“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 ur-
gent 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 histori-
cal 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 collec-
tion 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 Brit-
ish 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-Literature-

Companions/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
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University of the Arts, London).
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© 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
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 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 1

Rachel Carroll and Fiona Tolan

PART I
Rights27

1 Like nobody else: women and independence in the novels of Charlotte

Smith and Mary Wollstonecraft 29
Kaley Kramer

2 Romantic women travel writers, politics and the environment:

an ecofeminist reading of the Swiss landscape 42
Kathryn Walchester

3 Feminism and animal advocacy in the long nineteenth century:

Anne Brontë and the ‘abuses of society’ 55
Helena Habibi

4 “They all revolved about her”: disability, femininity, and power

in ­mid-Victorian women’s writing 69
Clare Walker Gore

ix
 Contents

5 The “quest for harmony”? Utopia, matriarchal communities,

and feminist self-critique 82
Kaye Mitchell

6 Jan Morris and the territory between: interrogating nation and normality
in contemporary Welsh trans writing 96
Gina Gwenffrewi

PART II
Networks111

7 “Men shall not make us foes”: Charlotte Brontë’s letters and her female
friendship networks 113
Deborah Wynne

8 Transatlantic feminism and antislavery activism: women’s networks,

letter writing, and literature in the long nineteenth century 125
Clare Frances Elliott

9 Forgotten feminist fiction: Netta Syrett, New Woman writing,

and women’s suffrage 138
Lucy Ella Rose

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 150
Emily L. Pickard

11 “What means a frontier?” Nancy Cunard, feminist internationalism,

and the Spanish Civil War 165
Eleanor Careless

PART III
Bodies181

12 Reputation of [her] pen: retrieving the black female body

from the margins of the page and the stage 183
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 201
Jane Ford

x
 Contents

14 Lesbian-trans-feminist modernism and sexual science:

Irene Clyde and Urania 215
Jana Funke

15 “Beauty in Revolt”: fashioning feminists in Rebecca West and Jean Rhys 230
Sophie Oliver

16 “The rule of three”: textual triads, trialogues, and women’s voices

in Sylvia Plath, Jackie Kay, and debbie tucker green 244
Deirdre Osborne

17 Feminism, eugenics, and genetics: from convergence to contestation 263

Clare Hanson

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 277
Nancy Jiwon Cho

19 “Dearest Norah…”: the professional and personal relationships forged

between an editor and her authors 293
Elizabeth West

20 Feminist citation in Buchi Emecheta’s early fiction and autobiography:

publishing race, class, and gender 306
Nicola Wilson

21 “Working with the cloth”: materialising women’s creative labour

in the work of Rosamond Lehmann, Beryl Bainbridge, and Joan Riley 322
Rachel Carroll

22 “To the sisters I always wanted”: women, writers’ groups, and print
culture in Glasgow, 1980–1988 336
Kate Wilson

23 Mother Country: Leonora Brito writes Wales – black British identity,

maternity, and memory in the Welsh short story 352
Bethan Evans and Jenni Ramone

xi
 Contents

PART V
Activism365

24 In a circle with Mary Hays: writing novels to reform society in the 1790s 367
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) 380
Teja Varma Pusapati

26 “Rice puddings, made without milk”: Mother Seacole reforms

“home habits” in the Crimea 393
Sarah Dredge

27 “Your Great Adventure is to report her faithfully”: the centring

of women’s voices and stories in suffrage theatre 406
Naomi Paxton

28 A life can be a manifesto: connecting Bernadine Evaristo to a history

of feminist manifestos 419
Fiona Tolan

29 Holding women’s voices: Open Clasp as an example of feminist

theatre practice 432
Kate Chedgzoy, Rosalind Haslett, and Catrina McHugh

30 Protecting the land, safeguarding the future: ecofeminism, activist

women’s writing, and contemporary publishing in Wales 446
Michelle Deininger

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 Men-
delssohn (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, Edin-
burgh 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 con-
temporary 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 Col-
lege, Oxford, UK. Her work is located in the intersections of gender, religion, theology, and his-
tory. 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 Gold-
smiths, 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 Univer-

sity, 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 Hu-
manities 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 Dis-
sident 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 Scot-

tish 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 produc-
tion, media studies, and digital humanities.

Helena Habibi completed her PhD at Durham University, UK in 2020. Her thesis examines inter-
sections between speciesism and gendered oppression and explores the development of a feminist-
vegetarian 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 senti-
mental 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 re-
search spans late-Victorian literature to contemporary culture. She is associate editor, Women’s Writ-
ing (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: De-
colonise 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, In-
dia. 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 Postco-
lonial Literatures in the Local Literary Marketplace: Located Reading, The Bloomsbury Introduc-
tion 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 At-
wood: 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, Plot-
ting 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 Visit-
ing 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: Mak-
ing 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: Lega-
cies 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 permis-
sion 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 wom-
en’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 in-
dividuality 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 intel-
lectual 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 litera-
tures. 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 his-
tories 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. Inclu-
sion 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 con-
texts, 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 contribu-
tions 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, Wollstone-
craft’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 philoso-
phy 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 Mar-
tineau, 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’ depic-
tion 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 concen-
tration 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 move-
ment 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

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Sarah Grand foreground their dissection of prevailing modes of economic, sexual, and reproduc-
tive 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 ex-
ploring 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 liter-
ary 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 environ-
mental 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 con-
temporary 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 femi-
nist 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 appar-
ent. 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 previ-
ous 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

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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 sympa-
thies 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 con-
dition 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 dou-
ble 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 expe-
rienced 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 il-
lustrates 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 sub-
ject 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

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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 Ro-
mantic 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 observa-
tional 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 Words-
worth’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, go-
ing 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 libera-
tion 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 non-
human 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 slaugh-
ter 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 hunt-
ing, 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 wom-
en’s power and agency are not the exclusive preserve of overtly radical texts. As Walker Gore

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 Writing women’s rights – from enlightenment to ecofeminism

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 invalid-
ism’, 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 re-
silient 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 writ-
ers, 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 didacti-
cism, 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 think-
ing 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,

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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 con-
texts 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 influ-
ence are perpetuated in the public sphere, they seek to remedy the dispersal of women as a collec-
tive 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 ena-
bling 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 col-
lective, 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 under-
pinned 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 author-
ship 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 profes-
sional 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

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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. Chal-
lenging 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 net-
works were carefully cultivated, highly valued, and fiercely defended.
Letters also play an important role in Clare Elliot’s chapter, “Transatlantic Feminism and Anti-
slavery 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 anti-
slavery 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 At-
lantic. 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 Brit-
ish 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 move-
ment 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. Expand-
ing 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 his-
torical 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 show-
cased 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

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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 net-
works 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 sup-
porting 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 pub-
lished 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 internation-
alism, 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 differ-
ent 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 net-
works 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 dif-
ference 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 oppres-
sion 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,

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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 colo-
nisation 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 ge-
netic 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 neo-
slave 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 contem-
porary ‘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 typi-
cally 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 com-
mon 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 uncou-
ple gender from sex is absent in these earlier attempts to rationalise and champion women’s ‘natu-
ral’ 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 intel-
lectual 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

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 Rachel Carroll and Fiona Tolan

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 dem-
onstrates, 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 cat-
egories’. 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, ‘con-
stitute 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’ iden-
tification 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 deb-
bie 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

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 Writing women’s rights – from enlightenment to ecofeminism

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 postco-
lonial 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 cen-
tury 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 Genet-
ics: 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 inter-
ested 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 re-
sisting 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 progres-
sive 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 eugen-
ics (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 ge-
netic 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 con-
temporary women’s writing on the fascinations but also the dangers of manipulating genetic in-
heritance, 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.

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 Rachel Carroll and Fiona Tolan

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 collec-
tion, 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 them-
selves 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 circulat-
ing 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 ar-
chival materials to examine the career and influence of Norah Smallwood (1909–1984), pioneering

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 Writing women’s rights – from enlightenment to ecofeminism

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 profes-
sional advancement for women, and West charts Smallwood’s progress through the then male-
dominated 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, encourage-
ment, 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, Elea-
nor Graham), West notes that these women have – until recently – largely been forgotten in pub-
lishing 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, found-
ing Virago Press in the 1970s – was yet to be felt. Pre-feminist in many ways, Smallwood is never-
theless 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 examin-
ing 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 working-
class 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 neglect-
ful of race and class in its analysis of oppression. Nevertheless, in focusing on the material pro-
duction 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 liter-
ary production, and their access to literary networks and publishing, Rachel Carroll’s essay ex-
tends the study of women’s production and creative labour into the realm of the textiles arts and

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 Rachel Carroll and Fiona Tolan

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 accept-
able 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 pe-
ripheral 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 manifes-
tation 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 ‘ephem-
eral, 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 chap-
ter, “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

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 Writing women’s rights – from enlightenment to ecofeminism

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 Im-
oinda, 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 accept-
able 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 expres-
sion to women’s experience, shaping and extending the meaning of liberty and equality in chang-
ing 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 libera-
tion, 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

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 Rachel Carroll and Fiona Tolan

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 chap-
ter “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 in-
creasingly forceful and uncompromising expression. Writing within a tradition of religious dissent
– in which exclusion from professions, political participation, and university education was expe-
rienced 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 radi-
cal 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 per-
sonal correspondence and public letter writing in the evolution of women writers’ political under-
standing 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 ra-
tionality, 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. Pusa-
pati 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 transform-
ing 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

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 Writing women’s rights – from enlightenment to ecofeminism

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 business-
woman 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, sub-
tly 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 domes-
tic 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 some-
times coded forms which critique can take in women’s writing of the period. It exposes the white-
ness 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. Pro-
fessional 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, litera-
ture, 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 ‘per-
formative 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 il-
lustrate 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
 Rachel Carroll and Fiona Tolan

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 com-
bination 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: con-
necting Bernardine Evaristo to a history of feminist manifestos”, Fiona Tolan examines the com-
plex 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 explor-
ing 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 recog-
nition 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. Com-
bining a feminist ethos, working methods, and practice, Open Clasp specialises in issue-based
collaborative practice, often working with vulnerable or marginalised constituencies. Contextu-
alising 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 women-
centred 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 cul-
ture) 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 perfor-
mance 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 jus-
tice 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 capital-
ism. 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, pollu-
tion, 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 nov-
els, 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 foun-
dations 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
 Rachel Carroll and Fiona Tolan

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 (Of-
fice for National Statistics 2019).
These longstanding and persistent inequalities are met by the vicissitudes of the present mo-
ment. 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 Ex-
tinction Rebellion movement, employing civil disobedience strategies to draw attention to en-
vironmental 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, anti-
colonial 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 twenty-
first 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. Individ-
uals 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 best-
selling 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 im-
pactful 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 amend-
ment to the Republic of Ireland’s constitution (following an historic referendum in 2018, allow-
ing 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, institu-
tions, 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’ femi-
nism 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 publish-
ers’ 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 Inter-
national Women’s Day apparent from 2018 onwards (Forester et al. 2020: 23). Global online plat-
forms 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 des-
ignated 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, or-
ganising, 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 ur-
gent 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 pam-
phlets 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 of-
fered as a creative, literary, cultural, and intellectual resource for those interested in understand-
ing 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.

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25
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 educat-
ing 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 Wol-
lstonecraft 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 permis-
sion 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 independ-
ent 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 individ-
ual 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

29 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 epony-
mous 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 ex-
istence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and con-
solidated 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 fore-
ground 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 revolu-
tion 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 reader-
ship 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 ex-
planation, 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 oppor-
tunity 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. Rous-
seau’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

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autobiography establishes the author as the product of experience, rational self-reflection and in-
dependence. 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 indi-
vidual 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 repre-
sentation 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 infa-
mous 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 Romantic-
period wanderer held out the promise of a splendid and admirable self-imposed isolation. The fig-
ure 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

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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 auto-
nomic 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 behav-
iours. 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 indi-
vidual 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 sen-
sibility faced nearly insurmountable challenges to claiming such a status (Latimer 2013: 11). Mas-
culine 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 cal-
culated attempt at social mobility. Crucially, Shamela’s affected performance of sensibility is in-
distinguishable 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, philo-
sophical 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 wom-
en’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

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style focalises so intensely through the eponymous character that her independence is unques-
tioned: 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 prom-
ise 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 ex-
istence…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 chap-
erone 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 expecta-
tions, 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 sensi-
bility 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 desti-
tute 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 embody-
ing “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 dis-
course. 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 mid-
way 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

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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 fam-
ily 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 declara-
tions 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 un-
derstand 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 “Noth-
ing 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 rec-
ognised 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 dis-
played. 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

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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 ef-
fects 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 independ-
ence 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 ill-
health”, 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 wed-
ding 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 inde-
pendence, 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 rhapso-
dies 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 fa-
ther 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

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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. Emme-
line’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 ensur-
ing 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 ques-
tionable 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 dis-
solute 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 Mor-
rissey 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 reli-
able 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, rep-
resenting 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, Wol-
lstonecraft recognises later in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and in The Wrongs of Woman,

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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 suf-
ficiently 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 iden-
tity 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 domes-
tics 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 Mon-
treville’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 as-
tonished 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 preten-
sions!” (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.

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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 pru-
dence. 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 perme-
ates 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 asser-
tion 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 at-
tempt 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 im-
proved 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
 Women and independence in the novels of Smith & Wollstonecraft

and financially independent than Wollstonecraft’s heroine, Mary. The daughter of a dissolute gam-
bler, Ethelinde lives on the financial generosity of her cousin’s family – in many ways, her narra-
tive 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 New-
enden 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 Dav-
enant 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 “pet-
ulant”, 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 suf-
ficient 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 Wol-
lstonecraft’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, be-
lieving 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 moder-
ate 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 restric-
tions 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 un-
equivocal 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 tri-
umph of sentimentalised, middle-class, heterosexual society (contained symbolically in the emo-
tionally 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
 Kaley Kramer

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 solicita-
tions 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 sup-
porters 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 Declara-
tion 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 represen-
tations 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 assess-
ment 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 lib-
erty; 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 ech-
oes Sir William Blackstone’s earlier insistence that women are “so great a favourite of the laws

40
 Women and independence in the novels of Smith & Wollstonecraft

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 alterna-
tives 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 Wollstone-
craft’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 Univer-
sity 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: Ox-
ford 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.

41
 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 nine-
teenth 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 inclu-
sion 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 writ-
ing 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 articula-
tions 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 assump-
tion that women have a unique relationship with nature due to the ways they have been culturally

DOI: 10.4324/9781003429951-4 42

 An ecofeminist reading of the Swiss landscape

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 con-
nection, 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 trav-
elogue, 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 Can-
tons, 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 Tour-
ists (Heafford 2006: 44). The final text to be considered in this chapter is the account of Words-
worth’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 collec-
tion 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 di-
versity 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
 Kathryn Walchester

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 cas-
tigated 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 feminin-
ity and the natural world. The geographical locus of the attention of these writers and their con-
temporaries 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 Words-
worth, 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 ex-
amined 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 relation-
ship 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
 An ecofeminist reading of the Swiss landscape

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 Swit-
zerland, 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 sen-
sibility” 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 Excur-
sion 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-in-
law. 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 Neu-
chatel, 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 deco-
rates 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
 Kathryn Walchester

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 criti-
cal 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
 An ecofeminist reading of the Swiss landscape

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 sub-
lime 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 révo-
lutionaire 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 favour-
ably reviewed. Having published her accounts of the events of the French Revolution in her Let-
ters 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 Ken-
nedy notes, “she had gone to Switzerland expecting to find wonderful scenery and enlightened so-
ciety, 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 politi-
cal 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
 Kathryn Walchester

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 excite-
ment 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 Swit-
zerland, 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 en-
thusiasm 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 repub-
lican 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 Fleet-
wood (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 Rousseauvian-
figure, 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 descrip-
tions 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
 An ecofeminist reading of the Swiss landscape

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 po-
litical 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 en-
compassed 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 disap-
pointment about the events surrounding the fall of the Swiss Confederacy in 1798, when Napole-
onic 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 re-
vered 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

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 Kathryn Walchester

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 Words-
worths, 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 par-
ticular 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 val-
ley 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 preoc-
cupations 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 moun-
tainous 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 Ar-
senal, 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
 An ecofeminist reading of the Swiss landscape

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 con-
nection 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 de-
scription 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
 Kathryn Walchester

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 commemo-
ration 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 Switzer-
land began to be constructed from the 1850s (Ring 2011: 32). Later in the century, nature contin-
ued 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 writ-
ing 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 tradi-
tion, one which identifies human actions as interdependent with the natural world, rather than
seeking to dominate it.

