which ‘come to us with claims that have yet to be filled, as attempts to mark us as they have themselves been marked’ (Forché 1993: 31). These poems are full of the historical damage which, brought trenchantly back into the present, they want to repair. It is Cunard’s ongoing transnational partisanship that brings her into the orbit of the feminisms of the 1970s. In the winter of 1975–1976, the socialist feminist magazine Red Rag ran an issue focused on international struggles in Spain, Namibia, and Portugal. The article on Spain, written by the ‘Women’s Campaign Against Fascist Spain’, states with theoretical clarity that “fascism is based on sexism and as women we must fight both” (3). This was a transnational feminist campaign, formed at a protest outside the Spanish Embassy which was timed to coincide with a demonstration by the French women’s movement held at Hendaye on the Spanish border. Written from the perspective of Spanish women, the article explains how the legacy of Franco’s dictatorship means that “it is very difficult for us to have anything similar to the Women’s Movements we know to exist in Europe and America” (5). The Spanish connection was formative, too, for the politics and tactics of the urban guerrillas that emerged in the Sixties, including the Angry Brigade, an anti-imperialist anti-capitalist group who were the British equivalent of Germany’s BaaderMeinhof (Carr 2010: 136). An Angry Brigade communiqué makes this connection explicit, claiming that “we machine-gunned the Spanish Embassy last night [December 1970] in solidarity with our Basque brothers and sisters” (Carr 2010: 237). One of those allegedly involved with the Angry Brigade was the late modernist poet Anna Mendelssohn, whose writings were crucially shaped not only by the ­Spanish war but by Cunard’s poetry. Mendelssohn’s poetry, not dissimilarly from 176

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Cunard’s, has been described as “equally invested in mixing the personal and political” (Kennedy and Kennedy 2013: 147) despite her distance from the mainstream women’s movement, and the affective afterlives of the Spanish war find a unique record in her experimental lyric. A diffuse, feminist-internationalist genealogy is discernible in these loose connections and legacies. As Paul Saint-Amour has argued, weaker social (and cultural) ties can in fact “facilitate more diverse and attenuated clusters” than strong ones (2018: 28), and it is only ‘weak ties’ that can be traced between the internationalism of women activists such as Cunard, Pankhurst, and Warner, and the internationalist feminism of the 1980s. The alternative histories told by internationalist women and feminist internationalists reveal the fascist repression of feminist progress in Spain and clarify the inseparability of fascism and sexism – a relationship that has received only limited critical attention (Marcus 2020: 258) – as well as the continuum between anti-colonialism and antifascism. But it is in the highly experimental forms of Cunard’s poetry that questions of relationality and canonicity are activated and a more intimate internationalism is formulated. It is in her poems, too, that we find the distinctive mood of ‘mobilising melancholy’ which traverses scales not only of proximity and distance, the everyday and world politics, but of past and present, bringing together historical and current struggle in an affective economy of literary-political transnational partisanship that is ongoing. Cunard’s internationalism speaks to a specific turn in contemporary feminism towards transnational and plurinational alliances, as represented by movements such as Ni Una Menos in Argentina and the International Women’s Day Strike of 2017: a turn which calls for the abolition of borders, the intersectionality of struggle and for revolution, as Lola Olufemi puts it, “in service of every living thing” (2020). To quote Cunard’s own contribution to Authors Take Sides: “Spain is not ‘politics’ but life; its immediate future will affect every human who has a sense of what life and its facts mean […] Above all others the writer, the intellectual, must take sides”.

Acknowledgements I am grateful to the Executor of Nancy Cunard’s Literary Estate for permission to reproduce material from her archives; to Sara Crangle, Sandeep Parmar, and Matthew Holman for valuable and generous feedback on early drafts; to the archivists at the Harry Ransom Center; to the editors of this volume; and to the Literary Encyclopaedia and the University of Sussex for funding this project.

Notes 1 This is not the only time Cunard has been described as a ‘political tourist’, as Maureen Moynagh (1998, 2008) has discussed. 2 Nancy Cunard Papers, Harry Ransom Centre, Austin, Texas, box 1, folder 8. Subsequent citations will supply box and folder numbers thus (8.4).

Works Cited Alexander, Sally, and Jim Fyrth (eds.) (2008) Women’s Voices from the Spanish Civil War, London: Lawrence & Wishart. Ayers, David (2004) Modernism: A Short Introduction, Oxford: Blackwell. Bandarage, Asoka (1987) “Towards an International Feminism,” Outwrite, 56: 1–13. Beevor, Anthony (2006) The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936–1939. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Berman, Jessica S. (2011) Modernist Commitments: Ethics, Politics, and Transnational Modernism, New York: Columbia University Press.

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Eleanor Careless Brittain, Vera (1929) “Feminism at Geneva,” Time and Tide, 25 January. Carr, Gordon (2010) Angry Brigade: A History of Britain’s First Urban Guerrilla Group, Oakland, CA: PM. Clay, Clay (2017) “‘The Modern Weekly for the Modern Woman’: Time and Tide, Feminism and Interwar Print Culture,” Women: A Cultural Review, 27(4): 397–411. Coward, Ros (2019) “Franco Refugees Still Haunted by the Past,” The Guardian. Available at: https://www. theguardian.com/world/2019/feb/09/franco-spain-refugees-haunted-by-the-past-retirada (Accessed: 15 Nov 2022). Cunard, Nancy (1937) Authors Take Sides, The Left Review, London: Left Review. Cunard, Nancy (1939a) “At a Refugee Camp,” Manchester Guardian, 10 February. Cunard, Nancy (1939b) “Contrasts on French Frontier,” Manchester Guardian, 3 February. Cunard, Nancy (1939c) “Spanish Refugees in France,” New Times and Ethiopia News, 22 April. Cunard, Nancy (1939d) “Striking Revelations about Spanish Refugees at the Argelès Camp,” New Times and Ethiopia News, 18 March. Cunard, Nancy (1939e) “Terrible Conditions at Perpignan,” New Times and Ethiopia News, 18 February. Cunard, Nancy (1939f) “Terrible Plight of Spanish Refugees,” New Times and Ethiopia News, 25 February. Cunard, Nancy (1939g) “The Camp at Argelès,” Manchester Guardian, 9 February. Cunard, Nancy (2016) Selected Poems of Nancy Cunard, edited by Sandeep Parmar, Manchester: Carcanet Press. Cunningham, Valentine (1980) The Penguin Book of Spanish Civil War Verse, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Deacon, David (2008) British News Media and the Spanish Civil War, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Delap, Lucy (2007) The Feminist Avant-Garde: Transatlantic Encounters of the Early Twentieth Century, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Donlon, Anne (2014) “Things and Lost Things: Nancy Cunard’s Spanish Civil War Scrapbook,” The Massachusetts Review, 55(2): 192–205. Dowson, Jane (2002) Women, Modernism and British poetry, 1910–1939: Resisting Femininity, London: Taylor and Francis. Edwards, Brent H. (2003) The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Forché, Carolyn (1993) Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness, New York: Norton. Forché, Carolyn (2014) “Introduction,” in Duncan Wu (ed.) Poetry of Witness: The Tradition in English, 1500–2001, New York: Norton, pp. 1–6. Ford, Hugh (1968) Nancy Cunard: Brave Poet, Indomitable Rebel, 1896–1965, Philadelphia, PA; New York; London: Chilton Book Company. Gago, Verónica (2020) Feminist International: How to Change Everything, London: Verso. Gättens, Marie-Luise (2001) “Three Guineas, Fascism, and the Construction of Gender,” in Merry M. Pawlowski (ed.) Virginia Woolf and Fascism, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Giles, Paul (2020) Backgazing: Reverse Time in Modernist Culture, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gordon, Louis G. (2007) Nancy Cunard: Heiress, Muse, Political Idealist, New York; Chichester: Columbia University Press. Holmes, Rachel (2021) Sylvia Pankhurst: Natural Born Rebel, London; New York: Bloomsbury. Huber, Sam (2021) “Muriel Rukeyser ‘among Wars’: Feminist Internationalism in the Second Wave,” American Literature, 93(4): 655–683. Kennedy, David, and Christine Kennedy (2013) Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain 1970–2010: Body, Time & Locale, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Kennedy-Epstein, Rowena (2013) “Recovering Muriel Rukeyser’s Savage Coast,” The Paris Review. Available at: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2013/06/11/recovering-muriel-rukeysers-savage-coast/ (Accessed: 16 Aug 2022). Lea Spira, Tamara (2014) “Intimate Internationalisms: 1970s ‘Third World’ Queer Feminist Solidarity with Chile,” Feminist Theory, 15(2): 119–140. Mangini, Shirley (1991) “Memories of Resistance: Women Activists from the Spanish Civil War,” Signs, 17(1): 171–186. Marcus, Jane (2004) Hearts of Darkness: White Women Write Race, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Marcus, Jane (2020) Nancy Cunard: Perfect Stranger, Nancy Cunard, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.

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Cunard, feminist internationalism & the Spanish Civil War Moynagh, Maureen (1998) “Cunard’s Political Lines: Political Tourism and its Texts,” New Formations, 34: 70–90. Moynagh, Maureen (2008) Political Tourism and Its Texts, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Nash, Mary (1995) Defying Male Civilization: Women in the Spanish Civil War, Denver, CO: Arden Press. Nesbitt, Jennifer P. (2005) Narrative Settlements: Geographies of British Women’s Fiction between the Wars, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Olufemi, Lola (2020) Feminism, Interrupted: Disrupting Power, London: Pluto Press. Parmar, Sandeep (2016) “Introduction,” in Sandeep Parmar (ed.) Selected Poems of Nancy Cunard, Manchester: Carcanet, pp. xi–xxxix. Partridge, Eric (1982) A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English: Colloquialisms and Catch-Phrases, Solecisms and Catachreses, Nicknames, Vulgarisms and Such Americanisms as Have Been Naturalized, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Saint-Amour, Paul (2018) “Weak Theory, Weak Modernism,” Modernism/Modernity Print+, 3(3). Available at: https://modernismmodernity.org/articles/weak-theory-weak-modernism (Accessed: 1 Aug 2022). Spender, Stephen (1939) Poems for Spain, London: The Hogarth Press. Srivastava, Neelam (2021) “The Intellectual as Partisan: Sylvia Pankhurst and the Italian invasion of Ethiopia,” Postcolonial Studies, 24(4): 448–463. Traverso, Enzo (2017) Left-wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and Memory, New York: Columbia University Press. Warner, Sylvia T. (1959) “Women as Writers,” Journal of the Royal Society of Arts, 107(5034): 378–386. Warner, Sylvia T. and William Maxwell (2013) Letters, London: Chatto & Windus. Wechsler, Shoshana (2001) “A Mat(t)er of Fact and Vision,” in Anne F. Herzog and Janet E. Kaufman (eds.) How Shall We Tell Each Other of the Poet?: The Life and Writing of Muriel Rukeyser, New York: Palgrave, pp. 226–240. Women’s Campaign Against Fascist Spain (1975) “Spain,” Red Rag, pp. 3–5. Young, Tory (1998) “The Reception of Nancy Cunard’s Negro Anthology,” in Maroula Joannou (ed.) Women Writers of the 1930s: Gender, Politics and History, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 113–122. Young, Tory (2013) “Myths of Passage: Paris and Parallax.” in Maroula Joannou (ed.) The History of British Women’s Writing, Volume 8, Basingstoke: Palgrave, pp. 275–290.

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PART III

Bodies

12 REPUTATION OF [HER] PEN Retrieving the black female body from the margins of the page and the stage Marl’ene Edwin

Yet, I hope, the reputation of my pen is considerable enough to make his glorious name to survive all ages, with that of the brave, the beautiful, and the constant Imoinda. (Behn 2003 [1688]: 7).

Imoinda: Or She Who Will Lose Her Name (2008) is a rewriting of Aphra Behn’s prose fiction Oroonoko (1688) by an African-Caribbean woman, Joan Anim-Addo.1 Behn, England’s first woman playwright, sets her text on a Surinam plantation and narrates the story of Oroonoko, a royal prince who is sold into slavery. In Imoinda, Anim-Addo places the black female at the centre of the narrative, invoking African and Caribbean music and song to narrate the history of African enslavement. A play for twelve voices in three acts, Act One contains eight scenes portraying nobility, love, jealousy, and revenge prior to that fateful journey of the middle passage. Briefly, the first act sees a mourning Imoinda after the death of her father, pursued by Prince Oko. There is an immediate attraction and the two secretly commit to one another. The King, unaware of this commitment and in the absence of his son who has been sent on a mission, has granted any maiden of his court to the neighbouring Chief, who knowingly (he is aware of the secret commitment) selects Imoinda as his future bride. On his return from hunting, Prince Oko consummates his commitment to Imoinda and both face an enraged Chief who seeks revenge. The King, feeling betrayed by his son, delivers Oko and Imoinda to the slave traders waiting “at the gate” (53). Act Two finds our main protagonists aboard the “nightmare canoe” (55) destined for new land that we know is the Americas. Act Three ends with the plantation and the birth of the Caribbean nation. This chapter focuses on the notion of the literary text as archive and how it is creolised. I suggest that this creolisation takes place through the inflection of Caribbean realities. Antoinette Burton posits the notion that not only can a text be a “source of evidence”, but it can also be “an enduring site of historical evidence and historiographical opportunity in and for the present” (Burton 2003: 5). In this regard, I examine how Anim-Addo’s Imoinda deploys Behn’s novella Oroonoko as a ‘source of evidence’ in order to create a new and contemporary creolised archive through her neo-slavery libretto Imoinda. I specifically ask: what meanings might be gained from the literary representation of the black female body within this text when compared with the representation within Behn’s Oroonoko? How do these texts translate and represent black female subjectivity to

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contribute to an understanding of the creolised archive? How does slavery relate to the Caribbean archive in this contemporary neo-slavery narrative? What meanings does the text reveal, especially in relation to the paradigm of the neo-slave narrative as defined by Ashraf Rushdy (1999) and Arlene Keizer (2004)?2 Rushdy consciously argues that neo-slave narratives “talk back” to much, much more than just slave narratives, and describes neo-slave narratives as “contemporary novels that assume the form, adopt the conventions, and take on the first-person voice of the antebellum slave narrative” (Rushdy 1999: 3).3 Rushdy also argues that the format of the neo-slave narrative is important to the author. In the case of Imoinda, Anim-Addo has through the medium of the libretto found a way to give voice to the historically muted subject of slavery which, while certainly important to the author, is also of historical importance to the Caribbean region and a wider diaspora (Rushdy 1999: 87–97). For Charles Johnson, the slave narrative “whistles and hums” with history (1985: 112). Such whistling and humming is brought to the forefront in AnimAddo’s libretto. According to Keizer (2004), Caribbean writers use slave characters and slavery to theorise about identity formation and to reconsider such established theories of subjectivity as psychoanalysis, Althusserian interpellation, and performance theory. It is a reconsideration of performance theory that is relevant here and which begins my overall argument. In considering the performance aspect of Imoinda, I examine the changing nature of such a performance and the challenges/questions that emerge around authorship and how a black woman can traverse these challenges. Anim-Addo insists: If there are moments when the human spirit should be celebrated, then surviving Atlantic slavery is certainly one of them. Since modernities have now taken descendants of the enslaved to Europe and the West in greater numbers, why not celebrate that survival through opera? (2015: 573) That opera, as a national European tradition and art form, is appropriated as a means of restaging Caribbean history underscores the problematic that such an “extravagant of art-forms” entails (Cowgill et al. 2010: 4). Here, I am specifically concerned with Anim-Addo’s libretto as a creolised archive that functions cross-sectionally as a crucial though relatively new archival space for the preservation of Caribbean culture and its written and oral traditions. Imoinda foregrounds and examines the black female body and a version of Caribbean history that the text performs and archives. The first part of this chapter explores Anim-Addo’s use of chorality within the libretto. Chorality, in this instance, “refers to the way in which individuals, characters, situations and landscapes occupying a precise place” within the economy of the text “are all gathered together by the author into an atmospheric unity representative of the historical moment being portrayed” (Pierce 1998: 52). The second part defines the notion of double archive and seeks to illustrate the way in which Anim-Addo has used the “reputation of [her] pen” to reconfigure a position which until recently has been firmly located and constructed through the lens of Restoration literature. In order to tell Imoinda’s story and in so doing, Anim-Addo creates the paradigm of the creolised black female body as living archive. The third and final parts explore the textual relationships that were formed and developed within this twentyfirst century neo-slavery libretto that relies on a reclaiming of historical memory, myth, and fiction.

Transcultural chorality: on board the ‘Nightmare Canoe’ Borrowing Barbara Kowalzig’s term “transcultural chorality” and her argument that “transcultural chorality does not work flatly in order to differentiate […] but rather to establish connections 184

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b­ etween cultures” (2013: 178–210), I hope to show that Anim-Addo has been able to articulate the link between cultures. Importantly, as Giovanna Covi has argued, Anim-Addo “revises the very reality that inspired Behn’s fiction and […] takes on a different literary shape” (Covi 2003b: 83). Retrieving the black woman from the ‘shadows of history’, Anim-Addo is able to present Imoinda, and indeed all of the women within her text, as subjects in history and subjects with agency and political power. The “historical moment being portrayed” in the central Act of Imoinda is the Middle Passage. In Anim-Addo’s libretto, the reader is placed on board the “Nightmare Canoe” (Act 2 Scene 1, 55) and witnesses the deconstruction and simultaneous reconstruction of a community that was and is yet to come. Anim-Addo narrates that tortuous journey from Old Guinea (or Africa) to the slave plantations in the “New” Land. Act Two opens with the stage directions and it is here that no spoken words are necessary in setting the scene; the stage direction reads: On board a slaveship. […] Bales stacked ship shape. Dim lights. Wooden structure. ­Lanterns swing with the rocking, creaking, groaning of the slaveship. Shackled bodies on the bales come partly into the glare of the lanterns and then recede. Whipcrack. IMOINDA stumbles and falls into an open space among the bales. SAILOR ties her to a post. (55) “Dim lights”, “groaning”, and “shackled bodies” reinforce Mina Karavanta’s perspective that Anim-Addo has been able to “narrate the reduction of the African subject to chattel by describing the methods of incarceration and instruments of torture aboard” the Slaveship (2013: 104). Yet it is from this witnessing of torture that the strong community of women will emerge. Anim-­ Addo’s Imoinda speaks not only of her experiences within the context of colonisation and slavery but also for the countless black slave women who have endured similar trials and tribulations. Anim-Addo’s use of the female chorus can be seen as an example of cultural practices within the communities, thereby acting as the foundation for Imoinda’s survival. Aboard the “nightmare canoe”, they sing: Chorus:

I am number eighty-three Best to forget. Raped again yesterday Mouth stuffed with rope. Tossed and dashed and tossed again. Some new terror strikes the nightmare canoe. (62)

As indicated above, Anim-Addo re-imagines the subjectivity of the enslaved and through the use of the chorus demonstrates Kowalzig’s “transcultural chorality”. Furthermore, through the gift of voice to those who were silent, Anim-Addo is able to shed a new light on the past, present, and future. Of the chorus, Natasha Bonnelame writes, “they are the sounds of the drums and the women wailing in Old Guinea, they are the collective and the keepers of the slave’s histories” (2010: 228). Bonnelame argues further that the chorus embodies the slave songs of the plantation community safeguarding the ancestral history of Old Guinea which Imoinda is destined to pass down to future generations (2010: 228). Imoinda’s story is analogous with the history of the enslaved African woman: pregnant through rape, yet she chooses life, signifying the future of the Caribbean nation. This in turn can be indicated as the black female body as creolised archive. 185

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In order to safeguard the memories Imoinda carries, relationships on board the “nightmare c­ anoe”, and indeed the plantation, would need to be formed quickly. Anthropologist, Sidney Mintz writes: From the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, Caribbean plantation labour became adept at forming relationships quickly, especially dyadic relationships. Because the basis for operating in terms of known status categories was under constant pressure from migration and external coercion, they had to learn to deal socially with others, often in the absence of culturally-specific preconceptions about the meanings of individual differences in age, gender or physical variety. (Mintz 1996: 295–296) These dyadic relationships exist between Imoinda and her maid Esteizme and between Imoinda and the collective that is the chorus. Anim-Addo’s use of “repetition and re-enforcement” (Gilroy, 114) imprints the pathways for cultural survival on the reader’s and audience member’s brain. At the same time, her use of opera as a medium for telling Imoinda’s story bridges the “oral and the written narrative, creating a space which at once speaks of the individual and the multiple voices of the African presence in the Americas” (Bonnelame 229). These strategies alert the reader to the fact that “memory sees more than the eye” (Gilroy 1998: 114). Also, a Caribbean author, Beryl Gilroy argues that women writers use memory to “grasp consciousness and challenge the currency of existence” (1998: 114–115). Anim-Addo’s portrayal of Imoinda is in line with Gilroy’s premise that “we use our bodies as store houses of hurt and graveyards of pain, anguish or terror” (1998: 115). Imoinda’s body is subject to hurt, pain, anguish, and terror – sold to the slave traders, trapped on board the “nightmare canoe”, raped by the overseer, and finally giving birth to the child of her abuser. Imoinda’s story, then, is one of multiple memories which “reside and remain in the body” (Brown-Hinds 2002: 99).

Reputation of [her] pen: refiguring a double archive To further understand Imoinda’s story, I return to Behn’s text. The epigraph at the beginning of this chapter is the closing paragraph of Behn’s Oroonoko and speaks to Behn’s desire for Oroonoko, the main protagonist of her text, “to survive all ages”. Apparently, an afterthought (as I read it), Behn adds “with that of the brave, the beautiful and the constant Imoinda” (7). It is “the brave, the beautiful and the constant Imoinda” who drew Anim-Addo’s focus. Critics of Behn such as Rhoda Trooboff (2004) have referred to the fact that such a noble figure as Oroonoko is ensconced within the literary page thereby disallowing a portrayal on the stage. Indeed, in Thomas Southerne’s stage adaptation of Oroonoko (1696), which he begrudgingly credits to Behn,4 he writes in his introduction: I stand engag’d to Mrs Behn for the occasion of a most Passionate Distress in my last Play; and in a Conscience that I had not made her a sufficient Acknowledgement, I have run further into her Debt for Oroonoko, with a Design to oblige me to be honest; […] I have often wonder’d that she would bury her Favourite Hero in a Novel, when she might have reviv’d him in the Scene. She thought either that no Actor could represent him; or she could not bear him represented: […] she always told his Story more feeling, than she writ it. (Hughes 2007)

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While Behn attempts to configure a literary and historical space for Oroonoko, the same ambition does not manifest itself in the subsequent stage productions of Oroonoko such as Southerne’s, where the noble black savage becomes a peripheral figure. If, as Southerne suggests, Oroonoko is buried within the literary text, then what does this mean for Imoinda? Anim-Addo’s Imoinda articulates the long and complex history of Atlantic slavery, colonisation, and Empire which is a haunting yet crucial and integral part of European history. The critical reception of this libretto, as of other diaspora literatures by ethnic minority authors, remains marginal.5 Often the English classic travel narrative, although set in the same historic period, remains blind to African-Caribbean experiences of imperial conquest.6 Correspondingly, Behn’s and Southerne’s texts remain blind to African-Caribbean experiences and portray black characters who are in conflict with, and who are also destroyed by, white Europeans. Yet Behn’s Imoinda is desired by her white captors with a “hundred white men sighing after her and making a thousand vows at her feet” (Behn 2003: 16). Indeed, Southerne’s Imoinda undergoes a cultural bleaching and is played by a white woman on the stage.7 Whereas playwrights such as Southerne (1696), John Hawkesworth (1760), and Biyi Bandele (1999) have adapted Behn’s Oroonoko, Anim-Addo has elected to rewrite and refigure Behn’s Imoinda in her libretto, Imoinda. Anim-Addo’s rewriting and refiguring charts the development of Imoinda, Esteizme, and the chorus of women who form new relationships despite the dehumanising effects of enslavement. Imoinda is firstly “mistress Imoinda” (12), daughter of a Kromanti warrior, then becomes twice betrothed: “give me your hand” (28) and “here’s my hand. She is yours. I have promised her to no-one else” (40). Losing her name on board the slaveship, she becomes “Number one, six, nine” (63) and once on the plantation is renamed “Clemene” (74), and finally becomes a mother giving birth to “a girl! And hope for new life again” (94). It is the black woman, the black female body that is able to transcend the inhuman circumstances inflicted upon her and create a “community of perseverance”, to use Karavanta’s words, “through suffering thus propelling their present of slavery into the future of the Diaspora” (2015: 68) and political power. I agree with Karavanta that Anim-Addo, through her retrieval of “the black woman from the position of mute witness” and her presentation of the black woman as a “subject in history”, has been able to rewrite the history of colonial modernity and animate the archive (2013: 47). In ­Archive Fever (1998 [1996]) Jacques Derrida underscores that “nothing is less clear today than the word ‘archive’” (90). This is due, in part, to the cross-disciplinary nature of the term ‘archive’ and the way in which it has expanded. In effect and for the purposes of this chapter, I wish to argue that through close examination of Imoinda, it can be seen how the archive may be said to have become animated and hence creolised. If this hypothesis holds, the question of how the process of creolisation reconfigures the archive needs to be fully explored. From Derrida’s psychoanalytical reading of the concept of the archive to Michel Foucault’s definition of what the archive is not – that is, not “the library of all libraries” and not “that which collects the dust” but rather “the system of utterability” and the “law of what can be said” – the debates surrounding the archive continue to expand upon archival space as a physical site and also as an “imaginative site” with the boundaries constantly shifting (Voss and Werner 1999: i). It is the idea of an “imaginative site” with the boundaries constantly shifting that is of particular importance in my reading of Imoinda. Carolyn Hamilton et al., in their introduction to Refiguring the Archive, emphasise that “the ­archive – all archives – every archive – is figured” (2002: 7). Calling for a rethinking of the

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patterns that manifest themselves visibly and invisibly in archived material, they suggest that the focus should be on “the particular processes by which record was produced and subsequently shaped, both before its entry into the archive, and increasingly as part of the archival record” (9). For Hamilton et al., the archive is always being refigured. It is a refiguring of the double archive that I wish to explore at this stage of my overall argument. In a literary context, Anim-Addo’s libretto may be seen to function as an alternative double archive: literary and performance. As outlined above, the libretto as a written text is specific and concrete in form and content. It follows that as a text written to be performed, the libretto becomes the path to performance – an archive of oral and written texts. Literary critic Caryl Emerson states that, as a literary genre, the libretto is often seen as a “vexed entity”. This is because not only is it expected to carry the narrative plot, but it also can be, and is, read independently of its music and as such is seen as a “ludicrous literary experience” (Emerson and Odani 1994: 183). Of particular importance, however, is the concept that the libretto is a reduced version of the real thing. That is to say, the original source (a literary text) is adapted and the result either bears accusation of infidelity or on occasion may not be suitable for music. I highlight this concept to suggest that Anim-Addo’s text cannot be said to be a “vexed entity” as her libretto is not a reduced version of the original source but rather a counter-writing of the history of a particular silence. As Karavanta argues, the text attends not only to the history of slavery but also to a history of silence in which the black woman is doubly expropriated (2013: 47). I further suggest that in light of the above, it is Behn’s text that is shown to be the reduced version. AnimAddo’s rewriting of the history of the Caribbean as part of the Black Atlantic speaks to what Paul Gilroy describes as: the desire to return to slavery and to explore in imaginative writing […] a means to restage confrontations between […] enlightened Euro-American thought and the supposedly primitive outlook of prehistorical, cultureless and bestial African slaves. (Gilroy 1993b: 220) What makes Anim-Addo’s text distinctive from other texts that address the middle passage is that her “return to slavery” was written as a libretto. Of this choice, Anim-Addo says “I had to write an opera […] because the capacity shown by the African-heritage people to survive in the new world has to be a story celebrated in song, dance, music” (2003c: 81–87). The libretto, then, is a combination of all these genres: a performative genre that addresses the issue of textual silence and allows Imoinda’s story to be told. To be more precise, as Karavanta concludes, “by revising the genre of the libretto and inviting each operatic performance of her text to draw on the musical tradition that will host it”, Anim-Addo’s libretto “represents the tradition of music, language and sound of other cultures whose original voices are lost, translated and distorted in the process of colonization” (Karavanta 2015: 49). This “process of colonization” means that in Behn’s text, Imoinda is figured as a Roman Goddess, “the beautiful black Venus” (Behn 2003 [1688]: 16), whereas Anim-Addo, in contrast, chooses to create a more corporeal Imoinda, firmly within an African body. Furthermore, AnimAddo complicates the position of this body within the European/African/Caribbean matrix. The reader meets Imoinda first in the public sphere of funerary rites where she is having her hair braided and tells her maid, “about the corn row, I’d say start with a parting in the middle. Then make all the plaits travel uphill” (7). The “corn row” is a cultural marker in which Anim-Addo is able to signal Imoinda’s purity and innocence. As bell hooks writes:

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before we reach the appropriate age we wear braids, plaits that are symbols of our innocence, our youth, our childhood. Then we are comforted by the parting hands that comb and braid, comforted by the intimacy and bliss. (1989: 382) Imoinda is comforted “by the parting hands that comb and braid” and in this way, Anim-Addo indicates the characters as not Europeanised Africans: they are Africans. Moira Ferguson in Subject to Others: British Women Writers and Colonial Slavery 1670–1834 (1992) states that “eurocentric constructions of Africans and slaves” were constantly depicted in texts by white female authors who routinely “misrepresented the very African-Caribbean slaves whose freedom they advocated” thereby allowing this misrepresentation “to be so readily accepted as the reality of all African countries” (Ferguson 1992: 6). Further, Rushdy states that neo-slave narratives: make sometimes implicit, sometimes explicit comments about white appropriations of the slave’s voice and challenge white authors who attempt to contain and regulate the firstperson representation of fugitive slaves. (1999: 6) In contrast, Anim-Addo attempts to rectify this misrepresentation by constructing a story from the “locus of impossible speech” (Hartman 2008: 3). Behn’s characterisation of Imoinda renders her voiceless, yet Anim-Addo has, to borrow from NourbeSe Philip, been able to “conjur[e] something new from the absence of Africans as humans that is at the heart of the text” (NourbeSe Philip 2008:189–207).