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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 le-
gally sanctioned misconduct towards his wife would now be deemed domestic abuse. His inces-
sant 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 her-
self 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 inter-
connected 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.

55 DOI: 10.4324/9781003429951-5

 Helena Habibi

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 en-
vironmental 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, al-
though 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 fic-
tion. 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 counter-
parts 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 objec-
tions 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

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necessary for Empire building. Hunting was thus intended to display ideas about English mascu-
linity, 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 writ-
ing 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 anti-
hunting 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 con-
nected to notions of English wealth, power, and Empire (Gregory 2007: 13). Naturalists and orni-
thologists 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 ac-
tivism (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

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 Helena Habibi

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 Pro-
tection 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 be-
half 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 cam-
paigner 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 sur-
vey 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 spe-
ciesist 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 impo-
tence, 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

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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 hier-
archical 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 oppres-
sion and exploitation.
Wollstonecraft’s feminism assumes that women can only achieve equality with men by aban-
doning their fellow subjugated, ‘non-reasoning’ beings – nonhuman animals. By advocating that
women should be educated to develop greater reasoning powers than their meagre education al-
lowed, 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 prob-
lematic; 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). Wol-
lstonecraft’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, Wollstone-
craft’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 op-
pressions 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 crit-
ics to remark on this sensitivity’ (Adams 2010: 186) and ‘the tendency of many scholars to ig-
nore the signs of alliance between feminism and vegetarianism’ (Adams 2010: 192). The seeming

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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 mar-
ginalised, 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 si-
lence. 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 ena-
bles 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 con-
cerned with the interconnected masculinist cultures of hunting and avian annihilation that simi-
larly 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 ‘sub-
dued 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] con-
fidently 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 dif-
fered 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

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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 cultur-
ally 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 sug-
gesting 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 sav-
age 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 non-
human 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

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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 wrongdo-
ing 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, pen-
etrates 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 par-
tridges’ (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 twenti-
eth 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

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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 es-
tate, 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 pheas-
ants; 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 imprison-
ing 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 insti-
tutions: marriage and the hunt. Instead, Helen assumes her mother’s surname and inherits the fam-
ily 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 an-
nihilation. 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,

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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 animal-
abusing 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 im-
age reveals to us that Anne and her sisters, with their gazes averted from the scene of avian annihi-
lation 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 prox-
imity 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 ex-
ploited, 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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 Feminism & animal advocacy in the long nineteenth century

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 menac-
ing 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 at-
tempting 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 inter-
connected 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 fol-
lows 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 treat-
ment of those creatures, including Agnes herself, whom they consider beneath them on a hierarchy
of beings.

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 Helena Habibi

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-bird-
nesting 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 shock-
ing 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 bird-
murdering 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 af-
finity 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. Cru-
cially, 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 feminist-
vegetarian interruptions serve both women and nonhuman animal-centred concerns, or do they in-
evitably 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 po-
tential ‘as a political act of resistance’ (Adams 2010: 19) against dominant narratives and interpreta-
tions that marginalise and oppress women and other animals. I read as potential feminist-vegetarian

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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. Re-
gardless 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 criti-
cal, 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 nonhu-
man 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 contin-
ued 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 (Shuttle-
worth 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 Lit-
erature 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 Uni-
versity 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 im-
possible 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 dis-
ability” (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 accord-
ing 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 sug-
gested 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 ‘lady-
novelists’ in particular because their depiction of virtuous disabled characters has enabled them to

69 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 pleas-
ure 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 femi-
nists, 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, in-
valids 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 subver-
sion” (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 mid-
Victorian 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 disa-
bled figure mentioned in the review above, the exemplary female invalid. Moreover, both are

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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 exem-
plary 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 patri-
archal 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 disabil-
ity 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” be-
yond 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 dis-
ability 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

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be familiar with the image of the idealised invalid. Before they meet Cousin Helen, the Carr chil-
dren 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 fi-
nancial 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 con-
structions 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 non-
disabled 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 unremark-
able 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 senti-
mentality and easy pathos associated with the genre, The Moorland Cottage also contains a bit-
ing 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 self-
ishness 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, how-
ever, 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 bois-
terousness, 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 Mag-
gie to keep house without apparently attributing any real value to the endeavour, Mrs Buxton of-
fers 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 “oc-
casional hours” with Mrs Buxton “all the knowledge, and most of the strength of her charac-
ter” (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 ap-
peals 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 en-
gaged, 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 accom-
pany 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 some-
thing (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 ac-
tive 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

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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 cre-
ate 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 be-
ing 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 Mag-
gie 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 pa-
tient, 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, nightmar-
ishly, back to where we started.

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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). Serious-
minded 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 Er-
mine Keith.
(Yonge 1985/1865: 367)

While this ending closely parallels Gaskell’s conclusion, however, Yonge’s novel has a very dif-
ferent 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 re-
ward), 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 her-
self fills this role, and that she needs a larger scope for her talents and energies than she finds in her

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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 Soci-
ety 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 intellec-
tually 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.

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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 con-
fined 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 pub-
lishing 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 ambi-
tions with marriage and motherhood – but Ermine’s generous celebration of her success as “a thor-
ough 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). Ra-
chel herself attributes her inability to realise her ambitions firmly to her own inadequacies. Imme-
diately 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 any-
thing 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)

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We do not, however, see this woman in action or learn anything else about her; the idea that a non-
disabled 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 endanger-
ing 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 so-
cial 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 call-
ing 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. Juck-
ett 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 con-
ventional 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

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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 good-
ness 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 didacti-
cally, 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 consist-
ently 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 Uni-
versity 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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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 facil-
itates 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 move-
ment 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 work-
ing 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 sug-
gest that even the ‘classic’ examples of Herland and The Female Man can be read as displaying

DOI: 10.4324/9781003429951-7 82

 Utopia, matriarchal communities & feminist self-critique

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 com-
plicate 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 in-
dividuals 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 contes-
tatory 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 Uto-
pia, 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 Marx-
ist 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 exam-
ples that I consider in this chapter, their production of discomfort is, I contend, their notable strength.

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The blueprint utopias of the late nineteenth century fell out of favour for their seeming rigid-
ity, 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 exclu-
sivity, 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, illu-
minates 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 (pub-
lished 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 In-
dian 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 fic-
tion, 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 do-
ing so, I argue, evince most starkly the possibility of self-critique latent within feminist utopian
literature.

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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 experienc-
ing the body, using language, and defining power”, and demanded, therefore, “a complete trans-
formation 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 anthol-
ogy, 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 alterna-
tives 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 dis-
course 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 ques-
tioned 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 mind-
set 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 pro-
ductive 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

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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 compris-
ing 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, harmo-
nious 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 com-
munity 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-without-
conflict 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 aristoc-
racies. 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” (Gil-
man 1915/1979: 82);2 as well as the existence of an implicitly hierarchical stratification of society

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such that education of children (child-rearing, effectively) is assigned only to “the most highly com-
petent”, 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 instruc-
tive 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 untrou-
bled peace, the unmeasured plenty, the steady health, the large good will and smooth man-
agement 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 indica-
tive of a process that remains, still, incomplete. The novel thereby asks questions about the limita-
tions 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 ulti-
mately 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 hon-
eypot, 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)

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This description, evidently, plays out the internal contradictions of “femininity” in a patriarchal so-
ciety. 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); Jean-
nine, 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 autobiographi-
cal 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 rela-
tive 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 rec-
onciling 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 anti-
feminist reviews (“Shrill … vituperative … […] selfish femlib … needs a good lay … this shape-
less 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 capi-
talism 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 gen-
erative 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 ironi-
cal 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 differ-
ent 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 uto-
pianism 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 “ex-
poses 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 subver-
sion/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 pro-
genitors), 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 sus-
ceptibility 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, cunt-
lickers, 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,

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“The place sounded utopian, martial or monastic, depending on which publication was interview-
ing, 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 for-
wards: 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; psy-
chologically, 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), pro-
ceeding 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 liv-
ing” (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 catas-
trophe, 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

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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 Carhul-
lan. […] 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 imprison-
ment 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 heart-
beat 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 re-
sistance”) 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 uto-
pian 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 con-
tradiction 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 contradic-
tory 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, lead-
ing 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 Gil-
man 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 interlock-
ing 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, women-
only 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 depic-
tion of the “hill women”, and William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890), with its return to a medieval-
style 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).

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Twenty-First Century Fiction: What Happens Now, Basingstoke: Palgrave, pp. 197–211.
Russ, Joanna (2002) The Female Man [1975], London: The Women’s Press.
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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 crea-
tive 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 cri-
tiqued 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 reassur-
ance 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 ini-
tiate, 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 96

 Nation and normality in contemporary Welsh trans writing

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 rep-
resents 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 procreation-
related 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 dys-
phoria: “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

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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 ques-
tioned 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 ven-
eration 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 heteronation-
alist 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 inde-
pendence of Catalonia from Spain. Writing on two pathways for Catalonia, involving either a re-
iteration 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 politi-

cal 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, ter-
ritorial, 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 pos-
sibilities offers a way of developing Morris’ more obscured expressions and aspirations about

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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 “ex-
perimentation” 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 emerg-
ing consciousness of alienation, though in Preciado’s case with a specific recognition of the dam-
age 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 op-
pressive 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 begin-
ning 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 consoli-
date 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’ pub-
lished 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 es-
says reveal the similarities between Morris’ idealism and that of Preciado, but they also clarify

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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’ endur-
ing 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-lived-
experience. 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 com-
munity 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 re-
turns 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 deter-
mined 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 individual-
ized 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 commu-
nities 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 instabil-
ity 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 psychi-
cal 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 trans-
sexual 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 be-
longing 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 heterona-
tional 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 constric-
tive demands of heteronationalist citizenship, while also indicating that Morris’ utopia is tran-
scendental, 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 con-
ception 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 “unrecog-
nized community” is defined more by what it is not, with the rejection of “sect or dogma,” “nation-
alism” 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 Machynl-
leth 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 Mor-
ris’ 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 dis-
suade 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 normal-
ity,” 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 Bal-
lard 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 individ-
ualistic town to an ethereal paradise, in the latter case, a place almost without language, comfort-
ing 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 contain-
ing 188, and Thinking Again 130. The entries seldom cover more than one or two short pages,

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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 di-
ary, 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 con-
solidate 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 Presi-
dent 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)

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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 com-
munities 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 board-
rooms? … 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, dubi-
ous 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 reveal-
ing 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 Prac-
tice, 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. Mor-
ris’ 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, re-
inforcing 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)

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Overtones of a particular Quaker gathering, recorded in 1911, in which “the Way of Service” is de-
scribed 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 inter-
national “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 elimi-
nation 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 intel-
ligence, 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 resem-
blance 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 coun-
try, 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

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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 lla-
wenydd a dwi’n llawn llawenydd” (Trans. ‘This place is full of joy, and so am I’) (93). As a poign-
ant 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’ depic-
tion 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).

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 Nation and normality in contemporary Welsh trans writing

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 gener-
ally 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 an-
other 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 experi-
mentation 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 experi-
ence depicted by Morris as a middle-aged, economically advantaged trans woman in Llanystum-
dwy, and underscoring the more visceral, hyper-visible depiction of trans identity in relation to

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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

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be falling apart, Morris always punches up: her writings attack the elites that run the global econ-
omy, 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.

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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 on-
wards 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 represen-
tations 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, prefer-
ring 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 king-
dom 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 em-
ployed 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,

113 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 Char-
lotte (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 fa-
ther’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 can-
not 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 well-
known novelist, she felt disadvantaged because of her sex; concerned that her novels were some-
times 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 Wil-
liam 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 writ-
ers 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 inti-
mate 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.

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 Charlotte Brontë’s letters and her female friendship networks

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 introduc-
ing a knowledge of the world that enabled them to test (and sometimes push beyond) the bounda-
ries 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 dis-
approval, 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, ex-
periences 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.

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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 iso-
lated parsonage in the village of Haworth in Yorkshire, they paced the parlour together in the eve-
nings 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 encoun-
tered 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-year-
old 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 independ-
ent 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 Keel-
dar, 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 frus-
trated 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 im-
patience 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 ener-
getic 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 sis-
ter Emily following Mary’s example, and in 1842, the sisters enrolled as pupil teachers in the Pen-
sionnat 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 exam-
ple. 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)

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 Charlotte Brontë’s letters and her female friendship networks

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 review-
ers 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 con-
siderable 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 Redun-
dant?”, 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. Tay-
lor’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 emanci-
pated, sexually knowledgeable women. In this climate, a novel set in the 1830s based on women’s

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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 fe-
male friendship and solidarity. It is set in a fictional Yorkshire village and presents several inter-
connecting 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 friend-
ship 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 consola-
tion 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 be-
cause “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). How-
ever, 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 Mar-
tineau, 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

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opposite[s]” (Chapple and Smith 1995: 161). The robust and energetic Gaskell lived in Manches-
ter 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, teach-
ers, 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 reser-
vations 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 abili-
ties (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

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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 “ge-
nius” 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 con-
stantly 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

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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 fe-
male writers, showed in their writings and in their lives that this was a male myth. In a poignant let-
ter 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).

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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 sepa-
rated by a vast body of water were connected by a common ethical goal of social equality. De-
bates 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 rela-
tionship 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 pro-
duced 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, na-
tionhood, and race in related exchanges and campaigns. My argument here focuses on this Atlan-
tic “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 transat-
lantic 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 eman-
cipatory 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

125 DOI: 10.4324/9781003429951-11

 Clare Frances Elliott

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 peti-
tion 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 philan-
thropist 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 pre-
sent 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 sis-
terhood, 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 cam-
paigning 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

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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 be-
lieve 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 anti-
slavery 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 Re-
construction 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 at-
tention. 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)

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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 la-
bour 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 moth-
erhood and female experience: Stowe taught these children as though they were her own, extend-
ing 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 aboli-
tionist 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, provid-
ing room in her novel to focus on cross-racial relationships, debates about the North and South,

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and that all important sentimentality that encouraged readers to engage with the other’s predica-
ments. 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, moth-
erhood 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 mir-
rored in the antislavery writing of female activists. And, as with Stowe, motherhood, female eman-
cipation, 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 Ameri-
can 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 activ-
ism, 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 acquaint-
ance 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 Vin-
dication 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.