Imoinda’s generational conversation Central to the libretto are Imoinda, her maid (Esteizme), and Prince Oko. From the outset, we learn that the libretto features two very powerful women, albeit in different ways. Imoinda is powerful as a maiden of the court, yet Esteizme’s power stems from her relationship with the spirituality of the ancestors and mother earth. A key point to note at this stage is that, throughout the eight scenes in the first act, Esteizme is only referred to through her status as maid and does not actually become “Esteizme” until Act Two when they are on board the slave ship, thus signalling the shift in power relationship and her coming into selfhood. Of that tortuous journey on the middle passage, NourbeSe Philip writes of the resources that the African body contains, that of “spirit”, “intelligence”, “memory”, and “creativity”: Time and again these resources impelling her to flee, run from, subvert, the institution of slavery. Is we bodies saving we – forcing we to live in them. We coming to understand that surviving needing the body. (91) Imoinda’s story is that of the black female body, embodying “spirit”, “intelligence”, “memory”, and “creativity”, arriving in the new world, a body which also contains the past, the present, and the future. Anim-Addo in rewriting Behn’s Oroonoko proclaims that the black woman is not silenced; rather, she writes: “what Behn does not know in 1688 is that we survived. Imoinda survives. Her descendants will rewrite that shared story” (Anim-Addo 2003c: 80). Survival is central

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to the generational conversation that Anim-Addo engages with her audience. Her strong collective of women preserve life, remembering that their children will be the emergent nation. Their story transcends time and signifies formations of resistance and survival. Sarah Bruno applauds the fact that, some three hundred years later, Behn’s cause is: taken up […] by a black female playwright from Grenada, who sought to connect Imoinda’s story to both her own transatlantic ancestry, as well as the history of transplanted AfricanCaribbean peoples as a whole. […] Thus, Behn could not imagine her Imoinda within a dialogue of creolisation, because Behn’s historical position precluded her from realizing what the full implications of the creolising process would be. (Bruno 2013: 12) This retelling by Anim-Addo, within a dialogue of creolisation, is in stark contrast to Behn’s Imoinda who does not survive in the earlier text. Rather, Behn allows Imoinda to suffer a gruesome death at the hands of her beloved Oroonoko who: with a hand resolved […] gave the fatal stroke, first cutting her throat, and then severing her yet smiling face from that delicate body, pregnant as it was with the fruit of tenderest love. (2003 [1688]: 72) This “cutting” of the throat speaks to a metaphorical and brutal silencing that is present throughout Behn’s text. Behn’s Imoinda is largely without a voice, with the narrator only permitting speech when Imoinda is questioned by the king and denies her marriage to Oroonoko. She utters, “that, by all our power I do, for I am not yet known to my husband” (20). Whereas Behn’s Imoinda and unborn child do not survive, Anim-Addo ensures that the shared story is both creolised history and “family” history, about which Anim-Addo has also written extensively (2007: 48–92). Not only does Anim-Addo write Imoinda’s h(er)story, it is also simultaneously “hystory”, as suggested by Odile Ferly in “Women and History-Making in Literature”, where she posits the hypothesis that: Caribbean women writers show the other facet of History: the history of the ordinary Caribbean people, and in particular women […] what they produce is “hystory”. Hystory is the story told by the womb. (Ferly 2006: 43) In writing Imoinda’s story, Anim-Addo has elected to give her a voice initiating an absent conversation. By absent conversation, I refer to the fact that Behn’s Oroonoko could not have existed without the “silent” Imoinda whose conversation, although present in the text, was never articulated. Their absent conversations consisted of talking with their eyes; for example, Oroonoko “told her with his eyes that he was not insensible of her charms” while “Imoinda was pleased to believe she understood that silent-language of new-born love” (Behn 2003 [1688]: 16). Behn’s “silencing of the black woman as a subject in history” (Karavanta 2015: 47) speaks to what Toni Morrison describes as “invisibility through silence […] to allow the black body a shadowless participation” (Morrison 1992: 10). Importantly, this enables Anim-Addo to draw on Behn’s text as a “literary archive of imperialism […] to write the history of colonization and slavery from the perspective of Imoinda” (Karavanta 2013: 47). If Behn’s text might be considered the first and imperial archive, my argument is 190

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that, as the first African-Caribbean libretto celebrating a Caribbean genealogy, Anim-Addo’s text should be considered as reconfiguring and reanimating the archive. I suggest that the literary text as archive is creolised in the sense of how it is inflected by Caribbean realities, in its provision of an insider version of Atlantic history, and in its family history perspective, which is indicative in Anim-Addo’s emphatic “we survived”. In her telling of Imoinda’s story, Anim-Addo is able to “extend the cultural practices of the communities to the words on a page” (Wilentz 1992: 117), thus building towards a creolised archive.

Alter(native) Imoindas: will the real Imoinda please stand up? How these “cultural practices” appear on the page and the representation of black female subjectivity is of relevance. While Behn’s Imoinda is depicted as “a beauty”, “female to the noble male” (2003 [1688]: 16), other physical attributes have her constantly dancing, stumbling, fainting, and more than willing to aid Oroonoko in taking her life when she “lays herself down before the sacrificer” (2003 [1688]: 72). Behn’s representation of the black female body as beautiful but somehow clumsy is taken a step further in Southerne’s adaptation, where his Imoinda is represented as a white female, thus completely denying Behn’s black Imoinda a place on the stage and effectively erasing her from the page. Indeed, it has been argued that Southerne’s white heroine eclipses black female representations and appropriates a cloak of antislavery, creating more sympathy for oppressed white femininity than African slavery (MacDonald 1999: 71–86). In altering Imoinda’s skin colour, Southerne enabled the women in his audience to visually identify with a white heroine. This visual identification is reinforced in a “Prologue spoken by Mr Ryan on the first time of his playing the Part of Oronooko [sic]”, in which he states: “If his Imoinda’s Chast and beauteous too, That Copy, Ladies, he transcrib’d from you” (Multiple Contributors 1711: 44). In Imoinda’s Shade: Marriage and the African Woman in Eighteenth-Century British Literature, 1759–1808, Lyndon Dominique argues that Southerne’s Oroonoko has created two white Imoindas, “one for the stage, the other for the pages of his published text” (2012: 46). Dominique argues further that, although the stage version of Imoinda is white and is seen as such, the textual version of Imoinda should be read as an African woman. He states that “in performances of Oroonoko, Imoinda is seen as English and familiar; in the read versions of the play she is understood to be African and different” (2012: 56). In effect, Dominique attempts to highlight what he considers to be the incorporation of Imoinda’s whiteness into the African presence which is marked and fluid in Southerne’s published text. Yet, what neither Behn’s or Southerne’s texts achieve is Imoinda’s representation of the brutal truths of slavery in the new world and her shared story. Bandele’s play, commissioned by the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) and titled Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko in a new adaptation (1999), follows a similar narrative to Behn’s novella in that he re-introduces the black Imoinda erased from Southerne’s stage and for the first time performs the African section of Behn’s novella that was omitted from earlier productions. Yet, the Surinam section draws greatly on Hawkesworth’s 1760 adaptation. In an interview with Simon Reade, the RSC dramaturge who worked with Bandele, an explanation was given for the appropriation of Hawkesworth’s Surinam section. Reade states that after Bandele had written the African part, which they loved, and which lasted for about 90 minutes, Bandele did not produce a second part and explained that he was not interested in writing the Surinam section. Gregory Doran, the director, and Reade, the dramaturge, both recalled Hawkesworth’s adaptation and decided to use it. Once edited, Bandele was asked to provide a few link passages. On comparing with Hawkesworth’s adaptation, these link passages are evident, for instance, in Part Two, Act One, Scene Two, where the slaves gather in a circle “swaying gently in a ritual dance to Shango, the God of thunder 191

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and also the God of justice and fair play” (1999: 80) and again in Act Two, Scene Two, Bandele invokes Eshu, the trickster-god as a dialogue between Oroonoko and Imoinda. Despite Bandele’s attempt to depict an Africanised version of eighteenth-century Africa, his portrayal of Imoinda bears interrogation. Even though Bandele had restored her blackness, he fails to recognise the black female body as equal and powerful. Thus, Bandele’s Imoinda becomes the victim of multiple rapes by her own people. Bandele’s African kingdom is “a place of betrayal, brutal sexuality, violence and exploitation” (Munns 2004: 189), where Imoinda castrates and kills the aged King when he attempts to force her to perform fellatio. She is then raped by the King’s chief adviser and his men before being sold to the white slavers. Bandele deviates from Behn’s novella in which Imoinda consents to be killed by Oroonoko’s hand. Nevertheless, Bandele does not permit his Imoinda to survive: as she makes to stab herself, OROONOKO stays her hand, takes the dagger away, and grabs her in a tight embrace. […] Then, in one swift movement, OROONOKO breaks her neck. (1999: 103) The breaking of Imoinda’s neck invokes a brutality well removed from that of Behn’s Imoinda who “lays herself down before the sacrificer”. Jessica Munns, in “Reviving Oroonoko ‘in the scene’: From Thomas Southerne to Biyi Bandele”, notes that Bandele’s “idea of retelling from an African perspective an English narrative that simultaneously condemns and exculpates the threeway trade in objects and people between England, Africa and the West Indies is exciting” (2004: 192). Yet, I wish to argue that the excitement to which Munns alludes is in relation to Bandele’s stage portrayal of a colourful African world and bears no relation to the excitement caused by Anim-Addo’s subversive rewriting of Behn’s 1688 proto-novel. Anim-Addo’s Imoinda, a woman-centred narrative, highlights the importance of women as repositories of cultural and historical memory, ancestral forgiveness, and the maternal founding of the Caribbean Nation. It is the black female body, then, that Anim-Addo wished to excavate from Behn’s textual page to claim her rightful place, if not on Southerne’s stage, then on the twenty-first century stage. She states: I imagine because there’s such an absence of black people on the […] operatic stage […] then to me it would be truly a celebration to see black characters and singers on stage performing opera. (Guarracino 2007: 220) In Blackness in Opera (2012), Naomi André et al. argue that blackness in the opera is either conflated with minstrelsy or that the opera automatically associates blackness with a generic conception of “otherness”. The editors of this collection state that: despite changing ideals about representing “reality” onstage, and despite increasingly sophisticated and nuanced portrayals of black characters, there still exists the tacit assumption that the presence or portrayal of “blackness” inherently provides an alternative to traditional (that is, white, European, or both) power structures, even if a norm for blackness is established within the world of the opera. (André et al. 2012: 7)

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André et al. suggest that opera operates along a spectrum in which the standard, white, and/or European is at one end and blackness/otherness is at the other. As Bruno states: even as Eurocentric notions interact with or balk at representations of blackness the two ideals occur in a dichotomy which ignores the inter-fluidity and cross cultural exchanges that white and black interactions have always engendered. (Bruno, 2013: 17) The fact that Southerne’s Imoinda was played by a white woman may well have been as a result of theatrical traditions in that it was uncommon for women to follow the male tradition of “blacking up” and Southerne would have been appealing to the sensibilities of his female audience. This would have also allowed white actresses at that time to play the role without having to blackface.8 Yet, if we take for instance Shakespeare’s Othello (1603), Dympna Callaghan (2000) has argued that “Othello was a white man”. What Callaghan is referring to here is the fact that Othello was originally written for a white man in blackface makeup. In 1999, Hugh Quarshie, a black British actor, made a similar argument when he declared: If a black actor plays Othello does he not risk making racial stereotypes seem legitimate and even true? When a black actor plays a role written for a white actor in black make-up and for a predominantly white audience, does he not encourage the white way, or rather the wrong way, of looking at black men. [...] Of all parts in the canon, perhaps Othello is the one which should most definitely not be played by a black actor. (Quarshie 1999: 5) So, in the contemporary staging of Imoinda, what are the problematic issues associated with casting? Rushdy’s notion of the “white appropriations of the slave’s voice” is of relevance here. On the page, “race” is visualised and explicit, while on the stage, performances rely on what the audience see with regard to race and on how the audience makes sense of and interprets what they are seeing. The “white way, or rather the wrong way, of looking” are issues that were faced in the first full length production of Imoinda discussed below.

Staging Imoinda: towards a live performance One aspect of performativity relates to the techniques used by Anim-Addo and is central to the rewriting of Imoinda’s personal history and the collective history of the African diaspora. Covi writes: music is foregrounded and dance is released, clearly not because Anim-Addo aesthetically chose the opera, but because she substantially decided to liberate linguistic and bodily communication from authorial control and let all characters speak. (2003b: 87) As Covi suggests, Anim-Addo not only gifts Imoinda with voice but an entire cast who are able to share the pluralities of their history through a multiplicity of bodily expressions. It is the female collective who can be heard “wailing” (2008: 7) in the distance and when the “shadow of the whip falls”, it is again “female figures [that] fill the shadows” amidst the “rumble of pain and song” (2008: 55). Anim-Addo’s choice of libretto has not only enabled her to “liberate linguistic and

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bodily communication” but has empowered a collective performativity of individual and shared suffering. Through dance and singing, the chorus of women implore Imoinda to listen to her body: WOMAN Don’t ask us. Dance. Trust your eyes. (89) ESTEIZME Heed the spirits. Trust your eyes. They speak through our bodies. You’ll hear no lies. (90) Anim-Addo is able to perform characterisation through cultural specificity. That is to say, through hair, funeral rites, bonding between women, and so on, all of which connects the remembrances of their African ancestry to their transplanted location. Questions of performance relate to my consideration of the archive, not least because it involves a passing on “by ear” or, to be more precise, what Gertrude Stein refers to as “syncopated time” (Meyerowitz 1967: 93–131) in that the audience experiencing a live performance is always in a state of temporality. That is to say, “the time of the play/[libretto] (story time) in relation to the emotion of the spectator (emotional time) in the audience” (Frank 2008: 502). Likewise, Karavanta states that Imoinda is written in the form of an intercultural libretto, and as such: the text invites its constant translation and simultaneously performs the transculturation of the genres of tragedy and opera. In other words, the text as a libretto is an invitation to the musical tradition and operatic heritage of the host culture. (2015: 73) In terms of musical tradition, the libretto is open to multiple modes of directorial interpretation once it moves from the page to the stage. Collaboration with the composer is required alongside questions of authorship. That Imoinda did not emerge through the traditional route, that of the Composer contacting the librettist, is of significance. Traditionally, operatic criticism has disregarded the librettist, with more weight being given to the composer and the musical score. Paul Robinson’s main argument in Opera, Sex and Other Vital Matters (2002) is that “a libretto is not a text as we ordinarily understand the term”. For Robinson, “any interpretation of opera derived exclusively, or even primarily, from the libretto is likely to result in a misreading” (2002: 30–31). David Levin disagrees and in his text Opera through Other Eyes, responds to “a history of opera criticism that places music at the centre and the suppression or banalization of the libretto that has enabled that criticism” (1993: 2). Levin argues that the ambiguities and the complexities of the libretto’s linguistic text cannot be ignored. As Anim-Addo rightly states, the operatic world was not equipped to deal with “the cultural heritage of a black woman” and even less one who “dared to conceive of and articulate the operatic performance” that was envisioned for Imoinda (2015: 576). The acclaim afforded to this libretto resulted in the publication of a bilingual edition in 2003. Covi, the editor and translator writes: Why would she choose an Italian mode to break the silence on the brutality of gendered slavery? There is more to this choice than just the need to sing, in order to tell of and to 194

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celebrate survival—the survival of the raped and enslaved woman, her child, her community, of women and men who endured unspeakable humiliations, deprivations and violence for generations, and now are telling that tale. (2015: 112) It is a “telling [of] that tale” which has enabled Imoinda as libretto to function outside of the traditional libretto/musical score combination. Linda and Michael Hutcheon theorise both the libretto and musical score as scripts. Both are “only instructions for performance” (1996: xvi). If, as Robinson suggests, “an opera cannot be read from its libretto” and further, that a libretto “has no meaning worth talking about except as it is transformed into music” (2002: 341–342), what meanings can be interpreted from the numerous interactions that have taken place on a textual level resulting in the libretto functioning, as I mentioned earlier, as a double archive: literary and performance? In considering performance, Imoinda was first performed as a “rehearsed reading” in London in 1998, for which no musical score was developed. An initial extract of the libretto was then performed in 1999 and a full production staged in New York in 2008 at School of the Arts (SOTA), Rochester, New York. The 1999 London performance was staged in the Conservatory at the Horniman Museum, itself an archive, and signals the beginnings of what I have previously described as a creolised archive. The director for the Horniman performance of Imoinda was Juwon Ogungbe who, interestingly, was also the composer for Bandele’s adaptation of Behn’s Oroonoko discussed earlier.9 As Karavanta argues, Imoinda challenges “Western concepts of mortality, as manifested historically in opera” and transforms the way the “modern audiences respond to witnessing these concepts on stage” (Hutcheon 2004: 2). Moreover, through operatic power, Imoinda: Bring[s] together dramatic narrative, staged performance, a literary text, significant subject matter […], and complex music in a particularly forceful way. (Hutcheon 2004: 7) For Karavanta, Imoinda performs an “excess” not only of “effect” but of “affect” and the audience is challenged to share knowledge (2015: 80).10 It is a sharing of knowledge that occurred with the first full stage production held in New York, the result of a collaborative project, signalling the cultural potential of the text. Students from SOTA worked closely with Glenn McClure, the composer, and Alan Tirre, the musical producer, to research elements of the Atlantic Slave trade, illustrated in Imoinda, writing music that added an additional artistic layer of meaning.11 McClure’s musical composition consisted of a blend of cultural sounds; musical instruments from West Africa, the Caribbean, and Europe were used so as to connect all parts of the transatlantic world. Articulating his decision to cast colour blind, Tirre states: “slavery is everyone’s history not just black history” (McClure and Tirre 2009). Consequently, the role of Esteizme was given to a white female student. Then, in April 2013, a large-scale choral piece entitled The Crossing, composed by Odaline de la Martinez, and developed from Anim-Addo’s libretto, Imoinda, was performed in the United States by the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra in commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. This choral piece received its UK Premiere in November 2014 and was staged in a church. I return here to my question surrounding authorship. On both occasions, details of the librettist were omitted from all publicity and advertising material. This omission begs the question of a misappropriation of the work by the composer. However, when challenged, assurances were given that this would not occur again. Yet in August 2015, while undertaking further research on Imoinda, I conducted a brief search on the Internet. This search revealed that funding 195

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had been awarded to the composer for a U.S. Opera company to begin phase one of Imoinda.12 Yet, again, details of the librettist were omitted and the Opera Company was contacted directly and asked to rectify this error. They were issued with the following from the librettist: Specifically, permission to use Imoinda is contingent upon rights of attribution. I am to be consulted and my name is to appear on all publicity and material from the project in any medium published, copies of which I expect to receive. (email correspondence 16 August 2015) Furthermore, in November 2015, a number of video clips (three to ten minutes in length) of phase one by OperaEbony appear on YouTube13 and as previously indicated, the librettist received no prior notification. Altogether, the events outlined above and others that space does not allow me to mention (Anim-Addo 2015: 571–582) give rise to the question: who has the rights to the performance piece? Or as stated by Anim-Addo: In 2000, a Millennium Festival Award had made possible my approach to a composer of my choice to write the score for Imoinda. A year or so later with the score in hand, or at least the score for Act One, whose opera was in the making: the composer’s or my own? The reality of authority weighted on the side of the composer comes as an initial shock to the writer who first develops the project and then engages the composer. Such a process also serves to shift considerably questions of power and authorship as status and contested claims. (Anim-Addo 2015: 577) The “authority weighted on the side of the composer” is possible due to the way in which the “operatic text” is viewed. That is to say, that the libretto is viewed as having no meaning without its music! In essence, the composer steered the libretto Imoinda towards being marketable as a slave trilogy – an opera in three parts. The world premiere of the complete trilogy took place in February 2019. Of the performances to date, the one that has remained truest to Anim-Addo’s vision is the SOTA production. In this chapter, I have examined the ways in which the ‘reputation of Anim-Addo’s pen’ has enabled the formation of Imoinda’s story archive. Excavated from the ‘source of evidence’ that is Behn’s text, Anim-Addo has refigured the ‘double archive’ and has created the beginnings of a ‘creolised archive’. In humanising the slave population, Anim-Addo charges Imoinda ‘not to forget’. The libretto displays a shift in audience, thereby signalling transference in the portrayal of white responsibility in the slave trade and in so doing has fashioned a real historical context for her retelling. The network of women that make up the chorus is significant in its figuring of memory, and specifically cultural memory of “Old Guinea”. The key to resistance in the cruel conditions marking, to use Édouard Glissant’s words, “the irruption” (1989: 100) into the new world modernity for people of African descent is memory. Throughout the libretto we are reminded of the force of the whip but also that what is remembered, “the whip can’t undo” (19). Anim-Addo’s (re)membering, multiplicity of relationships and use of history has enabled the “silenced woman slave” of Behn’s text “to turn into agency and a whole collectivity of African slaves speaks through her voice” (Covi 2003b: 85). In telling Imoinda’s story, Anim-Addo reveals a narrative that is often excluded from history and literary texts. As such, the final paragraph of Behn’s novella, which is the epigraph

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with which I began this chapter, interestingly does not end with Oroonoko, but instead Imoinda, perhaps leaving a doorway for her story to be told. The playwrights who adapted the Ur-text, I suggest, read the closing line of Behn’s novella as determining the fate of the African people in the Caribbean. Throughout the many adaptations of Behn’s text, all of which focus on Oroonoko’s story, it is Anim-Addo’s ‘pen’ that has brought the African Imoinda to the forefront of the literary imagination, while refiguring the ‘double archive’, enabling one to read a ‘creolised archive’. By excavating Imoinda from Behn’s text, Anim-Addo has claimed “ownership, organisation, access and use” (Shanks 2008: 3), taking Imoinda from the page to the stage and back to the page.

Notes 1 Joan Anim-Addo’s libretto was first published in 2003 as a bi-lingual edition (English and Italian) This chapter will refer to the single language edition published in 2008 by Mango Publishing and all further references will use the shortened title of Imoinda. 2 For other neo-slave narratives, see Margaret Walker’s Jubilee (1966), Ernest Gaines’ The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971), Octavia Butler’s Kindred (1979), and Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987). 3 Bernard Bell is credited with the initial definition of the neo-slave narrative as “residually oral, modern narratives of escape from bondage to freedom” (1987: 289). 4 Rhoda Trooboff reads this credit as lip service, citing it as a stingy acknowledgement of his debt which is then followed swiftly by a critique of Behn’s choice of literary genre. In fact the eighteenth- and ­nineteenth-century playbills archived in the Covent Garden Theatre, New York Public Library and the Folger Library fail to mention Behn’s original authorship. See Trooboff (2004). 5 For a detailed paper on critical reception, see Barbara Christian, “Fixing Methodologies: Beloved” (1993), in which Christian outlines the critical reception of Toni Morrison’s Beloved, which is of relevance here as it serves as the precursor to the opera Margaret Garner. Similarly, Langston Hughes’ libretto for Troubled Island (1949) received mixed reviews, ranging from praise to dismissal, and closed after only three performances. It was the first performance by a major opera company of an opera by an African American composer and librettist. The composer, William Still, felt that the music had been misunderstood because of the conventional expectations of opera. See Leslie Sanders (2004). 6 As the English travel narratives fail to give an adequate “speaking voice” to this native-subject, the teaching of these literatures echoes a similar blindness, as Anim-Addo (2006, 2008) and Les Back (2008) have routinely argued, both collectively and individually. 7 See Thomas Southerne’s adaptation of Oroonoko where Imoinda is introduced to the plot as the daughter of a white man serving in the royal court. 8 See Wylie Sypher (1942: 21), in which Syper suggests that it was more acceptable for theatre audiences that Imoinda be white. Queen Anne and her ladies had been criticised for wearing blackface in Jonson’s Masque of Blackness (1609), but Englishwomen representing Moors had evidently worn black masks and makeup in London after the Restoration. See Anthony Gerard Barthelemy, Black Face, Maligned Race (1987). 9 It is highly likely that Juwon Ogungbe would have been working on both productions at the same time as they were staged just under a year apart. 10 It is important here to cite the Hutcheons’ analysis of audience and of the openness of the libretto as a text that can be transformed by each production: “A word is needed to explain what we mean by the ‘audience.’ Do we mean real people watching a particular production? The answer is: not really. […] In other words, each time even the same production is staged, the audience members will see something different, and, of course, they will respond individually in different ways. The variety of possible responses and interpretations is immense. For this reason, the ‘audience’ here is, in a way, a virtual one. Throughout our own discussion, however, we will be using what Kier Elam calls the ‘dramatic texts’ of the operas, that is, the libretto and the score, and not the ‘performance texts’ of particular productions. We acknowledge that scores and librettos are only relatively fixed texts, for new scholarly work produces new editions with some frequency. Yet they are still the shared raw materials, if you like, with which a production team (a second group of artist-interpreters) then works: directors, conductors, designers, singers, musicians, and so on. A specific production is, therefore, the collective interpretation of a second group of artists, but it

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Marl’ene Edwin remains only one possible reading of the dramatic texts. And audience members will, in turn, interpret that reading in their own multiple ways” (2004: 13–14). 11 See www.gold.ac.uk/wow. 12 See http://operaebony.org/imoinda.html. See also the composer’s press release which has the following statement: “Imoinda is a 60-minute opera in one Act with five main characters and a chorus/dancers. The grant will allow Martinez to make a video of scenes from Imoinda, giving an overview of the opera as a whole. The video will then be sent to opera companies with the purpose of future performance. New York City based Opera Ebony will be creating the video with Hope Clarke directing and Martinez conducting”. http://nickythomasmedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Odaline-de-la-Martinez-Opera-AmericaAwards.pdf (accessed August 2020). 13 See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccec7jg-yH8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0b2h1T9KCs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUHPdp-8DBo

Works cited André, Naomi, Karen Bryan, and Eric Saylor (eds.) (2012) Blackness in Opera, Chicago: University of ­Illinois Press. Anim-Addo, Joan (2003a) “Imoinda, or, She Who Will Lose Her Name: A Play for Twelve Voices in Three Acts/Imoinda, colei Che Perder Il Nome – Opera dodici voci in tre atti,” in Giovanna Covi, Chiara Pedrotti (trans.,) Giovanna Covi (ed.) Voci femminili caraibiche e interculturalita, Trento: Editrice Universita degli Studi di Trento, Dipartimento di Scienze Filogiche e Storiche, Labirinti 68, Appendices, pp. 1–155. Anim-Addo, Joan (2003b) “Imoinda Birthing the Creole Nation: Rewriting Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko,” in M. Rubik, J. Figueroa-Dorrego, and B. Dhuciq (eds.) Revisiting and Reinterpreting Aphra Behn. Proceedings of the Aphra Behn Europe Seminar ESSE Conference, Strasbourg 2002, Entrevaux, France: Bilingua GA Editions, pp. 75–82. Anim-Addo, Joan (2003c) “To Begin Our Knowing”: The Claiming of Authority and the Writing of “Imoinda,” in Giovanna Covi (ed.), Voci femminili caraibiche interculturalita, Trento: Editrice Universita degli Studi di Trento, Dipartimento di Scienze Filogiche e Storiche, Labirinti 68, pp. 81–87. Anim-Addo, Joan (2008) Imoinda, or, She Who Will Lose Her Name: A Play for Twelve Voices in Three Acts, London: Mango Publishing. Anim-Addo, Joan (2015) “Travelling with ‘Imoinda’: Art, Authorship, and Critique,” Callaloo, 38(3): 571–582. Bandele, Biyi (1999) Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko in a New Adaptation, London: Amber Lane Press. Barthelemy, Anthony Gerard (1987) Black Face, Maligned Race, Louisiana: Lousiana State University Press. Behn, Aphra (2003 [1688]) Oroonoko, edited by Jane Todd, London: Penguin. Bell, Bernard (1987) The African American Novel and its Tradition, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Bonnelame, Natasha (2010) “From Restoration to Creolisation: Joan Anim-Addo’s Imoinda as 21st century Afromodernist Woman,” in Marl’ene Edwin, Natasha Bonnelame and Tendai Marima (eds.) Imoinda: Criticism & Response, New Mango Season, Vol 3, No. 3, pp. 225–235. Brown-Hinds, Paulette (2002) “‘In the Blood’: Performing Memory in Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow,” in Joan Anim-Addo (ed.) Centre of Remembrance: Memory and Caribbean Women’s Literature, London: Mango Publishing, pp. 95–112. Bruno, Sarah (2013) “Sleeping Volcanoes: The Production (and Productivity) of Violence in Joan AnimAddo’s Imoinda, Or She Who Will Lose Her Name,” MA Thesis, Lehigh University. Burton, Antoinette (2003) Dwelling in the Archive: Women Writing House, Home, and History in Late Colonial India, New York: Oxford University Press. Butler, Octavia (1979) Kindred, New York: Doubleday. Callaghan, Dympna (2000) Shakespeare Without Women: Representing Gender and Race on the Renaissance Stage, London and New York: Routledge. Covi, Giovanna (2003a) “Da Aphra Behn a Joan Anim-Addo: Quando Gender e Creolité Scrivono La Storia Della Schiavitú”, in Giovanna Covi (ed.) Voci femminili caraibiche e interculturalita, Trento: Editrice Universita degli Studi di Trento, Dipartimento di Scienze Filogiche e Storiche, Labirinti 68, pp. 97–109. Covi, Giovanna (2003b) “Oroonoko’s Genderization and Creolization: Joan Anim-Addo’s Imoinda”, in Margarete Rubik, Jorge Figueroa-Dorrego and Bernard Dhuicq (eds.) Revisiting and Reinterpreting Aphra

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Retrieving the black female body from the margins Behn, Proceedings of the Aphra Behn Europe Seminar ESSE Conference. Strasbourg 2002, Entrevaux: Bilingua GA Editions, pp. 83–92. Covi, Giovanna (2015) “Creolizing Cultures and Kinship: Then and There, Now and Here,” Perspectives from the Radical Other, Synthesis 7. http://synthesis.enl.uoa.gr/perspectives-from-the-radical-other-7-2015/ giovanna-covi.html Covi, Giovanna, Joan Anim-Addo, Velma Pollard and Carla Sassi (eds.) (2007) Caribbean-Scottish Relations: Colonial and Contemporary Inscriptions in History, Language and Literature, London: Mango Publishing. Cowgill, Rachel, David Cooper and Clive Brown (eds.) (2010) Art and Ideology in European Opera: Essays in Honour of Julian Rushton, Woodbridge: Boydell Press, pp. 1–10. Derrida, Jacques (1998 [1996]) Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz, Chicago, IL, London: University of Chicago Press. Dominique, Lyndon J. (2012) Imoinda’s Shade: Marriage and the African Woman in Eighteenth-Century British Literature, 1759–1808, Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Emerson, Caryl and Robert William Odani (1994) Modest Musorgsky and Boris Godunov: Myths, Realities, Reconsiderations, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ferguson, Moira (1992) Subject to Others: British Women Writers and Colonial Slavery, 1670–1834, London: Routledge. Ferly, Odile (2006) “Women and History-Making in Literature,” in Moira Inghilleri (ed.) Swinging Her Breasts at History, London: Mango Publishing, pp. 30–46. Frank, Johanna (2008) “Resonating Bodies and the Poetics of Aurality; Or, Gertrude Stein’s Theatre,” ­Modern Drama, 51(4): 501–527. Gaines, Ernest (1971) The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, New York: Dial Press. Gilroy, Beryl (1998) Leaves in the Wind: Collected Writings of Beryl Gilroy, London: Mango Publishing. Gilroy, Paul (1993a) Small Acts: Thoughts on the Politics of Black Cultures, London: Serpent’s Tail. Gilroy, Paul (1993b) The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, London: Verso. Glissant, Édouard (1989) Caribbean Discourse. Trans. Michael Dash, Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Guarracino, Serena (2007) “Imoinda’s Performing Bodies: An Interview with Joan Anim-Addo,” in Joan Anim-Addo and Suzanne Scafe (eds.) I Am Black/White/Yellow: An Introduction to the Black Body in Europe, London: Mango Publishing, pp. 212–223. Hamilton, Carolyn, Verne Harris, Jane Taylor, Michele Pickover, Graham Reid and Razia Saleh (eds.) (2002) “Introduction,” Refiguring the Archive, Alphen aan den Rijn: Kluwer Academic Publishers, pp. 7–18. Hartman, Saidiya (2008) “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe, 26: 12.2. Hawkesworth, John (1760) Oroonoko. A Tragedy as it is Now Acted at the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane. By Thomas Southerne with Alterations, Dublin: G Faulkner, P Wilson and M Williamson. hooks, bell (1989) “From Black is a Woman’s Color,” Callaloo, Spring, 39: 382–388. Hughes, Derek (ed.) (2007) Versions of Blackness: Key Texts on Slavery from the Seventeenth Century, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hughes, Langston (1949) Troubled Island, New York: Leeds Music Corporation. Hutcheon, Linda and Michael Hutcheon (1996) Opera: Desire, Disease, Death, London and Lincoln: ­University of Nebraska Press. Hutcheon, Linda and Michael Hutcheon (2004) Opera: The Art of Dying, Cambridge, MA: Harvard ­University Press. Johnson, Charles (1985) Oxherding Tale: A Novel, New York: Simon & Schuster. Karavanta, Mina (2013) “The Injunctions of the Spectre of Slavery: Affective Memory and the Counterwriting of Community,” Affect and Creolisation. Special Issue. Feminist Review, 104: 42–60. Karavanta, Mina (2015) “Into the Interior of Cultural Affiliations: Joan Anim-Addo’s Imoinda and the Creolization of Modernity,” Synthesis http://synthesis.enl.uoa.gr/fileadmin/synthesis.enl.uoa.gr/uploads/ Issue7/4.Karavanta.pdf Keizer, Arlene (2004) Black Subjects: Identity Formation in the Contemporary Narratives of Slavery, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Kowalzig, Barbara (2013) “Transcultural Chorality,” in Renaud Gagné and Marianne Govers Hopman (eds.) Choral Mediations in Greek Tragedy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 178–210. Levin, David (1993) Opera through Other Eyes, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

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Marl’ene Edwin MacDonald, Joyce (1999) “The Disappearing African Woman: Imoinda in Oroonoko after Behn,” ELH, 66(1): 71–86. McClure, Glenn and Alan Tirre (2009) “Imoinda: Processes of Musical Composition and Casting.” ­Conference paper. Words from Other Worlds: Critical Perspectives on Imoinda. Conference held at Goldsmiths, ­University of London, November 2009. Meyerowitz, Patricia (1967) Gertrude Stein: Writings and Lectures 1909–1945, London: Peter Owen. Mintz, Sidney W. (1996) “Enduring Substances, Trying Theories: The Caribbean Region as Oikoumenê,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2(2): 289–311. Morrison, Toni (1987) Beloved, London: Chatto & Windus. Morrison, Toni (1992) Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Multiple Contributors (1711) A Miscellaneous Collection of Poems, Songs and Epigrams. By several Hands. Dublin: T. M. Gent. Vol. I. Munns, Jessica (2004) “Reviving Oroonoko ‘in the Scene’: From Thomas Southerne to Biyi Bandele,” in Susan Iwanisziw (ed.) Troping Oroonoko from Behn to Bandele, Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 174–197. NourbeSe Philip, M. (2008) Zong!, Middletown: Wesleyan University Press. Pierce, Glenn (1998) Manzoni and the Aesthetics of the Lombard Seicento: Art Assimilated into the Narrative of I Promesi Sposi, London: Associated University Press. Quarshie, Hugh (1999) Second Thoughts About Othello, Chipping Campden: International Shakespeare Association. Robinson, Paul (2002) Opera, Sex and Other Vital Matters, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Rushdy, Ashraf (1999) Neo-Slave Narrative: Studies in the Social Logic of a Literary Form, New York: ­Oxford University Press. Sanders, Leslie (ed.) (2004) The Collected Works of Langston Hughes: Gospel Plays, Operas and Later Dramatic Works, Columbia: University of Missouri Press. Shanks, Michael (2008) Archive and Memory in Virtual Worlds. Talk at the Media X conference, USA. ­Stanford. http://documents.stanford.edu/michaelshanks/302 Southerne, Thomas (1696) Oroonoko: A Tragedy, Amsterdam: The Hague. Sypher, Wylie (1942) Guinea’s Captive Kings: British Anti-Slavery Literature of the XVIIIth Century, ­London: H Milford. Trooboff, Rhoda M. (2004) “Reproducing Oroonoko: A Case Study in Plagiarism, Textual Parallelism, and Creative Borrowing,” in Susan Iwanisziw (ed.) Troping Oroonoko from Behn to Bandele, Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 108–140. Voss, Paul J. and Marta L. Werner (1999) The Poetics of the Archive. Studies in the Literary Imagination. Atlanta: Georgia State University, pp. 32:1. Walker, Margaret (1966) Jubilee, Boston, MA: Houghton Miffin. Wilentz, Gay (1992) Binding Cultures: Black Women Writers in Africa and the Diaspora, Bloomington, ­Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.