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Unlike More, who appears to have disregarded the disenfranchisement of her own female ex-
perience 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 entrap-
ment, 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 Im-
mediate 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 dis-
covered 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 boycott-
ing 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, Massachu-
setts. 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 pro-
mote 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

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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 emancipa-
tory 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, con-
sumer 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 Fred-
erick 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 correspond-
ence 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 eman-
cipatory campaigns were. Following the Seneca Falls convention, on 28 July 1848, Douglass’s

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newspaper The North Star published an editorial on the intersection of women’s rights and aboli-
tionist 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 so-
ciety 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 hor-
ror 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 strat-
egy 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 ex-
tended to every member of the human family […] We ask you to pause and reflect on this

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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 read-
ily 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 hu-
manity 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 re-
sponsibility 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 cru-
cial 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] wom-
an’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

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presented the movement as primarily a male club, yet women were responsible for antislavery net-
works 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 op-
pressive 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, Bridgewa-
ter, ­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 Newcastle-
born Griffiths, Douglass also knew the influential Newcastle upon Tyne sisters-in-law, the Rich-
ardsons. 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 move-
ment 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 El-
len 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

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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 benevo-
lence, 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 Rich-
ardson 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 Mc-
Kivigan 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 dehumani-
sation 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 exploi-
tation 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 vi-
sion 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 communica-
tion 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

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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 hav-
ing 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 demon-
strating 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.

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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 con-
temporary 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 daugh-
ter 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 devel-
oped 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 shift-
ing 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 il-
lustration), 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: 10.4324/9781003429951-12 138

 Netta Syrett, New Woman writing, and women’s suffrage

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 profes-
sional woman writers, offering a new perspective of Syrett as a suffrage writer and her role in a fin-
de-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 emanci-
pation. 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 im-
portant 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 rebel-
lion, 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 con-
tentious 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 propa-
ganda, 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 Suf-
frage 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

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 Lucy Ella Rose

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 wom-
en’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). Echo-
ing Ardis, Charlotte Vanhecke claims that “although Netta Syrett’s views on gender were undeni-
ably 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 Van-
hecke’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 Por-
trait 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 contribu-
tion 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 remark-
able 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) Bea-
trice 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, includ-
ing 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 Lau-
rence 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

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 Netta Syrett, New Woman writing, and women’s suffrage

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 con-
cerning gender issues in her autobiography tells us that she did not likely have a particularly po-
litical 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 docu-
ments 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 work-
ing 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

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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 dis-
proves 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 op-
portunity 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 contem-
porary 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 per-
sistence 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 per-
formance 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 suf-
fragettes 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”,

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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 im-
prisonment 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 “regret-
table 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 mil-
itant 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 audi-
ence 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 sen-
timental 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 col-
lective 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

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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 “ensem-
ble 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 Ques-
tion” 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 move-
ment 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 twentieth-
century 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 sto-
ries 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 highlight-
ing her development of New Woman fiction. Syrett’s famous uncle Grant Allen, a Canadian sci-
ence 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 hero-
ine’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

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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 sen-
sational 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 re-
fusal 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, mock-
ing, [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 educa-
tion, 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 move-
ment” (224). Syrett alludes to historical feminist events and figures throughout the novel, imbuing

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it with a realism that encourages readers’ recollection of, and engagement with, this past. For ex-
ample, 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 so-
ciety, “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 histori-
cal 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] move-
ment” 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 increas-
ingly 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 ac-
cepted 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

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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 vehe-
mence 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 sen-
timental 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

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within the narrative itself and across the time between its setting and publication. In an impas-
sioned 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 vote-
winners – 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, rel-
egated 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 for-
gotten by contemporary readers, and that the suffrage campaigners’ “works live after them” (314).
Indeed, contemporary newspaper reviews note the historical significance and informative po-
tential 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 “con-
vincing […] 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 re-
cently 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 Brit-
ish 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 col-
lective 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 contrib-
uted 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 fic-
tion 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 centu-
ries, this chapter offers a more nuanced and comprehensive understanding of the relationships be-
tween women, women and writing, and women’s writing and women’s rights over the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries.

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Works cited
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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.
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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 Con-
gress 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: 10.4324/9781003429951-13 150

 Muir and Cruickshank in the founding of Scottish PEN

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 through-
out 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 civil-
ians. 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 writ-
ers 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 Dawson-
Scott, and her desire to achieve gender equality is reflected in their Women’s Manifesto. This doc-
ument 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 silenc-
ing a person is to deny their existence
(PEN 2018)

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 Emily L. Pickard

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 writ-
ers 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 conflict-
ing) 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 under-
writes 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 im-
portance 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 lan-
guages 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 cor-
respondence 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 femi-
nist, 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 cul-
tivating 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 liter-
ary 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 organisa-
tions, 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

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 Muir and Cruickshank in the founding of Scottish PEN

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 relation-
ships 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 dif-
ferent 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 pa-
triarchal, 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 ini-
tially 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 stu-
dio 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 Scot-
land’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 adminis-
trative support at various points in his life), Marion C. Lochhead, and Willa and Edwin Muir.

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 Emily L. Pickard

Muir, while also a poet in her spare time, often in Scots, mostly published prose fiction and non-
fiction. 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 Acad-
emy 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 ex-
periences 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 Mod-
ern Scot, and was friends with the likes of Cruickshank, Eric Linklater, F. Marian McNeill, Cath-
erine 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 Renais-
sance 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 sig-
nificant 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

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 Muir and Cruickshank in the founding of Scottish PEN

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 ac-
tivities 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, Essay-
B
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 at-
tended 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 Renais-
sance, 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, nei-
ther 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 corre-
spondence 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
 Emily L. Pickard

investigations of the period, which Palmer McCulloch argues were “defined by its male contribu-
tors 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 recep-
tions 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 Edin-
burgh 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 na-
tionalist 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, show-
ing 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 contempo-
rary letters, nor the acknowledgement of Cruickshank’s role in organising their delegation. Her

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 Muir and Cruickshank in the founding of Scottish PEN

neglect to represent Cruickshank or any of her female friends in this era (such as McNeill, Loch-
head, 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 cor-
respondence 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 out-
put. 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 Ad-
miral 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 men-
tion 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 narra-
tive 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 Estho-
nia (!). […] 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 Renais-
sance, 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 let-
ter 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 organ-
isers 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 transla-
tions (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 narra-
tive 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 Chris-
tianson 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 nar-
rative 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 imagina-
tion 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 Loch-
head 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 con-
temporaries is clear in her letters and her own literary output. For instance, in a letter to Mc-
Neill 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 defini-
tion 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 disap-
proval 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 cur-
rently no monographs on her work.
Cruikshank used her considerable influence and organisational skills to ensure events con-
nected to the movement were funded and writers were taken care of, gaining respect and admira-
tion 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 en-
sured 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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 Muir and Cruickshank in the founding of Scottish PEN

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. Further-
more, 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” sug-
gests 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 rela-
tionship 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 net-
works. 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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 Emily L. Pickard

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 perspi-
cacious 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 But-
ter, 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 cor-
respondence”, 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 indica-
tion 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 busy-
ness: the imperative to tackle administrative duties for themselves, the restrictive division of la-
bour 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, pro-
vides 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 pros-
ecuted 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 in-
ternational organisation” based on “certain basic feminist principles” as seen in her 1928 resolu-
tion (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 defini-
tion 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 Cruick-
shank 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 Cruick-
shank 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
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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 Liter-
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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
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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,
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Muir, Willa (1932c) [Letter to Helen Cruickshank 3]. Correspondence and photocopies and transcripts of
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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 SANG-
HARSH. 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 out-
break 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 Repub-
lican 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

165 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 experi-
mental 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 un-
cover 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 mod-
ernism (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 impersonal-
ity 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

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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 conven-
tional 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 sup-
port 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 tour-
ist”, 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 co-
ordinating 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 Fas-
cism or against it.

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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 an-
thology 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, proto-
feminist 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 great-
est 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 exaggerat-
edly 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, Cu-
nard cultivates an ironic imitativeness that undercuts the masculinist canon. Parodying Eliot’s fa-
mous 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 great-
granddaughter 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, be-
gan. 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

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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 experi-
ences 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 Manches-
ter 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 signifi-
cant 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 intern-
ment 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 vic-
tory 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 con-
ditions 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 am-
plify 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 femi-
nist 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

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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 Span-
ish 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 emo-
tive 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 Republi-
cans 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

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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). How-
ever, 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 futur-
ist 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 imme-
diacy 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 Cu-
ban 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 self-
effacing 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 wit-
ness (following Levinas) as “a responsibility for the other” (2014: 19). The act of recording

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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 writ-
ing (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 proxim-
ity 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-feminist-
internationalist 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. Sub-
jects 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 dis-
torted 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 regis-
tered 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 de-
mands. “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 read-
ing Hitler’s speech in Nuremburg”. The theme of eating is not limited to Cunard’s own inter-
rupted 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 con-
ditions 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: “Eu-
rope’s nerve strung like catapult, the cataclysm roaring and swelling… / But in Spain no. Per-
haps 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 despond-
ency. 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 bal-
ances 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 dis-
tinction. In her 1959 lecture “Women as Writers” – described by Jennifer Nesbitt as “a mid-
century 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 vi-
sion” (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, tak-
ing 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 type-
script 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 re-
flection 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 mo-
bilising melancholy (a phrase I adapt from Traverso’s analysis of left-wing melancholia [2017]),
and sustain political commitment.

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 Eleanor Careless

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 “Pass-
port 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 resist-
ance, 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 char-
acteristic 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 or-
der’ 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 dictator-
ship 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 Baader-
Meinhof (Carr 2010: 136). An Angry Brigade communiqué makes this connection explicit, claim-
ing 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

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 Cunard, feminist internationalism & the Spanish Civil War

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 lega-
cies. 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 anti-
fascism. 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 partisan-
ship 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 mate-
rial 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).

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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 no-
bility, 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 com-
mitment 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 en-
during 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

183 DOI: 10.4324/9781003429951-16

 Marl’ene Edwin

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, espe-
cially 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 an-
tebellum 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 Anim-
Addo’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 per-
formance 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 slav-
ery 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 repre-
sentative 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 “reputa-
tion of [her] pen” to reconfigure a position which until recently has been firmly located and con-
structed 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 twenty-
first 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
 Retrieving the black female body from the margins

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 describ-
ing 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 slav-
ery 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 fu-
ture. 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.

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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 op-
erating 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 over-
seer, 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 South-
erne’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 fur-
ther 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, coloni-
sation, 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 Correspond-
ingly, 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 play-
wrights 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 en-
slavement. 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. Anim-
Addo’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 primi-
tive 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 God-
dess, “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, Anim-
Addo 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 inno-
cence, 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 in-
dicates 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 first-
person 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] some-
thing 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 sur-
vives. 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 African-
Caribbean 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 Im-
oinda 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 simul-
taneously “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 Carib-
bean 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 con-
versation. 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 articu-
lated. 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 imperial-
ism […] to write the history of colonization and slavery from the perspective of Imoinda” (Kara-
vanta 2013: 47). If Behn’s text might be considered the first and imperial archive, my argument is

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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 subjec-
tivity 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 sac-
rificer” (2003 [1688]: 72). Behn’s representation of the black female body as beautiful but some-
how 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 op-
pressed 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 hero-
ine. 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 Litera-
ture, 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 Oroo-
noko, 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 di-
rector, 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 Hawkes-
worth’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

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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 be-
comes 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, Ban-
dele 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 three-
way 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 per-
forming opera.
(Guarracino 2007: 220)

In Blackness in Opera (2012), Naomi André et al. argue that blackness in the opera is either con-
flated with minstrelsy or that the opera automatically associates blackness with a generic concep-
tion of “otherness”. The editors of this collection state that:

despite changing ideals about representing “reality” onstage, and despite increasingly so-
phisticated 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 estab-
lished 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 ide-
als 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 “black-
ing 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 cast-
ing? 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 see-
ing. 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 re-
writing 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 com-
munication 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 in-
volves 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 am-
biguities 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

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celebrate survival—the survival of the raped and enslaved woman, her child, her commu-
nity, 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 tradi-
tional 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 Rob-
inson suggests, “an opera cannot be read from its libretto” and further, that a libretto “has no mean-
ing 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 per-
formed 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 Horni-
man 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 his-
torically 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 cul-
tural 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, assur-
ances 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

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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 “op-
eratic 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 Febru-
ary 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 mark-
ing, 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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 Retrieving the black female body from the margins

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 Trou-
bled 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 teach-
ing 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 ‘audi-
ence.’ 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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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-America-
Awards.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

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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 produc-
tion” (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 contemporar-
ies 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 ten-
dency 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 ac-
counts of late nineteenth-century eugenic thought privilege men’s contribution to the field but

201 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 responsi-
bility 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, how-
ever, 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 writ-
ing 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 sensa-
tion 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 mobil-
ity 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 consola-
tory). 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

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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 fe-
male 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 mother-
hood […] 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 intel-
lect 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 evolution-
ary 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, op-
portunity, 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 man-
aged 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 perma-
nently 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 pro-
gressive agenda surfaces here through what Joyce Zonana has called feminist orientalism: an off-
shoot of Edward Said’s orientalist discourse which deploys images of patriarchal oppression in the

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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 limi-
tations 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 attractive-
ness of the trope is not merely connected to the fragile instability of the Chinese woman’s “sway-
ing” 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 Schrein-
er’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 pres-
sure 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 ‘mater-
nalist’ 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 characterisa-
tion of maternity and motherhood as matters of civic responsibility and an attendant valorisa-
tion 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

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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 mar-
riage. 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 reproduc-
tive 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 eugen-
ics” (Richardson 2003: 192). In these remarks, Caird would certainly have been thinking of femi-
nists 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

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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 en-
vironmental 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 il-
lustration 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 facul-
ties, 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 ex-
amples 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

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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 Gil-
man 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 com-
plex, 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 sex-
parasitism 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 inflec-
tion. 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 evolu-
tion, 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. Gil-
man’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 com-
munity 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). In-
terestingly, 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]).

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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 lean-
ing 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 hyme-
noptera” (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 rear-
ing 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 per-
sonal 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 per-
formed collectively – at least by the colony’s designated caregivers. In Herland, Gilman ex-
periments 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 em-
ployment 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 de-
scription 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).

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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 ap-
pear, 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 bury-
ing of originality, the emergence of “sports” becoming progressively more unlikely. Given her dis-
taste 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 spot-
light 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 de-
stroyers, 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 interde-
pendent. 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.

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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 tenden-
cies […] 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 vorti-
ces 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 car-
ried 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 achieve-
ment. 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 mo-
ments, 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,

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 Eugenic feminism and female economic dependence

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 evolution-
ary change, directed by the “mad revolt” of chance variation, is swiftly succeeded by a macro-
image 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 im-
agine 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 hus-
band) 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 ve-
racity 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

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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 ani-
mal 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 like-
ness 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 an-
other: to see how Tant’ Sannie and I, you and Bonaparte, St Simon on his pillar, and the em-
peror 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 locomo-
tive 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 de-
scribed 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 su-
premacy.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 ento-
mologically inspired forms of looking are vital to Caird, Schreiner, and Gilman’s evolutionary

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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.

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Gilman, Perkins Charlotte (2015) Herland and The Yellow Wallpaper, London: Vintage.
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Lanser, Susan (1989) “Feminist Criticism, ‘The Yellow Wallpaper,’ and the Politics of Colour in America,”
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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 part-
ner, 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 interrogat-
ing 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 under-
standing 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

215 DOI: 10.4324/9781003429951-18

 Jana Funke

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 dis-
ciplines, including biology, forensics, psychiatry, anthropology, and history. As feminist scholars
have demonstrated, sexological knowledge often reinforced sexist views and mobilised biologis-
tic 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 frame-
works 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 in-
terdisciplinary 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 pub-
lications 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 un-
derstandings 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 hap-
pen 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 jour-
nal Urania alongside Montessori educator Dorothy H. Cornish and animal rights campaigner Jes-
sey Wade (Ingram and Patai 1993; Oram 1998, 2001; Tiernan 2008a,b; Steele 2018). This was a

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 Lesbian-trans-feminist modernism and sexual science

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 individu-
als 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 organiza-
tion 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 conven-
tional 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 informa-
tion 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 trans-
lation 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 transcend-
ence” (2008: 43). In declaring sex to be an accident, Clyde and her collaborators insisted that hu-
man consciousness was independent of and capable of transcending the social meanings assigned
to the sexed body.

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 Jana Funke

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 alterna-
tive 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 quali-
ties 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 femi-
nist 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 domina-
tion 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 differ-
ences 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 suf-
frage 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 psycho-
logical 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 Kip-
lings, 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 Free-
woman 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 femi-
nists 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 ex-
pressions of heterosexual desire, assuming that they inevitably reinforced restrictive binary divi-
sions 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 in-
spired 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 review-
ing 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 fulfil-
ment, 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 po-
tential 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 cri-
tique 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 con-
structions 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

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“feminine attachments” to emerge between people belonging to the “feminine type”, but vehe-
mently 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 liberation-
ist 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 incarna-
tions to consolidate instead a relationship with feminism” (Hargreaves 2005: 77). Woolf’s com-
plex 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 publica-
tions 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

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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 criti-
cism 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 single-
authored books, Clyde challenged sexological beliefs and authority by using scientific counter-
arguments (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 con-
tain 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 concep-
tions 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 as-
yet 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 surgi-
cal 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

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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 “pro-
found 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, “abolish-
ing 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 impor-
tant 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 mod-
els 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 Rad-
clyffe 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 Theosophi-
cal 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 dimen-
sion 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

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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 non-
feminist 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] repro-
duction and the improvement of mental states, with less advanced strata alone devoted to carry-
ing 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 essen-
tially 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 partheno-
genesis 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 Gil-
man’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 Con-
trol (1930). Parthenogenetic reproduction is also evoked humorously in Barnes’ Ladies Almanack
(1992: 22–26).

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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 pas-
sion 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 les-
bian 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, Kathar-
ine 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 celi-
bate 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 aes-
thetic 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

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and her contemporaries to expand understandings of the biological body, evolutionary develop-
ment, 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 reso-
nated 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 femi-
nism. 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 twentieth-
century constructions of sex, gender, and sexuality. It played an important role in sexological and feminist
debates of the time (Frederickson 2014; Leng 2018).

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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 physi-
cal 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 con-
nect 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 vi-
olence 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: 10.4324/9781003429951-19 230

 Fashioning feminists in Rebecca West and Jean Rhys

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 re-
flect, 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 instabil-
ity of modern life and its aestheticised counterpart, modernism (Lehmann 2000; Garrity 2010).
Relatedly, fashion as a discursive system – characterised by change, imitation, and dialectics (be-
tween distinction and standardisation; the individual and society) – has been explored by modern-
ist 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 para-
doxical 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 pro-
duce the subject (2014: 101). The materialist focus that this view necessitates, of clothes as worn ob-
jects 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 John-
son, 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 theo-
rists, 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).

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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 femi-
nist 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 mat-
ter, 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 con-
text: 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 discursiv-
ity 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” (Glendin-
ning 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

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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 be-
coming feminist that are apparent in these details of West’s own experience: the rage and exhilara-
tion, 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 rep-
resentations 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 re-
ally is” (West 1913: 155–156). For Adela, too, the physical extension of her body and the experi-
ence 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” (Rol-
ley 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, ­middle-
and upper-class femininity, it must be said), the recontextualisation of fashionable dress as it be-
comes 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 physi-
cal invasion into public space, the remaking of femininity and production of feminist subjectivity

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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 consum-
erism 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 sig-
nalled 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 im-
mediate 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 subjectiv-
ity 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 fall-
ing 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 representa-
tive 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 suf-
fragette 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 immer-
sion 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

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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 associa-
tions 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 meta-
phors, 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)

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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 identity-
in-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 sexual-
ity” (2003: 231). We can now see that an emphatically material (rather than only discursive) ver-
sion 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 Cre-
ole 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 experi-
ences 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 rela-
tions, 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 ‘nega-
tive 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 sub-
jectivity 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 peo-
ple. 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 objecti-
fied 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 representa-
tion 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 Rosen-
berg (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 exploita-
tion. 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 pos-
sessions, 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 experi-
ences 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, compan-
ionship, 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)

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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 emo-
tions, 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 power-
less 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, eroti-
cally 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 repre-
sentation to allow for the body and emotions: they allow for the possibility of “transformation,

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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 poststruc-
turalist 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 in-
volves 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 neces-
sarily 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 manu-
script 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 methodo-
logical 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 suf-
frage novel, almost but not quite a roman-à-clef with mini-biographical portraits of real-life fig-
ures, 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

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unpolished aesthetic also shows West’s search for a feminist literary voice. Just as Adela is grap-
pling 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 connect-
ing 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 pur-
pose 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 al-
ternatives, 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 dif-
ferent 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 unfeel-
ing 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 recogni-
tion 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.

241
 Sophie Oliver

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Barad, Karen (1998) “Getting Real: Technoscientific Practices and the Materialization of Reality,” ­differences:
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Burstein, Jessica (2012) Cold Modernism: Literature, Fashion, Art, College Park: Penn State University
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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
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Oliver, Sophie (2016) “Fashion in Jean Rhys/Jean Rhys in Fashion,” Modernist Cultures, 11(3): 312–330.
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Parkins, Ilya (2008) “Building a Feminist Theory of Fashion: Karen Barad’s Agential Realism,” Australian
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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 antago-
nist, 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 oth-
ers, 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 minori-
tised 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 to-
gether 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: 10.4324/9781003429951-20 244

 Textual triads, trialogues, and women’s voices

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 crit-
ics’” 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 dra-
matic 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, Adop-
tive 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 per-
formance. 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 lis-
tening’ of the disembodied performed voice – oral and aural – recalling Charles Bernstein’s ob-
servation 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 typographi-
cally 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 move-
ments” 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 (alterna-
tive) 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 institu-
tions 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 con-
sidering 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

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 Deirdre Osborne

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 histo-
ries of empire – the violence of acquiring territories and subduing populations, separating colo-
nised 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 re-
viewer 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 rela-
tionship, 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 ex-
periences (childbirth, miscarriage, trans-racial adoption, female sex tourism) and sociocultural his-
tories (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),

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 Textual triads, trialogues, and women’s voices

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 imagina-
tively 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 conse-
quences 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 conven-
tions 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 dra-
matic monologue is a conversation with self and projected or imagined other, and the dialogue

247
 Deirdre Osborne

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 pro-
cesses them systematically, irrespective of complex emotions of maternal passion, ambivalence,
and morbidity; experiences of trans-racial adoption produce perspectives outside socially pro-
jected norms and alter conceptions of families and nation; the negative aftermath of imperial-
colonial 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 dramatic-
poetic 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’ […] ex-
presses 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 rec-
ognise 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 ex-
clusion by attempting “to find a specific discourse closer to the body and emotions, to the unname-
able 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 con-
tours 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 moth-
ers, 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 reproduc-
tion. 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

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 Textual triads, trialogues, and women’s voices

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 develop-
mental 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 ap-
preciating 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 con-
straints 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)

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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’ put-
downs 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 insist-
ence 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.
NOVICE Least I aint/ I aint / see…
REGULAR what?
What?
NOVICE ‘That’ (re REGULAR).
REGULAR What?
NOVICE Her.
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 physi-
cal 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 cre-
ates a bleak unity, without empathy.
To convey the shifting allegiances and dynamics between the multiple characters requires a de-
manding 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 “dom-
inant [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 complexi-
ties 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 dissemina-
tion, 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 under-
went two of the three experiences of maternity she portrays, she did not give up a child for adop-
tion. 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 ac-
count 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 po-
etics, we should remember, as Kirsten Hudson notes, that “not every pregnant body becomes a ma-
ternal 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 her-
ethics […] 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 promis-
ing 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 self-
recrimination, 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 preg-
nant 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 environ-
ment realises fertility, and Plath juxtaposes female fecundity with male medical expertise and appa-
ratuses 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 be-
ing, 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 murderous-
ness 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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 Deirdre Osborne

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 adop-
tion 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 incre-
dulity 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 scan-
dal, wore it casual / as a summer’s dress” (28).
While Andrew Walker maintains that “Plath’s sense of dramatic language and genre were de-
cisively formed by dramatic forms of poetry and radio dramas”, noting “Three Women” as a “de-
cisive 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

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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 trivi-
alized 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 re-
works 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 cir-
cumstances 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.

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 Deirdre Osborne

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 (pub-
lic 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 Mi-
chelle 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, compli-
cation, 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.

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 Textual triads, trialogues, and women’s voices

LOCAL He did paid.

NOVICE For what?
[…]
LOCAL
NOVICE …For what?
LOCAL For the… ‘Local Styles at Local Prices’
For the sign…For the shelter. For me.
Fe us.
REGULAR He –
NOVICE paid…
REGULAR
REGULAR
NOVICE …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 Nov-
ice, 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 unset-
tling 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
 Deirdre Osborne

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 being
played by Black actresses. Ultimately, Regular, Novice, and Local all remain sexually subordinate
to men through the deception that Bumster enacts upon them. While this is common ground, it
does not serve to build any bridge (or feminist consciousness) between them but illustrates the as-
sumptions that Bettina Aptheker outlines:

We as white women […] have not yet ventured onto an emotional terrain which would
challenge the contours of our own choices and strategies for survival – an emotional terrain
which would serve as a gateway to a new and decidedly more radical conceptualization of
our position as women in this society.
(1982: 11)

The colonial and capitalist damage done to local lives remains a never-ending loop in which the
psychological and emotional experiences are held in a dramatic echo chamber that opens the text
with the Local 1: “we juss live – there” (5), subtly rearticulated as Local, “We just…live / live
here” in closing (61). The cyclical structure resonates with Viviane Saleh-Hanna’s model of Black
Feminist Hauntology: “an anti-colonial analysis of time that captures the expanding and repetitive
nature of structural violence […]. The ghosted nature of this work brings forth or calls upon the
silent yet visible and enduring realities of colonialism” (2015: Section 20). In drawing together
triangulation, trialogue, and the cyclical structure, it is worth noting in Saleh-Hanna’s argument
that a triangle can be a portion composing an infinite round:

I envision Black Feminist Hauntology as simultaneously central and relegated to the cor-
ners of a thousand identical triangles lying side by side to form a perfect circle, demarcated
within the endlessly cyclical nature of the racist formation of bodies, institutions and time.
(2015: Section 40)

Saleh-Hanna’s “perfect circle” further resonates with the set (designed by Miriam Buether) for
London’s Soho Theatre (2005), featuring a circle of white sand on which the three actors sat or
stood. “It revolved almost imperceptibly throughout the performance, mirroring the subtle shifts
of emphasis and meaning created by the characters’ verbatim-like playback of each other’s lines”
(Osborne 2007: 237–238). The circularity of the plot’s arc, the triangulation of the three view-
points: Novice, Regular, Local, and their wedges of language, constantly altering alliances and
enmities, produce a dynamic that is consonant with Saleh-Hanna’s conceptualisation.

Conclusion: acts of circumstantial evidence

By cross-pollinating the dramatic form of a play with poetry techniques, or by exploiting the false
intimacy and revelation of the confessional and dramatic monologue traditions through a triadic

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structure, the three authors transcend the experiential limits of convention and enact dissonances
that destabilise a sole, or authoritarian, or authority viewpoint. In grouping Plath, Kay, and tucker
green together, there are also concordances and dissonances, producing uneasiness as well as
achieving a reassuring balance. Plath’s racist appropriations that she employs as metaphors in
other works (The Bell Jar, “Lady Lazarus”, “Daddy”, the sequence of five poems in Ariel – “The
Bee Meeting”, “The Arrival of the Bee Box”, “Stings”, “Wintering”, “The Swarm”) necessitate
contestation and critique and a re-examination through Critical Race Studies, and yet Kay has
testified that “The Adoption Papers” (winner of the Forward and Saltire Prizes) was inspired by
the three voices of Plath’s drama (Foster 2013). Additionally, tucker green’s casting directive also
subtly positions Black British women within the play’s subject matter, the indigene British genera-
tions also born ‘there’, that destabilises clear-cut economic power differentiations in race politics
based upon ‘here’ and ‘there’, ‘home’ and ‘holiday’. Notably, the play’s missing element is a white
male character, the coloniser whose mobility and global rampaging configured the conditions of
the imperial-colonial aftershock that trade encapsulates. The effect is that white male power re-
mains invisible and (directly) unchallenged.
Each of the three writers have pioneered a particular presence in British literary culture, open-
ing up artistic spaces for women’s experiences and creativities to be recognised and valued. Plath
wrote of maternity through confronting aesthetics. As Clark observes, “She believed her experi-
ence of childbirth and motherhood were important to her creative work” (2021: 1075). “Three
Women” is a particular form of maternal poetics that reveals white women’s maternity and its
outcomes for a materially specific class of women, while gesturing to the painful limits placed
upon women’s advances outside the role of motherhood. Kay challenges familial heterodoxy,
positioning Scottishness prominently in African diasporic cultures and Black British literature.
Her restitutions of adoptive and racially mixed people’s experiences in national narratives have
been trailblazing. tucker green changed the conditions of theatre, never a neutral space for a
Black writer, by reshaping it to her terms through her arresting stage idiom, casting specificities,
and refusal to comply with expectations that a playwright should be biographically and discur-
sively accessible. As a triumvirate, “Three Women”, “The Adoption Papers”, and trade might
even be viewed as the mediation between their uncharacteristic or un(der)represented subject mat-
ter, and the reader/listener/audience member who may or may not be familiar with the depicted
experiences.
If performance constitutes, in W.B. Worthen’s definition, “a significant critical act in that larger
scene, the changing scene of social life”, in application to these three woman-generated, women-
centred texts, “audiences [as a result] learn to read, to do, and to see differently” (2010: 56, empha-
sis in original). There will always be someone left out, or on the edge of cultural representation.
But when that constitutes a whole social group – mothers, transracially raised children, Black
women – through centralising these groups’ perspectives, as Plath, Kay, and tucker green do in
these three works, social norms can be re-fashioned by their cultural creativities, to engender the
possibility of changed perspectives, and to aid in dismantling “dominant cultural logic” in its mul-
tiple and resilient forms.

Notes
1 Kay’s ‘The Adoption Papers’ was republished in Darling: New and Selected Poems by Bloodaxe in
2007.
2 The published version of trade had its first season at the RSC October 2005 and at Soho Theatre, London,
March 2006. An earlier version was performed by the RSC in October 2004 and in March 2005 at Soho
Theatre, London.

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 Deirdre Osborne

3 Tue 28th Aug. BBC Radio 3, Original music composed and directed by Dominique LeGendre. Cast:
Adoptive mother – Jenny Lee, Birth mother – Sandra Clarke, Daughter – Kath Howden.
4 O’Brien alerts us to Plath’s critical essay “Context” (1962) where Plath situates herself in a lineage of
twenty-six poets and Derek Walcott is the only “writer of color” (2022:104).