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13 “WE WEAR THE BANDAGES, BUT OUR LIMBS HAVE NOT GROWN TO THEM” Eugenic feminism and female economic dependence in Mona Caird, Olive Schreiner, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman Jane Ford The “human female parasite”, writes Olive Schreiner in her feminist treatise Woman and Labour, is “the most deadly microbe which can make its appearance on the surface of any social organism” (Schreiner 1978: 82). With this unflattering epithet, Schreiner describes the condition of woman who, through the ‘advance’ of civilisation (and with it the disappearance of occupations associated with the land) has been removed from the sphere of labour and intellectual activity. The principal harm of this condition, she remarks, is that it passes on the habits of indolence to the offspring, risking the introduction of a decadent strain within human evolution. The culminating image of this supposed regression is a supersensual woman of ancient Roman civilisation, “accepting lust in the place of love, ease in the place of exertion, and unlimited consumption in the place of production” (1978: 91). The idealised productivist ethos of domestic labour and physical reproduction (which, as Carolyn Burdett argues, are importantly aligned for Schreiner) is framed here against an image of decadent enervation and excess prevalent in the late nineteenth-century cultural moment (Burdett 2001: 61, 2013: 44). Though eventually published in 1911, the core ideas of Woman and Labour were originally conceived in the 1880s and 1890s – a time when many of Schreiner’s (New) woman contemporaries were discovering an application for evolutionary ideas which lent force to the argument for the reform of stifling sexuo-economic arrangements. Indeed, following the publication of Darwin’s theory of evolution through natural and sexual selection in 1859 and 1871 (respectively), a tendency to understand social phenomena through the lens of biological competition and adaptation had emerged. Eugenics, being the manipulation of reproductive practices with the aspiration to ‘improve stock’, is a logical extension of this tendency.1 If evolutionary ideas had been deployed in one direction to support the anti-feminist agenda of characterising women as the physically and intellectually weaker sex, many New Woman writers mobilised eugenic ideas in the other to explain how changes to woman’s social environment – meaning greater legal, economic, and social freedoms – could result in a more healthy female organism (and thus race). Dominant accounts of late nineteenth-century eugenic thought privilege men’s contribution to the field but

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DOI: 10.4324/9781003429951-17

Jane Ford

as Angelique Richardson has persuasively shown, “some of the most sustained expressions of eugenic ideas were to be found in fiction and, in particular, in a body of late nineteenth-century fiction by women” (Richardson 2003: XV). Of course, eugenic thought’s aspiration to draw reproduction within the realm of civic responsibility seems hardly the most promising basis for the articulation of a feminist politics, particularly given that the rhetoric of this engagement – as we see in the examples from Schreiner – is so heavily steeped in images of grotesque female nature. For feminist intellectuals of the time, however, it presented a compelling case for increased professional and social opportunities for women as well as fertile rhetorical and conceptual possibilities. In Olive Schreiner and the Progress of Feminism, Carolyn Burdett points out that although in Second-Wave feminism “the conviction that differences between sexes are determined by nature has […] proved the most dangerous of dangerous ideas”, for many women of the late nineteenth century, “the languages of evolution” appeared to contain great emancipatory potential (Burdett 2001: 2). In particular, “love, marriage and ­maternity – all the traditional provenance of women – could be brought within the aegis of rational action” giving women a powerful stake in human progress (2001: 5). It is the work of this chapter, then, to map some negotiations with eugenic feminism in New Woman writing (both challenges and endorsements) focusing on the fiction and non-fictional writing of three authors: Mona Caird, Olive Schreiner, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The British discourses to which Caird, an Anglo-Scot, contributed, figure prominently in my analysis, but it is important to note that the issues at the heart of this chapter reflect international networks and synergies. Gilman, an American, undertook extended lecture tours of Britain in 1896 and 1899, meeting many British feminists during this time (Beer and Heilmann 2002: 180). She was also a correspondent of the cosmopolitan writer and intellectual, Vernon Lee, who, as Patricia Pulham points out, was instrumental in the “introduction of [Gilman’s] work to a European audience” (Pulham 2004: 35). Schreiner, a South African, was a prominent member of feminist clubs in England and South Africa and published her two-part article on the “Woman Question” (the basis of Woman and Labour) in the New York magazine, Cosmopolitan. Caird herself caused a sensation on both sides of the Atlantic with her controversial remarks on marriage in the 1880s and 1890s. Richardson has suggested that “Caird did more than any contemporary to raise popular awareness in Britain and America of changing attitudes to marriage” (Richardson 2003: 280). The particular positioning of Caird, Schreiner, and Gilman in relation to evolutionary biology and social responsibility led to different, but importantly interconnected, perspectives on the Woman Question which deserve to be read together. More particularly, I am interested in how, within the framework of their eugenic/anti-eugenic visions, imagery derived from popular science (insects, entomology, and microscopy, for instance) offered New Woman writers the perspectival mobility to reflect on the larger structural problems within the division of labour and, at the same time, magnify those insidious social ties and expectations that circumscribe women at a local level. In this chapter, the first to consider the special significance of insects within New Woman writing, I will argue that insect organisation and biology provided a suggestive mechanism through which to imagine different evolutionary futures for the human species (some nightmarish, some consolatory). These tropes furthermore provide a compelling rationale to grant women their equal share in human industry and intellectual life.

Eugenic and anti-eugenic visions The concept of atrophy – being the reduction in the size or function of part of the anatomy – is central to the claims New Woman eugenicists make about the consequences of female economic 202

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dependency. In the three chapters of Woman and Labour titled “Parasitism”, Schreiner chronicles how the historical realities of agrarianism, and later, mechanisation, had led to an erosion of female labour. Deprived of manual and then later productive activity within the household, excluded from the “more complex [intellectual] duties of modern life”, women’s bodies and intellects have, according to Schreiner, languished – effectively perished through underuse (Schreiner 1978: 61). With only a reproductive role left to her, woman is reduced to the “passive performance of sexual functions alone” – “her hand whitened and frame softened, till, at last, the very duties of motherhood […] became distasteful” (1978: 81). In its historical long-view of female industry, there are striking parallels between Woman and Labour and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s earlier volume, Women and Economics (1898). Writing from an American perspective, Gilman argues similarly that the exclusion of women from the activity of money-making had led to an atrophy of her intellect and productive capabilities. Women’s economic dependence on the male dictated that man (as opposed to environment) had been “the strongest modifying force in her economic condition” – a scenario which, Gilman argued, led to the evolutionary exaggeration of sexual characteristics in women (Gilman 1994: 38). Gilman was an admirer of Schreiner’s work but given the timescales involved – even the parts of Schreiner’s original manuscript published in Cosmopolitan did not appear until 1899 – she could not have been influenced by her ideas. As Judith A. Allen reports, “both wrote unaware of each other’s projects” (Allen 2009: 173). Like the emergence of evolutionary theory itself – characterised, as it was, by parallel discoveries in cognate fields – Schreiner and Gilman independently and simultaneously discovered the implications of eugenic thought for their visions of social equality. Indeed, that Schreiner was concerned about a regression of the female human long before the publication of Woman and Labour is evident within The Story of an African Farm (1883). The novel narrates the story of Lyndall, an orphan girl who lives on a remote African farmstead with her cousin, Em, and Em’s Boer stepmother, ‘Tant Sannie’. Lyndall hungers for education, opportunity, and financial independence but with no money or access to books, her only prospects would appear to lie in her “elfin-like beauty” (Schreiner 2008: 155). At seventeen, having managed only to secure for herself the polite schooling permitted to girls (and this at great personal effort), she confides in the young shepherd, Waldo. She reflects “[I]f I might but be one of those born in the future; then, perhaps, to be born a woman will not be to be born branded”. As it is, she explains: We fit our sphere as a Chinese woman’s foot fits her shoe […] In some of us the shaping of our end has been quite completed. The parts we are not to use have been quite atrophied, and have even dropped off; but in others, and we are not the less to be pitied, they have been weakened and left. We wear the bandages, but our limbs have not grown to them; we know that we are compressed […]. (2008: 155) This is, of course, a reference to the now obsolete Chinese practice of binding young girls’ feet. As Victor Shea and William Whitla point out, “the ideal foot length of 7 centimetres [was] obtained by binding the toes so tightly into the sole of the foot that the toes and arch are broken and permanently constricted” (Shea and Whitla 2015: 525n). Foot-binding – made familiar to the Victorians through George Tradescan Lay’s The Chinese as They Are (1841) – was regarded as a “mark of beauty since it resulted in a swaying walk” (2015: 525n). The regressiveness of Schreiner’s progressive agenda surfaces here through what Joyce Zonana has called feminist orientalism: an offshoot of Edward Said’s orientalist discourse which deploys images of patriarchal oppression in the 203

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East to communicate, and to seek to change, something about the circumscribed reality of women living in the West (Zonana 1993). Schreiner would not be the first or last to deploy the motif of foot-binding to describe the limitations imposed on Western women; in Florence Nightingale’s Cassandra: An Essay (1852/1979) and William Dean Howells’ A Previous Engagement (1897), for instance, the bound foot similarly stands in for a woman “denied proper development” (Nightingale 1852/1979: 26). The attractiveness of the trope is not merely connected to the fragile instability of the Chinese woman’s “swaying” gait, but the fact that feet are archetypal symbols of freedom and mobility. The smallness of Lyndall’s feet is emphasised frequently in the narrative. Lyndall’s suitor, Gregory Rose, notes that she had “tiny, very tiny feet” and a resident at a farm where she took lodgings professed that she “never saw any feet so small” (2008: 234). That Lyndall’s dainty feet are such a defining physical characteristic – a means, in fact, of locating her after her disappearance – communicates Schreiner’s conviction in the morbid state of female development. Schreiner advances the view that while small feet are fetishised as an expression of delicate refinement in women, the characteristic is one that is both physically disabling and an articulation of the internal constriction of female ambition. It is with some humour that Gilman, too, attacks the tendency to prize delicate hands and feet: Woman’s femininity […] is more apparent in proportion to her humanity than the femininity of other animals in proportion to their caninity or felinity or equinity. “A feminine hand” or a “feminine hoof”. A hand is an organ of prehension, a foot an organ of locomotion: they are not secondary sexual characteristics. (Gilman 1994: 45) But Schreiner’s point is not merely that through long underuse, woman has lost her power of mobility and self-determination. More than this, she claims that the atrophy of certain faculties in women has been actively manufactured; the forces of ‘civilisation’ are the environmental pressure under which more ‘robust’ specimens of womanhood have buckled. This is a point Schreiner makes more explicitly when she returns to this imagery in Woman and Labour: In the East to-day the same story has wearisomely written itself: in China, where the present vitality and power of the most ancient of existing civilisations may be measured accurately by the length of its woman’s shoes. (Schreiner 1978: 97) Although located at the opposite end of the political spectrum, echoes of Max Nordau’s famous invective on fin-de-siècle culture, Degeneration (1892), permeate Schreiner’s prose, itself troubled by images of decadent enervation and imperial collapse derived from other, ancient, civilisations. Over-sexed and under-worked, parasitical woman is, for Schreiner, a troubling originator of the kind of effete masculinity central to Nordau’s attack. Her feminism, as we can see, in part, in her reference to Chinese cultural practices, is involved in what are sometimes referred to as ‘maternalist’ attitudes towards imperial and racial supremacy. Although the concept of maternalism is, in Jane Lewis’ words, somewhat “slippery”, in this chapter, I take it to mean the characterisation of maternity and motherhood as matters of civic responsibility and an attendant valorisation of reproduction as important social labour (Lewis 1994: 39). Maternalism, in responding to late ­nineteenth-century anxieties about imperial competition and/or decline, citizenship, status, and racial purity, co-opted eugenics into its vision of motherhood as an ameliorating function (Richardson 2003: 9). The orientalist imagery that we find in Schreiner and others reflects these 204

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imbrications of feminist and colonial ideology. Zonana asserts that “figuring objectionable aspects of life in the West as ‘Eastern’, […] Western feminist writers [frequently] define their project as a removal of Eastern elements in Western life” and certainly the sequestration of women from the sphere of (intellectual) activity is rendered ‘other’ in Schreiner’s writing through reference to Chinese foot-binding practices (Zonana 1993: 594). Mona Caird is a contemporary of Schreiner’s, her correspondent, and (alongside Schreiner and Sarah Grand) is “credited with implanting the New Woman on the fin-de-siècle cultural landscape” (Heilmann 2004: 5). Caird rose to prominence with an 1888 Westminster Review article on marriage. The piece, which called marriage “a vexatious failure”, proved incendiary and was picked up by Daily Telegraph editor, Edwin Arnold. Recognising the provocative power of the piece, Arnold posed the question to his readers: “Is Marriage a Failure?”, receiving 27,000 animated letters in response (Richardson 2003: 180). While, as Heilmann points out, Schreiner and Caird corresponded over themes pursued at Karl Pearson’s Men and Women’s Club (2004: 5), Caird’s understanding of the position of women in a post-Darwinian world is different from feminists like Schreiner (and indeed, Gilman), in several important ways. Notably, Caird fiercely rejected the teleological uses of evolutionary biology and particularly the way in which the promise of an egalitarian end-term of human progress was marshalled to encourage the ‘right’ kind of reproductive citizenship. In an address delivered to the Forty-First Annual Meeting of the Personal Rights Association, for instance, Caird criticises the doctrine of “vicarious sacrifice” in which individuals (particularly women) are compelled to become “subservient parts of a social whole”, sacrificing their own self-development for the promise of a “Golden Age” that will never come (Caird 1913: 4, 7). Caird points out that eugenicists are particularly guilty of this: Can we not persuade our contemporaries to ask themselves if, for instance, the apostles of eugenics have shrunk from any measure, however outrageous, which they thought promised the desired results? Provided the end is gained, the individual must pay the price. (1913: 8, original emphasis) The targets of Caird’s address are multiple, but, as Richardson indicates, she was especially riled by the “collusion of her female compatriots with invasive forms of state control, including eugenics” (Richardson 2003: 192). In these remarks, Caird would certainly have been thinking of feminists like Gilman, whom she met on a tour of Britain in the 1890s (Beer and Heilmann 2002: 180). The sacrificial strain of Gilman’s civic maternalism is abundantly clear in Women and Economics, which (like Schreiner’s Woman and Labour), adopts the historical long-view of female oppression. Gilman writes that [w]omen can well afford their period of subjection for the sake of a conquered world, a civilized man. In spite of the agony of the process, the black, long ages of shame and pain and horror, women should remember that they are still here; and thanks to the blessed power of heredity, they are not so far aborted that a few generations of freedom will not set them abreast of the age. (Gilman 1994: 134) Gilman makes the point that in the context of “geologic ages”, the days of female oppression are few – are, in fact, less numerous than the years of sacrifice endured by “males in earlier species” (1994: 134, 135); a point she reinforces through analogies to insect life, asking one to consider “the death of the drone bee” or “the hapless little male spider” (1994: 135). It is precisely this 205

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attitude that women should be sacrificed to, or even comforted by, a teleological narrative of biological advancement that Caird finds so distasteful. She argues that a “loss of [human] level” cannot be warded off through the immolation of women within a cult of rational reproduction since this serves only to cultivate subordination and homogeneity. Mobilising apian imagery in a different direction, Caird indicates that in placing limits on individual liberty, we risk becoming like “that foolish and much over-rated insect, the bee, hopelessly submerged in the social hive” (Caird 1913: 9). She advocates, instead, engendering a “passion for protecting and liberating and giving scope to the individual impulse and aspiration” (Caird 1913: 11). Caird’s engagement with evolutionary biology, in contrast to Gilman’s, offers redemptive possibilities for the individual in a lifetime. Angelique Richardson points out that “Caird drew on both Darwinian and Lamarckian ideas, following their emphasis on the importance of environmental factors in producing evolutionary change” (Richardson 2003: 197). Productively for Caird, Lamarckian inheritance posited that through the exercise of their faculties, animals were capable of improvement and, importantly, might pass on acquired characteristics to their offspring. Richardson further explains that Caird “challenged the idea that women were destined for evolutionary stasis”, “co-opt[ing] evolutionary biology into an alternative narrative which […] demonstrated [women] themselves were subject to evolutionary change” (2003: 197). One illustration of this attitude occurs in Caird’s The Daughters of Danaus, a novel which tells the story of Hadria Fullerton, an aspiring female composer whose musical ambitions are ultimately frustrated by her oppressive parents and, later, husband. The novel, which positions itself against hereditarian ideas, throws up a number of genetic anomalies, individuals who teasingly suggest a more progressive model of social and biological progress. For instance, of her friend and mentor, Professor Fortescu, Hadria remarks “[a]ll the old hereditary instincts of conquest and ownership appeared to be utterly dead in him” (Caird 1989: 201). The professor, whose late wife had “taunted him because he would not treat her as his legal property” had (though unsuccessfully) attempted to set her free “from her dependence on [him]; to teach her to breathe deep with those big lungs of hers and think bravely with that capacious brain” (1989: 201–202). For Fortescu, as for Caird, an individual woman is not damned by a historical pattern of alienation from spheres of economic and intellectual activity; though Caird certainly concedes that the task of finding an arena for the exercise of long-dormant faculties is particularly arduous within the inequitable conditions of the nineteenth-century present. Fortescu’s optimism in urging defiance against hereditary inclinations offers a sharp contrast to Schreiner’s Lyndall who, in imagining an atrophy of certain female faculties, laments that the “shaping of [some girls’] end has been quite completed” (2008: 155).

Insects, microscopy, and human social organisation What is clear from the above discussion is that analogies derived from insect life abound in New Woman writing as a means of articulating a range of positions about the relationship between evolutionary biology and contemporary gender relations. In some respects, this is unsurprising. Darwin’s writing in On the Origin of Species and The Descent of Man contains many vibrant examples of the way insects interact with and adapt to their environment—examples which would seem to shed light on human relations. In The Descent, for instance, females of the insect world are described as alarmingly deficient in locomotive and sense organs as well as frequently powerless against the (sometimes violent) sexual advances of the male. Darwin describes how in “Chloeon […a species of mayfly] the male has great pillared eyes, of which the female is entirely destitute” while “[t]he ocelli [eyes] are absent in the females of certain insects, as in the Mutillidae [wasps]; and here the females are likewise wingless” (Darwin 2004: 316–317). The “ardent” male sand 206

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beetle seizes his mate with “sickle-shaped jaws” and similarly “many genera of water-beetles […] are armed with a round flat sucker, so that the male may adhere to the slippery body of the female” (2004: 318). Gillian Beer draws attention to the fact that Darwin’s “description is necessarily conditioned by the assumptions and beliefs condensed in various kinds of discourse active at the time he was writing” (Beer 2000: 46). Victorian gender ideology, for instance, finds expression in Darwin’s writing through anthropomorphism and analogy. In The Descent, he draws on the characteristics of “the lower animals” to account for perceived differences in the disposition and mental powers of the human male and female (Darwin 2004: 629). In what reads like a Ruskinian definition of the separate spheres, woman’s “greater tenderness and less selfishness” is counterbalanced with man’s “higher eminence” and delight in competition (2004: 629). Writers like Schreiner and Gilman absorb gendered discourses of natural history to re-work them for feminist ends. More than this, though, the preoccupation with scientific descriptions of insect life registers genuine alarm at the way evolution has served female organisms (organisms whose adaptation to sex-functions frequently tends towards the morbid limitation of her independence) and is rhetorically purposive. As Schreiner remarks in Woman and Labour, it behoves us to note that in: certain ticks, another form of female parasitism prevails, and while the male remains a complex, highly active, and winged creature, the female, fastening herself by the head into the flesh of some living animal and sucking its blood, has lost wings and all activity, and power of locomotion; having become a mere distended bladder, which when filled with eggs bursts and ends a parasitic existence which has hardly been life […] The whole question of sexparasitism among the lower animals is one throwing suggestive and instructive side-lights on human social problems. (Schreiner 1978: 78n) Schreiner’s observations are entomologically correct but they also have a distinctly gothic inflection. Though cautiously expressed—framed as a mere “instructive side-light”—Schreiner invites us to read this vampirical egg-sac of a creature as a warning of what might await us if we fail to reverse the human female’s economic dependence on the male. Schreiner regards these examples from insect and animal life as having genuine implications for our understanding of human evolution, but evolutionary biology is also a ready source of grotesque imagery which she mines for its inflammatory potential. Of course, this is not to say feminist eugenicists drew on insect life exclusively to invoke alarming or nightmarish possibilities for our evolutionary future. Notably, for Gilman, colony insects such as ants and bees provided a suggestive model for the optimal ordering of society. Gilman’s short utopian story “Beewise” (1913) which, as Carol Farley Kessler points out, “clearly provides a preliminary sketch for Herland”, describes two predominantly female communities located in the hills and coast of California (Kessler 1995: 68). The title of her story is a reference to the final line: “Go to the ant, thou sluggard, consider her ways and be wise” (Gilman 2009: 234)—a pun with which Gilman was evidently amused since it is repeated in Herland. In the story, the two settlements, Herways and Beewise contain cooperative, egalitarian communities which operate with hive-like efficiency. Inhabitants are dedicated to a life of service to the community and, in the manner of insects, are highly specialised to individual functions. Once optimal capacity is obtained, residents “swarm like the bees and start another [colony]” (2009: 233). Interestingly, in the 1890s, California was a kind of epicentre for Bellamyite Nationalist Socialism (a movement inspired by Edward Bellamy’s socialist utopian novel, Looking Backwards [1888]). 207

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Gilman was herself a contributor to the organ of the movement, The California Nationalist, and would have been well acquainted with socialism’s use of bee and hive imagery in relation to an idealised structure of cooperative labour (Scharnhorst 1985: 195). The story does suggest a leaning towards Bellamyite socialism (which advocates national ownership of the means of industry) although the “remarkable” feature of these communities is not their economic organisation, but that “the population consisted very largely of women” (2009: 226). By the time Gilman wrote Herland, she had seen her way in to a fully parthenogenic community of women which, I would argue, is similarly inspired by insect life. In this novella, when the misogynistic visitor Terry Nicholson declares “Women cannot cooperate – it’s against nature”, his fellow travellers, Jeff Mengrave and Vandyck Jennings, ask him to bear in mind the social cooperation of “the hymenoptera” (the taxonomic category to which bees and ants belong). Later, when Terry complains of the lack of opportunities for struggle and conquest within the all-female community, Jeff bristles that “‘[y]ou’re talking nonsense – masculine nonsense’, […] ‘Ants don’t raise their myriads by a struggle, do they? Or the bees?’” (132). It is clear that hymenopteric social organisation appeals to Gilman because it models what she perceives to be the ‘essential’ female characteristics of peaceful cooperation and productive labour and, at the same time, subverts the male hierarchy of human society. The idea that insect colonies can provide an instructive model of social organisation is one Gilman returns to often in her writing. In The Home: its Work and Influence, published five years after Women and Economics, Gilman again reflects on the more expansive social role enjoyed by women in the early development of the human species. The “constructive tendency is essentially feminine” she writes, and “the destructive masculine”: a belief she sees exemplified in the toiling female ranks of the hymenoptera. The ants’ and bees’ eusociality (involving the cooperative rearing of the brood) is a particular source of her admiration: These marvellous insects, perfected types of industry and of maternity, have succeeded in organising motherhood. Most creatures reproduce individually, these collectively—all personal life absolutely lost in the group life. Moved by an instinct coincident with its existence, the new-hatched ant, still weak and wet from the pupa, staggers to the nearest yet unborn to care for it, and cares for it devotedly to the end of life. (Gilman 1972: 88, original emphasis) In ant society, maternity being disaggregated from the rearing of offspring, nurturing is performed collectively – at least by the colony’s designated caregivers. In Herland, Gilman experiments with this idea by implanting cooperative brood care into the human social structure. Herland’s nurseries are attended by specially educated “co-mothers” that tend to the needs of children who are not their own, freeing-up their biological mothers to pursue alternative employment aligned to their particular aptitudes (Gilman 2015: 137). For Gilman, whose feminist ideals were maternalist, this must have seemed a powerfully liberating image. Indeed, there is considerable human feeling in her description of the new-born ant, still covered in the detritus of its egg, ministering to its sibling through a sense of inborn devotion to the community. This is not to say Gilman regarded hymenopteric organisation as utopian in itself; though it has a strong emotional and intellectual appeal, she was troubled by the fact that hive-homogeneity is not conducive to the kind of excelsior vision of species progress she espoused. She appends her description of the ant colony with the statement: “But this is only multiplication, not improvement. Nature has one more law to govern life besides self-preservation and reproduction – progress” (1972: 88). 208

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Although Gilman and Caird were fundamentally at odds in their understanding and application of evolutionary biology, here they briefly converge. Caird too feared that any hive-like formation of human society would eliminate the kind of chance variation required for evolutionary change. In her Personal Rights’ Association address, she remarks that: As the strata of what I call Hive-heredity accumulate, there is always a deeper and deeper soil of Hive-instinct out of which each new generation has to spring. Is it not progressively unlikely, therefore, that “sports” [i.e. biological variants] would appear? And if they did appear, at lengthening intervals, would they not be handicapped by a strong herd-instinct […]? (1913: 9) Where Gilman regarded insect life’s sacrifice of the individual to the collective in positive terms, Caird saw it as mere foolishness. Both, however, worried that models of human organisation which approximate the hive or colony might be compromised by the fact of their genetic fixity. Here Caird warns that the obstruction of (women’s) self-fulfilment contributes to a gradual burying of originality, the emergence of “sports” becoming progressively more unlikely. Given her distaste for homogeneity, it is clear why Caird finds the glorification of apian civilisation so suspect. In fact, things ‘done’ in the interests of the community, social whole, or social organism (phrases which constitute a kind of “collective-term fetish”) are frequently, according to Caird, done to the detriment of the individual and serve to destroy productive difference (1913: 16). This idea of community as a destructive and inhibiting force is one Caird puts under the spotlight in Daughters of Danaus and she does so, in part, through images of entomology, microscopy, and insect life. In the opening pages of the novel, as an unmarried girl of twenty-one, Hadria makes an address to her siblings, who have formed a secret debating society. The speech, which deals with the subject of “free-will” begins with a quote from Emerson’s 1851 “Conduct of Life” lecture, “Fate”; it reads: “the soul contains that event that shall befall it, for the event is only the actualization of its thoughts; and what we pray to ourselves is always granted” (Caird 1989: 8). Opposing Emerson’s view that “man makes his circumstance”, Hadria argues that fate is merely a product of the “subtle relation between character and conditions” (1989: 8, 10). Opening with a taxonomy of human “types” she states that: Roughly, we may say that people are divided into two orders: first, the organizers, the able, those who build, who create cohesion, symmetry, reason, economy; and, secondly, the destroyers, those who come wandering idly by, and unfasten, undo, relax, disintegrate all that has been effected by the force and vigilance of their betters. […] Who can dare to say ‘I am master of my fate,’ when he does not know how large may be the share of the general burden that will fall to him to drag through life, how great may be the number of these parasites who are living on the moral capital of their generation? (1989: 9–10) Like an amateur entomologist, Hadria adopts a system of classification that enables her to separate human specimens into the categories of producer and parasite. Using the spider motif, Hadria describes a web-like system of relation in which organisers and destroyers are necessarily interdependent. She asks, “has not the strongest soul to count with these, who weave the web of adverse conditions, whose dead weight has to be carried”? (1989: 10). In many ways, I would suggest that Caird is responding to George Eliot’s earlier use of entomological tropes (such as microscope and parasite) to explore the complex bonds that connect individuals within the social organism. 209