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 17
FEMINISM, EUGENICS,
AND GENETICS
From convergence to contestation

Clare Hanson

Both eugenics and genetic engineering are strategies which aim to improve the quality of future
humans, but where early twentieth-century eugenics focused on altering the balance of character-
istics in the population as a whole, genetic engineering was and is concerned with manipulating
individual genomes. To a large extent, this shift from the macro to the micro level has been driven
by developments in technoscience, particularly the discovery of the structure of DNA, the crack-
ing of the genetic code and the creation of recombinant DNA. However, social factors have also
played a part in this transition. The prominence of the eugenics movement in the first half of the
twentieth century coincided with a move towards the state’s taking greater responsibility for the
health and welfare of the population, while the post-war expansion of molecular biology was ac-
companied by a shift to a neoliberal ethos in which health choices, including genetic interventions,
were increasingly framed as a matter of individual choice. In consequence of these changes, the
ethical issues raised by eugenics and genetic engineering are differently inflected. In relation to
eugenics, the primary concern is with the coercive reach of the state, while in relation to genetic
engineering, the focus has been on differential access to genetic technology. The common thread is
the fear that interventions in human nature will only exacerbate existing inequalities and injustices.
The concept of eugenics goes back to the ancient world, when Plato argued in the Republic
for a programme of selective breeding which would privilege the reproduction of the elite while
the lower classes would be discouraged from proliferating. However, it was given a fresh impetus
in the nineteenth century with the advent of Darwin’s evolutionary theory, which was grounded
in the principle of descent with modification. Darwin’s insights into heredity prompted his half-
cousin, Francis Galton, to argue that human beings should take control of their own evolution
and replace natural selection with artificial selection. In 1883, Galton coined the term ‘eugenics’
(literally ‘good breeding’) for the science of improving the population, a science which he rec-
ognised would be particularly complex in relation to human beings as it entailed “cognisance of
all influences that tend in however remote a degree to give the more suitable races or strains of
blood a better chance of prevailing” (Galton 1943: 17). His ideas were influential and spawned a
movement which spread across the globe, the principles of eugenics being sufficiently broad to
appeal across the political spectrum, while being adaptable to local contexts. In late-nineteenth-
century Britain, the idea of improving the population spoke to conservative fears of national and
imperial decline while simultaneously capturing the attention of progressive social reformers. In

263 DOI: 10.4324/9781003429951-21

 Clare Hanson

the decades that followed, British women writers repeatedly addressed the tensions thrown up by
successive iterations of eugenic thought.

Eugenic feminism
Eugenics is, by definition, inseparable from the politics of reproduction, so it is unsurprising that
from the outset, the eugenics movement was closely tied to strands in nineteenth-century femi-
nism. While the primary goal of First-Wave feminism was female suffrage, additional concerns
were the sexual double standard and the costs of maternity, issues which were prominent in rep-
resentations of the New Woman, an icon of feminist modernity who was both celebrated and
satirised in the press and literary fiction. As Angelique Richardson has shown, the New Woman
was also often linked to eugenic thought, which seems counterintuitive as the eugenics movement
offered no real challenge to gendered inequality (Richardson 2003: 4–9). However, eugenics could
be seen as empowering for women in that it stressed the importance of maternity in improving the
health and strength of the population. Building on this, feminists began to argue that the control of
reproduction should lie in the hands of women, challenging Darwin’s contention in The Descent of
Man (1871/2004) that in human beings (unlike most other species) males were the agents of sexual
selection. According to eugenic feminists, such as Frances Swiney (1889) and Arabella Kenealy
(1891), women’s natural power of selection had been undermined because the economic pressures
of the mid-nineteenth century led to a surplus of women, tilting the balance of power towards men.
Women were better equipped to make a sound choice of reproductive partner and it was imperative
that the power of sexual choice should be restored to them: from this perspective, female sexual
selection was a force for national renewal and motherhood was a civic duty.
The theme of female reproductive choice is at the heart of the fiction of Sarah Grand, a novelist,
short story writer, and polemicist who has a claim to have coined the term “New Woman” in an
1894 article for the North American Review. Grand’s most successful novel, The Heavenly Twins
(1893), explores the dire consequences of failure to exercise reproductive choice, as demonstrated
by one of the main protagonists, Edith Beale, a sexual innocent who has been over-protected by
her parents. She makes the mistake of marrying a syphilitic womaniser and her son is subsequently
born with secondary syphilis, while her own illness leads to insanity and death. The novel sug-
gests that in her abrogation of reproductive responsibility, Edith is as degenerate as her spouse.
In contrast, her cousin Evadne, who has read widely in physiology and medicine, takes immedi-
ate action when she discovers that her husband has a dissolute past, refusing to consummate her
marriage. When her husband subsequently succumbs to degenerative heart disease, she marries a
doctor with whom she has a healthy son. The novel thus endorses the idea that an educated and
informed woman can contribute to the health of the nation by resisting degeneracy and choosing
a sound reproductive partner.
Evadne embodies the principles of civic motherhood, although Grand makes it clear that her
choices take their toll on her mental health and indicates that women are more susceptible than
men to psychological and physical pressure. In this respect, her fiction reflects the widespread eu-
genic belief in innate sexual differences, which when combined with her emphasis on motherhood
makes for a curious blend of progressive and conservative views on sex and gender. The same is
true of George Egerton (the pseudonym of Mary Chevalita Donne), whose short story collections
Keynotes and Discords were a runaway success in the 1890s. Egerton was notorious for her ar-
ticulation of female desire and her critique of the sexual double standard, yet in her fiction, sexual
freedom is ultimately subordinated to the cult of maternity, particularly for middle-class women.
In “A Cross Line”, for example, the main protagonist, Gipsy, abandons an affair as soon as she

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becomes pregnant by her husband and settles down to sewing baby clothes, assisted by a maid who
has herself lost an illegitimate child. The class bias of British eugenic thought, which was much
concerned with the dysgenic threat posed by the urban poor, is deeply inscribed in this story, which
contrasts Gipsy’s health and strength with the faded appearance of a maid who nonetheless serves
her like “a faithful dog” (Egerton 2014: n.pag.).
To a large extent, eugenic thought relied on neo-Darwinism, a version of Darwinism which
was promoted by some of his followers but which Darwin himself would not necessarily have
endorsed. The core principles of neo-Darwinism were that the units of inheritance were sealed
from the environment and that the sole driver of evolution was random mutation. The alternative
view, associated with the French biologist Jean Baptiste de Lamarck, was that evolutionary change
could be driven by the inheritance of characteristics acquired as the organism responded to its
environment. The difference between these perspectives was significant because the environment
was thought to be more easily manipulated than heredity, and for this reason, the Lamarckian view
tended to appeal to progressive social reformers. Among these was Mona Caird, a New Woman
novelist who argued that the individual was largely a product of socio-historical contexts and that
human nature was “a mere register of the forces that chance to be at work at the moment, and of the
forces that have been at work in the past” (Caird 2010: 197–198). On this basis, Caird pushed back
against the biological determinism and pro-natalism of eugenicists like Grand and Egerton, argu-
ing that woman’s nature was not fixed nor was her identification with the maternal role inevitable.
However, she was something of a lone voice and there was surprisingly little feminist opposition
to eugenics as it became increasingly influential in the first two decades of the twentieth century.
The Eugenics Society, which was founded in London in 1907, was a key factor in this respect.
Its membership had considerable social and cultural capital, being overwhelmingly middle to up-
per middle class and including prominent doctors and scientists, some of them Nobel laureates.
Strikingly, as Daniel Kevles has pointed out, half the membership consisted of women, as did a
quarter of the officers (Kevles 1995: 64). The Society tended to be socially conservative but also
attracted social radicals, notably those associated with the Fabian Society, including George Ber-
nard Shaw and Sidney and Beatrice Webb. The Fabians supported the concept of a scientifically
planned society, the scientific component consisting of positive eugenics to encourage breeding
among the mentally and physically fit and negative eugenics to discourage reproduction among
the degenerate. The British eugenics movement was largely concerned with negative eugenics
and the control of the poor. Indeed, poverty and degeneracy were often conflated, as exemplified
by the belief that ‘feeble-mindedness’ was especially prevalent in the pauper class, as were drunk-
enness and promiscuity. The Eugenics Society campaigned energetically for the segregation of the
‘mentally deficient’ in order that their taint would not be passed on, and in 1913, the government
passed a Mental Deficiency Act which allowed for the detention of some of the ‘feeble-minded’.
The Society also argued for voluntary sterilisation of ‘mental defectives’, with strong support from
women’s organisations across the political spectrum, from the National Conference of Labour
Women to the Conservative Women’s Reform Association.

Eugenics and modernity

As Marius Turda suggests, eugenics can be seen as an integral part of modernity in that it plays
into a vision of a rational social order predicated on advances in science and technology (Turda
2010: 12). For eugenicists, the advances which could be mobilised to improve the quality of the
population were sterilisation, as noted above, and contraception. Birth control was a topic which
first came to wider public attention with the publication of Marie Stopes’ Married Love (1918),

265
 Clare Hanson

which aimed to enhance married life by providing detailed knowledge about conception and con-
traception. Like Sarah Grand, Stopes struggled with the tension between a commitment to equal
rights feminism and to a eugenic ideology which was underpinned by a belief in innate sexual
differences. She also had to negotiate the conflict between the feminist demand for universal con-
traception and the eugenic drive to differential reproduction: this led her to downplay the impact
of birth control on middle-class women and to focus disproportionately on the provision of contra-
ception for the poor, while she was also a vocal advocate of sterilisation for the ‘defective’. Similar
contradictions are evident in the work of her U.S. counterpart Margaret Sanger, the powerful birth
control advocate who campaigned for equality in the sense of the right to self-determining mother-
hood while arguing that people with mental and physical disabilities should be sterilised. Accord-
ing to her critics, Sanger also failed to distance herself sufficiently from the racism that inflected
the work of many prominent American eugenicists, who were concerned about the danger posed
to the population by both African Americans and European immigrants. The writings of one of the
best-known feminists of the day, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, both responded to and promoted such
racist eugenic views. In an essay published in the American Journal of Sociology, Gilman argued
for the forcible removal of African Americans on the grounds that they constituted an injury to the
body politic, while her speculative fiction With Her in Ourland notes the risks posed by the injec-
tion into a population of the “alien blood” of “low-grade” immigrants (Seitler 2003: 68).
In Britain, speculative fiction became the genre of choice for exploring the future of reproduc-
tion, particularly after the publication of J. B. S. Haldane’s Daedalus, or Science and the Future
in 1923. Haldane was a gifted evolutionary biologist and an equally gifted populariser of science,
and in Daedalus, he considers the implications of a biological advance, namely a technique for
ectogenesis or gestation outside the womb, for the creation of a planned society. In his fictional fu-
ture, the technique enables the control of reproduction and the uplift of the human species, devel-
opments which the book’s male narrator views with satisfaction. The book caused a stir and led to
Haldane’s being contacted by a journalist with whom he began a relationship, leading to their mar-
riage in 1926. In that year, Charlotte Haldane published Man’s World, a speculative fiction which
offers a partial critique of the future sketched out by her husband. In her novel, society is run by
a male scientific elite and reproduction is managed along eugenic lines. Motherhood is open only
to women selected for “the propagation of the race” and their reproductive partners are assigned
to them by the state (Haldane 1923: 51). Where Charlotte Haldane’s text diverges from Daedalus
is in dramatising a key protagonist’s rebellion against these constraints and thereby underscoring
the limitations of the role assigned to women under the rubric of eugenic motherhood. The novel
also anticipates the wider abuses of Nazi eugenics through the rhetoric used by the scientists, who
are dedicated to the preservation of “the white race” and develop chemical weapons targeted at
“the black pigment in negroes” (63–64). In its exploration of the adjacency of eugenics and racial
thinking, the novel anticipates later texts that engaged critically with the rise of Fascism, including
Katherine Burdekin’s Swastika Night (1937/1985) and Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas (1938).
Eugenic ideas surface in a number of modernist texts, including Olive Moore’s experimen-
tal fiction Spleen (1930/1996), which turns on the conflict between the protagonist’s intellectual
ambitions and her maternal duty: the priority of the second is underscored when a mismanaged
pregnancy is followed by the birth of a disabled child. However, it is in the work of Virginia Woolf
that the ambiguities of the eugenic imagination are most fully explored.
Woolf’s relationship with eugenics has been the subject of heated debate, with some critics
fastening on an early diary entry in which she describes her horror when she sees a procession
of “imbeciles” and concludes “They should certainly be killed” (Woolf 1977: 13). Extrapolating
from this, Donald J. Childs (2001) argues that Woolf’s fiction reveals an enduring sympathy with

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eugenics which has been whitewashed by her biographers and critics. In the other camp, David
Bradshaw (2002) reads Woolf as satirising eugenic thought as part of her sustained opposition to
patriarchy. In a sense, both views are correct, as Woolf’s fiction elucidates a fundamental tension
in the modernist response to eugenics, which is compounded of attraction towards the ideal of
rational modernity and fear of its exclusionary logic. This dialectic becomes particularly clear in
Mrs Dalloway, where eugenics is represented by Sir William Bradshaw, a doctor whose views
closely echo those of Sir George Savage, who treated Woolf for mental illness for over a decade.
Through her account of Bradshaw’s beliefs, Woolf’s narrator underscores the appeal of the con-
cept of the ideal human (signalled by the term “Proportion”) and the coercive logic of the drive
to impose that ideal on others (represented by the term “Conversion”). S/he draws attention to
the imbrication of eugenics and a conception of national identity hostile to misfits and outsiders
when she comments that, in his adherence to proportion, “Sir William not only prospered himself
but made England prosper, secluded her lunatics, forbade childbirth, penalized despair”; further,
she underscores the connection between eugenics and the imperial project when she suggests
that conversion “feasts on the wills of the weakly” across the “heat and sands of India, the mud
and swamps of Africa” (Woolf 1992b: 129–130). Despite the generic nature of these references
to India and Africa, Woolf is unusual for the time in registering the connection between eugenics
and the imperial project which, as Michel Foucault points out, was founded on biological racism
(Foucault 2004: 255). Where Mrs Dalloway focuses on negative eugenics, To the Lighthouse sheds
a critical light on positive eugenics through the figure of Mrs Ramsay, an icon of eugenic mother-
hood who, by Woolf’s admission, resembles her own mother. Mrs Ramsay respects “the great in
birth” because she is herself descended from a “noble, if slightly mythical, Italian house” and she
has eight children who are, in her view, “full of promise”, energetic, gifted, and attractive. She has
charitable interests and is particularly exercised by the need for clean milk, a recurring theme for
eugenicists who recognised the importance of a healthy environment. Yet she remains “a private
woman whose charity was half a sop to her own indignation, half a relief to her own curiosity”
and whose account of “the iniquity of the English dairy system” is mocked by her husband and
children (Woolf 1992c: 14, 80). Despite her rich inner life, she lacks agency beyond the domestic
sphere and, in this respect, the novel echoes Charlotte Haldane’s critique of eugenic motherhood.

The Second World War and its aftermath

Eugenic logic found its ultimate expression in German racial ideology, which during the Third
Reich was used to justify the sterilisation of the feeble-minded, the insane, people with physical
disabilities, such as deafness and blindness, homosexuals, and gypsies or Romanies; subsequently,
the Nazi regime’s commitment to the superiority of the ‘Nordic’ type was used to legitimise the
murder of six million Jews. It is often assumed that eugenics petered out after these atrocities,
but this is not entirely the case. While no extermination of this kind and scale has occurred since
1945, eugenic policies continued to be implemented in liberal democracies in post-war Europe: in
Sweden for example, over 60,000 of the ‘feeble-minded’ and mentally ill were sterilised between
1945 and 1976. In the United Kingdom, many of the architects of post-war reconstruction were
members of the Eugenics Society and though no explicitly eugenic measures were introduced,
eugenic assumptions were implicated in the setting up of selective state secondary education and
the provision of special schools and mental deficiency hospitals for the “backward” (Hanson 2013:
13–65). Similarly, it is often argued that there was an epistemological and ideological break be-
tween pre- and post-war genetic science. As noted earlier, there was undoubtedly a shift in the
epistemic object of genetics due to the discovery of the structure of DNA and the focus on cracking

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the genetic code. The object of attention shifted from the population to the individual genome and
there was a new emphasis on finding the genetic causes of disease: in this context, geneticists po-
sitioned themselves as participants in an international scientific enterprise with the double helix as
a signifier of human universality. Nonetheless, the eugenic assumptions associated with pre-war
or classical genetics continued to shape the thinking of many geneticists, including James Watson
and Francis Crick. Watson’s support for eugenics, which he terms “evolutionary self-correction”,
is well-known, but Crick also endorsed eugenic ideas, arguing that genetic deterioration posed a
threat to the race. Accordingly, he proposed a tax on children which would deter the poor from
reproducing, the assumption being that the rich were better endowed with the desirable qualities
of health and intelligence (Crick 1963: 294).
The continuities and discontinuities between the old genetics and the new were explored by a
range of post-war writers, including Naomi Mitchison and Doris Lessing. Mitchison was the sister
of J. B. S. Haldane and was friendly with James Watson, who dedicated his account of the discovery
of the structure of DNA to her (Watson 1997). She was also on good terms with the embryologists
C. H. Waddington and Anne McLaren, both of whom worked on the influence of the environment
on development. In Memoirs of a Spacewoman (1962), a speculative fiction set thousands of years
in the future, Mitchison considers the relative impact of heredity and the environment through a
series of breeding experiments involving humans and “alien” species (Mitchison 1976: 47). These
demonstrate the influence of the mother/host on the new hybrid organism, so that the novel chal-
lenges gene-centrism and, in this sense, offers a radical view of genetics and development. At the
same time, it offers a cautious endorsement of the eugenic manipulation of inheritance and the
environment, as is also the case in Solution Three (1973), a speculative fiction dedicated, in return,
to James Watson. In this imaginary future, a world government is seeking to solve the problem
of human aggression by stabilising the population, most of which has been cloned from just two
individuals, an African American man and a white British woman who have been selected for their
“superior” qualities. In addition to sharing a genome, the clones are subjected to “strengthening”,
or conditioning which fits them for their designated roles in society (Mitchison 1995: 59). Again,
the novel is sophisticated in its understanding of the interplay between genes and the environment
but stays within the eugenic problematic as it posits biological rather than social change as the key
to human progress.
Lessing’s science fiction of the late 1970s and early 1980s takes a more critical view of eugenics
and of genetic engineering, which was then just beginning to seem a viable prospect. Her Canopus
in Argos sequence is an evolutionary epic on a grand scale, mapping the activities of inter-galactic
empires over millennia. The most benevolent of the empires, Canopus, employs conventional eu-
genic strategies to speed up the evolution of its subject populations. On Shikasta (Earth), for exam-
ple, when a “promising” species emerges, they are tutored by members of a more advanced species
and encouraged to breed only from the “best” individuals (Lessing 1981: 42). However, the rival
Sirian empire turns to genetic engineering to manage its population, and as she depicts its genetic
experiments, Lessing emphasises the links between eugenics, genetics, and empire. Specifically,
she draws parallels between the strategies used by the Sirians and the implicitly eugenic measures
employed by the British government in Southern Rhodesia, the country which she had left in 1949.
In the “Loombi Experiment”, for example, the Sirians deliberately stall the development of a “low-
grade species” in order that they will accept their role as an all-purpose labour force: the allusion
is to the way in which the white regime denied education and training to the black population of
Southern Rhodesia in a system which, according to UNESCO, “trains Africans to provide efficient
service at lower levels while ensuring for Europeans a superiority designed to confirm a racial my-
thology” (UNESCO 1975: 40). Similarly, the space-lifting of the Loombis from one uncongenial

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planet to the next echoes the forced movement of the black population of Southern Rhodesia to the
poor land of the “reserves”, leading to widespread poverty and ill-health.

Genetics, gender, and race

By the 1970s, genetics had become a major international enterprise. The genetic code was cracked
in 1966, laying the foundations for the creation of recombinant DNA by cutting and splicing genes
with molecular tools. By combining genetic material from more than one source, it was possible to
modify the genome of an individual organism and it was also possible to combine genetic material
across species, creating the new field of transgenics. To the public, it seemed that scenarios that
previously belonged to the sphere of science fiction were on the brink of realisation, fuelling new
ethical concerns. In particular, the intersection of genetic engineering and assisted reproductive
technology (ART) sparked alarm. The combination of in vitro fertilisation and pre-implantation
genetic diagnosis appeared to open the door to embryo selection, leading to debates about the
genetic control of society on both sides of the Atlantic. Perhaps the most vocal opposition to the
eugenic potential of ART came from the radical feminist group Finnrage (Feminist International
Network of Resistance to Reproductive and Genetic Engineering) which was set up in 1986. The
group’s 1989 “Comilla Declaration” linked genetic engineering with eugenic selection accord-
ing to sex, race, and health, arguing that genetics was imbued with an ideology in which “human
beings are viewed as inherently inferior or superior. This led to degradation, discrimination and
elimination of oppressed groups; be they women, disabled, people of certain colors, races, reli-
gions, class, or caste”. Presciently, Finnrage went on to link the extractive economy of genetic
engineering with the exploitation of wider planetary resources, noting that “similarly, traits of
animals and plants are arbitrarily valued as being desirable or undesirable and become subject
to genetic manipulation” (Finnrage 1989). However, as Hilary Rose has argued, the weakness of
Finnrage lay in its blanket rejection of genetic engineering and reproductive technology and fail-
ure to recognise women’s divergent interests, particularly in the context of the distress caused by
infertility (Rose 1994: 185–186).
By the time of the Human Genome Project (HGP), biotechnology was a global industry, and
literature and culture were also increasingly globalised. Critical thinkers who engaged with is-
sues arising from genetics saw their influence extend far beyond national borders, with the work
of Donna Haraway being particularly significant for feminist thinking about science. In Mod-
est_Witness@ Second_Millenium. Female Man©_Meets_OncoMouseTM (1997/2018), Haraway
challenges the male Enlightenment scientific tradition which assumes a separation between the
observer and the object of study and makes the case for the agency of the object of knowledge,
with specific reference to OncoMouseTM, a genetically engineered breast cancer research model.
She claims kinship with the mouse as an agent and cultural actor who, like her, is “living its many-
layered life as best it can”. She accepts her complicity with the mouse’s suffering while noting
that OncoMouseTM is imbricated with systemic inequalities and is far more likely to benefit white
women than African Americans, whose death rates from breast cancer remain disproportionately
high (113).
Zadie Smith’s White Teeth speaks directly to the issues raised by Haraway. The novel drama-
tises the potential overlap between eugenics and genetic engineering through a plot featuring a
Nazi scientist who not only survives the Second World War but becomes the eminence grise be-
hind a research programme that culminates in the creation of a transgenic organism programmed to
develop specific forms of cancer. Marcus Chalfen, the geneticist who has created FutureMouse©,
exemplifies the Enlightenment scientific tradition critiqued by Haraway, with its assumption of a

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clear-cut distinction between the observer and object of study: for him, the mouse is “a biological
site for experimentation into heredity” and he is baffled by the way the public reacts to his inven-
tion as though it has some bearing on “the mouseness of the mouse” (Smith 2001: 419). As Josie
Gill suggests, Smith challenges his perspective through an implicit conflation of FutureMouse©
with Danger Mouse, a popular cartoon of the 1980s and 1990s which featured a mouse as “the
most famous spy in the world” (Gill 2013: 23). Haraway’s insights are further engaged when Irie,
a friend of Chalfen’s son, examines photographs of FutureMouse© and sees, not an experimental
object, but a knowing collaborator, a mouse-spy interpreting and subverting human expectations:

There was [a tumour] on its neck that appeared practically the same size as its ear. But the
mouse looked quite pleased about it. Almost as though it had purposefully grown new ap-
paratus to hear what Marcus was saying about him. Irie was aware this was a stupid thing to
think about a lab mouse. But, once again, the mouse-face had a mouse-cunning about it […]
Terminal disease? (the mouse said to Irie) What terminal disease?

The implication is that the mouse can understand and resist human designs – even genetic ones – a
point reinforced by its escape, cheered on by Irie’s father who claims the mouse as kin: “Go on my
son! thought Archie” (542).
Like Haraway, Smith draws attention to the sticky web of identifications, hopes, and fears that
attach both scientists and the wider public to epistemic objects of research, be they genes or model
organisms. By interweaving the themes of genetic engineering, immigration, and race, she also
exposes the origin of many of the fears surrounding genetic technology. The association of genet-
ics with racial thinking goes back a long way, and the belief that populations differ in their geneti-
cally inscribed characteristics has been difficult to dislodge, despite the best efforts of eminent
geneticists such as Richard Lewontin (1972). Smith makes this point as Iqbal’s wife translates her
“immigrant” fears about hybridity and “dissolution, disappearance”, into a comic riff on genetic
recombination, foreseeing a future where one of her sons, “genetically BB; where B stands for
Bengali-ness” marries Sarah “aa where ‘a’ stands for Aryan”, leading to “a legacy of unrecogniz-
able great-grandchildren (Aaaaaaa!)” (327).
The international circulation of ideas and debates amongst feminist thinkers and women writers
is evident in parallels between Smith’s concerns and those of Octavia Butler, the most prominent
North American writer to address the imbrication of genetics and race. Butler’s work was pub-
lished in a period when major research projects were raising problematic issues around genetics
and race. The Human Genome Diversity Project was set up in the early 1990s to map genetic
frequencies within populations. The aim was to track the history of human migration, but due to
its focus on indigenous populations at risk of extinction, the project was seen by many as a form
of biocolonialism, extracting genetic data for the benefit of researchers rather than donors. Similar
problems beset the HapMap Project, which was established in 2002 to map patterns of genetic var-
iation which affected health and disease. There were fears that this too would fail to benefit those
who donated their DNA, and more significantly, that the emphasis on genetic variation would
reinscribe the idea of a genetic basis for race. Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy (republished as Lilith’s
Brood [2000]) addresses the theme of biocolonialism through its dramatisation of the relationship
between human beings who have survived a nuclear disaster and the Oankali, a humanoid species
who roam the universe looking for organisms whose genetic material they can adapt for their own
purposes. They want to interbreed with humans so that they can appropriate the human genetic
predisposition to cancer, using it to re-grow limbs and create more flexible bodies: in exchange, the
hybrid species will be engineered so that the qualities that lead humans to destroy each other are

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eliminated. This genetic exchange is structured by a huge imbalance of power, the humans having
little choice but to breed with the Oankali if they want to survive, in a clear reference to slavery
and the appropriation of the reproductive power of black women’s bodies. In addition, the idea that
a genetic disposition to cancer might be recruited for treatment/enhancement recalls the infamous
case of Henrietta Lacks, a young black woman whose cancer cells were extracted without her
knowledge or consent, subsequently becoming the source of the first immortalised cell line, still
one of the most important in medical research.
Margaret Atwood’s Maddaddam trilogy (Atwood 2004, 2009, 2014) is explicitly international
in its concerns, addressing the risks posed by the concentration of genetic knowledge in the hands
of global corporations. The first novel in the series, Oryx and Crake, depicts a society built on the
commodification of vitality, where bioengineering is the most significant field of corporate activity
and genetic research is directed both at the treatment of disease and the enhancement of human
life. The trilogy turns on the actions of Crake, a gifted geneticist who believes that humans are a
disastrous species because they are hard-wired for conflict. Accordingly, he engineers a pandemic
which wipes out almost all the existing population and splices together human and non-human
DNA to create humanoids, known as the Crakers, who are vegetarian and free from aggression.
While Atwood stresses the ambivalence of Crake’s eugenic programme, in which creation and
destruction are inextricably intertwined, there is no direct criticism of the idea of human enhance-
ment. In this respect, the novel coheres with the ethos of liberal eugenics that was promoted by
a number of philosophers around the turn of the millennium, in which enhancement is seen as
permissible as long as it does not compromise justice. More importantly, Atwood is interested in
exploring new modes of engagement between humans and other species, an issue she broaches
through the relations between the human survivors and the transgenic organisms they have cre-
ated. These include not only the Crakers but the Pigoons: pigs containing human neocortex tissue
which were originally designed to host organs for transplant. As the human survivors attempt to
understand these hybrid organisms, Atwood draws attention to the contradictory logic which struc-
tures our engagement with other species, as some human qualities are arbitrarily projected onto
them while they are assumed to lack others: accordingly, the humans expect aggression from the
Pigoons but completely fail to recognise their powerful communicative skills. By underscoring the
fact that qualities thought to be exclusive to humans may be shared with other species, the trilogy
chips away at human exceptionalism and in this respect can be aligned with post-humanist and
post-anthropocentric perspectives. It also resonates with Haraway’s emphasis on the reconfigura-
tion of relations between humans and other species in the era of the Anthropocene. As Crakers,
­Pigoons and humans negotiate new modes of thriving alongside one another, the trilogy models
the ways in which companion species might learn to be, in Haraway’s words, better able “to prac-
tice the arts of living and dying well in multispecies symbiosis” (Haraway 2016: 98).