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Indeed, Eliot was interested in the interplay between productive beings and social parasites and had exposure to the concept of biological parasitism through her partner, George Henry Lewes, who observed the parasitic action of vorticella (mobile, single-cell organisms) in water drops (Wormald 1996). Anne-Julia Zwierlein usefully points out that Eliot perfected the sensitive web of connections, especially in Middlemarch (1871–1872), where seemingly detached elements of the social body are shown latently to influence the course of all other elements – in fact multiplying the system’s complexity, in the way that parasites […] generally do. (Zwierlein 2005: 165–166) Zwierlein continues: “[w]hile in Eliot nearly everyone can potentially manifest parasitical tendencies […] the moral question the novel explores in the languages of biology and parasitology is the relation between egotism and community” (2005: 166). The key instantiation of this attitude occurs in the acclaimed “microscope” passage where Mrs Cadwallader and her match-making are conceptualised, under the metaphorical “strong lens”, as: “certain tiniest hairlets which make vortices for these victims while the swallower waits passively at his receipt of custom” (Eliot 1987: 83). In the same way that in Eliot, certain “tiniest hairlets” operate to create “vortices for […] victims”, Caird’s web-like structure of “adverse conditions” brings “daily food” to “the relaxed and derivative people [who live] on the strength of the strong”. Here however, comparisons must end since, unlike Eliot, Caird, who returns to the spider motif repeatedly during the course of the novel, makes clear that the web is an extended metaphor for the social and economic subjection of women. In fact, clarifying her position to brother Ernest, Hadria inverts the rhetoric of female parasitism, characterising women not as destructive egg-layers, but insects ensnared within an enervating web of social expectation. She remarks “if [Emerson] had been a girl, he would have known conditions do count hideously in one’s life. I think there are more ‘destroyers’ to be carried about and pampered in this department of existence than in any other” (1989: 14, original emphasis). Because it describes discrete, gossamer-like connections between people, the ‘web’ is an apt motif for Caird who wants to magnify the latent domestic ties that impede female achievement. Hadria, who ultimately remains with her oppressive husband out of a concern for the health of her mother (herself a meek and servile figure), presciently declares that, in order to bring “her power to maturity” a woman must be prepared to “tear through so many living ties that restrain her freedom” (1989: 14; 15). These ties, she explains are the “prejudices that are twinned in the very heart-things of those one loves” and have “held many a woman helpless and suffering, like some wretched insect pinned alive to a board throughout a miserable lifetime” (1989: 15). Hadria’s intellectual recognition of the naivety of Emerson’s position is, however, belied by a secretly cherished belief that she might, one day, break free of the stifling duties she owes to her family. The narrator reports that “despite the view […] Hadria has expounded in her capacity as lecturer, she has an inner sense that somehow, after all, the will can perform astonishing feats in Fate’s despite” (1989: 17, original emphasis). In fact, Hadria’s vacillation between Emersonian and fatalistic points of view reflect corresponding adjustments of her social microscope. At moments, Hadria is impressed with a sense of the “vast dim possibilities that lurked out there” (1989: 115). Feeling elevated above the “vain and futile things of life that we struggle for”, she imagines the Scottish landscape in which she grew up, a dramatic scene of evolutionary conflict: the wind kept up its cannonade against the walls, hooting in the chimneys with derisive voices, and flinging itself, in mad revolt, against old-established hills and the stable earth, 210

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which changed its forms only in slow obedience to the persuadings of the elements, in the passing of centuries. (1989: 116) This image, which would seem to operate as a metaphor for those glacial movements of evolutionary change, directed by the “mad revolt” of chance variation, is swiftly succeeded by a macroimage of insects struggling in magnified ditch water: And then came reaction, doubt. After all, humanity was a puny production of the Ages. Men and women were like the struggling animalcaluæ that her father has so often shewn the boys, in a drop of magnified ditch-water; yet not quite like those microscopic insects, for the stupendous processes of life had at last created a widening consciousness, a mind which could perceive the bewildering vastness of Nature and its own smallness, which could, in some measure, get outside its own particular ditch, and the strife and struggle of it, groping upwards for larger realities. (1989: 116) Under the metaphorical weak lens, Hadria’s Emersonian optimism remains intact. However, as I point out, the emphasis on biological conflict in these passages makes it impossible not to read Hadria’s epiphanous encounter with nature as a prophecy of evolutionary change. By adopting the evolutionary long-view, Hadria is able to step back from the “occupations of [the] ditch” and imagine nature’s slow assault on “old-established” hereditary instincts: instincts which change their “forms […] in slow obedience to the persuadings” of evolutionary law. Under the metaphorical strong lens, the invisible threads of adverse circumstance come back into focus and Hadria images herself once again a “wretched insect”, groping up towards improbable freedom. Experience does little to eclipse the analogy. When it becomes clear that Hadria’s union with her husband fails to yield the freedom that she was promised, she leaves her children and family to pursue a musical career in Paris. The strain of her limited wealth (the lion’s share of which now belongs to her husband) alongside the humiliation and fragile health of her mother, demand that Hadria return home. Confiding in her friend, the writer, Veleria Du Prel, Hadria regrets that a woman without means of livelihood, breaks away from her moorings – well, it is as if a child were to fall into the midst of some gigantic machinery […] let her try the feat, and the cracking of her bones by the big wheels will attest its hopelessness. (1989: 208) In this way, economic independence and equality of opportunity break down into a spectacle of dismembered insects, “a vast spider’s web seem[ing] to spread its tender cordage round each household, for the crippling of every winged creature within its radius. Fragments of torn wings attested the struggles that had taken place among the treacherous gossamer” (1989: 268). Though Caird leaves open the possibility of long-term social and evolutionary change, the circumstances of Hadria’s own life become, ironically, the triumph of her address – the greatest proof of the veracity of her contention that in the sensitive web of connections that constitute patriarchal society, women are like “poor fl[ies] doomed to a sweet and sticky death” (1989: 210). The Story of an African Farm too performs a number of perspectival manoeuvres designed to re-focus our understanding of sex relations. In a dream-like episode titled “Times and Seasons”, Schreiner conflates Emersonian and Darwinian motifs, in this way highlighting the biological 211

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connectedness of all living things. Observing those “wonderful people, the ants”, the narrator obliquely remarks “we learn to know; see them make war and peace, play and work, and build their huge palaces” (2008: 116–117). The passage then proceeds to catalogue the insect and animal life of the plain, culminating in a final image of a gander’s entrails. The narrator reports that “each branch of blood vessels is comprised of a trunk, bifurcating and rebifurcating into the most delicate hair-like threads, symmetrically arranged” (2008: 118). At last, the question is posed: “how are these things related that such a deep union should exist between them all? Is it chance? Or are they not fine branches of one trunk, whose sap flows through us all”? (2008: 118). While the critic Jane Wilkinson reads the “unifying metaphor of the tree” as a reference to Darwin’s idea of common descent, Mandy Treagus emphasises the passage’s metaphysical quality, suggesting links to Emerson’s declaration that “each particle is a microcosm, and faithfully renders the likeness of the world” (Wilkinson 2001: 112; Treagus 2014: 104). Though the pairing of Emerson and Darwin present obvious logical difficulties, their shared image of biological unity is useful to Schreiner precisely because it has the virtue of making a difference – a chief mischief of biological ­determinism – recede from view. In a later episode, Lyndall pursues similar ideas, remarking to Waldo: Sometimes it amuses me intensely to trace out the resemblance between one man and another: to see how Tant’ Sannie and I, you and Bonaparte, St Simon on his pillar, and the emperor dining off larks’ tongues are one and the same compound, […] What is microscopic in one is largely developed in another […] If a huge animated stomach like Bonaparte were put under a glass by a skilful mental microscopist, even he would be found to have an embryonic doubling somewhere indicative of a heart. (2008: 164–165) The comparison is hardly flattering since it describes “Bonaparte”, a vagrant who lives on the farm, as a mere “animated stomach”: a phrase which resonates with Henry Mayhew’s remark in London Labour and the London Poor, that “the rudest form of animal life […] is simply a locomotive stomach” (Mayhew 1861: 43). Schreiner’s point, however, is that sex difference, like those disparities of temperament and appearance, are not elemental. As Lyndall complains to Waldo, “we enter the world little plastic beings […] and the world tells us what we are to be, and shapes us by the ends it sets before us. To you it says – Work; and to us it says – Seem!” (2008: 154, original emphasis). In this way, Lyndall’s “skilful mental microscopist” offers a series of enlargements that serve not to magnify sexual difference but rather to eliminate it. There is much to feel uncomfortable about in the accounts of female economic dependency described in this chapter. Though conducted in the service of securing greater freedoms for women, eugenicist arguments for the more equitable distribution of labour contain a tacit acceptance of women’s evolutionary inferiority and are furthermore caught up in notions of European racial supremacy.2 Even Caird, who attacks the doctrine of “vicarious sacrifice” that inheres within eugenic thought and whose Lamarckian vision contains the positive potential of female self-development, was not above waving the red flag of human degeneracy. At the same time, writers like Schreiner, Caird, and Gilman worked with a register that copper-fastened the exclusion of woman from the sphere of work and intellectual activity on the grounds of her supposed inferiority and turned it on its head. In evolutionary biology, they enacted powerful arguments for the re-organisation of human society upon more equal lines and – in the case of Schreiner and Gilman – emphasised women’s role in shaping the evolutionary destiny of man. It has been my contention that entomologically inspired forms of looking are vital to Caird, Schreiner, and Gilman’s evolutionary 212

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critique of contemporary economic arrangements. Keyed into anxieties about degeneration and genetic fitness, the insect helped dramatise the morbidity of female economic dependence and gave rhetorical vibrancy (as too an incendiary edge) to these writers’ arguments. Insect life was also crucial to their imaginative extrapolations of human evolution (facilitating projections that were sometimes terrifying, sometimes aspirational) and prompted perspectival manoeuvres that put prevailing assumptions about biological difference under the microscope.

Notes 1 Critics such as Sally Ledger regard Schreiner as, at least “entangled […] with the eugenics project”; a fact she regards as “radically attenuating her political vision” (Ledger 1997, 43, 2007, 164). By contrast, Carolyn Burdett argues that Schreiner is opposed to eugenics, pointing out that “Woman and Labour does not endorse eugenics or social Darwinism; rather it engages with these arguments in order to neutralize what Schreiner saw as their pernicious implications for women” (Burdett 2013: 40). Whether one regards Schreiner as an exponent of eugenics depends, I think, on how you define the term. There is certainly much in hard-line eugenic thought that Schreiner found to be unacceptable and moreover the biological influences she wanted to see enacted are those that might be achieved through the equitable organisation of human labour. In other words, her eugenic agenda operates in the service of a feminist end. 2 For critiques of the racial politics of feminist writers such as Gilman and Schreiner, see, for instance: Lanser (1989); Peyser (1998: 63–91); Ledger (1997: 71–90); Barash (1989). More recent critical work such as that by Allan (2009) and Burdett (2001) positions itself against this body of criticism, which they regard as having a presentist bias and/or over-simplifying Gilman and Schreiner’s complex engagement with evolutionary biology.

Works Cited Allen, Judith A. (2009) The Feminism of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Sexualities, Histories, Progressivism, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Barash, Carol (1989) “Virile Womanhood: Olive Schreiner’s Narratives of a Master Race,” in Elaine Showalter (ed.) Speaking of Gender, London: Routledge, pp. 269–281. Beer, Gillian (2000) Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-­Century Fiction. 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Beer, Janet and Ann Heilmann (2002) “‘If I were a man’: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Sarah Grand and the ­Sexual Selection of Girls,” in Janet Beer and Bridget Bennett (eds.) Special Relationships: Anglo-­American Affinities and Antagonisms, 1850–1936, Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 178–197. Burdett, Carolyn (2001) Olive Schreiner and the Progress of Feminism: Evolution, Gender, Empire, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Burdett, Carolyn (2013). Olive Schreiner, Tavistock: Northcote House Publishers. Caird, Mona (1913) Mrs Mona Caird on Personal Rights, London: The Personal Rights Association. Caird, Mona (1989) The Daughters of Danaus, New York: The Feminist Press. Darwin, Charles (2004) The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, edited by James Moore and Adrian Desmond, London: Penguin. Eliot, George (1987) Middlemarch, edited by W.J. Harvey, London: Penguin. Gilman, Perkins Charlotte (1972) The Home: Its Work and Influence, Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Gilman, Perkins Charlotte (1994) Women and Economics: A Study of the Economic Relation Between Women and Man, New York: Prometheus Books. Gilman, Perkins Charlotte (2009) “Bee Wise,” in Robert Shulman (ed.) The Yellow Wall-Paper and Other Stories, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 226–234. Gilman, Perkins Charlotte (2015) Herland and The Yellow Wallpaper, London: Vintage. Heilmann, Ann (2004) New Woman Strategies: Sarah Grand, Olive Schreiner, Mona Caird, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Kessler, Farley Carol (1995) Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Her Progress Towards Utopia, Syracuse: Syracuse University Press.

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Jane Ford Lanser, Susan (1989) “Feminist Criticism, ‘The Yellow Wallpaper,’ and the Politics of Colour in America,” Feminist Studies, 15(3): 415–441. Ledger, Sally (1997) The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the Fin de Siècle, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Ledger, Sally (2007) “The New Woman and feminist fictions,” in Gail Marshall (ed.) The Cambridge ­Companion to the Fin de Siècle, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 153–168. Lewis, Jane (1994) “Gender, the Family and Women’s Agency in the Building of States: The British Case,” Social History, 19(1): 37–55. Mayhew, Henry (1861) London Labour and the London Poor, London: Griffin, Bohn and Company. Nightingale, Florence (1852/1979) Cassandra: An Essay, New York: Feminist Press. Peyser, Thomas (1998) Utopia and Cosmopolis: Globalisation in the Era of American Literary Realism, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Pulham, Patricia (2004) “A Transatlantic Alliance: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Vernon Lee,” in Ann Heilmann (ed.), Feminist Forerunners: New Womanism and Feminism in the Early Twentieth Century, ­London: Pandora, pp. 34–43. Richardson, Angelique (2003) Love and Eugenics in the Late Nineteenth-Century: Rational Reproduction and the New Woman, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Richardson, Angelique (2016) “Eugenics and Freedom at the Fin de Siècle,” in Louise Henson et al. (eds.) Culture and Science in the Nineteenth-Century Media, New York: Routledge, pp. 275–286. Scharnhorst, Gary (1985) “Making her Fame: Charlotte Perkins Gilman in California,” California History, 4(3): 192–201. Schreiner, Olive (1978) Woman and Labour, London: Virago. Schreiner, Olive (2008) The Story of an African Farm, edited by Joseph Bristow, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Shea, Victor, and William Whitla (eds.) (2015) Victorian Literature: An Anthology, Oxford: Wiley Blackwell. Treagus, Mandy (2014) Empire Girls: The Colonial Heroine Comes of Age, Adelaide: University of Adelaide Press. Wilkinson, Jane (2001) “Nature and Art in Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm,” in Itala Vivan (ed.), The Flawed Diamond: Essays on Olive Schreiner, Sydney: Dangaroo Press, pp. 107–120. Wormald, Mark (1996) “Microscopy and Semiotic in Middlemarch,” Nineteenth-Century Literature, 50(4): 501–524. Zonana, Joyce (1993) “The Sultan and the Slave: Feminist Orientalism and the Structure of Jane Eyre,” Signs, 18(3): 592–617. Zwierlein, Anne-Julia (2005) “From Parasitology to Parapsychology: Parasites in Nineteenth Century ­Science and Literature,” in Anne-Julia Zwierlein (ed.), Unmapped Countries: Biological Visions Nineteenth-­ Century Literature and Culture, London: Anthem Press, pp. 155–172.

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14 LESBIAN-TRANS-FEMINIST MODERNISM AND SEXUAL SCIENCE Irene Clyde and Urania Jana Funke In the 1990s, feminist scholars Angela Ingram and Daphne Patai (1993: 265–302) began to ­research feminist writer Irene Clyde (1869–1954). With the help of archivist and historian Lesley Hall, they discovered that Clyde was the same person as Thomas Baty, an internationally known English legal scholar, who lived in Japan from 1916 until the Second World War, working as a legal advisor to the Japanese Foreign Office in Tokyo. During this time, Clyde established herself as an editor and author of radical feminist thought: she wrote the feminist utopian novel Beatrice the Sixteenth: Being the Personal Narrative of Mary Hatherley, M.B., Explorer and Geographer (1909), co-edited and contributed articles to the feminist journal Urania (circa 1916–1940), and published a collection of essays, entitled Eve’s Sour Apples (1934), celebrating what she called the “feminine ideal” (54). Her work was strongly shaped by collaboration and exchange with other women, including Irish poet, theologian, and suffragist Eva Gore-Booth (1870–1926) and her partner, the Irish-English suffragist and social justice campaigner Esther Roper (1868–1938). Across her writings, Clyde articulated a feminist project that was radical in calling for the elimination of male supremacy, abolition of gender binaries, acknowledgement of the mutability of biological sex, critique of heterosexual marriage and biological reproduction, and celebration of female–­ female intimacy.1 Previous scholars have rightly begun to read Clyde’s life and work as part of trans history (Oram 1998; Smith 2008; Tiernan 2009). Instead of focusing on Clyde’s biography or interrogating her identity, this chapter examines connections between Clyde’s lesbian-trans-feminist politics and the works of other feminist writers of the modernist period.2 It places particular emphasis on literary modernist authors who have received less attention in existing scholarship on Clyde and Urania. As Emma Heaney has persuasively argued, scientific and literary modernist writers often reduced trans femininity to an allegory that served, among other purposes, to secure “a cis understanding of sex” as defined by genitals and their supposed meanings (Heaney 2017: 5). Nowhere is this more apparent than in sexological constructions of trans women as allegedly ‘trapped in the wrong body’ and in need of medical diagnosis and intervention. While this reductive way of framing trans femininity was highly influential, many (trans and non-trans) feminist writers in the modernist period also sought to challenge and expand sexological approaches to sex, gender, and sexuality – concepts that were not neatly differentiated in the early twentieth century. This chapter

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builds on scholarship by Alison Oram and Sonja Tiernan to consider Clyde’s complex engagement with sexual scientific ideas alongside other feminist engagements with sexology to examine some of these shared investments (Oram 1998, 2001; Tiernan 2008a, 2009). Sexology or sexual science emerged as a field of knowledge in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Sexual science built on, combined, and reworked knowledge from various disciplines, including biology, forensics, psychiatry, anthropology, and history. As feminist scholars have demonstrated, sexological knowledge often reinforced sexist views and mobilised biologistic arguments about differences between men and women to refute feminist demands for social and political change (Faderman 1978; Russett 1989; Jackson 1994; Bland 2001). With regard to sexuality, sexology has been criticised for developing medicalising and often pathologising frameworks for categorising individuals on the basis of their sexual desires and behaviours (Bland and Doan 1998). Yet, as more recent scholarship has shown, sexology was at best loosely defined interdisciplinary field of knowledge characterised by internal contestation and debate (Bauer 2009; Chiang 2009; Schaffner 2011; Fisher and Funke 2015, 2018; Leng 2018). Because of this lack of coherence and the resulting conceptual indeterminacy, sexual science offered a vibrant field of possibility when it came to defining and debating the meaning of physical sex, gender identity, and gender roles as well as sexual desire and acts. As a result, sexological and feminist thought was deeply and often productively entangled in the early twentieth century (Hall 2004; Leng 2018; Funke 2023b). The ways in which Clyde navigated sexual scientific ideas both within her single-authored publications and the jointly edited journal Urania offer important insights into early twentieth-century lesbian-trans-feminist politics and literature. Like other feminist authors, Clyde was highly critical of aspects of sexological thought. Her interest in androgyny was inspired by a vehement resistance to biologistic and deterministic elements of sexual science, for instance. At the same time, Clyde mobilised sexual scientific thought to depict biological sex as mutable and open to evolutionary change over time. She engaged creatively with scientific constructions of ‘instinct’ to expand understandings of heterosexual biological reproduction and open up other possibilities for thinking about intimacy and love, especially between women.3 In doing so, Clyde was deeply connected to and in dialogue with wider lesbian, queer, and trans feminist movements and literary cultures of the interwar period.

The Aëthnic Union and Urania In 1912, the avant-garde feminist journal The Freewoman (1911–1912) published an article introducing a new organisation called “The Aëthnic Union”. According to the author of the article, T. Baty, “the young organisation […] has nothing to say about sex in itself”. Instead, it “recognises that upon the fact of sex there has been built a gigantic superstructure of artificial convention which urgently needs to be swept away”. This, the author explains, can only happen if “sex is resolutely ignored” (Baty 1912: 278). The very name of the organisation was modelled on the Greek term ethnos, which describes “a ‘race’” with no sex, inspired by the fact that, as the author stresses, there is “no specific word for sex” in Greek (Baty 1912: 279). Although we have little information about the membership and activities of the Aëthnic Union, the organisation was most likely created in 1911 by Clyde alongside Gore-Booth and Roper (Tiernan 2008b: 168). A few years later, in 1916, Clyde, Gore-Booth, and Roper co-founded the queer feminist journal Urania alongside Montessori educator Dorothy H. Cornish and animal rights campaigner Jessey Wade (Ingram and Patai 1993; Oram 1998, 2001; Tiernan 2008a,b; Steele 2018). This was a 216

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collaborative effort, signalling solidarity and kinship between trans and non-trans women invested in lesbian and queer feminist politics. Clyde edited Urania for the entire twenty-five years of its existence and played an important role in writing many editorials, frequently using the initials I.C. Urania was a privately printed periodical with an international editorial team and readership. It was in print from 1916 to circa 1940, published bimonthly from 1916 to 1920 and later tri-annually due to the increased price of paper. Urania was free, and costs were absorbed by the five co-editors listed as contacts at the end of each number. Over 250 copies per issue were privately circulated among readers who were interested in and sympathetic to the journal’s agenda. Whereas W.H. Smith stopped selling The Freewoman in 1912, arguably because of its sexual content (Delap 2002: 625) – a decision that heavily contributed to the journal being shut down due to lack of funds – the independent funding and private circulation of Urania meant that the editors were more autonomous. The journals included editorials alongside book reviews, summaries of lectures and books, extracts from novels, poems, and occasional correspondence. The “Star-Dust” section included reprinted press clippings from international journals and newspapers, documenting a wide range of topics covering global events. In line with Gore-Booth’s axiom “sex is an accident”, which was printed on the cover page of the journal, the goal of Urania was to eliminate distinctions of sex and gender, allowing individuals to reach their full potential. The editors declared in each issue: Urania denotes the company of those who are firmly determined to ignore the dual organization of humanity in all its manifestations. They are convinced that this duality has resulted in the formation of two warped and imperfect types. They are further convinced that in order to get rid of this state of things no measures of “emancipation” or “equality” will suffice, which do not begin by a complete refusal to recognize or tolerate the duality itself. If the world is to see sweetness and independence combined in the same individual, all recognition of that duality must be given up. For it inevitably brings in its train the suggestion of the conventional distortions of character which are based on it. (“Declaration” 1919: 1; emphasis in the original) The wide-ranging content of the journal reflected these concerns. Urania covered women’s global struggle for equal rights, including access to education and the professions. It included information about experiences that would nowadays be labelled as queer, trans, and intersex, and critically debated heterosexual marriage and biological reproduction among other topics. The title of the journal was a reference to the term ‘Uranian’ which is often treated as a translation of the German word ‘Urning’. This term was coined by nineteenth century German jurist Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, who maintained that homosexual people belonged to a ‘third sex’ and were born with a male soul in a female body or vice versa (Stryker 2009: 37; Leck 2016: 33–68). Later sexologists also used this trope of gender inversion to provide a framework for understanding trans experiences (Prosser 1998; Breger 2005). Although it is possible that the editors of Urania were familiar with Ulrichs’ writings, reading the title of the journal as a direct reference to his work is misleading. It is more likely that the editors were inspired by the same classical sources as Ulrichs: Urania is a reference to the platonic account of Aphrodite Urania, who represents pure intellectual or spiritual – rather than physical and embodied – love. According to Judith Ann Smith, Urania used “mystico-scientific evidence to promote an ideal of androgynous spiritual/sexual transcendence” (2008: 43). In declaring sex to be an accident, Clyde and her collaborators insisted that human consciousness was independent of and capable of transcending the social meanings assigned to the sexed body. 217

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In her contributions to Urania, as well as her single-authored book publications, Clyde fleshed out this vision, developing a lesbian-trans-feminist political project in which gender and sex were mutable, and in which heterosexual desire and biological reproduction were replaced by alternative forms of intimacy, love, and kinship between women. Echoing Gore-Booth, Clyde declared in Eve’s Sour Apples that “the soul has no sex” (1934: 60), calling for “[r]efusal and obloquy to all recognition of sex-distinctions!” (1934: 94). While seeking to abolish binaries of sex and gender, Clyde nevertheless remained invested in what she described as her “feminine ideal” (1934: 54), the allegedly superior “characteristics of the feminine type”: “charm and delicacy” and “love and sympathy” (1934: 87). Society had done women a disservice in associating these feminine qualities with “feebleness” (1934: 87), thus failing to recognise their vital importance to individual and human progress. For Clyde, women tended to be “more considerate and refined” than men while showing “as much strength of mind and determination as men” (1934: 44). She hoped for a feminist future in which all individuals were liberated to pursue these feminine qualities while also being free to explore other elements of their character unrestricted by conventional understandings of gender or sex. Clyde began to articulate these ideas in her utopian novel, Beatrice the Sixteenth (1909). The first-person narrator, a geographer and physician called Mary Hatherley, is kicked by a camel while travelling in Asia Minor. She enters a different historical moment, sometime before Christ, and is rescued by a group of people who speak a combination of Latin and Greek and are described as “the relics, preserved like flies in amber, of some Romano-Syriac civilisation” (1909: 8). They take Mary to a country called Armeria in which divisions based on gender and sex have largely been abolished: the narrative initially avoids using gendered pronouns when describing some of the Armerians and does not indicate their sex. The Armerians are perplexed when Mary asks them on what basis they differentiate between men and women, wondering “[w]here is the difference?” (1909: 77). At the same time, Armeria celebrates femininity: Queen Beatrice rules the country, and the narrator increasingly uses female pronouns to describe some of the characters who form intimate relationships with each other (Albinski 1988: 15–43). Clyde’s feminist utopia is loosely modelled on classical societies and depicted as a monarchy in which some Armerians are enslaved. Ingram and Patai compare the book to Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) and argue that the designation of ‘slave’ is not meant to carry stigma in Clyde’s narrative, especially since individuals can apply to change their status in Armeria (1993: 267). Still, Clyde’s uncritical engagement with histories of enslavement is indicative of wider elitist and hierarchical tendencies in her work. While radical in terms of wanting to abolish divisions of sex and gender and seeking to elevate lesbian forms of intimacy, Clyde’s work is deeply conservative in reinforcing other divisions between groups of people, especially in relation to class and social status. This tendency is also expressed in her endorsement of conservative principles that seek to protect the “higher classes” of the aristocracy, which she connects with the “charm” of femininity (1934: 221). These elitist and exclusionary dimensions of Clyde’s work are typical of other white middle-class feminist writings of the interwar period and offer another means through which we can situate her work within wider debates in literary and scientific modernism.

Interwar feminism, sex, and science Scholars have tended to focus on the radical dimensions of Clyde’s work, arguing that her writings anticipate later feminist approaches emerging in the second half of the twentieth century. For Patai and Ingram, Clyde’s Beatrice the Sixteenth bears similarities with Ursula Le Guin’s exploration

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of androgyny in her feminist science fiction novel The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) (1993: 268). Patai and Ingram also argue that Clyde’s critique of heterosexual sex as allegedly tied to domination and subordination anticipates feminist analyses by Catherine McKinnon and Andrea Dworkin (1993: 270). More recent scholarship has placed Clyde in dialogue with queer and trans feminist studies. Tiernan highlights how the ways in which Urania sought to abolish binaries of sex and gender anticipate later queer feminist work by scholars like Judith Butler (2008b: 166). Similarly, Oram argues that Urania articulates a feminist project that was “not simply about moving from one embodied sex to the other, but, more radically, about abolishing the physical boundaries between masculinity and femininity altogether” (1998: 215). In its resistance to biologistic definitions of sex and championing of diverse gender expressions, Urania can also usefully be considered in light of more recent explorations of trans feminisms (Stryker and Bettcher 2016). Situating Clyde’s work within contemporary interwar feminist movements, it is notable that she explicitly challenged mainstream feminist approaches that emphasised women’s intrinsic differences from men. Maternal feminists, for instance, presented motherhood as a unique contribution women could make to society, thus foregrounding differences rather than similarities between the sexes as the basis of women’s liberation (Oram 1998: 218; LeGates 2001: 245–256). Clyde vehemently rejected the idea that women’s value was found in motherhood or maternity, stressing that it was a catastrophe that “every girl’s mind should be filled with the slaughter-house details of maternity” (1934: 102). While supportive of women’s suffrage, she was also highly critical of a feminist project that was primarily focused on achieving the right to vote (Tiernan 2008b: 167), suggesting that suffrage feminism did not go far enough in terms of liberating women – and society as a whole – from the restraints of sex and gender. In this far-reaching ambition and focus on interior and psychological emancipation, Clyde and Urania were aligned with another radical feminist journal that emerged in the 1910s, The Freewoman, edited by Dora Marsden and Mary Gawthorpe. Marsden and Gawthorpe had split from the WSPU (Women’s Social and Political Union) and founded The Freewoman in 1911 to carve out a feminist project aiming to liberate women on a spiritual and personal rather than political and material level (Delap 2002; Delap 2007: 21–27). The fact that Clyde published articles (as T. Baty) in The Freewoman in 1912 signals these shared investments. There were also important intellectual differences between The Freewoman and Urania: whereas Marsden’s editorials in The Freewoman were shaped by the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, Clyde explicitly resisted “[t]he glorification of starkness mistaken for strength, begun by our Kiplings, Nietzsches and Marinettis” (1934: 89). This rejection of masculinist modernist thought did not, however, prevent Clyde from pursuing a similarly elitist rhetoric of superiority and progress that also found expression in The Freewoman. Another difference between Clyde and The Freewoman was Marsden’s emphasis on sexual exploration as a means of inner liberation. As Lucy Delap has shown, “the Freewoman version of the feminist-superwoman emphasised the power of sexual experimentation to allow a transcendence of the ordinary spheres of life” (2007: 270). Clyde was highly critical of this approach and explicitly rejected the work of leading international feminist figures like Olive Schreiner, Rosa Mayreder, and Ellen Key. Clyde felt that these feminists had not gone far enough to understand women independently of heterosexual relations with men and their role as mothers; she maintained that “their feminism is at bottom as short-sighted and materialistic as Anti-feminism itself” (1934: 188). Clyde explicitly condemned physical expressions of heterosexual desire, assuming that they inevitably reinforced restrictive binary divisions between the sexes. Instead, she championed (largely spiritual or celibate) same-sex bonds between women in ways that were unusual in interwar feminism (Oram 1998: 218).

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Marsden, Schreiner, Mayreder, Key, and other feminists who – for a variety of reasons – e­ mbraced forms of (hetero)sexual expression as potentially liberating for women were often inspired by sexology, which increasingly shaped feminist approaches in the interwar period (Oram 1998; Bland 2001; Leng 2018). The Freewoman, for instance, played an important role in reviewing and circulating information about sexological works by writers like Otto Weininger, Edward Carpenter, Havelock Ellis, and Iwan Bloch to English-speaking audiences (Delap 2011). On the other hand, an unsigned 1937 article in Urania entitled “Abbeys of Hope”, which has the imprint of Clyde’s voice, maintained that it was troubling to observe the “growing sexuality apparent during the reign of King Edward the Seventh; and […] the increasing tendency to worship the biologist” (1937: 1). In this regard, Clyde’s approach stood in stark contrast to the work of other feminists who appropriated sexual scientific rhetoric to promote women’s right to sexual fulfilment, sex education, and birth control as the means to liberate women sexually.

Modernist androgyny Clyde was consistently critical of what she called ‘materialist’ and ‘pseudo-scientific’ approaches to sex and sexuality. As Oram argues, it is “extraordinary that the journal [Urania] never directly referred to the work of the sexologists” despite the fact that sexual science was becoming more mainstream in the interwar years (1998: 219). The names of well-known sexologists, including those mentioned and reviewed in The Freewoman, are absent both from Urania and Clyde’s other published work. An article in Urania entitled “The Slimy Enemy” (1930), which directly echoes language used in Eve’s Sour Apples and is very likely written by Clyde, for instance, condemns the “pseudo-scientific Determinism – in other words, Materialism”, which reduces the human spirit to “a function of the body” (1930: 2). The article goes on to state that “[a] world which sees the soul hopelessly imprisoned in the body […] will rate Beauty and Valiancy cheap, compared with Biology” (3). For Clyde, any investment in a scientific rhetoric that sought to reduce human potential to allegedly biological differences between men and women was bound to stifle individual development and social progress. Although different from the feminist approaches to sexual science mentioned above, this critique also connects Clyde with other debates within feminist modernist culture. Some of the most well-known queer feminist modernist writers, including Virginia Woolf and Djuna Barnes, for instance, were often highly critical of those strands of sexology that sought to impose rigid identity categories onto individuals based on fixed understandings of biological sex or sexual desire. The narrator of Woolf’s Orlando (1928) is content to “[l]et biologists and psychologists determine” the changeable sex of the protagonist, suggesting that they have other priorities (2008: 134). Barnes’ Ladies Almanack (1928) repeatedly mocks sexological attempts at classifying queer bodies and desires, including via the voyeuristic character of Patience Scalpel who seeks to study and dissect lesbian sexuality, but ultimately fails to arrive at understanding (Berni 1999). Ladies Almanack also satirises Radclyffe Hall, who appears as Tilly-Tweed-In-Blood in the book, for being overly invested in conservative ideas of monogamy and marriage and for embracing sexological constructions of same-sex desire. Clyde shared this critical assessment of Hall’s work. An unsigned 1929 review of The Well of Loneliness (1928) in Urania, which is almost certainly written by Clyde (Oram 1998: 226), praises the “art and delicacy” of Hall’s writing (1929: 2), but condemns The Well of Loneliness for its reliance on sexological models. The novel, which was published with a brief prefatory comment by sexologist Havelock Ellis, promoted the idea that an inborn masculinity in people assigned female at birth was one possible cause of same-sex desire. Clyde argues that it is only natural for 220

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“feminine attachments” to emerge between people belonging to the “feminine type”, but vehemently rejects the idea that these relationships should “find expression in the violent and brutally limited physical form styled by the world ‘perversion’” (1929: 1). In particular, Clyde takes issue with Hall’s decision to “make her heroine [Stephen Gordon] a boy in skirts” who is “masculine in shape and tastes” (1929: 1). This emphasis on masculinity is starkly opposed to the argument that love between women could exalt and further the feminine ideal, which Clyde wanted to champion. Clyde’s criticism of the model of sexual inversion arguably goes against the otherwise liberationist politics of Urania, and it is possible that her review “further stigmatized the homosexual as a social type with a recognizable identity” (Smith 2008: 57). Moreover, her dismissal of Stephen Gordon’s masculinity takes on transphobic dimensions when considering that scholars like Jay Prosser have also read The Well of Loneliness as a book centrally concerned with trans masculinity (Prosser 2001). At the same time, Clyde’s criticism of sexology can also be read as a rejection of the more limiting dimensions of sexological thought that often reinforced conventional ways of understanding the relationship between sex, gender, and sexuality. This desire to unsettle sexological systems of classification resonates with wider queer feminist constructions of androgyny in the modernist period (Weil 1992; Hargreaves 2005). As Smith has argued, Urania created “the androgynous Uranian as antithetical to the sexological definition of sexual inversion” (2008: 57). Similar to other modernist engagements with androgyny, Clyde’s work was “moving androgyny away from its pathologized, degenerative and decadent incarnations to consolidate instead a relationship with feminism” (Hargreaves 2005: 77). Woolf’s complex engagement with androgyny in the late 1920s, especially in Orlando and A Room of One’s Own (1929), for instance, has received widespread critical attention (Kaivola 1999; Marcus 2000: 229–230). Whereas Orlando presents androgyny as a state of physical and mental vacillation and change, A Room of One’s Own speaks to Clyde’s paradoxical call to transcend gender binaries without, however, losing sight of the importance of feminine difference. Woolf’s narrator in the essay famously concludes that “[i]t is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple; one must be woman-manly or man-womanly” (1998: 136), while also arguing that “[i]t would be a thousand pities if women wrote like men, or lived like men, or looked like men” (1998: 114). Similarly, Clyde called upon her readers to abolish or transcend differences between men and women while also remaining firmly opposed to “the present craze for assimilating women to men by the copying of every manly disfigurement” (1934: 70). She presented an androgynous ideal that firmly centred the feminine principle she wanted to champion. Clyde’s fascination with androgyny extended to the figure of the child, whose “fellowship with perfection is unbroken” (1934: 34). One target of her criticism, articulated in her book publications as well as in Urania, was the educational system that reinforced gendered differences by making young people aware of their sex (1934: 60ff). For the same reason, Clyde was also highly critical of sex education, arguing that “a child brought up without the consciousness of sex would be a full-orbed [sic] human being, the best the child could imagine” (1934: 68). Whereas other late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century feminist writers saw the lack of sexual knowledge, especially among girls and young women, as a problem that needed to be addressed by increasing access to sex education (Nelson 1997; Heilmann 2000: 78–82; Bland 2001), Clyde insisted on the damaging impact any sexual awareness would have on younger minds. This association of childhood with androgyny was echoed by psychoanalytic frameworks, which influenced other queer feminist modernist writers (Hargreaves 30). During her analytical sessions with Freud in Vienna in 1933 and 1934, for instance, H.D. explained her own gender nonconformity and bisexuality in terms of the psychoanalytic and sexological concept of arrested development. In a letter to her partner, Bryher, she wrote that her conversations with Freud had 221

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revealed that she was “stuck at the earliest pre-OE [oedipal] stage, and ‘back to the womb’ seems to be my only solution” (H.D. et al. 2002: 132). Bryher, who was assigned female at birth and identified as a boy, also associated childhood with androgynous freedom and shared Clyde’s criticism of the English education system. For Nancy, the protagonist of Bryher’s autobiographical novels Development (1919) and Two Selves (1923), the experience of going to secondary school is traumatic, resulting in a gendered splitting of the self that violently interrupts their development (Winning 2000). Although Clyde would most likely have struggled to reconcile Bryher’s trans masculinity with the feminine principle she was eager to uphold, a shared investment in childhood as opening up queer, trans, and feminist possibilities cuts across their work.

Biological sex and evolutionary change Despite Clyde’s overt rejection of biologistic or materialist thought, a careful reading of her work also reveals an ongoing debt to sexual scientific writings. In Urania as well as in her singleauthored books, Clyde challenged sexological beliefs and authority by using scientific counterarguments (Oram 1998: 222–223; Tiernan 2009: 58). Instead of concluding that Clyde’s work was “independent of sexology” (Oram 1998: 226), it is also possible to argue that Clyde, like other feminist writers, mobilised the inherent contradictions within the loosely defined field of sexual science. Rather than rejecting sexology as a whole, she specifically resisted those strands of sexual scientific thought that sought to impose rigid identity categories and aimed to naturalise binary divisions of sex and gender to present them as static and immutable. At the same time, there were many other elements of sexological thought that were useful for Clyde. In a letter to poet and homosexual law reformer George Cecil Ives, whose scrapbooks contain numerous newspaper clippings from Urania, Clyde (writing as Baty) states: At present I am much irritated by the “biological” sex-ridden people, who would insist on our tying ourselves down by our physical characteristics – about the true necessities of which they know very little. Any day some obscure gland or atomic structure may prove to be the real determinant of mental & moral character, even on their own materialistic conceptions of life. (Baty 1930) Instead of a complete rejection of biology in favour of the celebration of disembodied androgyny, Clyde’s letter reveals a fascination with the question of whether the biological itself may hold asyet undiscovered ways of understanding the sexed body. The mention of an ‘obscure gland’, in particular, speaks to the rise of endocrinological frameworks, which became central to sexological thought in the 1910s and 1920s, shaping the work of Ellis, Hirschfeld, Freud, and many others. To some extent, endocrinology held out the promise that the human body could be controlled and regulated. The interwar periods witnessed ongoing experiments with the implantation or surgical manipulation of glands to try and control hormonal secretions. The goals of these procedures included mental and physical rejuvenation, changes in sexual orientation, and gender-affirming surgeries (Armstrong 1998: 131–183; Sengoopta 1998; Stark 2020). As Oram (1998) and Tiernan (2009) have shown, Urania included frequent coverage of so-called ‘changes of sex’ in humans and animals in the 1920s and, especially, the 1930s. In 1924, for instance, Urania reprinted a letter to the Cumberland News from the owner of a Rhode Island Red chicken that had spontaneously undergone a “change of sex” (5). In Eve’s Sour Apples, Clyde draws repeatedly on zoological evidence to demonstrate “the possibility of such a change [of sex]” (1934: 108) in certain classes 222

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of worms and oysters. She also cites the work of endocrinologist and sexologist Eugen Steinach, whose “researches are said to have produced male guinea pigs” who started to behave like females as reported in The New York Times (1934: 109). Increasingly, in the 1930s, Urania featured stories of trans and intersex people to demonstrate “the fluidity of the biological sexed body” (Tiernan 2008b: 65). Drawing on endocrinological findings, Clyde hoped that “[s]ex itself may become alterable at will” (1934: 96), arguing that biological sex would no longer damage the individual “[i]f it can be put off like a garment” (1934:110). Clyde also acknowledged that biological sex was affected by processes of change that might exceed human knowledge and control. Anticipating queer and trans feminist engagements with evolutionary models of development (See 2020; Gill-Peterson 2021), Clyde stressed that “profound modifications of the physical organism […] clearly seem to be in progress” (1934: 113). For Clyde, freeing individuals in the present from the restraints of binary sex would only help to speed up a natural evolutionary process in which biological sex was already subject to change, “abolishing a dull and enforced duality, and liberating an unending variety” (1934: 99). As a result, Clyde’s trans feminism was not straightforwardly about transcending biological sex nor was it, as Ingram and Patai wrongly suggest, about remaining invested in binary divisions between the sexes (1993: 274). On the contrary, Clyde embraced evolutionary models of development to demonstrate that biological sex itself was mutable and open to change over time. The idea that the biological body held the potential to subvert binary divisions of sex was important for other queer feminist modernist writers as well. As I have argued elsewhere (Funke 2022), despite its critique of biologistic thinking, Woolf’s Orlando exists in dialogue with hormonal models of sexual development that presented the sexed body as changeable. Orlando’s spontaneous and unexplained change of sex from male to female resonates with Clyde’s model of evolution. Both narratives destabilise binary sex in favour of individual variation and freedom while nevertheless presenting queer and trans possibilities as intrinsically oriented towards the feminine and feminist (Bowlby 2008: xlii). The notion of a spontaneous change of physical sex also underpins Radclyffe Hall’s short story “Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself” (1934) in which gender nonconforming Miss Ogilvy ‘transes’ gender, sex, and time, to use Jen Manion’s phrase (2020), finding himself in the body of a Stone Age man. While the published draft of the story seems to reinforce the sexological model of sexual inversion that Clyde had rejected when reviewing Hall’s The Well of Loneliness, an unpublished draft of the text describes how Miss Ogilvy finds herself in the body of a youthful Stone Age woman, which is more closely aligned with Clyde’s celebration of the feminine ideal (Funke 2016). In addition, “Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself” can be read as a story about reincarnation and the rediscovery of a past life, indicating that Hall combined sexological and theosophical approaches alongside other belief systems, including Catholicism and Buddhism (Dellamora 2011: 53–76). Similarly, Clyde’s conviction that evolutionary development was teleological and driven by a higher purpose was informed by theosophical beliefs, which were also explored by other feminist writers involved in Urania (Oram 2001: 58–60). Gore-Booth, for instance, joined the Theosophical Society in 1919 (Tiernan 2012: 224–245). Theosophy emerged as a new spiritual belief system in the nineteenth century and was fundamentally shaped by the writings of Russian mystic Helena Blavatsky. As Joy Dixon has shown (2001), the theosophical concept of reincarnation opened up the possibility of inhabiting a multiply gendered and sexed mind and body that could change and evolve over the course of different life times. Clyde and her collaborators developed this dimension of theosophical thought, applying it both to the evolutionary development of the individual and humanity as a whole. Clyde, like Blavatsky, believed that evolutionary development was not primarily driven by natural and sexual selection, as Darwin and his followers suggested, but 223

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guided spiritually towards a progressive goal (Chajes 2019: 153–157). For Clyde, this meant that human consciousness alongside biological sex would change and evolve in accordance with the feminine ideal her work promoted.

Sexual reproduction and Sapphic idealism According to Clyde, changes in gender roles as well as biological sex were inextricably bound up with questions about the future of sexual reproduction and love. She strongly rejected the idea that the sexual instinct was structured by biological differences between men and women and therefore naturally heterosexual or reproductive (Oram 1998: 223–224). In 1931, Urania went so far as to declare “Instinct a Myth”, and Clyde elaborated in Eve’s Sour Apples that “the instinct of sex in human beings is a thing deliberately implanted and instilled by suggestion” (1934: 118). Although Clyde stressed that “[t]here is nothing in itself degrading in the pleasures of the sense” (1934: 24), she maintained that heterosexual sex was intrinsically degrading for both partners, precisely because it reinforced a sense of sexual difference that limited individual development. She was certain that “human beings in the near future will tend to decline to perform the offices of sex” and opt for a celibate life instead (1934: 110). Although Clyde explicitly framed this rejection of sexual instinct as a challenge to “the scientific mind” (1934: 119), she reconfigured rather than abandoned evolutionary and sexological understandings of instinct. For Clyde, heterosexual desire had to be replaced with “the desire to be like the adored” object of attraction (1934: 128; emphasis in the original). This, she argued, “is the instinct most truly and intensely natural to the human mind – this desire to be what one most appreciates” (1934: 35). Along with the gradual reconfiguration of biological sex, Clyde argued, sexual reproduction was bound to change over the course of evolutionary development. She rejected eugenic concerns about the future of the race (1934: 112–113), which were often mobilised by feminist and nonfeminist writers alike to valorise particular forms of heterosexual reproduction (Hall 1998; Allen 2000; Klausen and Bashford 2010; Turda 2010). At the same time, Clyde created new hierarchies between a more advanced “kind of stratum of individuals devoted to the [non-biological] reproduction and the improvement of mental states, with less advanced strata alone devoted to carrying on the reproduction of the physical vehicle” (1934: 113). For Clyde, “[c]elibacy […] [was] the very method and process of evolution […] – the evolutionary life-force”, signalling human advancement and progress (1934: 114). Drawing on La Parthogénèse (1913) by French zoologist Yves Delage and Russian biologist Marie Glodsmith, she maintained that “the feminine share in gestation is not that of a passive and nutritive receptacle: the germ of the future creature is essentially present in the ovum” (1934: 106), only requiring an external stimulus to initiate the process of reproduction. A 1938 issue of Urania includes the report of “A Pathenogenic Discovery” from the Japan Times. The article describes American biologist Ethel Browne Harvey’s experiments on the eggs of sea urchins, which demonstrate that “the cytoplasm, or jelly-like substance in the egg, contained within itself the possibilities for self-growth” (1938: 10). The concept of parthenogenesis allowed Clyde to consider the possibility of autonomous and asexual reproduction from the ovum without fertilisation, or, in her words, “the evocation of the new individual from the earth by plasmic will-power” (1934: 106). Parthenogenesis also features in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s utopian novel Herland (1915), and, as Susan Squier has shown (1994: 186–188), is central to Naomi Mitchison’s science fiction novel Memoirs of a Spacewoman (1962), which extends Mitchison’s earlier feminist negotiation of reproductive possibilities in Comments on Birth Control (1930). Parthenogenetic reproduction is also evoked humorously in Barnes’ Ladies Almanack (1992: 22–26). 224

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While Clyde certainly does not go as far as Barnes’ playfully obscene and privately published Ladies Almanack in depicting lesbian sex, her work does champion forms of intimacy between women. Whereas the matriarchal society described in Gilman’s Herland leaves little room for passion between women, Clyde’s utopian novel Beatrice the Sixteenth “dares to imagine a sexuality that is not male-centered” (Patai and Ingram 1993: 267). Clyde’s celebration of a “sexual love” that is “entirely independent of differences in sex” is yet again based on a reworking of biological and evolutionary thought (1934: 123; emphasis in original). In her article “Love and Criticism” (1930) in Urania, Clyde argues that the primordial origins of life demonstrate that “the germ of Love” existed without (hetero)sexual intercourse: “before coition existed Love existed” (1). As Smith explains, “[f]or Clyde, protoplasm, but more particularly women’s protoplasm, carried the potential for an evolutionary metamorphosis toward androgyny and same-sex spiritual ecstasy and rapturous love” (2008: 54). This celebration of spiritual female same-sex love can usefully be positioned within wider modernist traditions of “sapphic idealism” (Wallace 2006). Jo-Ann Wallace has coined this term to describe the ways in which Edith Ellis – Havelock Ellis’ wife – celebrated a spiritual (rather than physically expressed) model of lesbian love and intimacy. Wallace’s work builds on Suzanne Raitt’s (1998) argument that sexological discourse was more invested in discussions of love and intimacy (rather than physical or genital sex) than previous scholars have often assumed. Clyde’s rejection of physical and, more specifically, genital expressions of sexual desire, including lesbian desire, often risk reinforcing homophobic sentiments. At the same time, the celibate model of female–female intimacy she articulates also resonates with wider queer, lesbian, and feminist discussions of celibacy as an alternative to heterosexual marriage and motherhood (Doan 1991; Vicinus 2012; Kahan 2013). Within literary modernism, as Elizabeth English has shown, Katharine Burdekin’s utopian fiction “mutes homosexual passion” (2015: 50), but nevertheless affirms spiritual and emotional bonds between women and can therefore be read within the tradition of sapphic idealism. Christopher St. John’s celebration of platonic friendship and celibate intimacy in the autobiographical novel Hungerheart (1914) also resonates with Clyde’s articulation of celibate forms of intimacy and love between women (Mackelworth 2019; Funke 2023a). As a result, Clyde’s work can usefully be read as a contribution to broader feminist articulations of celibate love within queer and lesbian literary as well as sexual scientific modernism.

Conclusion Clyde’s writings, in both their radical and conservative dimensions, are deeply entangled with wider feminist literary and scientific debates in the early twentieth century. Clyde often distanced herself from suffrage, maternal, and eugenic feminist movements that were primarily invested in the fight for the vote or focused on championing heterosexual relationships and motherhood. At the same time, her work existed in dialogue with other feminist authors. These included, but were not limited to, her collaborators in the Aëthnic Union and fellow co-editors of Urania. As this chapter has begun to show, her writings can also usefully be situated within wider feminist debates that were central to literary modernist cultures of the interwar period. Although literary and scientific modernism often reinforced reductive understandings of trans femininity, one shared concern that connected feminist thinkers across (often considerable) political and aesthetic differences was a critical engagement with sexual science. Like many other feminist writers of her time, Clyde was deeply sceptical of deterministic dimensions of sexological thought and resistant to sexual scientific systems of classification that sought to categorise bodies, desires, and behaviours. At the same time, sexual science provided useful frameworks that allowed Clyde 225

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and her contemporaries to expand understandings of the biological body, evolutionary development, sexual reproduction, and intimacy. Reading Clyde’s work in tandem with writings by other feminist literary authors demonstrates how the lesbian-trans-feminist politics she developed resonated with wider conversations within feminist modernism.

Notes 1 Several scholars have described the feminism articulated in Clyde’s work and Urania as radical (Ingram and Patai 1993; Oram 1998; Tiernan 2008b). I am following their example to indicate differences between Clyde’s work and arguably more mainstream positions within interwar feminism, including suffrage, eugenic, and maternal feminisms. Calling Clyde ‘radical’ does not, however, mean that her work was (in any uncomplicated way) ‘progressive’, and I draw attention to the conservative and, at times, damaging implications of her work throughout this chapter. 2 I am using the term ‘lesbian’ rather than ‘queer’ to put emphasis on the centrality of female–female intimacy in Clyde’s work. It is not my goal to draw a line between lesbian and queer modernism or feminism. As Elizabeth English, Sarah Parker and I have argued elsewhere, lesbian and queer modernisms are deeply intertwined and impossible to separate (English, Funke and Parker 2023). 3 ‘Instinct’ was a widely theorised and heavily contested term central to nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury constructions of sex, gender, and sexuality. It played an important role in sexological and feminist debates of the time (Frederickson 2014; Leng 2018).

Bibliography “A Parthenogenic Discovery” (January to April 1938) Urania 127/128: 10–11. “Abbeys of Hope” (January-April 1937) Urania 121/122: 1. Albinski, Nan Bowman (1988) Women’s Utopias in British and American Fiction, New York: Routledge. Allen, Ann Taylor (2000) “Feminism and Eugenics in Germany and Britain, 1900–1940: A Comparative Perspective,” German Studies Review, 23(3): 477–505. Armstrong, Tim (1998) Modernism, Technology and the Body: A Cultural Study, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Barnes, Djuna (1992) Ladies Almanack, New York: New York University Press. Baty, Thomas (1912) “The Aëthnic Union,” The Freewoman, 14(1): 278–279. Baty, Thomas (1930) “Letter to George Cecil Ives, 20 May 1930,” Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin, British Sexological Society Records (Manuscript Collection MS-00518). Bauer, Heike (2009) English Literary Sexology: Translations of Inversion, 1860–1930, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Berni, Christine (1999) “‘A Nose-Length into the Matter’: Sexology and Lesbian Desire in Djuna Barnes’s ‘Ladies Almanack’,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, 20(3): 83–107. Bland, Lucy (2001) Banishing the Beast: Feminism, Sex and Morality, London: Tauris. Bland, Lucy and Laura Doan (eds.) (1998) Sexology in Culture: Labelling Bodies and Desires, Cambridge: Polity Press. Bowlby, Rachel (2008) “Introduction,” in Virginia Woolf (ed.) Orlando, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. xii–xlvii. Breger, Claudia (2005) “Feminine Masculinities: Scientific and Literary Representations of ‘Female Inversion’ at the Turn of the Twentieth Century,” Journal of the History of Sexuality, 14(1/2): 76–106. Chajes, Julie (2019) Recycled Lives: A History of Reincarnation in Blavatsky’s Theosophy, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Chiang, Howard (2009) “Double Alterity and the Global Historiography of Sexuality: China, Europe, and the Emergence of Sexuality as a Global Possibility,” e-pisteme, 2(1): 33–52. Clyde, Irene (1909) Beatrice the Sixteenth: Being the Personal Narrative of Mary Hatherley, M.B., Explorer and Geographer, London: George Bell & Sons. Clyde, Irene (1930) “Love and Criticism,” Urania, 81 & 82: 1. Clyde, Irene (1934) Eve’s Sour Apples, London: Eric Partridge Ltd. “Declaration” (January-February 1919) Urania, 13: 1.

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Lesbian-trans-feminist modernism and sexual science Delap, Lucy (2002) “‘Philosophical Vacuity and Political Ineptitude’: The Freewoman’s critique of the Suffrage Movement,” Women’s History Review, 11(4): 613–630. Delap, Lucy (2007) The Feminist Avant-Garde: Transatlantic Encounters of the Early Twentieth Century, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Delap, Lucy (2011) “Individualism and Introspection: The Framing of Feminism in The Freewoman,” in Maria DiCenzo, Lucy Delap and Leila Ryan (eds.) Feminist Media History: Suffrage, Periodicals and the Public Sphere, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Dellamora, Richard (2011) Radclyffe Hall: A Life in the Writing, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Dixon, Joy (2001) Divine Feminine: Theosophy and Feminism in England, Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press. Doan, Laura (1991) Old Maids to Radical Spinsters: Unmarried Women in the Twentieth-Century Novel, Urbana: University of Illinois Press. English, Elizabeth (2015) Lesbian Modernism: Censorship, Sexuality and Genre Fiction, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. English, Elizabeth, Jana Funke and Sarah Parker (2023) “Introduction,” in Elizabeth English, Jana Funke and Sarah Parker (eds.) Interrogating Lesbian Modernism: Histories, Forms, Genres, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 1–30. Faderman, Lillian (1978) “The Morbidification of Love between Women by 19th-Century Sexologists,” Journal of Homosexuality, 4(1):73–90. Fisher, Kate and Jana Funke (2015) “Cross-Disciplinary Translations: British Sexual Science, History and Anthropology,” in Heike Bauer (ed.) Sexology and Translation: Cultural and Scientific Encounters across the Modern World, Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, pp. 51–69. Fisher, Kate and Jana Funke (2018) “‘Let Us Leave the Hospital; Let Us Go on a Journey Around the World’: British and German Sexual Science and the Global Search for Sexual Variation,” in Veronica Fuechtner, Douglas E. Haynes and Ryan M. Jones (eds.) Towards a Global History of Sexual Science, 1880–1950, Berkeley: University of California Press. Frederickson, Kathleen (2014) The Ploy of Instinct: Victorian Sciences of Nature and Sexuality in Liberal Governance, New York: Fordham University Press. Funke, Jana (2016) “Introduction,” in Radclyffe Hall (ed.) ‘The World’ and Other Unpublished Works of Radclyffe Hall, Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 1–46. Funke, Jana (2022) “Sex: Hypnosis, Hormones, Birth Control and the Modernist Body,” in Alex Goody and Ian Whittington (eds.) The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism and Technology, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 273–285. Funke, Jana (2023a) “Lesbian-Trans-Feminist Modernism: Christopher St. John, Trans Masculinity and ­Celibate Friendship in Hungerheart: The Story of a Soul,” in Elizabeth English, Jana Funke and Sarah Parker (eds.) Interrogating Lesbian Modernism: Histories, Forms, Genres, Edinburgh: Edinburgh ­University Press, pp. 56–77. Funke, Jana (2023b) Sexological Modernism: Queer Feminism and Sexual Science, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Gill-Peterson, Jules (2021) “Trans Darwin; or, Supernormal Biology,” [Online] Sad Brown Girl. Available at: https://sadbrowngirl.substack.com/p/trans-darwin-or-supernormal-biology (Accessed: 21 Dec 2022). Hall, Lesley A. (1998) “Women, Feminism and Eugenics,” in Robert A. Peel (ed.) Essays in the History of Eugenics, London: The Galton Institute, pp. 36–51. Hall, Lesley A. (2004) “Hauling Down the Double Standard: Feminism, Social Purity and Sexual Science in Late Nineteenth-Century Britain,” Gender and History, 16(1): 36–56. Hargreaves, Tracy (2005) Androgyny in Modern Literature, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. H.D. et al. (2002) Analyzing Freud: Letters of H.D., Bryher, and Their Circle, New York: New Directions. Heaney, Emma (2017) The New Woman: Literary Modernism, Queer Theory, and the Trans Feminine Allegory, Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Heilmann, Ann (2000) New Woman Fiction: Women Writing First-Wave Feminism, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Ingram, Angela and Daphne Patai (1993) “Fantasy and Identity: The Double Life of a Victorian Sexual Radical,” in Angela Ingram and Daphne Patai (eds.) Rediscovering Forgotten Radicals: British Women Writers 1889–1939, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, pp. 265–302. “Instinct a Myth” (January–April 1931) Urania 85/86: 1–2l.