Postgenomics
The genetic engineering imagined by Atwood also resonates with the transhumanism which came
to prominence in the late twentieth century. Transhumanist philosophers advocate improving
the human condition by using technology, including biotechnology, to eliminate ageing and en-
hance human intellectual and physical capacities. For figures like Nick Bostrom (the Director of
Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute), this is an ethical imperative, whereas for feminist phi-
losophers like Rosi Braidotti, transhumanism represents a form of techno-utopia which rests on
“contempt for the flesh” and an attempt to escape from “the finite materiality of the enfleshed
self”; the transhumanist movement has also been criticised by disability scholars on the grounds

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that it risks constructing disabled bodies as inherently less valuable than others (Braidotti 2013:
91). However, as we move into the postgenomic era, the aims of transhumanism look less and less
likely to be realised any time soon.
The term postgenomic is sometimes used simply to refer to the period after the sequencing of
the human genome, but it also denotes a new style of biological thought which has emerged pre-
cisely because the HGP has deconstructed many of its own assumptions, raising as many questions
as it answered. Most significantly, its findings have made it clear that genes do not in themselves
contain all the information needed to build a living organism. As the philosopher and historian of
science Evelyn Fox Keller puts it, our view of the role of the genome has changed from “an ex-
ecutive suite of directorial instructions” to a “reactive system that enables genes to regulate gene
expression in response to their immediate environment” (Keller 2015: 10). Rather than focusing
on genes as atomistic units, postgenomic research is concerned with the dynamic architecture of
the genome, in which what was thought of as “junk DNA” is involved in complex regulatory pro-
cesses, alongside epigenetic mechanisms such as DNA methylation which modify gene expression
in response to environmental cues. In many respects, this emphasis on the dynamic complexity
of the genome represents a return to the holistic view of gene function pioneered by Barbara Mc-
Clintock, who discovered transposons or “jumping genes” in the 1940s, and Lynn Margolis, who
argued in the 1960s that evolution was driven by symbiosis rather than competition. There is also a
striking convergence between postgenomics and the feminist new materialism which has emerged
over the last decade, building on the pioneering work of theorists such as Karen Barad and Braid-
otti. While Barad (2007) draws on quantum physics to develop the concept of “agential realism”,
which denotes a material reality which is not fixed but which emerges in mutually constitutive
intra-actions, Braidotti draws on the biological concept of autopoiesis, that is the belief that matter
is self-organised and structurally relational, to develop her vitalist materialist philosophy. This fo-
cus on the dynamic interactivity of matter has enabled feminist new materialists such as Elizabeth
Wilson (2015) and Vicky Kirby (2018) to take a fresh approach to the question of embodiment
which has vexed feminism for decades, dismantling the stale opposition between biological es-
sentialism and social constructionism. Following the lead of the biologist and gender theorist Anne
Fausto-Sterling, they frame the body as “biosocial”, formed in and through exchanges with its en-
vironments, simultaneously “100 per cent nature and 100 percent nurture” (Fausto-Sterling 2005:
1510). This perspective allows for a more nuanced and politically salient account of women’s
lives, one which is attentive to the reality of embodied and embedded experience while emphasis-
ing the dynamic, autopoietic power of living organisms. This shift in biological thinking might
also lead to a more cautious approach to the goal of manipulating inheritance, which is not only
biologically complex but, as the writers discussed in this chapter and others such as Jackie Kay
(2010) and Yaa Gyasi (2016) show, raises social and ethical questions too important to be left in
the hands of biotech companies.

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 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

Nancy Jiwon Cho

The hymn has been a literary mode of self-expression for Christian women in Britain from ­almost
the beginning of its development in the long eighteenth century as a vehicle for congregational
worship. The contribution of women writers to English hymn writing has been substantial and
prominent; the pioneer hymnologist Daniel Sedgwick’s Comprehensive Index of Names of Origi-
nal Authors and Translators of Psalms and Hymns, with the Dates of their Various Works, Chiefly
Collected from the Original (1863) contains at least 234 women’s names among a total list of 1,480
writers (some names are only initials, so gender cannot be ascertained). Thus, nearly 16% of the
hymn writers known to Sedgwick, “the foremost living English hymnologist” of his time (­Julian
1925: 1036) were women. As a comparison, only 5% were women – there were four women (Anna
Laetitia Barbauld, Jane Elliott, Lady Anne Lindsay, and Lady Carolina Nairne) out of seventy-six
writers – in the popular verse anthology The Golden Treasury of Songs and Lyrics (1861), edited
by F. T. Palgrave (cited in Russ 1984: 76). In this context, the sizeable proportion of women hym-
nwriters acknowledged so early in the hymnological history seems extraordinary.
Although Virginia Woolf suggested in “A Room of One’s Own” that, by the end of the nine-
teenth century, “all the older forms of literature were hardened and set” so that “[t]he novel alone
was young enough to be soft in her [a woman’s] hands”, the English hymn, a form whose develop-
ment was contemporaneous with the rise of the novel, was also malleable for women writers’ use
(Woolf 1999: 100). The “father” of English hymnody, Isaac Watts (1674–1648), started publish-
ing hymns in the 1710s and contemporary women who penned hymns include Elizabeth Singer
Rowe (1674–1737) and Judith Madan (1702–1781). A century later, in the golden age of English
hymnody, some of the most distinguished and popular writers of vernacular hymns were women.
Highly productive and culturally recognised figures included Charlotte Elliott (1789–1871), Cecil
Frances Alexander (1818–1895), and Frances Ridley Havergal (1836–1879). However, despite the
explosion of interest in women’s writing since the second half of the twentieth century, there has
been limited discussion in English literary studies about the long and prolific tradition of women’s
hymn writing that has existed in Britain since the eighteenth century.

277 DOI: 10.4324/9781003429951-23

 Nancy Jiwon Cho

As a devotional mode – a form primarily functioning to worship God – rather than an ­expository
one, the hymn was an acceptable textual medium for women’s religious expression in times when
St Paul’s prohibitions against female teaching and preaching were upheld in mainstream churches.
Indeed, the Bible offered powerful precedents for female religious song in both the Hebrew Bible
and the New Testament with the exemplary models of Miriam’s victory song in Exodus 15:20–21
and Mary’s Magnificat in Luke 1:46–55. The hymn’s noble aim to worship God, as well as its
requirement to be an accessible form for the whole Church, including the young and uneducated,
further meant that it was an enabling mode for women writers who lacked formal education. For
instance, it provided an emulatable model of verse for women whose access to poetry was limited.
Ann Taylor Gilbert (1782–1866), the daughter of an engraver who later became a dissenting min-
ister, recalled in her biography that the only verse in her childhood home was that of Isaac Watts
(quoted in Cho 2015: 9). Studying his work, she and her sister Jane Taylor (1783–1823) developed
their own art and became pioneers of children’s moral and religious verse. Susanna Harrison’s
Songs in the Night (1780) further reveals the accessibility and acceptability of hymns. This collec-
tion by a self-taught former domestic servant was a publishing success: “[b]y the 1820s, the work
had gone through fifteen British editions and six American editions” (Landry 1990: 9). Contem-
porary readers evidently understood the hymn as an apposite textual medium for the inscription
of spiritual experience by a labouring-class Christian woman (see Keegan 2005). The humble yet
devout mode, with its plain form and worshipful intent, evidently rendered Harrison’s verse ac-
ceptable and honourable. The hymn form had the potential to protect even women from the lowest
sections of society from accusations of pride or ambition.
While the respectability of the English hymn was enabling for women entering a male-­
dominated and patriarchal print culture, the form could also be artistically limiting. The devotional
nature of the hymn restricted the possible range of subjects, ideas, and tone. The requirement that
the text be suitable for the universal Church regulated language and the need to adjoin the text to
music curbed formal complexity. This chapter uses the case study of Anne Steele (1717–1778),
the first major woman hymn writer, to illuminate how the English hymn was both enabling and
restricting for women with literary aspirations. It demonstrates how the hymn’s respectability as a
religious medium for praising God rendered it an authorising form for women’s writing, publica-
tion, and religious ministry. However, it also discloses how the hymn’s constraints in form and
content, combined with the dominant gender ideology of the period, meant the form was unsuit-
able for the comprehensive exploration of female identity and aspiration in the eighteenth century.
To substantiate this claim, this chapter examines Steele’s thoughts on happiness – a subject of great
eighteenth-century philosophical concern – defined as “[t]he state of pleasurable contentment of
mind; deep pleasure in or contentment with one’s circumstances” (OED Online) as inscribed in her
public and private writings. In her published devotional works, Steele presented an official posi-
tion that adhered to a biblically inflected model of happiness as a heavenly condition. However, in
her unpublished lyric poetry, she also connected happiness with earthly experience. In particular,
the happy state is connected with the pleasures of writing and the greater freedoms offered to
women by singleness.

“Theodosia” and “Silviania”: Anne Steele’s public

and private literary personae
Steele was not the first woman to write congregational hymns in English, but she was the first ma-
jor female author in this genre. Her Poems on Subjects Chiefly Devotional, containing 105 hymns,
numerous occasional poems and 47 versifications of the Psalms in 2 volumes was published in

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1760. Her position as the “mother” of English women’s hymnody is clarified in Emma Pitman’s
Lady Hymn Writers (1892) where she is positioned as the first to be celebrated and is thus con-
structed as a prototypical figure. Significantly, Steele published her hymns as a woman using
an explicitly feminine neoclassical pseudonym “Theodosia”, meaning “[female] gift from God”.
Steele’s hymns became highly circulated and significant in Baptist worship because, in 1769, John
Ash and Caleb Evans included sixty-two of her compositions from Poems on Subjects Chiefly
Devotional in their A Collection of Hymns Adapted to Public Worship, which was effectively the
first Baptist hymnal (see Aalders 2008: 60–63). The “Bristol Collection”, as it became known, dis-
seminated Steele’s hymns extensively throughout Baptist communities in England. Significantly,
readers would have been aware that Steele’s hymns were written by a woman because the editors
identified her hymns as authored by “T”, which openly stood for “Theodosia”. The circulation
of the Collection was greater than that of Poems on Subjects Chiefly Devotional and the regular
singing of Steele’s hymns in Baptist churches meant they contributed to the formation of English
Baptists’ collective theology and corporate identity at this time.
After her death in 1778, the cultural prominence of her verse increased. A second edition of Po-
ems on Subjects Chiefly Devotional with an additional, third volume of Miscellaneous Pieces was
published in 1780. In 1787, fifty-two of Steele’s hymns were included in John Rippon’s A Selec-
tion of Hymns from the Best Authors Intended to be an Appendix to Dr Watts’s Psalms and Hymns
(1787), a hymnal which in Ken Manley’s words was “without an effective rival among British
Baptists from 1787 until 1828” (Manley 1967: 197). Steele’s hymns thus performed the function
of imparting a shared doctrine for the unification of the Baptist Church in the Anglophone world.
The Selection was further disseminated in America and became popular across denominations; as
T. G. Crippen has asserted, the Selection was “probably the most important of all the supplements
to Watts. […. T]he book was used in many paedobaptist congregations” (Crippen 1916–1918:
227). Evidently, the English hymn enabled Steele, who was officially prohibited from teaching
and preaching in accordance with St. Paul’s admonitions against female authority over men (1 Tim
2:9–15), to undertake religious ministry and leadership.
Steele’s success as a hymnwriter has meant that she is known predominantly as an author of
“chiefly devotional” verse. In recent decades, however, exciting possibilities for broadening our
understanding of Steele emerged with the gifting of the Steele collection – books and manuscripts,
including poetry and epistolary exchanges between Steele’s family members and friends – in 1992
by Hugh Steele-Smith, a descendent of Steele’s brother, to the Angus Library at Regent’s Park
College, Oxford. This extensive collection included substantial unpublished writings – poetry and
prose – by Steele. In 2011, these previously unknown or “lost” works were published in Noncon-
formist Women Writers, 1720–1840, edited by Timothy Whelan and Julia Griffin, alongside the
coterie writings of a network of younger women writers who were united by their dissenting faith
and geographical location in the West country. The publication of the manuscripts has allowed for
the widening and revision of scholarly understanding of Steele’s authorship and dissenting wom-
en’s writings in the period more broadly. Steele’s greatest cultural achievement is likely to remain
that of being the “mother” of English hymnody, but the publication of Nonconformist Women Writ-
ers has revealed that she was a writer of greater generic ambition and thematic diversity beyond
the “chiefly devotional” mode. She wrote humorous verse for family members, dialogic poems
of friendship, and children’s verses for her nephews and nieces in addition to devotional verse.
The social nature of the coterie works has revealed that Steele the writer was more than the lone
conduit for divine wisdom that her pseudonym “Theodosia” suggests. When she published using
this pseudonym, the authorial identity fashioned was of a solitary channel for God whose literary
inspiration was entirely heavenly.

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In fact, Steele came from a prominent Baptist family with wide social networks. Her father,
William Steele, was a timber merchant and pastor at Broughton, Hampshire. His position in trade
reflects the civic restrictions placed upon dissenters during the eighteenth century; as a religious
nonconformist, he would not have been able to hold public office or gain degrees at Oxford or
Cambridge. In the face of such discrimination, the dissenters established mutually supportive net-
works which safeguarded their minority culture and fostered their shared interests. Anne Steele’s
epistles establish the supportive nature of this community and reflect their intellectual pursuits
and literary aspirations. Her friends, supporters, and epistolary correspondents included clerical
teacher–scholars, such as Philip Furneaux (1726–1783), Caleb Evans, (1737–1791) and John Ash
(1724–1797), and women writers, including Mary Scott (1751/1752–1793) and Hannah More
(1745–1833). Furneaux assisted with the publication of the original edition of Poems on Subjects
Chiefly Devotional, and Caleb Evans, who had been Furneaux’s ministerial assistant at Clapham
(Smith 1986: 250), was instrumental in publishing the second edition of Poems on Subjects Chiefly
Devotional (1780) as editor with John Ash as discussed above. These men were associated with
dissenting academies – Furneaux studied at Moorfields Academy, Ash studied at the Bristol Bap-
tist Academy, and Evans was principal of the same academy – which were at the forefront of En-
lightenment theological and philosophical thinking within Dissenting circles. Steele’s association
with them places her within these educated circles. Steele in turn mentored a younger generation
of intellectually aspiring women writers including Mary Scott, who included Steele in her most
famous work, The Female Advocate (1774), a celebration of women writers, and Mary Steele
(1753–1813), her niece who became a prolific writer in her own right. Although limited in for-
mal education, Steele was clearly part of a wide network of cultured friends who shared literary
interests.
Prior to publication, Steele used the pastoral pseudonym “Silviania” to write in a wide variety
of secular subgenres, including epistles, friendship poems, and comic verse. These works were
circulated by coterie distribution among like-minded friends drawn largely from dissenting circles
in the South West of England. Steele’s unpublished compositions record her life in a sociable
community of literary enthusiasts. For instance, a manuscript poem “In a Dirty Cold Village”,
provides insight into her family’s engagement with eighteenth-century poetry. In this work, she
writes about the household’s shared fondness for reading literature. After describing evening visits
by neighbours, she states:

But if uninterrupted, sometimes we can find

Amusement much better than this for the mind:
When one of the company reads to the rest
Grave Author or Poet or what we like best
All soft and harmonious the time glides along
Conversing with Pope or with Thompson or Young:
(Griffin 2011, vol 2: 147)

Steele documents her family as not only engaging in social reading but “conversing” with the
leading contemporary poets – a two-way transformative social process much discussed in the
eighteenth-century. As Jon Mee has discussed, “Conversation didn’t just happen in eighteenth-
century Britain. It was scrutinized, policed, promoted, written about, discussed, and practised”
(Mee 2011: 6). These previously unpublished poems reveal that Steele’s art extended beyond
the “chiefly devotional”, was sociable, and was in dialogue with eighteenth-century literary
culture.