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Jana Funke Jackson, Margaret (1994) The Real Fact of Life: Feminism and the Politics of Sexuality c. 1850–1940, ­Abingdon: Taylor & Francis. Kahan, Benjamin (2013) Celibacies: American Modernism & Sexual Life, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Kaivola, Karen (1999) “Revisiting Woolf’s Representations of Androgyny: Gender, Race, Sexuality, and ­Nation,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, 18(2): 235–261. Klausen, Susanne and Alison Bashford (2010) “Fertility Control: Eugenics, Neo-Malthusianism, and Feminism,” in Alison Bashford and Philippa Levine (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 98–115. Leck, Ralph M. (2016) Vita Sexualis: Karl Ulrichs and the Origins of Sexual Science, Urbana: University of Illinois Press. LeGates, Marlene (2001) In Their Time: A History of Feminism in Western Society, New York: Routledge. Leng, Kirsten (2018) Sexual Politics and Feminist Science: Women Sexologists in Germany, 1900–1933, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Mackelworth, Jane (2020) “‘The Nature of My Love Had Never Been in Doubt…’ Christopher St John (18711960): Platonic Love and Sapphic Desire,” Cultural and Social History, 17(3): 375–389. Manion, Jen (2020) Female Husbands: A Trans History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marcus, Laura (2000) “Woolf’s Feminism and Feminism’s Woolf,” in Sue Roe and Susan Sellers (eds.) The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 209–244. Nelson, Claudia (1997) “‘Under the Guidance of a Wise Mother’: British Sex Education at the Fin de Siècle,” in Claudia Nelson and Ann Sumner Holmes (eds.) Maternal Instincts: Visions of Motherhood and Sexuality in Britain, 1875–1925, Basingstoke: Palgrave, pp. 98–121. Oram, Alison (1998) “‘Sex is an Accident:’ Feminism, Science and the Radical Sexual Theory of Urania, 1915–40,” in Lucy Bland and Laura Doan (eds.) Sexology in Culture: Labelling Bodies and Desires, Cambridge: Polity Press, pp. 214–230. Oram, Alison (2001) “Feminism, Androgyny and Love between Women in Urania, 1916–1940,” Media History, 7(1): 57–70. Prosser, Jay (1998) Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality, New York: Columbia University Press. Prosser, Jay (2001) “‘Some Primitive Thing Conceived in a Turbulent Age of Transition’: The Transsexual Emerging from The Well,” in Laura Doan and Jay Prosser (eds.) Palatable Poison: Critical Perspectives on the Well of Loneliness, New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 129–144. Raitt, Suzanne (1998) “Sex, Love and the Homosexual Body in Early Sexology,” in Lucy Bland and Laura Doan (eds.) Sexology in Culture: Labelling Bodies and Desires, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, pp. 150–164. Russett, Cynthia Eagle (1989) Sexual Science: The Victorian Construction of Womanhood, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Schaffner, Anna Katharina (2011) Modernism and Perversion: Sexual Deviance in Sexology and Literature, 1850–1930, Basingstoke: Palgrave. See, Sam (2020) Queer Natures, Queer Mythologies, New York: Fordham University Press. Sengoopta, Chandak (1998) “Glandular Politics: Experimental Biology, Clinical Medicine, and Homosexual Emancipation in Fin-de-Siecle Central Europe,” Isis, 89(3): 445–473. Smith, Judith Ann (2008) “Genealogies of Desire: ‘Uranianism,’ Mysticism and Science in Britain, 1889– 1940,” MA Thesis, The University of British Columbia (Vancouver). Stark, Jamie F (2020) The Cult of Youth: Anti-Ageing in Modern Britain, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Steele, Karen (2018) “Ireland and Sapphic Journalism between the Wars: A Case Study of Urania (1916– 40),” in Catherine Clay, Maria DiCenzo, Barbara Green and Fiona Hackney (eds.) Women’s Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1918–1939: The Interwar Period, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 388–402. Squier, Susan Merrill (1994) Babies in Bottles: Twentieth-Century Visions of Reproductive Technology, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Stryker, Susan (2009) Transgender History, San Francisco, CA: Seal. Stryker, Susan and Talia M. Bettcher (2016) “Introduction: Trans/Feminisms,” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, 3(1–2): 5–14. “The Change of Sex in Poultry” (May-August 1924) Urania 45/46: 5. “The Slimy Enemy” (January-April 1930) Urania 79/80: 2–4.

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Lesbian-trans-feminist modernism and sexual science “‘The Well of Loneliness’ or ‘Cut by the Country’” (May-August 1929) Urania 75/76: 1–2. Tiernan, Sonja (2008a) “The Journal Urania (1916–40): An Alternative Archive of Radical Gender Masquerade,” in Deirdre Quinn and Sharon Tighe-Mooney (eds.) Essays in Irish Literary Criticism: Themes of Gender, Sexuality, and Corporeality, Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press, pp. 55–69. Tiernan, Sonja (2008b) “‘No Measures of Emancipation or Equality will Suffice’: Eva Gore-Boothʼs Radical Feminism in the Journal Uraniaʼ,” in Sarah O’Connor and Christopher C. Shepard (eds.) Women, Social and Cultural Change in Twentieth Century Ireland, Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, pp. 166–182. Tiernan, Sonja (2009), “A History of Female to Male Transsexuality in the Journal Urania,” in Sonja Tiernan and Mary McAuliffe (eds.) Sapphists and Sexologists; Histories of Sexualities, Volume 2, Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, pp. 56–70. Tiernan, Sonja (2012) Eva Gore-Booth: An Image of Such Politics, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Turda, Marius (2010) Modernism and Eugenics, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Vicinus, Martha (2012) “The History of Lesbian History,” Feminist Studies, 38(3): 566–596. Wallace, Jo-Ann (2006) “Edith Ellis, Sapphic Idealism, and The Lover’s Calendar (1912),” in Laura Doan and Jane Garrity (eds.) Sapphic Modernities: Sexuality, Women, and National Culture, New York: Palgrave, pp. 183–200. Weil, Kari (1992) Androgyny and the Denial of Difference, Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Winning, Jo (2000) “Introduction,” in Bryher (ed.) Development and Two Selves, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, pp. v–xli. Woolf, Virginia (1998) A Room of One’s Own, and Three Guineas, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Woolf, Virginia (2008) Orlando, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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15 “BEAUTY IN REVOLT” Fashioning feminists in Rebecca West and Jean Rhys Sophie Oliver

Rebecca West and Jean Rhys did not know one another personally, their writing careers eventually took very different paths, and their politics may seem incompatible. West was a committed and proud feminist to the end (Scott 1995: 124); in a late-life interview, Rhys scorned the suffragettes and their heirs (Rhys 1978: 70). But as the first decade of the twentieth century ended, and at a moment of intense public discussion over the status and rights of women in Britain, both had sat down to write for the first time. In the resulting, unfinished manuscripts, West’s suffrage novel The Sentinel (probably begun in late 1909, perhaps abandoned in 1911, posthumously published in 2002) and Rhys’ diary-cum-novel “Triple Sec” (begun as a diary in 1913, looking back on events from 1911, and formalised in 1924), each author was responding to the moral and physical strictures of late Edwardian femininity: sexual objectification and sexual violence, a lack of bodily autonomy, and the sexual double standard that insisted on some women’s purity, creating stereotypes that divided women, often by class and race, into the chaste and the unchaste (Bland 2001: xiii).1 Their acute awareness of the ruling images of femininity led both West and Rhys to write strikingly visual texts. As this chapter will explore, their first works are full of clothes and dressed women. But in their shared frustration with women’s entrapment in images, and their mutual (though very differently expressed) concern for women’s agency, their use of clothes also signals the insufficiency of representation for some feminist ends. In these two early texts, dress exceeds the inhibiting realm of spectacle and imagery, becoming instead an emphatically material phenomena that stresses moving bodies, bodies that can be moved emotionally, and which connect with other bodies. In this way, clothes help West and Rhys go beyond the stasis of femininity towards autonomy, the feeling, desiring, relating subject, and (even in Rhys’ ambivalent case) the production of feminist subjectivity. In writing quite openly in these early texts about sex and its relation to economics, about violence against women, and about women’s sexuality (in both their cases, this boldly includes homoerotic forms of desire), West and Rhys were writing in the tradition of New Woman and Edwardian fiction that resisted regulating images of femininity to make room for complex forms of subjectivity. Edwardian novelists, writes Jane Eldridge Miller, were “eager to discard what [H.G.] Wells termed the ‘sawdust doll’ […] an embodiment of British society’s stereotypes of femininity” (1997: 3–4). There was in the fiction of the era a “prevailing spirit of feminine unrest”, wrote one literary critic of the time, or to return to Wells’ estimation, an “extraordinary discontent of women DOI: 10.4324/9781003429951-19

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with a woman’s lot” (Miller 1997: 3). Eagerness, unrest, discontent: in The Sentinel and “Triple Sec”, these feminist feelings and orientations – feminist in that they can politicise someone as much as express their existing feminist politics; they can help produce feminist subjectivity – are all materialised through clothes as material objects worn on the body. Those restless, dissatisfied feelings are joined, as I will discuss, by others such as hope and desire. The restlessness of these manuscripts is also apparent in their unfinishedness and unevenness, and in the instability of their genre (both blend autobiography and novelistic experiment, and The Sentinel also draws extensively on documentary sources [Laing 2000: 14]). Just as clothes in these novels help form feminist subjectivity and emphasise that formation as a process, these restless texts underscore the formation-in-process of their authors’ feminism, at a time when the term itself had only just begun to gain currency (DiCenzo 2011: 165). Elizabeth Sheehan’s Modernism à la Mode argues that there is a “convergence between fashion and novels’ particular capacity to reflect, render, and remake the social fabric, as well as to adjust readers’ modes of sensing the world” (2018: 3). Paying attention to the materiality of clothes in these early, unresolved novels helps shape my interpretive response to them as pieces of writing trying to “remake the social fabric”. This is pronounced in these early modernist works, whose authors were visibly figuring out the right narrative form to meet changing gender relations. In my conclusion I suggest that the novels, like the clothes in them, constitute material feminist actions.

Modernism and fashion The role of fashion as an emblem of modern aesthetic forms is well established: from Baudelaire to Woolf, fashion (as a system of fast-paced sartorial change) was a privileged sign of the instability of modern life and its aestheticised counterpart, modernism (Lehmann 2000; Garrity 2010). Relatedly, fashion as a discursive system – characterised by change, imitation, and dialectics (between distinction and standardisation; the individual and society) – has been explored by modernist scholars as a productive way of thinking about the construction of subjectivity in modernist literature. Jessica Burstein’s Cold Modernism relates a modernist investment in a “world without selves” (2012: 2) (in Wyndham Lewis and Mina Loy) to early twentieth-century fashion’s paradoxical struggle to reproduce originality. Vike Martina Plock has explored the use of fashion and its “conceptual apparatus” (2016: 1) by five interwar women in analysing identity formation, both in their novels and in understanding their professional lives as writers and their positions in literary culture. Equally, in modernist culture more generally, dress and consumption have been useful in refiguring femininity as an active force and asserting women’s role in the public sphere. In Rita Felski’s influential formulation, “The emergence of a culture of consumption helped to shape new forms of subjectivity for women, whose intimate needs, desires, and perceptions of self were ­mediated by public representations of commodities” (1995: 62). But as Ilya Parkins points out, fashion does not only mediate or represent the self, it helps produce the subject (2014: 101). The materialist focus that this view necessitates, of clothes as worn objects rather than fashion as a discursive or conceptual system, emerged in modernist scholarship as new materialism gained ground theoretically. Drawing on thing theory in the work of Barbara Johnson, Bruno Latour, and Alfred Gell, Celia Marshik shows how garments in early twentieth-century texts, including two short stories by West and Rhys, “impinge on, frustrate, and alienate wearers” (2016: 5), blurring the boundaries between subjects and objects. Using Jane Bennett’s ideas about “vibrant matter”, along with the work of Elizabeth Grosz and other new materialist and affect theorists, Sheehan is likewise interested in the agency of dress in modernist texts, its capacity to shape perception and the attention it draws to “the material dimensions of collective feeling” (2018: 18). 231

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This scholarship has shifted the focus from the discursivity of fashion in forming subjectivity (individual or collective) to the materiality of clothes in that process. Parkins’ theoretical work has been important, but rare, in discussing fashion and subject formation from an explicitly feminist perspective. For example, she takes insights from feminist physicist Karen Barad’s theory of ‘agential realism’ (1998) to stress identity work as a process that occurs in what Barad calls ‘intra-action’ with the material world. Building on this, Parkins writes: “Fashion is undoubtedly a discursive machine, but it is also a site of intimate encounters between consuming subjects – ideologically associated with women – and material things: garments, fabrics, accessories” (2008: 502). Granting agency to subjects, but one that is always formed through the agency of other matter, and thus never fixed, Barad’s agential realism helps Parkins form a feminist theory of fashion’s role in producing relational and anti-essentialist subjectivity. This is innovative, not least because, as she points out, a theoretical literature addressing the feminist significance of fashion is largely missing. Through West and Rhys’ early unfinished novels, I hope to build on the foundations laid by Parkins. Specifically, I am interested not only in these authors’ use of clothes as material objects helping to produce women’s agency in the face of early twentieth-century strictures on femininity and sexuality, but in fashion’s material role in producing a feminist subjectivity in that same context: a dissatisfied, discontented, but hopeful and connected sense of self in process, felt by women intent (to varying degrees) on transforming the situation in which they find themselves. Returning to these texts’ depiction of feminist struggle shows why the move from discursivity to materiality is important, as both novels reveal their protagonists’ (and authors’) frustration with images, and their desire for bodily agency and affective connections with others. Clothes, as material objects that move us, in which we move, and with which we ‘intra-act’, are especially helpful for seeing the role of matter, the body, and emotion in forming feminist subjectivity, and the relational aspect of a collective identity like ‘feminist’.

The Sentinel: deeds and dresses West’s first, unfinished novel follows the development and political awakening of Adela Furnival, a young science teacher from Lancashire who comes into some inheritance, leaves her post at the school, and becomes a militant suffragette. She takes part in and helps plan protests and riots, for which she is imprisoned and force-fed, events that help date the manuscript to around 1909, when the first forcible feeding of Women’s Social and Political Union members began and West was just 17 (Laing 2000: 9–10). West’s own involvement with Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst’s WSPU dated back to at least October 1907, when, after attending a suffrage rally with over 4,000 marchers, she wrote a letter to The Scotsman, defending the split of the WSPU from the Liberal Party. Her sister Winnie described West – Cicely ‘Cissie’ Fairfield as she was then – as a “feministe enragée” (Glendinning 1987: 30). The angry teenage Cissie sold copies of the WSPU paper Votes for Women, wore a “Votes for Women” badge to school (for which she was “nagged and worried”, as she recalled in a later essay, “A Training in Truculence” [West 1913: 154]) and experienced the forceful dispersion of protestors by police (West 2000: 10). Writing in around 1909 to her sister Lettie, who was also a suffragist and may be a model for Adela, she described standing: outside the pool at Forsyth Rd. and shout[ing] “Keep the Liberal out!” […] One Liberal man tried to shake me and hurt me, much to their delight… However one Suffragette […] was knocked down and trampled on by a member of the Women’s Liberal Federation. They 232

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tried to make me stop shouting “Keep the Liberal out!” but of course it was no good. I kept on from 10 till 8! (2000: 8) In my reading of The Sentinel, I want to pay attention to the bodily and emotional aspects of becoming feminist that are apparent in these details of West’s own experience: the rage and exhilaration, the “ke[eping] on”, the physical presence and pain of women, and amongst all this, the role of clothes – like that emotive (“worrying”) suffrage badge – in producing her feminist subjectivity. In The Sentinel – which, like many feminists of the period, was not only concerned with the vote – this focus on the body is connected to Adela’s traumatic and conflicting experiences of her sexuality. The short Book I is centred on Adela’s seduction as a young woman by an older man, an event that leaves her compromised in a moral order that demands women of her class are virgins before marriage. Adela’s anger at these “fictitious values” (West 2002: 169) – at stereotypical representations of women, or “lady-likeness” as West called it in “A Training in Truculence” (1913: 154) – is partly what leads her to feminism in Book II. We should see the intense physical and affective dynamism of West’s descriptions of feminist activity, from suffrage protests to bonds and desire between militant women, as a challenge to the restrictive image of a woman’s body as expressed in the sexual double standard, and a counter-claim for Adela’s bodily autonomy. Against “lady-like pessimis[m]” and the “atmosphere of sex-subordination” and joylessness in which West had been educated, suffragism was an education in “stretch[ing] herself” to “find out who she really is” (West 1913: 155–156). For Adela, too, the physical extension of her body and the experience of heightened emotions are key to producing her subjectivity. We will see that clothes help West articulate the moving, acting, and feeling body of the young feminist. The function of fashion in the feminist movement in early twentieth-century Britain, from politicised consumer practices to the large-scale parades of well-dressed women organised by the WSPU, has been widely discussed by women involved in the cause and later scholars (Tickner 1987; Rolley 1990; Green 1997, 2017; Parkins 2002). In her autobiography, the suffragist Cicely Hamilton attributed the importance attached to dress to a concern for “a feminine note” that would counter “the legendary idea of the suffragettes, as masculine in manner and appearance” (Rolley 1990: 47). Katrina Rolley extends the point, suggesting that militant suffragettes’ deliberate disturbances and violent actions such as window smashing challenged dominant definitions of femininity, an anxiety felt in anti-suffrage remonstrations against “unsexed” suffragettes. Smart and “dainty” clothes were encouraged in the movement – and are evidenced in photographs of suffragettes – as a way to assure the public of their femininity (1990: 51–52). Hamilton heard Emmeline Pankhurst “advise very strongly against what she considered eccentricity in the matter of dress; her reason being that it would shock male prejudice and make the vote harder to obtain” (Rolley 1990: 59). Even as the suffragettes made this pragmatic concession to feminine image (a white, ­middleand upper-class femininity, it must be said), the recontextualisation of fashionable dress as it becomes paired with stones and hammers in the hands of the suffragettes did a good deal to challenge definitions of femininity. As many other scholars have noted, dress was one of the ways in which the suffragettes resisted the division between a male public sphere and female private sphere. Important work by Barbara Green (1997) on the spectacular practices of suffragettes has shown how the display of fashionable women in marches contributed to both an intervention in the male public sphere and the production of a specifically feminine civic identity. But despite the centrality of the dressed body in scholarly accounts of fashion and suffrage, and the suffragette’s very physical invasion into public space, the remaking of femininity and production of feminist subjectivity 233

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in militant feminism largely remains discursive: it is almost exclusively viewed as an issue of spectacle, visibility, and representation. Green’s recent work on the everyday activism of consumerism through feminist periodicals shifts the emphasis from discourse to affective relationships between women and consumer products, and between feminists, as part of the “construction of feminist communities” (2016: 363; see also 2017: 41–88). I want to develop this emphasis here, for West’s depiction of militancy in The Sentinel shows us that the dressed body of the suffragette is a dynamic, affective force as much as a prominent image, and that clothes as matter are crucial to the making of feminist subjectivity. The dress of the militant leader Mary Gerald is emphasised when she is first introduced at the beginning of Book II as Adela’s politicisation is underway. Compared with Adela’s “immobile” face, “framed” – like an image – “in the rich gold folds of her silk motor veil”, we first see Mary in movement as she enters the room “with a stir of green linen skirts and mauve petticoats” (25). She is “vivacious” in her suffragette colours of purple and green, and the vitality of her body is signalled by its movement in clothes and proliferating verbs (“dancing” hazel eyes, the “empt[ying]” of letters onto a desk, which in turn “shook an inkstand and rippled a wave of purple over its immediate surroundings” [25–26]). In response to Adela’s paralysed anxiety about the loss of her virginity, Mary paces, “the only sound […] the dragging of her linen skirt on the gross pile of the woollen carpet” (28). West responds to the fixity of feminine image, then, with the dynamic body, whose active force is registered in the materiality of her clothes – how they sound when her body moves in them, rather than how they look. In the case of Mary Gerald, clothes work together with her body to define her feminist presence. It is useful here to centre the body in Elizabeth Grosz’s terms, as “active, viable and autonomous” rather than subdued, contained, and devalued (1994: ix). Not only does this assert the agency of a woman’s body, a key concern in the context of West’s feminism, but it understands the body as “the very ‘stuff’ of subjectivity” (Grosz 1994: 9). In The Sentinel, Adela’s developing feminist subjectivity is shown to be embodied and relational between bodies. In the first protest scene that follows Adela’s meeting with Mary, this is stressed by the feminine clothes of the suffragettes. One woman asserts her physical presence above the crowd as she shimmies up a lamppost, her “opera-cloak falling back” to reveal her “shining arms and bosom” and her coloured petticoats revealed too, “ruffling” as she drops to the ground (39). An angry “narrow-chested little clerk with pale lewd eyes” spits “Suffragette” at Adela and stabs her in the thigh with his hat pin (38), as West redirects the visuality of clothing into physical forces that constitute the action. Here clothes are no longer only representative of something, such as femininity (though that as witnessed by the men’s “resentment” [39] at the flash of petticoat), they are material agents in the protest. In response to her “force” and “resolution”, civilian men and police snatch at Adela’s skirts (41). Images have become actions, skirts no longer defining Adela’s femininity but material agents that do things, causing reactions and participating in reactions in turn: infuriating and inciting men, forcefully confronting the troubling body of the suffragette with other, authoritative bodies, evading their grasp as the body moves away. Terms from affect theory are helpful here, such as its concern with the “capacities” of bodies “to act and be acted upon” (Seigworth and Gregg 2009: 1). The skirts in this scene alone help us see this: ruffled petticoats that form the suffragette’s action and in turn cause anger; snatched skirts that affirm the transgressive suffragette body in movement and its provocation. In this heighted affective scene, clothes materialise – and, in doing so, help the reader see – what Greg Seigworth and Melissa Gregg call “forces of encounter”, “proof of a body’s never less than ongoing immersion in and among the world’s obstinacies and rhythms” (1). Proof of the body’s immersion in the world – its participation, its capacity to act and be acted upon – is crucial for West and for her feminist contemporaries concerned to challenge the image of femininity and sexual morality with 234

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a woman’s agency and bodily autonomy, for it is proof of “what a body can do” (Hardt 2007: x). This “struggle”, as Adela calls it (41), which is partly materialised by clothes, is thus one of the processes through which she is becoming a feminist in the novel. Clothes are material participants in that process, not merely markers of what the body beneath them is doing. This is clear when, as a group of women are escorted away by police, Adela notices a typist has removed her hat and is swinging it along as she walks. Adela calls it “beauty in revolt”, and wonders that it has not “aroused the masses long ago” (40). The removed hat not only signals a challenge to femininity, but in this moment of being swung is “intra-acting” (to recall Parkins’ use of Barad) with the typist in the production of her feminist subjectivity: in that exuberantly free movement of her arm and in the provocation of “the masses”, her body and her hat are forging her oppositional identity. If beauty is “in revolt” in this novel, if the flowing green dress of a suffragette is a “menace” that “created an alarm” (77), it is because it belongs to a female body with agency. For Adela, this is also a desiring body. Much of Book II is concerned with her burgeoning sexuality, as she develops and examines ardent feelings for the Labour and pro-suffrage politician Robert Langlad. As Adela reflects on her early experience of non-marital sex and the sexual morality that regulates her as a result, her awareness of her own sexuality is also explored through her relationships with other militant women. It is often said that West is invested in the beauty of other women. Scott’s assertion that throughout her work “she richly textualises the female body and apparel” is apparent in her first novel, too, though the idea that she also “carefully distances herself from any lesbian identification” (Scott 1990: 564) is less clear-cut in The Sentinel. The “fragile” “faery” beauty of the militant Psyche Charteris in her “green silk Liberty gown” is described at length from the wide-eyed perspective of Adela, who “gaped” at her, “astonished”, “hypnotized” (161). But Psyche’s fashionably clothed body is not only a feminine sight to Adela, it is an affective force, her “five feet one inch of fragility transmuted by her irresistible purpose into a civilising instrument” (219), which in turn stirs strong, homoerotic feelings in Adela. As she watches Psyche sleep one night, “the moonlight of the brilliant crescent soaked through the blind and lay on Psyche’s body, stretched sword-straight under the white linen. Adela wondered […] to what new ordeal this implacable young warrior would lead her” (167). By affecting Adela so forcefully, creating a strong, sexualised connection between them, Psyche’s fashionable beauty is the agent of Adela’s increased awareness of her own body, of her sexuality, an awareness that is entwined in the novel with her coming to feminist politics and violent protest. Psyche’s silk Liberty gown becomes a form of armour, foregrounding the medieval associations of this kind of aesthetic dress: she is a “Knight of the Holy Ghost”, her acceptance of the pain inflicted in violent protest “an extraordinary efflorescence of spiritual bravery and beauty, like those visitations of the divine that sometimes lifted the [?mists] [sic] of sins in the Middle Ages” (216). In turn, the WSPU green of the dress and “wide green hat tricked with violets” (160) are rematerialised in green and purple bruises on Psyche’s body. “So it’s only wearing the colours”, thinks Adela (216). Clothes and body are inseparable from the Cause, and not merely as metaphors, but as material elements in the production of feminist subjectivity. This is most apparent when Psyche’s bruised body, briefly uncovered before she “slipped the green gown over her head”, secures Adela’s commitment: It has the tremendous effect on Adela that trifles sometimes have on sane, well-balanced minds. It acted on her nature chemically, changing the substance though not the method. And it added to her qualities an avid, implacable appetite for just revenge that made her henceforth a terrible foe to evil. (168) 235

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In this extraordinary description of the material process that is becoming a feminist, the force of Psyche’s militant body, which as we have seen is inseparable from her fashionable beauty, causes chemical changes in Adela’s own body. The beauty of a well-dressed woman in The Sentinel is, then, the object of homoerotic desire, which helps assert Adela’s bodily autonomy in the context of the sexual double standard, and an affective trigger that helps form her militant feminist identityin-process. Both – increased bodily autonomy and militant rage – come together in the novel to produce Adela’s feminist subjectivity, as she physically challenges the images of femininity that regulate her sexuality and works actively with other “avid” women to transform their rights and status. Exploring the materialist, affective, and relational nature of becoming feminist in The Sentinel, as I have done through clothes, shows in new ways how this unfinished manuscript looks forward to West’s first published work.2 While Lauren Rosenblum (2019) has argued for West’s embrace of the relationality of periodicals in her developing feminism from 1911 – she started writing for Dora Marsden’s Freewoman as, or soon after, she finished The Sentinel – Barbara Green has shown that West took from The Freewoman “a discourse of feminine appetite and feminist sexuality” (2003: 231). We can now see that an emphatically material (rather than only discursive) version of what West called “the suffrage movement’s […] insatiable appetite for life” (Green 2003: 231) goes back to The Sentinel. It can be said to have found new vitality in The Freewoman, rather than originating there. Green also traces West’s call for women’s “riotous living” to her short story published in the first issue of BLAST, “Indissoluble Matrimony” (1914). Here the “unruly feminine appetite” of Evadne is “regard[ed] as ‘primitive’ and animalistic” by her anti-feminist husband George (Green 2003: 233). His racialised, primitivist approach to women’s sexuality and bodily agency – also expressed through his view of “her curious dress, designed in some pitifully cheap and worthless stuff by a successful mood of her indiscreet taste – she had black blood in her” (West 1914: 98) – reminds us that women’s bodies are unevenly socially produced, a fact that is key to the formation of feminist subjectivity in Jean Rhys’ “Triple Sec”.

“Triple Sec”: the feminist feeling of an “old blue thing” Jean Rhys’ first manuscript is a novel written as the diary of Suzy Gray, a young, poor, white Creole woman from the West Indies living in London. Its origins lie in a cheerless room in Fulham in 1913, when Rhys sat down to write her own ‘diary’ in some exercise books, a recollection of “everything that happened to me in the last year and a half” (Rhys 1979: 129), events that included an illegal abortion. In 1924, in Paris, Rhys showed these notebooks (which must have been quite substantially extended over the years, for “Triple Sec” goes up to 1919) to a journalist, Pearl Adam, who liked them, typed them up (editing as she went), and sent the typescript to Ford Madox Ford (Rhys 1979: 155), who was to have a decisive role in Rhys’ early career (see Angier 1990; Seymour 2022). When Rhys wrote Voyage in the Dark, she went back to the exercise-book diaries rather than “Triple Sec” for her source material; either some of the diaries or Part II, Chapter 2 of the manuscript were also reworked for the story “Till September Petronella”, eventually published in 1960 (Thomas 2022: 5). “Triple Sec” was “unpublishably sordid”, according to the artist Stella Bowen, Ford’s partner at the time (Seymour 2022: 101). Suzy has ambitions to be on the stage but as the book opens in 1911 is instead living precariously as the companion of the wealthy Tony. His inevitable departure precipitates Suzy’s slide into prostitution, during which she is raped by a wealthy American, Carl,

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and has an illegal abortion to terminate the pregnancy. The diary is an account of these experiences and an exposition of the patriarchal system that makes them possible: the sexual politics that deem a woman like Suzy disposable, as simultaneously property and of little value. It is also an account of Suzy’s (usually failed, often confused) attempts to assert some agency, whether through modelling for artists or getting engaged, and through friendships with other women. Positive relations, which are a muted though consistent feature of all Rhys’ work, are still neglected in Rhys scholarship, though recent studies on emotion and desire in her work are changing that (Wilson and Johnson 2013). From her first to her last text, the relationship between the self and others is in fact Rhys’ major obsession, and it is often negotiated in her writing through clothes, which act as pivots between the individual and society (Oliver 2016; Plock 2017). This theme is also key to reading the feminism of her fiction. Rhys had a complicated relationship with feminism, and scholars have noted the difficulty of ascribing feminist politics or values to her novels. Finding a way past the apparent complicity of Rhys’ protagonists in their own oppression, Anne Cunningham (2013) describes the ‘negative feminism’ of the fiction, with its failures that ultimately help critique white patriarchy and imperialism.. Here I want to argue that looking to clothes in “Triple Sec” – especially in light of the foregoing argument about West and the role of the body and emotions in forging feminist subjectivity and relationships – lets us see the shape of a more affirmative feminism that runs subtly throughout her work. To be sure, the “psychological triumphs” of liberal feminism are not to be found in Rhys (Emery 2003: xii). But in her first text is discernible what she would call in a later unpublished manuscript the “forlorn hope” (Rhys 1938) of equitable, caring relations between people and, with them perhaps, an escape from unequal gendered and racialised power dynamics (for further discussion of this manuscript, see Oliver 2021). Laurel Harris has recently argued that Rhys’ later fiction contains “moments of future-oriented affirmation” through animated objects and attachments to objects, including clothes (2021: 20). But just as Maroula Joannou (2015) has argued for the connecting power of dress in Wide Sargasso Sea, we can also trace the way clothes in “Triple Sec” help shape Suzy’s fraught attachments to other people. Fashionable dress sexualises and commoditises Suzy in line with contemporary sexual politics in which women are seen as the sexual property of men (Bland 2001: xiii). It makes her what Harris, referring to actual objects in Rhys’ novels, calls an “image-object” (2021: 28). Thoroughly objectified and wounded by this dehumanisation, Suzy shuts down all feeling, making her an easy target for predatory men. But this objectified unfeeling is also “what [she is] up against”, to use Sara Ahmed’s words for the trigger that makes someone a feminist (2017: 3).3 It forms a subtle but strong sense of injustice that propels this diary-novel, and it causes Suzy to seek, briefly and unresolvedly, alternative attachments and modes of being. These alternative emotional and bodily states are enabled through dress, too. But rather than commodified chic, these are everyday clothes outside the fashion system. This distinction, which in the terms of my argument is also a distinction between representation and materiality (between spectacle and embodied feeling), takes on much of its urgency from the imperial structures informing Rhys’ life and work. As Mary Lou Emery has explored most extensively, Rhys’ writing “addresses the colonialist relationships reproduced in the dynamics of seeing”, always in relation to a gendered politics of visuality (2003: xiv). Together these dynamics control who looks, who is looked at, and in what ways. In “Triple Sec”, specifically, Leah Rosenberg (2004) has analysed the exoticising, sexualised representation of Suzy by the artist Tommie, based on William Orpen. Indeed, Suzy’s colonial origins shape how she is seen sexually by men more generally, to whom her ethnicity seems uncertain: when Suzy insists she is English because her father was, Carl replies, “You don’t look it quite”. He is happy she is not “one of these big

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English girls” (Rhys 1924: 68). If, as Lucy Bland notes of the quasi-Darwinian racist views of the period, “lower-class women, above all the prostitute, resembled the lower-race woman along the lines of a shared ‘primitive’ sexuality” (2001: 76), this resemblance seems secured in the minds of Suzy’s lovers, like Richard and Tony, who call her “kitten” and “bird”, and Carl, who compares her to a child (68). By cementing the men’s use of her as an object to be consumed, this racialised sexualisation also inserts Suzy into a capitalist system of exchange that Rhys relates to slavery. When Suzy reflects on money that Carl gave her, twenty pounds (“her price”), she claims that it’s “Cheap! My great grandfather paid much more for a pretty slave” (83). As Harris writes, “what Aimé Césaire calls the ‘thing-ification’ of the black colonial subject […] haunts Rhys’s fiction” (2021: 22). Rhys’ often romantic over-identification with the Black people of her native Dominica and her hatred for the British and their treatment of “the despised English female”, as she calls her in “Triple Sec” (217), lead her to a problematic equation between the enslaved and a young white West Indian woman who is used for sex. But this equation also lies at the heart of Rhys’ acute and important sense that the way men in Britain exploit women is connected to imperialist exploitation. This is not a metaphor: it is Rhys’ way of joining the dots in a global system that rests on the circulation of goods and money, the labour of the exploited, and white men’s violent abuse. In “Triple Sec”, this system is underlined by fashionable clothes, as they turn Suzy into an item for sale, an image-object to be appraised. Many of her activities involve shopping and eating with men who pay for both. When she wears an expensive new black velvet dress to dinner with Tony, men “looked and looked”: “I got it at Madam Harbour’s – She’s charged awfully, as much as Ratillon’s nearly. But it is pretty – – I have a little black velvet hat too, with a white osprey.[”] – – I wanted awfully to look nice, so I’m glad I did. – – Tony said, “You simply get prettier every day, kitten, – I don’t wonder everyone’s looking at you”. (18, punctuation in original) At this moment in Suzy’s account, when Tony is about to leave for America on business and cut ties with her, this chic outfit and the logic of competition signalled by comparative prices from upmarket, Paris-inspired shops signifies both Suzy’s value as a desirable visual commodity and her disposability. Her exchange value is confirmed when, down on her luck, she plans to sell her fur coat, evening dresses, and jewellery to make ends meet: these are Suzy’s sole possessions, her total worth. Fashionable clothes make it more possible for men like Tony to talk about “ordering a girl” (53) and for Suzy to reflect bitterly on “my price” (83). They emphasise the uncompromising economics that justify her mistreatment: the sexual violence she experiences in hotel rooms and even by the doctor who performs her illegal abortion. Fashion, then, is profoundly connected to – and one major symbol of – this poor Creole woman’s lack of bodily autonomy. In this context, while Suzy is always carrying out affective labour (sex work, massage, companionship, modelling), her own emotions are prohibited.4 In response to her exploitation and Tony’s abandonment, she closes down her feeling: The thing I felt with – I don’t know what to call it – my heart or my soul or something – has gone snap, and now I don’t care tuppence for anything or anybody. – – – They may try and try and screw and rack, but I’m quite dead inside and can’t feel so it doesn’t matter. (33, punctuation in original) 238

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Such unfeeling is the corollary of Suzy’s fashionable dress: treated as an object rather than a ­human, she resigns herself to inanimation, which in turn permits the exploitative system to function. For this deadness is what seems (to Carl) to permit further sexual violence, as Suzy – ­paralysed by her traumatic experiences, silent, and physically compliant – is raped. “There’ll never be any more love for me”, she reflects. “Only that” (72). But, of course, in writing her diary, Suzy is constantly betraying her emotion. Despite her sense that “her heart is a block of ice” (86), the diary is all about how she feels: “I must write in future more of events and less of feelings” (127). And certainly, Suzy writes of a wide range of emotions, from shame and depression to fear and even – as we will see – happiness. Just as it was for Rhys when she sat down to write for the first time, the diary is a form of agency for this powerless woman. It is her “friend”, she will “tell it everything” (16), a subversive way to resist what happens to her by exposing what is actually going on within the patriarchal, imperialist system in which she is caught. As Suzy writes to herself in “Triple Sec” (which was originally called “Suzy Tells”): “on the surface everything is all right – underneath one glimpses all sorts of horrors” (56). In telling of those horrors, the diary and its feelings subtly assert Suzy’s agency in a context in which that agency is denied. Other alternative “glimpses”, not of horror but of Suzy’s capacity to act and feel, are crucial to “Triple Sec”. Whereas scholars like Emery (2003, 2007) and Rosenberg have looked for forms of resistant subjectivity within the representational structures Rhys depicts, I want to pay attention to Suzy’s attempts to escape them. In “Triple Sec”, she calls them “glimpses of companionship” (195), brief but deeply felt attachments to others, in which bodies and emotions rather than images are paramount. One attachment in particular, to a friend called Jennie, is approached through dress. Amongst Suzy’s exploitative relationships with men and the woman Ethel who runs the massage business, Jennie is an authentic, joyful connection. On a trip to “Westgate” (Margate), on which they “laughed and giggled like kids”, what they wear is significant: Jennie “looked very pretty in her pink cotton frock and I had my old blue thing but it looked nice” (111). There “is something utterly natural and free about” Jennie (113), and these everyday clothes – a simple unfashionable cotton garment, an old familiar item – seem to be the means by which the women move and feel freely. Suzy writes: “I love the shape of her figure, especially under a thin cotton frock like the one she wears here” (114). Suzy’s thoughts of Jennie’s body, effortlessly shown in a thin fabric without structure, lead her to describe Jennie’s hair, skin, eyes, and finally her “thin-lipped mouth”. This overtly homoerotic recollection concludes with Suzy’s memory of Jennie kissing her the first day they met, telling her: “‘You’re the prettiest thing I’ve ever seen – I think I’m going to love you? [sic]’ And we’ve been friends ever since” (114). There is “more love” for Suzy, with Jennie. Unlike the fashionable dress that had turned Suzy into an image-object for men’s consumption, in this case ordinary clothes enable a physical, erotically charged connection between two female friends. Throughout the novel, these kinds of brief relationships with women – with Lady Marjorie (“I’ll always love her” [221]) and Mrs Poupèye (“Wonderful woman! If I were a man I’d marry someone like that, and leave far far away, as far as possible” [230]) – represent Suzy’s way out of the sexual system that values her body as an image but refuses its agency to act and feel. They are prefigured here, in the deliberate contrast of two unfussy dresses to chic black velvet. This contrast – between Suzy’s restriction in a system of spectacular commodification and the glimpses of a felt, agential alternative – propels “Triple Sec”, which is charged by Suzy’s desire to escape her circumstances and her persistent fall back into them. These alternatives point to the feminist motivations for going beyond discursivity and representation to allow for the body and emotions: they allow for the possibility of “transformation, 239

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potentialities […] for thinking (and feeling) beyond what is already known” (Pedwell and ­Whitehead 2012: 116–117). But does this also make an unhelpful binary out of the distinction? Clare Hemmings has written about the importance of both epistemology and ontology in feminist theory and praxis. Contra the insistence among affect theorists and new materialists that poststructuralist projects concerned with epistemology foreclose the ontological, Hemmings (2005) has argued that feminist standpoint theory, for one, does not separate knowing from being. In Elspeth Probyn’s Sexing the Self (1993), for example, a standpoint epistemology or feminist reflexivity involves both feeling and knowing, “a negotiation of the difference between whom one feels oneself to be and the conditions of possibility for a liveable life” (Hemmings 2012: 149). This dissonance between one’s experience and what one knows would be better, is what “feminist politics necessarily begins from”, writes Hemmings (2012: 148). In this light, my reading of Rhys’ depiction of bodies in, and the feeling of, ordinary clothes does not have to be framed as a binary rejection of discursivity in favour of materiality. In fact, bringing representation and knowledge together with emotions and bodies, in the way Hemmings describes, has an important function in terms of understanding Rhys’ approach to clothes, for it lets us see how clothes in “Triple Sec” help forge Suzy’s feminist subjectivity. This phrase is not generally applied to Rhys’ characters. But the fashionable dress that permeates Part I of the manuscript especially, and the way it turns Suzy into an image-object, is partly what creates a sense of “rage, frustration and the desire for connection”, in Hemmings’ words (2012: 148). Fashion and its representational restrictions upset and shame her, as when she spends hours dressing for a dinner “as Tony likes it” (7) only to find she is as good as loaned to another man and implicitly compared to two “dark […] pretty” girls with “very low dresses on” (8). Suzy “felt shy and stupid”, and she blushed; the situation “made me somehow depressed” (9). These emotional experiences recounted at the start of the novel are where a kind of feminist subjectivity begins for Suzy.5 This is part of what motivates the diary: a “feeling of being wronged. You sense an injustice” (Ahmed 2017: 22), which makes Suzy want to ‘tell’. “I want to write about last night”, she says the morning after the humiliating dinner (7). This affective dissonance is then cemented through her knowledge that things could be better, when the “conditions of possibility for a liveable life” (Hemmings) are glimpsed in the companionship of Jennie and the bodily and emotional freedom and agency felt in their outmoded cotton dresses.

Conclusion: the matter of feminist modernist writing In fact, the blurriness between discursivity and materiality is a feature of Rhys and West’s scrappy, unfinished first texts, whose nature as material objects in the process of being made is hard to ­ignore. Thinking about writing in light of the foregoing discussion of the materiality of clothes – of what they do and their role in the actions and feelings of women – is especially helpful for thinking about feminist writing as a form of writing in process, one that has transformative ends in sight, though they may never be fully met. Ilya Parkins has stressed the usefulness of clothing in such methodological reflections, for it helps to “denote” “the action of construction” (2005: 290). By drawing attention to the role of clothes in forming feminist subjectivity, West and Rhys stress that formation as a material process – one of construction. The styles of their first manuscripts do this too. Laing characterises The Sentinel as a collaged text (2000: 10). Part bildungsroman, part suffrage novel, almost but not quite a roman-à-clef with mini-biographical portraits of real-life figures, it draws from West’s personal experience and, in documentary mode, on newspaper reports of, for example, protests and forced feeding. The rawness with which she writes of violence done to women, Laing reflects, could be seen as a sign of aesthetic failure (West 2002: xv). But this 240

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unpolished aesthetic also shows West’s search for a feminist literary voice. Just as Adela is grappling with a new sense of her sexuality and the shameful legacy of the sexual double standard, with her connections to other women and to the militant feminist movement, West too is feeling around for her own feminist orientation. Focusing on clothes in the novel as shaping and connecting forces, rather than discursive representations, as I have done, stresses the nature of the writing, too, as a material action with a purpose. For West, this is not only her own politics but, as for any suffrage novelist, the furthering of the Cause, “directing readers through identification to proper political action” (Green 2003: 225). Resisting the teleological notion of a particular feminist purpose to which The Sentinel is striving (permanently, since the vote was not won for several years after West put it aside), Jill Richards suggests: “The value in this early work is […] the way we can see the author trying things out […] It would seem that the search for an adequate form for the women’s movement was a matter of trial and error” (2020: 86). Instead, Richards sees in the novel’s indecisive form and non-linear repetitive plot echoes of the relational process of becoming feminist, “the creation of new spaces for politics made in between people acting and speaking in the present tense” (92). I have argued that those relations are also forged through clothes. Similarly, in the diary, Rhys chose a form that stresses everyday becoming, self-construction as a procedure in time, the always ongoing outcome of trying words out. As Suzy lurches between alternatives, between her felt experience, which does not “seem right” (Ahmed 2017: 22), and what she hopes would be a liveable life, she is living through the process of becoming a feminist. As we have seen, this process occurs as she experiences and reflects on the difference between being an image-object in fashionable clothes and the way everyday simple clothes allow her to feel, move, and connect to another woman outside the strictures of femininity. In this light, we can see Suzy’s diary as a material action. It is a process with a purpose: to expose her situation and try to imagine, tentatively and not quite successfully, a more liveable one. What this focus on the process of becoming and the figuring out of feminist politics through form also underlines is how significant feminism was to the development of literary modernism, a fact long established (Pykett 1995; Miller 1997) but somehow still sidelined (Seshagiri 2017). New social arrangements, for example, beyond the sexual morality that constrained West, Rhys, and their characters, required the construction of new aesthetic solutions. In The Sentinel and “Triple Sec”, the formation of feminist subjectivity required the trying out – or trying on – of different forms of writing. Clothes point us towards this constructive process, as material agents in the formation of modern, and feminist, subjectivity.

Notes 1 There is no reason to think they met, but West did review Rhys’ fiction, including Voyage in the Dark (1931), which was substantially informed by “Triple Sec”. Although she found the novel too gloomy, West asserted that Rhys was one of the finest writers of her generation (Seymour 2022: 139–140). 2 See the Introduction to West 2002 for Laing’s discussion of its relation to West’s feminist journalism and her later fiction, including the rewritten version of The Sentinel, another abandoned manuscript called Adela (1911/1912), and The Judge (1922) which also has themes of suffrage and sexuality. 3 For a study that “stay[s] with the negativity of unfeeling”, seeing the “racial and sexual politics of unfeeling not as oppression from above but as a tactic from below”, see Yao 2021. 4 On the affective labour of models and sex workers, see Ditmore 2007 and Wissinger 2007. 5 Interestingly, fashionable dress is also where Adela’s feminism begins in The Sentinel, in her recognition that a lace pelisse she saw for sale was made and sold by girls with poor working conditions and life chances (27–28). Yet fashionable dress, like Psyche Charteris’ Liberty gown, is also where I have located a materially driven feminist politics in West’s novel. A binary distinction between fashionable and ‘everyday’ clothes is ultimately hard to sustain, though they are distinguished in “Triple Sec”: fashionable garments are worn and full of emotions, after all, often precisely because of their commodity or spectacular status.

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Works cited Ahmed, Sara (2017) Living a Feminist Life, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Angier, Carole (1990) Jean Rhys: Life and Work, London: Faber. Barad, Karen (1998) “Getting Real: Technoscientific Practices and the Materialization of Reality,” ­differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 10(2): 87–128. Bland, Lucy (2001) Banishing the Beast: Feminism, Sex and Morality, London: IB Tauris. Burstein, Jessica (2012) Cold Modernism: Literature, Fashion, Art, College Park: Penn State University Press. Cunningham, Anne (2013) “‘Get On or Get Out’: Failure and Negative Femininity in Jean Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark,” Modern Fiction Studies, 59(2): 373–394. DiCenzo, Maria, with Lucy Delap and Leila Ryan (2011) Feminist Media History: Suffrage, Periodicals and the Public Sphere, Houndsmill: Palgrave Macmillan. Ditmore, Melissa (2007) “In Calcutta, Sex Workers Organise”, in Patricia Clough (ed.) The Affective Turn, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 170–186. Emery, Mary Lou (2003) “Jean Rhys and the Visual Cultures of Colonial Modernism,” Journal of Caribbean Literatures, 3(3): xi–xxii. Emery, Mary Lou (2007) Modernism, the Visual, and Caribbean Literature, New York and Cambridge: ­Cambridge University Press. Felski, Rita (1995) The Gender of Modernity, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Garrity, Jane (2010) “Virginia Woolf and Fashion”, in Maggie Humm (ed.) The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and the Arts, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 195–211. Glendinning, Victoria (1987) Rebecca West: A Life, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Green, Barbara (1997) Spectacular Confessions: Autobiography, Performative Activism, and the Sites of ­Suffrage 1905–1938, New York: St Martin’s Press. Green, Barbara (2003) “The New Woman’s Appetite for ‘Riotous Living’: Rebecca West, Modernist ­Feminism, and the Everyday,” in Ann Ardis and Leslie Lewis (eds.) Women’s Experience of Modernity, 1875–1945, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 221–236. Green, Barbara (2016) “The Feel of the Feminist Network: Votes for Women after The Suffragette,” Women: A Cultural Review, 27(4): 359–377. Green, Barbara (2017) Feminist Periodicals and Daily Life: Women and Modernity in British Culture, Cham: Palgrave. Grosz, Elizabeth (1994) Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporeal Feminism, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Hardt, Michael (2007) “Foreword: What Affects Are Good For,” in Patricia Clough (ed.) The Affective Turn, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. ix–xiii. Harris, Laurel (2021) “Impassagenwerk: Jean Rhys’s Interwar Fiction and the Modernist Impasse,” Journal of Modern Literature, 44(3): 19–34. Hemmings, Clare (2005) “Invoking Affect: Cultural Theory and the Ontological Turn,” Cultural Studies, 19(5): 548–567. Hemmings, Clare (2012) “Affective Solidarity: Feminist Reflexivity and Political Transformation,” Feminist Theory, 13(2): 147–161. Joannou, Maroula (2015) “From the Black Dress to the Red: Jean Rhys and Dress in Wide Sargasso Sea,” in Erica Johnson and Patricia Moran (eds.) Jean Rhys: Twenty-first Century Approaches, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Laing, Kathryn (2000) “‘The Sentinel’: Rebecca West’s Buried Novel,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, 19(1): 9–26. Lehmann, Ulrich (2000) Tigersprung: Fashion in Modernity, Cambridge: MIT Press. Marshik, Celia (2016) At the Mercy of their Clothes: Modernism, the Middlebrow and British Garment ­Culture, New York: Columbia University Press. Miller, Jane Eldridge (1997) Rebel Women: Feminism, Modernism and the Edwardian Novel, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Oliver, Sophie (2016) “Fashion in Jean Rhys/Jean Rhys in Fashion,” Modernist Cultures, 11(3): 312–330. Oliver, Sophie (2021) “Jean Rhys’s Dress,” The Essay, BBC Radio 3, 20 April: https://www.bbc.co.uk/ programmes/m000v870. Parkins, Ilya (2005) “Material Modernity: A Feminist Theory of Modern Fashion,” unpublished PhD thesis, York University, Toronto.

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Fashioning feminists in Rebecca West and Jean Rhys Parkins, Ilya (2008) “Building a Feminist Theory of Fashion: Karen Barad’s Agential Realism,” Australian Feminist Studies, 23(58): 501–515. Parkins, Ilya (2014) “Fashion”, in Celia Marshik (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Modernist Culture, New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 96–110. Parkins, Wendy (2002) “‘The Epidemic of Purple, White and Green’: Fashion and the Suffragette Movement in Britain 1908–14,” in Wendy Parkins (ed.) Fashioning the Body Politic: Dress, Gender, Citizenship, Oxford: Berg, pp. 97–124. Pedwell, Carolyn, and Anne Whitehead (2012) “Affecting Feminism: Questions of Feeling in Feminist Theory,” Feminist Theory, 13(2): 115–129. Plock, Vike Martina (2016) Modernism, Fashion and Interwar Women Writers, Edinburgh: Edinburgh ­University Press. Pykett, Lynn (1995) Engendering Fictions: The English Novel in the Early Twentieth Century, London: Arnold. Rhys, Jean (1924) “Triple Sec”, Jean Rhys Papers, Writings, The University of Tulsa, McFarlin Library, Department of Special Collections & University Archives. Rhys, Jean (1938) “The Forlorn Hope,” Jean Rhys Papers, Writings, The University of Tulsa, McFarlin Library, Department of Special Collections & University Archives. Rhys, Jean (1978) “Q&A: Making Bricks Without Straw,” Harper’s, 1 July: 70–71. Rhys, Jean (1979) Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography, London: Andre Deutsch. Richards, Jill (2020) The Fury Archives: Citizenship, Human Rights, and the International Avant-Gardes, New York: Columbia University Press. Rolley, Katrina (1990) “Fashion, Femininity and the Fight for the Vote,” Art History, 13(1): 47–71. Rosenberg, Leah (2004) “Caribbean Models for Modernism in the Work of Claude McKay and Jean Rhys,” Modernism/Modernity 11(2): 219–238. Rosenblum, Lauren (2019) “Rebecca West and Newspaper Writing as Modernist Genre,” Feminist Modernist Studies, 2(2): 180–93. Scott, Bonnie Kime (1990) “Rebecca West,” in Bonnie Kime Scott (ed.) The Gender of Modernism, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 560–569. Scott, Bonnie Kime (1995) Refiguring Modernism: Postmodern Feminist Readings of Woolf, West, and Barnes, vol 2: Women of 1928, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Seigworth, Greg, and Melissa Gregg (2009) “An Inventory of Shimmers,” in Greg Seigworth and Melissa Gregg (eds.) The Affect Theory Reader, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 1–28. Seshagiri, Urmila (2017) “Mind the Gap! Modernism and Feminist Praxis,” Modernism/Modernity Print Plus, 2(2). https://modernismmodernity.org/forums/modernism-and-feminist-praxis Seymour, Miranda (2022) I Used to Live Here Once: The Haunted Life of Jean Rhys, London: William Collins. Sheehan, Elizabeth (2018) Modernism à la Mode: Modernism and the Ends of Literature, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Thomas, Sue (2022) Jean Rhys’s Modernist Bearings and Experimental Aesthetics, London: Bloomsbury. Tickner, Lisa (1987) The Spectacle of Women: Imagery of the Suffrage Campaign 1907–14, London: Chatto & Windus. West, Rebecca (1913) “A Training in Truculence,” in Jane Marcus (ed.) The Young Rebecca: Writings of Rebecca West 1911–1917, London: Virago [1983], pp. 154–157. West, Rebecca (1914) “An Indissoluble Matrimony,” BLAST, 1: 98–117. West, Rebecca (2000) Selected Letters of Rebecca West, edited by Bonnie Kime Scott, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. West, Rebecca (2002) The Sentinel, edited by Kathryn Laing, Oxford: Legenda. Wilson, Mary, and Kerry Johnson (2013) Rhys Matters: New Critical Perspectives, Cham: Palgrave. Wissinger, Elizabeth (2007) “Always on Display: Affective Production in the Modelling Industry”, in Patricia Clough (ed.) The Affective Turn, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 231–260. Yao, Xine (2021) Disaffected: The Cultural Politics of Unfeeling in Nineteenth-Century America, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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16 “THE RULE OF THREE” Textual triads, trialogues, and women’s voices in Sylvia Plath, Jackie Kay, and debbie tucker green Deirdre Osborne

The trialogue is both an unusual literary form and a rarely examined literary strategy that interlaces single speakers of monologic segments into a community of voices. It creates a vocal dynamic in which the constant presence of a third speaker engenders a pattern of thought sequencing and a possibility of interaction (or not) that interrupts the balance of two sides – protagonist and antagonist, speaker and respondent, call and response – which constitutes the main communicative form of dialogue. In considering the trialogue as a collaborative method, Carole Richardson, Michelann Parr, and Terry Campbell find that we recognize the need to share our own voice, hear our voice reflected in the voices of others, and hear others’ voices reflected in our own. This leads us to a gradual rediscovery of our lived experiences and our selves. (2008: 282) Such an opportunity for interaction, revelation, and affirmation has implications for how minoritised experiences that are located beyond “dominant cultural logic” (Scott and Wynter 2000: 164) might be creatively articulated. The capacity of the trialogue form can generate experimental and experiential innovation to disrupt expectations and conventions about subject matter, structure, and genre in which the use of juxtaposition, be this of aesthetic styles or sociocultural histories and experiences, is a vital constituent in the composition and the effects the work produces. Sylvia Plath, Jackie Kay, and debbie tucker green – who span a chronological period of over sixty years and possess distinct backgrounds and heritages – can be productively grouped together through the ways in which they galvanise the trialogue form for centralising women’s first-­ person perspectives and engaging in patriarchal critique. Plath’s “Three Women: A Poem for Three Voices” (1962), published in Winter Trees (1971), Kay’s sequence “The Adoption Papers” in The Adoption Papers (1991), and tucker green’s trade (2005) were written for three different media, as radio drama, novella-poems, and play, respectively.1 “Three Women”, set in a hospital “Maternity Ward and round about” (40) renders three ante- and post-natal maternity experiences through live birth, miscarriage, and adoption. “The Adoption Papers” is divided into three chronologically ordered parts of ten chapters to poeticise an experience of one trans-racial adoption from three perspectives in 1960s Glasgow. trade is a continuous playtext without acts or scenes, dramatising DOI: 10.4324/9781003429951-20

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women’s sex tourism in a former colony, implicitly in the Caribbean region, with white tourists and black locals. While Martin Riedelsheimer and Korbinian Stöckl question “most, if not all critics’” attribution of a Caribbean setting, “not specified in any way in the playscript” but articulated only in the noun “‘canerows’ rather than ‘cornrows’” (2017: 122), their approach to trade, as dramatic literature serving theoretical models, means the distinct semiotics and meanings created by a Black woman writer’s play in performance, in the British theatre complex, are unacknowledged. tucker green’s dramatic idiom lends itself to accents variously described as “the sound and rhythm of British (black) urban speech” (Goddard 2005: 377) and “vocal patterning that combines pidgin, Creole, standard English and black urban vernaculars” (Tyler 2020: 138), and was rendered by the three actresses (of Caribbean heritage) for trade’s 2005 premiere production by the RSC.2 Each writer employs an arresting tripartite structure. Plath and Kay split the speaker into three female parts, First Voice, Second Voice, Third Voice in “Three Women”, and Birth Mother, Adoptive Mother, and Daughter in “The Adoption Papers”, while tucker green specifies that “three black actresses” play all of the characters in trade’s dramatis personae (4). As the whole play is composed of three non-stop interacting speakers, they are mimetically present throughout a performance. What is immediately noticeable is that there are no personal names but designations: Voice, Mother, Local. This economy of information emphasises speakers’ functions, symbolising how women exist in generalised and subordinated roles in patriarchal social relations. All three writers wrest the women from anonymising disregard so that the designations serve to evoke both Everywoman figures and idiosyncratic individuals. Plath’s radio drama conveys the audio-medium’s omniscient quality in activating ‘close listening’ of the disembodied performed voice – oral and aural – recalling Charles Bernstein’s observation that “sound as a material and materializing dimension of poetry also calls into play such developments as sound poetry, performance poetry, radio plays and radio ‘space’” (1998: 4). Kay’s poems were initially broadcast as a radio drama in 1990.3 In its novella form, Kay’s design resonates with Mikhail Bakhtin’s “architectonic unity” which, Russell Greer writes: “implies an understanding of the writer’s personal relation to the topic under consideration” (2013: 72). Kay employs three different typefaces on the printed text’s visual plain to differentiate her speakers: Palatino for Daughter, Gill for Adoptive Mother, Bodoni for Birth Mother, which typographically denotes three separate perspectives for the reader to visualise as voices in their ‘mind’s eye’. tucker green’s characters are “Three LOCAL women” (4). The protagonists are Novice, Regular, Local, (who are all sexually betrayed by Bumster, Local’s long-term partner). The three black actresses play eleven roles across sex, race, class, and generation (women, men, black, white, working-class, middle-class, young, and mature). Lea Sawyers describes trade as “Three movements” with “a threefold dimension of voice” (2020: 218) and Elaine Aston refers to “the trinary structure favoured by tucker green” and “the play’s trio of protagonists” (2020: 152, 161). As both ‘read’ and ‘said’, the triadic vocalisations reveal how all three texts’ aesthetics produce an (alternative) artistic archiving of particular eras and contexts of women’s lives. Grouped together, these three works function as a radical antidote to sociocultural verities formed from within a binary system of oppositional categories that buttress patriarchal and imperial-colonial power systems. The texts destabilise those resilient and essentialising tropes that have long underpinned thinking about women as sexualised, racialised, and pacified bodies within the social systems and institutions that privilege men. This chapter examines the structuring principles of triangles: the ‘triad’, the ‘trialogue’, and ‘the rule of three’ in each work, and the effects that such an articulatory strategy produces in considering women’s writing as fringed by the legacies of empire. Plath lived in the United Kingdom at a time when post-war migration from Africa, South-East Asia, and the Caribbean was changing 245

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the nation’s demographics and enriching British culture, a context of which she appears to be politically oblivious, consolidated by her racial privilege. Maeve O’Brien identifies how, when denied a flat in London in 1960 due to no “children, Negroes or dogs”, it is only “the disruption such polities [sic] caused her personally” (2022: 104) that Plath notes – not the wider racism of landlords and surrounding society’s hostility towards people of African descent. The grim histories of empire – the violence of acquiring territories and subduing populations, separating colonised mothers and children as a policy of British rule – while metaphorically traceable in “Three Women”, are unambiguously foregrounded in “The Adoption Papers” and trade. Although Plath’s literary corpus has been a long-term resident of the white canon, “Three Women” (a less racially problematic work than much of her writing) has received less scholarly attention than “The Adoption Papers” or trade. A performance analysis has yet to be conducted for the “Three Women” 1968 radio production or its revivals, or of any theatre productions – notwithstanding Nerys Williams’ recent insightful essay on the ‘poetics of listening’ (2022). Adapted for Camden People’s Theatre in 1996, it was performed by one actress. Joceline Powter telescoped all three voices and explored three stages of pregnancy and symbolically used props to enhance her movement. The sound effects of a crying baby and a typewriter added to the atmosphere. It was a strong performance that went through a range of emotions with ease and simplicity (Klugman 1996: n.pag.) Robert Shaw’s 2009 production played in London, Edinburgh, and off-Broadway, of which reviewer Lyn Gardner notes twenty years had passed since a professional theatre production. While acknowledging that the raw, women-centred drama, depicting the agonies of labour and maternal passion, was exceptional for 1962, Gardner anticipates: in a theatre world that happily accepts the poetic offerings of Sarah Kane and Debbie Tucker Green [sic], or the staged possibilities of The Waves, one of Plath’s own inspirations for the piece, I see no reason why it shouldn’t be brought to life. However, she concludes that this production diminished the written text: what we are offered is tinkling piano music, mournful mood lighting, an innocuous pale setting, as well as three perfectly good but indisputably ladylike performances that capture none of the wounded redness of Plath’s poetry, and do her the disservice of making her sound bleached and somewhat prissy. It’s a pity. What might have been a wonder ends up a mere curiosity. (2009: n.pag.) By triangulating “Three Women”, “The Adoption Papers”, and trade into a literary-critical relationship, this investigation follows Sarah Hastings in “the practice of using multiple sources of data […] establishing corroborating evidence” to provide multiple “lines of sight” and contexts “to enrich understanding” (2012: n.pag.). In each text, three women’s voices are the conduits by which to articulate a compelling range of woman-centring subject matter: un(der)represented experiences (childbirth, miscarriage, trans-racial adoption, female sex tourism) and sociocultural histories (the medicalisation of maternity, interracial relationships, imperial-colonial legacies of the British Empire). As a biological birth mother (Plath), as a transracially adoptive daughter (Kay), 246

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and as a person of post-war Caribbean migratory heritage (tucker green), the writers clearly have the recognisable experiential credentials to bring authority and edge to the topics they imaginatively render. However, caution should be maintained towards ascribing biographical associations or presumed feminist intent to their work. Heather Clark comments: I believe Plath would have been surprised, but pleased, to find herself a feminist icon […] She believed in equality of opportunity for women—a basic feminist principle—and was enraged by the sexual double standard of her day. (2021: 1075, 1077) For Kay, feminism is inextricable from gay rights and racial justice, as captured in a recent poem, “A Life in Protest”, which creates a memoryscape of Black women’s feminism in 1980s Britain: I remember the first OWAAD like a first kiss, and the first BLG, the euphoria, faces I’d been missing my whole life: Olivette, Mo, George, Carmen, Gloria Gail, Liliane, Hansa, Adjoa Femi, Berni, Claudette, Vadnie, Grace. Change your life meetings at A Woman’s Place. (2022) In relation to tucker green, much has been written about her in terms of anger in conjunction with her salutary critiques of white feminism. Aston states that “it is the anger among women that keeps them separated and isolated from each other that comes to dominate tucker green’s plays” (2020: 164). Elisabeth Massana identifies scholars Aston, Lynette Goddard and Vicky Angelaki as foregrounding “the work’s feminist politics, even if the playwright herself does not profess such an alignment” (2020: 258). Notwithstanding the play’s concern with the continuities and consequences of imperial-colonial violence, trade also highlights the sexual double standard where women end up more disadvantaged or compromised than men. Each author writes from and sets their work in a specific period of contemporary British social history (1960s, 1990s, 2000s). They inherit the ‘canon fodder’ of literary and dramatic conventions and transform them through the distinctive trialogue structure. Their dramatic-poetics render the genres of drama and poetry as porous categories for representing women’s experiences that have been, for the most part, marginalised, ignored, or erased in cultural histories. In grouping these three texts together, it does not follow that history or the sociocultural heritages of the writer and their work are cast aside, but that the effects wrought by the trialogue structure and form can elicit perspectives towards their subject matter (women’s bodies, lives, relationships) that diverge from mainstream thinking and its restrictive cultural clamps.

“The rule of three”: the triangle, the trialogue, and the triad As Neil Grossman observes, with regard to interactional dynamics, “Triangles are described as a three-person subsystem and the smallest stable group in an emotional system” (n.d.: n.pag.). Yet within the three-person group and triangulation, instability also lurks. Three simultaneously polarised positions are possible, or a two-versus-one dynamic, or unanimity. Whereas the dramatic monologue is a conversation with self and projected or imagined other, and the dialogue 247

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an exchange between two that can be adversarial, the triangle promises a circuit of perspectives in concord and discord, each one constantly corroborating the other two’s existence. A triangular relationship offers the scope of an always active conversation in which, as Richardson, Parr, and Campbell identify, “dissonances, consonances, and resonances” may be traced that are further layered by “our inner voice, the voice we share, and the voices we hear” (2008: 281). Placing Plath, Kay, and tucker green interpretatively together elicits a further triangle as a rhetorical frame: ­Aristotle’s Logos, Ethos, and Pathos. Their texts’ broad arguments (logos) might be summarised as: women’s experiences of childbirth are not homogeneous, even as the medical profession processes them systematically, irrespective of complex emotions of maternal passion, ambivalence, and morbidity; experiences of trans-racial adoption produce perspectives outside socially projected norms and alter conceptions of families and nation; the negative aftermath of imperialcolonial rule is disproportionately experienced by those people whose heritages bear the burden of dispossession. In relation to ethos, women speakers are the sole authority for persuading their audiences to understand the complexities of women’s lives and the injustices women can face. tucker green’s casting directive ensures that access to the play is only possible through Black women. The three texts’ use of distinctively stylised poetics to render a woman’s viewpoint makes an appeal to the reader’s/listener’s/spectator’s emotions and values (pathos). In each of the texts, the controlling mind of the woman writer induces the reader/listener/spectator to engage with three distinct sets of speakers, to follow the arguments, even as imagery, symbol, rhythm, punctuation, and dramaticpoetic devices produce oral, aural, and visual effects and affect. Moreover, while logos is a constituent in Aristotle’s rhetorical triangle, Albrecht Frenz reminds us that the three forms, monologue, dialogue, and trialogue – most associated with poetry and drama – “contain the Greek word ‘logos’ (word, teaching)” so that “The concept of ‘logos’ […] expresses the creative as well as the ordering power of the universe as well as that of the individuum” (2014: 13). The progression from monologue to dialogue to trialogue evolves into a community of juxtaposed voices. To what degree might these triadic texts repurpose Frenz’s observation, to recognise logos as a literary device for validating women’s perspectives beyond the sightlines of the universalising patriarchal lens? Hélène Cixous’ call for generating a pluri-versal anti-­patriarchal aesthetics advocates that “women must write through their bodies” (1976: 886) in forming the body of their texts. In concord, Julia Kristeva theorises that women respond to their socio-­symbolic exclusion by attempting “to find a specific discourse closer to the body and emotions, to the unnameable repressed by the social contract” to propose a her-ethics that is drawn from the mother–child paradigm (1986: 200). In that vein, Leah Souffrant argues: “If the body is the ground for writing, then pregnancy and childbirth must be intensely transformative” in advocating “the relationship between the generative female body and the creative female poet” (2009: 26). Plath, Kay, and tucker green’s trialogues differentially centralise the reproductive body, and the racialised body, wherein the affective power of maternity and motherhood in cultural history contours each work. Plath and Kay’s poetry offer an absorbing aesthetics of variables in maternity in 1960s Britain. Even though there is no reference to any of trade’s women characters being mothers, tucker green’s characters are located in a formerly plantocratic setting in which perpetuation of the enslavement system was reliant upon violence towards Black women through forced reproduction. The Black woman character, Local, inherits the causal arc from the commodified woman’s body in enslavement history, through to new forms of exploitation in contemporary capitalism. Diane Middlebrook describes “Three Women” as a “suite of monologues for noninteracting voices” (2006: 164). While the three voices neither overlap, nor are the personae textually aware of each other’s existence, the aurality created by their sequentially individual stories unfolding 248

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on the page does forge interaction. The poetic voices are an interwoven tripartite experience of an event central to human life that only mothers can do, childbirth, which is further reinforced in performance by three actors enunciating each voice, three actors who interact in terms of: timing, pause, modulation, accent, pace, pitch, and volume. Of the resonances that weave the triad together, or dissonances between their social roles (mother, wife, student), it is the ward as clinical sensorium that conveys the shared trauma – rather than euphoria – of childbirth. First Voice describes: “The sheets, the faces, are white […] Swabbed and lurid with disinfectants, sacrificial” (43), the “satchels of instruments” (44) and the evocation of general anaesthetic: “My eyes are squeezed by this blackness. / I see nothing” (45). Second Voice observes: “How white these sheets are” (42) before the curettage procedure, “I feel it enter me, cold, alien, like an instrument” (46) until “I am bled white as wax, I have no attachments” (49), and the Third Voice adds: “I have seen the white clean chamber with its instruments. / It is a place of shrieks” (44) and, in an allusion to abortion (illegal in 1962): “I should have murdered this, that murders me” (44). The lyricism of each discrete Voice could be three separate poems, but the developmental connections Plath composes produce a symphonic whole in which each juxtaposed voice harmonises, extends, and corroborates the other on the carousel of pregnancy and its childbirth outcomes: live birth and childrearing, live birth and giving up one’s child for others to raise, and death of a child. Similarly, to read “The Adoption Papers” with its visual energy of inter-changing typography, is to see and understand how each speaker is implicated structurally, formally, and thematically with the other. Like Plath, Kay does not orchestrate the speakers’ direct engagement on the page, but hers do have meta-awareness of each other, offering readers opportunities for simultaneously appreciating irony and poignancy in an overview of the ever-shifting emotional terrain. In “Chapter 10: The Meeting Dream”, the three women, distinguished by their typefaces, imagine the Birth Mother’s and Daughter’s appearances within the same stanza: We are not as we imagined: I am smaller, fatter, darker I am taller, thinner and I’d always imagined her hair dark brown not grey. I can see my chin in hers that is all, though no doubt my mum will say, when she looks at the photo, she’s your double she really is. (32) The terminal alliterative consonance (“er”) of the daughter and birth mother create unfinished comparatives. These emerge from a shared negation – “we are not” – a failure of the imagination to be accurate. Kay creates a simultaneous experience of present (the anaphoric “I am”), past (past perfect tense: “I’d…imagined”), and future (“will say”) that moves beyond realist temporal constraints into a realm of reverie, a technique that characterises much of the poem’s style. As Gaston Bachelard observes: reverie is entirely different from the dream by the very fact that it is always more or less centered upon one object. The dream proceeds on its own way in a linear fashion […] The reverie works in a star pattern. It returns to its center to shoot out new beams. (1964: 14) 249

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In contrast, trade, a continuous text shared by three speakers, pulsates with verbal propulsions uttered by three constantly interacting characters/performers on page and stage who ‘trade’ putdowns in a series of stand-offs. A textual unity of purpose is juxtaposed with the dramatised disharmony of standpoints. The playtext demands a seamlessly continuous enunciation even as overlapping and interrupted lines look syntactically fractured by hyphens, the emphatic insistence of italics, the self-consciousness of inverted commas, forward slashes, ellipses, and unstated intentions signalled by brackets. Its aurality, defined as “the sounding of the writing”, competes with orality “and its emphasis on breath, voice, speech” in delivering the text (Bernstein 1998: 13, emphasis in original). REGULAR People like you/ that are ‘here’. I go ‘there’ to get away from that. Least I aint/ I aint / see… NOVICE REGULAR what? What? NOVICE ‘That’ (re REGULAR). REGULAR What? Her. NOVICE REGULAR What? LOCAL Yet. (9–10) As Regular and Novice attempt to assert individual distance from the joint enterprise of their sex tourism through classist and ageist criteria, Local, as onlooker in the triad, could side with either one (and occasionally does). However, the acerbic “Yet” puts both in their place. While in physical proximity as performers (and typographically), the experiential chasms between the three are intensified in the unfolding mutual awareness of their predicaments in relation to Bumster. The effect of his shared betrayal and shattering of illusions that each woman witnesses of the other creates a bleak unity, without empathy. To convey the shifting allegiances and dynamics between the multiple characters requires a demanding method of verbal baton-passing in order to transition into each other’s sentences. tucker green’s plays necessitate such intense ensemble playing “because she undermines conventional syntax and weaves together her own melodic version of a script that allows multiple voices and perspectives to co-exist” (Osborne 2007: 232–233). Language, emancipated beyond formalising constraints, remains centre-stage; as actor Anthony Walsh confirms: There isn’t a dash or a dot or a comma or anything that is not supposed to be executed and it gets tricky when you’ve got a few characters in one scene […] You can start something, get cut off and then have to go back to that sentence you started three lines later. (Khan 2013: n. pag.) The shared endeavour of completing the throughline of a thought, sentence, or episode as a triad is reliant upon the choreography of lines for actors to communicate the aurality of the written text, as much as serving the emotional intention, characterisation, plot, and production semiotics.

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“I shall be a heroine of the peripheral” (Plath): birth(in)g the text Childbirth, the only means for perpetuating human existence, is persistently marginalised in “dominant [patriarchal] cultural logic” (Scott and Wynter 2000: 164) and by extension, literary genres. Souffrant argues that “Plath’s poetic style – though innovative in its own right, with its distinctive rhythms, fearless observations, and striking imagery – could not adequately express the complexities of her ideas on motherhood” (28–29), engendering her turning to the enunciable capacity of drama. However, Plath’s evocation of the relationship of mother to unborn child focuses upon the delivery, not, as Bracha Ettinger conceptualises, “the intra-uterine imaginary” where “Matrixial trans-subjectivity hosts moments of coemergence-in-differentiation that weave their own time zone” (2005: 706). “Three Women” creates a generic hinterland between love poetry, confessional, tésmoignage, auto/bio/graphical, and eulogy forms. Christopher Grobe suggests that confessional poetry has always been a performance genre: “Infused at every stage of its creation and dissemination, with the synesthetic ‘breath’ of embodied orality” (2012: 215–216). Although evincing traces of Grobe’s account, “Three Women” is not confessional. The triad of voices (performed aloud) disrupts the self-inward-facing guise of disclosure, even if the intimate domestic medium of radio (prior to portable or digital media) conveys the illusion of three women’s interspersed, innermost thoughts, connecting listeners to a collective woman-centric experience and a topic rarely endowed with artistic merit. Its first publication (by Turret Books in 1968), stereotypically retitles First Voice as Wife, Second as SECY (secretary), and Third as Girl. As aired on the BBC’s Third Programme in 1962 (which has not survived), the broadcast script indicates Penelope Lee as The Wife, Jill Balcon reading Sec., and Janette Richer as the Student. The surviving 1968 BBC recording cast Barbara Jefford reading The Wife. Carrie Smith observes: “One commentator in the Audience Research Report […] noted that ‘the poem needed to be seen in print and pondered upon”’ (2022: 250). Smith’s summary of the responses also reveals the panoply of misogyny and dismissive male comments: “a woman’s poem”, an “obstetric” poem and “tarted up street-corner gossip” (251). While Linda Wagner-Martin states that “all the knowledge Plath had acquired about pregnancy and childbirth, and social attitudes toward both, came to fruition in her magnificent – and ­radical – radio play” (2003: 101), Plath’s poetics cannot be cleaved to her own life. Although Plath underwent two of the three experiences of maternity she portrays, she did not give up a child for adoption. Third Voice is wholly imaginary, thereby unsettling the subgeneric autobiographical aspect. As Clark reveals, Plath “could be cruel in her letters and poems towards ‘barren women’, or to those who had made the decision to have an abortion” (2021: 1076). Jacqueline Rose exposes how intentional fallacy underpins much Plath criticism: There she is! Sylvia Plath – nothing hidden. The true story told. Isn’t that why she wrote in the way she did? […] Biography loves Sylvia Plath. [… I watch this story shut down around her, clamping her writing into its hollow wooden frame. (2002) Furthermore, in formulating initiatory ideas about “Three Women”, Plath notes in her journal, “Much easier to work up because not personal” (Walker 2019: 50). The slippage between the confessional genre, the mode with which Plath has been primarily associated, with its beguiling, self-revelatory strategies, and the biographical critical filter that her poetry attracts, is redressed by Rose’s caveat, “if biography is relevant to the work of Sylvia Plath, this does not make the work biographical” (2002: n. pag.). Moreover, Clark points out that, “When we read Plath as merely

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a confessional poet […] we trivialize her political awareness and involvement” (2021: 1080). In support of the political edge, Williams records, “Written some five months before abortion was legalized in the UK and a year following the breaking of the Thalidomide scandal, ‘Three Women’ places women’s gynaecological rights to the center stage for a listening public” (2022: n. pag.). Sarah A. Kuczynski goes so far as to apply Grantly Dick Read’s guide, Childbirth Without Fear (popular in 1950s United Kingdom and United States, which Plath owned and notated), arguing that: “the stages of labor outlined in Three Women closely follow Read’s prescriptive directions for a natural birthing experience”, and concluding: “Three Women has yet to be considered as a commentary on this specific obstetrical movement” (2018: 147). Kuczynski’s discussion pertains only to First Voice, however, and extracting one voice not only ignores the “triple-voiced verse” (Souffrant 2009: 29), but erases how Plath’s trialogue of women’s voices haunt each other – how they could be each other, which is the whole point. Maternity as a process is driven by protean, mutable, visceral, and violent physical states and Plath’s First Voice poetically augurs Kristeva’s sensational “Stabat Mater” (1985) some decades later. Kristeva’s dual text juxtaposes the lived, embodied birth narrative alongside the intellectual deconstruction of the culturally idealised symbols of maternity. Her bold-type, left-justified account of giving birth to her son functions as maternal marginalia to her academic philosophical exegesis. Plath’s imagery for First Voice – “There is no miracle more cruel than this. / I am dragged by the horses, the iron hooves. / […] / I am the centre of an atrocity. / What pains, what sorrows must I be mothering? / Can such innocence kill and kill?” (44) – is echoed in Kristeva’s: “My body is no longer mine, it writhes, suffers, bleeds […] As if I had not brought a child but suffering into the world […] One does not bear children in pain, it’s pain that one bears” (1985: 138). In connecting women’s potentially generative bodies to their writing as a form of maternal poetics, we should remember, as Kirsten Hudson notes, that “not every pregnant body becomes a maternal body, and not every maternal body has experienced pregnancy” (2014: 41). Plath’s “Three Women” offers a graphic pregnancy-childbirth-aftermath, including pre-natal death, which, as Hudson points out, Kristeva ignores – an omission that surely problematises the revolutionary reach of the herethical model: By seeing the biological birth event of a live child as the standard on which to develop a herethics […] Kristeva fails to take into consideration the unique embodied ‘flesh knowledge’ of the catastrophic principle that is brought into being by a child’s non-arrival. (2014: 44) Plath’s Second Voice represents this missing perspective. The “flesh knowledge” is all-­determining of this speaker’s experiences. While it is well-trodden critical ground to note Plath’s use of the moon as the cipher to woman, Second Voice is out of joint with this lunar cycle. Although promising fertility, her continued menstrual cycle confirms she is not pregnant, or that she has miscarried another child. The moon “drags the blood-black sea around / Month after month, with its voices of failure” (46). The cycle does not bring hope of renewal but compounds constant loss and selfrecrimination, charted from “the small red seep, I did not believe it” (40), endorsed by “I could not believe it” (41) in trying to fathom her faulty female functioning, which is unlike the machine’s productivity: “Tap, tap, tap, steel pegs. I am found wanting” (41). Rose notes: “the only one of the three who alludes to a husband is the one who miscarries” (2002: n. pag.). Is it to be inferred that working contributes to her miscarriages? In 1960s Britain, middle-class women were encouraged to dedicate themselves to motherhood and raising children, and many employers fired women once

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they married. Smith underscores such workplace realities and judgement of the mother’s body in “Three Women” actress Jill Balcon’s 1953 memo to the BBC: “now that I’m several stone lighter again and not likely to give birth on transmission may I – please – come and work for you again?” (246). However, Plath’s women are middle-class and white. There are no references to economic hardship. Their expected maternal experiences are not shadowed by financial worries, domestic insecurity, or unemployment. Childbirth is part of an expected trajectory in what seem to be lives of material comfort for First Voice and Second Voice. Likewise Third Voice is a university student who returns to study after her trauma at the time when only 25% of U.K. university students were women (Jones and Castle 1986: 290). As pregnancy became telescoped into the same realm as disease in the evolution of the clinic and the modern hospital, the medicalisation of childbirth became dominated by technologies to extract the pregnancy from the pregnant woman. As Jennifer Shaw identifies: pregnancy increasingly came under the surveillance of the medical gaze in modernity, the aims of medicine in relation to the sick body were increasingly used in studying the pregnant body. […] the language of medical science has sought to be voice of the body without interference from the patient. (2012: 111) Plath’s maternity ward is represented as the space to process the birthing woman out of her unique state – to which no male has direct access – as swiftly as possible. Paradoxically, a sterile environment realises fertility, and Plath juxtaposes female fecundity with male medical expertise and apparatuses for controlling childbirth. The white hospital space is the tabula rasa onto which the women’s destinies become written through the penetrative gaze upon the female object by the male clinician and his entourage. The woman’s body is subjected to the instruments, personnel, and choreography of their activity. The ward exists in a state of readiness for the “great event” (40) and relinquishment of individuality – as First Voice describes – “I do not have to think, or even rehearse” (40). Once the three women’s bodies are no longer gestating their babies, they become inserted into a context of returning to normal (non-pregnant) functioning as quickly as possible: Third Voice: “There are the clothes of a fat woman I do not know. / […] I am a wound walking out of hospital” (49); Second Voice: “I am flat and virginal, which means nothing has happened” (49); and First Voice: “It is a terrible thing / To be so open: it is as if my heart / Put on a face and walked into the world” (50). Instruments also intervene for Kay’s birth mother and daughter, the daughter describing her own birth in the prelude: “I was pulled out with forceps / left a gash down my left cheek / four months inside a glass cot” (10), a stanza reprised in Chapter 8 but adding her Adoptive Mother’s devotion: “she came faithful from Glasgow to Edinburgh / and peered through the glass / she would not pick another baby” (28). Her birth mother (who will give her up) is determined that her baby survives, while “encased in glass like a museum piece” and “willing life into her”, Kay shows her maternal nurture overpowers her intellectual decision to relinquish her baby: “to the glass cot / I push my nipples through” (13). Juxtaposed with “willing life into her” is that the birthing woman can produce death as well as life, a corpse or a living human being, and she can die herself. Plath’s Third Voice asks: “and what if two lives leaked between my thighs?” (44), conjuring maternal morbidity. Kay’s birth mother fantasises a post-natal murderousness within a maternal ambivalence; the horrifying impulse, poetically cushioned by sibilance and alliteration that reinforces the work’s reverie, eases the reader into the desperate contemplation of infanticide:

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I’ll suffocate her with a feather pillow Bury her under a weeping willow Or take her far out to sea And watch her tiny eight-pound body (13) The poetic subjects in Plath and Kay cannot be divorced from the contouring realities of the time in which their depicted pregnancies occur, in which contraception (if unmarried) and abortion were illegal, unmarried mothers were stigmatised, and systems of forced adoption and trans-racial adoption provided ‘illegitimate’ or orphaned children to (white) childless married couples. Third Voice and Birth Mother are both teenage girls. As a result of unplanned pregnancy, their lives change forever. They bear the consequences while the father disappears. Although Kay’s Birth Mother had a passionate relationship with Daughter’s birth father: He was sorry; we should have known better He couldn’t leave Nigeria […] I am nineteen (12) In comparison, Plath’s Third Voice starkly describes rape through the classical Greek myth of Leda, raped by Zeus: “I wasn’t ready / […] I wasn’t ready. I had no reverence” (42). Their incredulity towards solely bearing the consequences is a lament that both poetic voices share: Plath’s Third Voice – “I thought I could deny the consequence— / But it was too late for that. It was too late” (42) while Kay’s birth mother persona states “I had no other choice” (17), “I lived the scandal, wore it casual / as a summer’s dress” (28). While Andrew Walker maintains that “Plath’s sense of dramatic language and genre were decisively formed by dramatic forms of poetry and radio dramas”, noting “Three Women” as a “decisive transition in Plath’s poetics” (2019: 44, 51), her awareness of the anglophone Caribbean heritage writers, whose post-war influences transformed British culture, remains a dimension to explore beyond the limits of this chapter.4 The social consequences are glimpsed in First Voice observing the hospital nursery’s newborns: “There are some with thick black hair, there are some bald. / Their skin tints are pink or sallow, brown or red; / They are beginning to remember their differences” (47), inferring they enter a world stratified according to sex-gender, race, class. Her vision, “I see them showering like stars on to the world— / On India, Africa, America” (47–8), evokes three major locations of the English imperial enterprise. The male “stars” of the nursery, the future world dominators, unnervingly echo Third Voice’s earlier: “And all I could see was dangers: doves and words, / Stars and showers of gold – conceptions, conceptions” (41), rendered through Zeus’ rape of Danae as golden celestial rain. Plath reconnects the stars to Third Voice as she views her daughter in the nursery, a baby born from rape: “She is crying at the dark, or at the stars” (47). While childbirth might link women around the globe and across race and class, the economic conditions and ethnic disparities in pre-natal and post-partum care persist today (MBRRACE-UK 2020), notwithstanding those conditions for childbirth in the early 1960s. Such a reality contrasts to the represented experiences of Plath’s three women, all of whom survive without any life-­ threatening birthing complications. Where is “the shadow that is companion to this whiteness” (1992: 33), as Toni Morrison names the Africanist presence – which she restores to centrality in 254

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American literary history? The “shadow” is unequivocally central to Kay’s and tucker green’s works as they represent the consequences of Britain’s imperial-colonial rule in terms of race and gender.

“Closer than blood. / Thicker than water. Me and my daughter” (Kay): mothertext and trans-racial aesthetics Souffrant quotes Rachel Blau DuPlessis’ claim that: “Motherhood leads to, demands, provokes, and excites innovations in poetry and inventions in poetics” (2009: 25). “Mothertext” (Osborne 2017, 2019) moves between mother and daughter standpoints, from a daughter’s reflections upon her mother or, as Kay imaginatively constructs, both birth and adoptive mothers’ reflections upon their daughter. It rescues the nuances and possibilities of this relationship submerged in literature and institutional silencing in which, as Adrienne Rich identifies, it has been “minimized and trivialized in the annals of patriarchy” (1977: 226). Representing maternity exposes the constraints of genre through highlighting the limitations of linear, realist, and naturalist narrative forms as a means of articulating the inter-subjectivity and co-affect of mother and unborn child. Kay’s work complicates the daughter–mother in utero inter-subjectivity and co-affect even further as she reworks it into an after-birth affiliation where the Adoptive Mother declares their bond: “Closer than blood. / Thicker than water. Me and my daughter” (34). Notably, Kay has quoted her mother in real life: “‘If we hadn’t met I would have come to find you’, she says. ‘You are as close as if I had given birth to you myself, she says’” (Kay et al. 2016: n. pag.). Like Plath’s Third Voice, Kay’s Birth Mother gives up her baby for adoption because the circumstances of their pregnancies give both women no choice. Daughter scripts her birth and life through a particular kind of textual formation. While Ikram Hili (2021) identifies the abundance of paper images in Plath’s poems, paperwork (and its intimations of consent), medical records, case files, adoption documents, are nowhere mentioned in “Three Women”. But they are central to the transaction between Kay’s Adoptive and Birth mothers: “I’m not a mother / until I’ve signed that piece of paper” (16) and “My name signed on a dotted line” (17). In not wishing to weight either writer’s work to biopic, it is worth noting the different paperwork (de)-attachments – as rendered by a writer who is already a mother but who had never given a child up for adoption (Plath), and a writer who had not yet met her birth mother, but had been given up for adoption – and was a recent mother herself (1988) when she finished the work (1990), written over a ten-year period (Kay). Both writers represent different reasons for their speakers’ pregnancies but the outcomes are similarly heart-rending. The effects on these bereft young mothers will be lifelong, no matter their attempts to repress the memory. A resilient umbilical-poetics haunts the texts. For Plath’s Third Voice: “Her cries are hooks that catch and grate like cats. / It is by these hooks she climbs to my notice” (47). In “The Adoption Papers”: I cannot pretend she’s never been my stitches pull and threaten to snap my own body a witness leaking blood to sheets, milk to shirts (13) No matter the mental exertion represented, to expunge the trace of babies whom they cannot raise, their bodies remind them that they have given birth. 255

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What Jennifer Yee terms a “mixophobic” model, born of imperial-colonial power, created a position of antagonism towards mixedness: “the nightmare vision of racial mixing that dominated from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century” (2003: 411). While interracial couples faced prejudice, it was once children were born that the fear of and antipathy towards mixedness produced socio-political responses riddled with stigmatisation and negative conceptualisations. As Chamion Caballero and Rosalind Edwards note: “by the time of mass migration in the 1950s, such attitudes were firmly established in British popular and institutional thought” (2010: 4) and underpinned the adoption and fostering system and social attitudes, as “The Adoption Papers” vividly represents. Notably, neither Birth Mother nor Daughter imagine each other racially in the poem, whereas Adoptive Mother is directly caught up in racial markers, from the time she adopts her baby. “I said oh you know we don’t mind the colour. / Just like that, the waiting was over” (14), through to being unequipped to prepare her daughter for racism which, as a white person, she has never experienced, and for which Daughter holds her accountable: “all this talk about her being black, / I brought her up as my own / […] colour matters to the nutters; / but she says my daughter says / it matters to her” (24). “The Adoption Papers” speaks to a particular history of mid- to late-twentieth century social services in Britain. The social worker became a new iteration of the historical white scribe of the dictated life stories of enslavement survivors, mediating the oral testimony for publication (public records). Post-war social services files (at a time when Black social workers were rare) have constituted important source texts. One exception was author E.R. Braithwaite. He offers a Black social worker’s perspective and recognises the ways in which Black and mixed children fared in 1960s white social services in Paid Servant (1962), published the same year as “Three Women”. From Isha McKenzie-Mavinga’s and Thelma Perkins’ In Search of Mr. McKenzie: Two Sisters’ Quest for an Unknown Father (1991), to Valerie Mason-John’s Borrowed Body (2006), and Michelle Scally-Clarke’s I Am (2001), the evidence documented in social services files has inscribed upon care-experienced girls’ identities in detailed and distressingly forensic ways – replete with the normalised racism in descriptions of the children and their developmental milestones. The evidence that Kay’s Daughter seeks in tracing her birth mother is extracted from such a traumatic legacy.

“All a we three” (tucker green): women’s dramatic dissonance tucker green’s characteristic play ‘text’ offers opportunities for audiences and readers to relish the ways in which language can be sounded – as it is seen, heard, and uttered. Through “distinctive and inter-related processes, she forces a re-tuning of how dramatic-poetic language is navigated – on and off the page – that supports Peter Elbow Davis’s observation that ‘we live in a text world just as much as we live in an oral world’” (Osborne 2020: 233). tucker green writes from within, against, and despite, the playwriting foundation of the well-made play in modern British theatre history and its structure of three acts and a momentum comprised of exposition, suspense, complication, dénouement, and resolution. Black British director Dawn Walton describes the well-made play “in terms of ‘a specific structure, usually three acts, with a particular arc: there is a problem, this thing affects everything, it plateaus up, and there’s a fall-off, a coda, at the end’” (Costa 2019: n. pag.). trade can be viewed as employing the three-part arc within each episode that punctuates the trajectory of the continuous piece of writing. Each of these episodes sets up the situation, builds anticipation, and is punctuated by an epiphany or twist in the plotline. The play employs the rule of three through its three characters experiencing the same situation in slightly altered ways that jar with one another. 256

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LOCAL NOVICE LOCAL NOVICE LOCAL REGULAR NOVICE REGULAR REGULAR NOVICE

He did paid. For what? […] …For what? For the… ‘Local Styles at Local Prices’ For the sign…For the shelter. For me. Fe us. He – paid… …With what?

(53–54)

There is no concordance between the women, only each woman’s dawning recognition of being devalued and defrauded. Bumster’s ambition to leave (Local) invokes post-war male-dominant migration stories, but through a guise of reparation: Gonna find mi a som’ady/som’ady who Will get me to there ‘here’ from my ‘there’, /I am/m’gonna – so mi cyan study… (41) The poignancy of the actress playing Local “(as BUMSTER)” assuming his character and then as Local proudly stating “He was top of his class” (41) underscores her emotional ‘investment’ in him compared with his selling of himself as a romantic investment to Regular – for investing in his own future only – plans of which all three are ignorant. Up to this point in the play, Local has the moral and linguistic upper-hand, caustically exposing the shameful behaviour of Novice, Regular, and the exploitative, conscienceless tourists. tucker green removes any possibility of sentimentality. Threaded through the gradual realisation for all three is Local’s undermining, punctuated by her questions: “Didju know bout me?” (48), “Did he even tell you about me?” (50), “you ask bout me? […] did yu ask over me […] …Did you ask…?” (51). Bumster’s plan does not include her and she is left merely with a sign for her business and all it does not signal of a secure future with him. The brutal historical triangle that contours the plotline and themes of trade is now overlayed by the seasonal displacement Local faces by white women tourists exerting their capital over her location and her man. As Wynter argues, a focus upon Black women’s geographies is key in unsettling coloniality. The ideology in which Western bourgeois Man becomes overrepresented as the singular, viable model of complete humanness has produced a corresponding “dominant cultural logic” (Scott and Wynter 2000: 164). As a counterpoint, trade is always from a Black woman’s viewpoint (Black author, three Black actresses) and thereby disrupts the default setting of the “White gaze” which, as Gary Yancy describes, involves “the correlative constitution of a racialized field that normalizes the marking of Black bodies through a relationship of White power” (2017: 243). Playing white women, (Novice, Regular, American Tourist), the Black actresses force an audience to ‘see’ their blackness at all times, which means, as Eduardo Bonilla-Silva argues in exposing colour-blinded racism, there are no “‘raceless’ explanations for all sort of race-related 257

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affairs” (2015: 1364). tucker green not only offers insights into the lives of the locals, but directly connects to her Black audience-reader in the shared consequences of colonial inheritances that are different to the ways in which white women continue to be the advantaged recipients of this history. The dynamics of the plot illustrate: “not simply a sociodemographic location but the site both of a form of life and of possible critical intervention” (Scott and Wynter 2000: 164). tucker green’s three Black actresses keep whiteness as central and under scrutiny, but not bodily present, as a system to be challenged and deconstructed, recalling Wynter’s reminder that “at the beginning of the modern world, the only women were white and Western” (Scott and Wynter 2000: 174). All possibilities of white mediation/interpretation are removed by white women characters