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Happiness in Steele’s published writings

One area in which Steele’s conversance and participation with contemporary culture is apparent is
her writings on the subject of happiness, a much debated eighteenth-century philosophical concern
that has not been previously analysed in relation to her art. Steele’s thematic interest in happiness
is signalled by the fact that the first volume of Poems on Subjects Chiefly Devotional contains six
works with titles that include the word “happiness” or “happy”. The third volume, Miscellaneous
Pieces in Verse and Prose, posthumously published in 1780, contains a further four works. I am
not the first to observe that Steele wrote multiple works on happiness; Joseph V. Michael observes
that “for one who suffered much physical pain, she has a number of hymns that express the experi-
ence of happiness” (Michael 2021: 111). This comment illustrates a tendency that has existed to
read women’s writings autobiographically and to interpret Steele’s writings as the fruit of internal
spiritual experience rather than of social, cultural, or literary engagement. Steele’s concern with
happiness in the context of her various illnesses as documented in biographies and family papers
may be viewed as poignant evidence of her spiritual refinement; however, I further suggest that
her authorial scope extended beyond the autobiographical and reflected her engagement with con-
temporary culture. I contend that Steele’s exploration of happiness is not only personal, emotional,
and spiritual, but also social, intellectual, and temporal in conversing on a much discussed subject
of her day – the nature of happiness and the best way to pursue it.
As Brian Michael Norton has discussed, “the eighteenth century witnessed an explosion of
interest in happiness, as both a subject of inquiry and a personal life goal” (Norton 2012: 1). For
instance, there were more essays on happiness “written in the eighteenth century than in any previ-
ous age” (McMahon 2004: 15). John Locke asserted in his “Essay Concerning Human Understand-
ing” (1690) that “the highest perfection of intellectual nature lies in a careful and constant pursuit
of true and solid happiness” (Locke 2001: 209). These words, from which Thomas Jefferson drew
one of the best known phrases of the American Declaration of Independence (1776), “remind us”,
as Catherine Winterer observes, “that the pursuit of happiness was one of the principal quests of
the enlightened people” (Winterer 2016: 2–3). The presence of this concern in eighteenth-century
literature is illustrated by the words of Alexander Pope – a poet whom Steele admired, as her
“Imitation of Mr. Pope’s Ode on Solitude” testifies – in An Essay on Man (1732–1734): “Oh Hap-
piness! our being’s end and aim!” (Pope 1745: 43).
Historians and philosophers have discussed how there was a shift of ideas regarding happi-
ness in the eighteenth century. The dominant mode of understanding of happiness in seventeenth-
century Europe was as salvation in heaven; as Darrin McMahon has discussed, “For much of
Western history, happiness served as a marker of human perfection, an imagined ideal of a creature
complete, without further wants, desires, or needs” (McMahon 2005: 13). However, this long-held
concept shifted in the Enlightenment so that happiness has become something humans could as-
pire to attain “in this life” (McMahon 2005: 13). This alteration was a gradual process and some,
especially biblicists, held on to the old way of thinking into the eighteenth century. However, by
the end of the century, the aspiration for mortal happiness had become prevalent even in religious
circles; as Alexis de Tocqueville observed of American preachers at the beginning of the nine-
teenth century, it was difficult to ascertain “whether the main object of religion is to procure eternal
felicity in the next world or prosperity in this” (McMahon 2005: 340). This paradigm shift can be
detected in Anne Steele’s oeuvre.
As mentioned, several of Steele’s published works take happiness as their subject matter. The
three volumes of the enlarged second edition Poems on Subjects Chiefly Devotional (1780) use
“happy” 101 times, “happiness” ninety-five times, “happier” seven times, and “unhappy” four times.

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Moreover, “happiness” appears in ten titles. In terms of Steele’s wider use of language in this pub-
lication, her highest frequency words include “thy”, “Lord”, “God”, and “thee”; thus, they all re-
late to the person of God, in keeping with Steele’s “chiefly devotional” mode. As Victoria Morgan
has pointed out, “The most common feature of devotional verse is the presence of a speaker who
seeks self-definition through a source that is felt to be external to and/or greater or other than the
self” (Morgan 2013). Or as K. J. E. Graham further clarifies, “devotional poetry is often recogniz-
able for its tendency to address a divinity” (Graham 2012: 352–354). Steele’s works are clearly
theocentric despite her use of the lyric voice. After words relating to the person of God, the most
recurrent terms used by Steele remain theological: they include “sacred”, “divine”, “love”, “soul”,
and “praise” – words in keeping with the hymnic mode. In the context of these devotional terms,
the frequency of “happy” and its root words – happiness, happier, and unhappy – is striking and
clearly signals Steele’s interest in this elusive state.
In Poems on Subjects Chiefly Devotional, the first work on the subject of happiness is the elev-
enth hymn, “Searching After Happiness”. This hymn is representative of Steele’s specific position
on happiness in her published works. Her message is that it cannot be found in earthly pleasure,
luxury, status, urban distractions or peaceful country retirement, but rather in the eternal realm
of heaven. It starts with a neoclassical apostrophe to Happiness and recognises that happiness is
pursued on earth:

I.
O Happiness, thou pleasing dream,
Where is thy substance found?
Sought through the varying scenes in vain,
Of earth’s capacious round.
(Griffin 2011, vol. 1: 49)

The answer to this question as expounded by Steele in the following verses is conventionally
Christian in clarifying the impossibility of finding this condition on the terrestrial plane:

II.
The charms of grandeur, pomp and shew,
Are nought but gilded snares;
Ambition’s painful steep ascent,
Thick set with thorny cares.
III.
The busy town, the crouded street,
Where noise and discord reign,
We gladly leave, and tir’d, retreat
To breathe and think again.
IV.
Yet if Retirement’s pleasing charms
Detain the captive mind,
The soft inchantment [sic] soon dissolves;
’Tis empty all as wind.
V.
Religion’s sacred lamp alone,
Unerring points the way,

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Where Happiness for ever shines

With unpolluted ray.
VI.
To regions of eternal peace,
Beyond the starry skies;
Where pure, sublime and perfect joys
In endless prospect rise.
(Griffin 2011, vol. 1: 49)

Using the hymn to preach to her readers or the congregation, Steele enacts religious leadership
through her hymn. At the same time, this hymnic discussion on the nature of happiness allows
Steele to engage in intertextual dialogue with contemporary literary debates on the subject. For, in
rejecting rural retirement, Steele is, in fact, countering the classical convention from Horace of the
“the Happy man” – a phrase abundant in eighteenth-century literature – “a conventional formula-
tion ordinarily used to describe the situation of one separated from the corruption of court or city”,
as Patricia Spacks has discussed, or the blessed man of Psalm 1 (Spacks 2009: 65). Here, Steele
may be understood as not only preaching a theological argument about happiness but revising a
popular trope of eighteenth-century literature for religious ends.
The hymn’s last verses, which point to heaven as the true location of happiness, thereby sug-
gesting that the present life is a teleological journey, also connects with the religious culture and
literature of the long-eighteenth-century England in echoing the trajectory of Christian’s allegori-
cal voyage from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City in John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s
Progress (1678):

VIII.
Dear Saviour, let thy cheering smile
My fainting soul renew;
Then shall the heavenly Canaan yield
A sweet, though distant view.
IX.
Be thy almighty arm my stay,
My guide through all the road,
’Till safe I reach my journey’s end,
My Saviour, and my God.
(Griffin 2011, vol. 1: 50)

Not only does Steele’s rhetorical content replicate Bunyan’s established phallogocentric narrative
that human happiness is to be found at the end of life with God in heaven, the hymn’s form is also
highly conventional in its employment of common metre (quatrains of alternating tetrameter and
trimeter lines, or in musical terms, 8.6.8.6. beats per line). As the name suggests, this metrical
scheme is one of the most conventional in English hymns. The traditionalist theology and form of
this published work intimate Steele’s conservatism as a Christian and author.
Steele’s repetition in her published works of the message that happiness can only be found
in heaven suggests that this was her earnest understanding of happiness as a mid-eighteenth-­
century dissenting woman. For instance, this idea is reiterated in “The Journey of Life”, the first
of twenty-one Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose, which was published in the third volume of the
posthumously published second edition of Poems on Subjects Chiefly Devotional (1780). In this

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generically hybrid work blending reverie, fantasy, allegory, autobiography, and homily, Steele
writes that “­Ruminating one even on the chequered scene of mortal life”, she “produced the fol-
lowing reverie”:

I fancied myself beginning a difficult and hazardous journey, […] and found myself at the
foot of a very high mountain […].
[…] I listened to the soothing strains with rapture, and fain would have dwelt in those
delightful groves! but [sic] a monitory voice reminded me that I was on a journey and that
this attractive place was not my home.
(Griffin 2011, vol. 2: 215)

Navigating the arduous journey with the help of “a book, in which I found a map of the country
through which I was travelling” (clearly the Bible), the narrator states that she “chose a narrow
path, which I was assured led to life, another name for the Land of Happiness” (Griffin 2011, vol. 2,
216). Thus, the “Land of Happiness” becomes synonymous with eternal life in heaven. As stated,
Steele’s argument that happiness is an eschatological goal is inherited from seventeenth-century
Puritan theology and, as such, her writings remind us of the persistence of their ideas among their
Dissenting inheritors. Indeed, it is worth remembering that, as McMahon has discussed,

[i]n the eighteenth century there were still enough […] close readers of the Bible – men
and women steeped in classical teachings on happiness and rich in the legacy of Christian
virtue – so as not to efface completely the line that separated being good from feeling good.
(McMahon 2005: 233)

Steele’s theology reflects the truth of this statement for many Christian women in the period.
One way of understanding Steele’s distinct teaching about happiness is that this was the
evangelical teaching that she wished to impart. Steele was biblicist in her Protestant faith and
the Bible teaches that happiness, contentment, and satisfaction are not to be found in riches.
As Ben Cooper suggests, “the speaker of Ecclesiastes – the happiness expert of the Hebrew
Scriptures. Or, perhaps more accurately: the unhappiness expert” asserts that “[t]he lover of
money will not be satisfied with money; nor the lover of wealth, with gain” (Eccl. 5:10) (Cooper
2014: 553, 554). Cooper further illuminates that, while the speaker of Ecclesiastes offers the in-
sight that every activity under the sun is futile – variously translated as “vanity” (KJV, NRSV),
“meaningless” (NIV), “futility” (HCSB) […] “a chasing after wind [Hebrew: ruach, breath,
wind, spirit]” (Eccl 1:14; 2:11, 17, 26; 4:4, 16; 6:9). … In the gospel of John, the suggestion
is made that “Jesus’ resurrection will provide the occasion for some form of enduring happi-
ness” (Cooper 2014: 554, 556). A fullness of joy will be accessible when they have received
Christ’s promise of resurrection that “I will see you again, and your hearts will rejoice, and no
one will take your joy from you” (John 16:20–21. Quoted in Cooper 2014: 556). This point is
insinuated by the frontispiece illustrations to the first two volumes of Poems on Subjects Chiefly
Devotional (1760). In both images, an older woman directs a younger woman away from the
earth towards heaven: in the first image by directing her protégée to the Bible while simultane-
ously pointing skyward and in the second by offering a telescope to help the younger woman
see heaven clearer.
In fact, Steele’s belief axiomatically held in her hymns – that happiness can only be found in
heaven – is also expressed in her published occasional poems directed to individuals. After an

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opening poem, “The Invocation”, the second volume of Poems on Subjects Chiefly Devotional
starts with “To Florio” and “To Belinda”, two epistolary poems which again preach that happiness
resides in Heaven not earth. “To Florio” is directed to a young man – identified as Gay Thomas
Attwater (1736–1792) by Julia Griffin – who “For blooming Happiness […] sighs”, waiting for
“Wealth” (Griffin 2011, vol. 1: 200). Steele’s speaker directs to him “take this glass” – an eye
glass or telescope, an emblem standing for the Bible (Watson 1999: 191) – which will help him
discover that wealth brings not happiness but care. She then directs Florio to use this “glass of
truth” to look upwards to “where Happiness resides. / […] “Beyond the reach of Care above the
sky” (Griffin 2011, vol. 1: 201). The narrative presented is similar to the action depicted in the
second frontispiece image.
The message that wealth does not generate happiness is extended in “Happy Poverty, or the
Poor in Spirit Blessed”. This hymn elaborates on Jesus’ teaching in the Beatitudes, Matthew 5:
3. The second part of the title clarifies that a lowly spirit is blessed and happy. In her rejection
of wealth, Steele anticipates the thoughts of current liberation theologists in understanding that
“the Kingdom belongs to the poor (Luke 6.20) and the rich have no part in it […] because money
is an idol which becomes an absolute value: we cannot serve God and Mammon (Matt. 6.24)”
(Fitzgerald 2007: 249). Certainly, the hymn title’s equation or interchangeability of happiness
with blessedness – which correlates with the meaning of the Latin term ‘beatus’ meaning blessed,
happy, and blissful – edifies that happiness is a sacred quality rather than a profane one. The hymn
again asserts that humility of spirit on earth will reap heavenly reward which far exceeds earthly
prosperity:

III.
In vain the sons of wealth and pride,
Despise your lot, your hopes deride;
In vain they boast their little stores,
Trifles are theirs [sic], a kingdom yours.
(Griffin 2011, vol. 2: 91)

Steele anticipates the recent findings of scholars of the science of happiness that the pursuit of
money generates malcontent; however, her hymn still does not consider the possibility that hap-
piness might be fostered on earth by other means, for instance, in loving relationships, through
creativity or freedom of autonomy (Compton and Hoffman 2019).
“To Belinda”, which follows “To Florio” in the third volume of Miscellaneous Pieces, reiterates
the message that “True happiness is not the growth of earth, / … / And never blooms, but in ce-
lestial air” (Griffin 2011, vol. 1: 202). As Timothy Whelan has identified “Belinda” as Mary Dod-
drige (1733–1799), the daughter of Congregationalist minister and hymnwriter Philip Doddridge,
the poem documents Steele’s assumption of the roles of spiritual counsellor and teacher within
her religious network. The epistolary works to Attwater and Doddrige, like her hymns, provide
evidence of Steele’s use of verse to impart religious guidance; however, they further establish her
as a motherly or aunt-like figure guiding the younger generation in keeping with the expected tra-
ditional established roles of women. Indeed, “To Belinda” more explicitly replicates the idea of the
second frontispiece to Poems on Subjects Chiefly Devotional where the older woman directs the
younger woman to heaven. Ash and Evans’ inclusion of the two epistolary poems in the expanded
1780 edition may be understood as contributing to the construction of a signature cohesive theol-
ogy regarding happiness in Steele’s published works.

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At the same time, Steele’s theocentric interpretation of the nature of happiness in her published
writings may be interpreted differently. In her groundbreaking study Victorian Poetry: Poetry,
Poetics and Politics (1993), Isobel Armstrong asserted that

The doubleness of women’s poetry comes from its ostensible adoption of an affective mode,
often simple, often pious, often conventional. But those conventions are subjected to inves-
tigation, questioned, or used for unexpected purposes. The more simple the surface of the
poem, the more likely it is that a second more difficult poem will exist beneath it.
(Armstrong 1993: 324)

This insight is also applicable to women’s poetry from earlier periods. In this light, Steele’s lim-
ited and rigid theological discussion of happiness might not be taken entirely at surface value.
Her conservative work in content and form may be comprehended as a cautious response to her
anxiety about publishing and the potential for criticism. Indeed, in an unpublished poem “On
Reviewing my Verses for Publication”, Steele inscribes an “anxiety of authorship” of the kind
articulated by Susan Gilbert and Sandra Gubar in their groundbreaking The Madwoman in the
Attic (1979):

My Mind with dark Ideas fill’d:

“How low the Line! How dull the Page!
“What Ear can rhymes like these engage?
“The Press -- ah! no suppress the Thought,
(Griffin 2011, vol. 2: 146)

Steele’s poem seems to testify to the devastating “anxiety of authorship” that Gilbert and Gubar
assert existed for women writers historically: “eighteenth- and nineteenth-century foremothers
struggled in isolation that felt like illness, alienation that felt like madness, obscurity that felt
like paralysis to overcome the anxiety of authorship that was endemic to their literary subcul-
ture” (Gilbert and Gubar 2000: 51). In the face of such debilitating anxiety, presenting a message
maintained by the ultimate authority – the divine scriptures – would have protected against so-
cial censure and critical disparagement. In other words, Steele’s singular conservative message
regarding happiness in her published works may be indicative not only of biblical faith but a
defensive strategy against personal attack. Following this line of thought, it is evident that the
source text for “chiefly devotional” works – the Bible – not only provided her with sanctioned
content but also with literary and spiritual authority. Steele’s biblicism as exemplified by her
most famous hymn – “Father of mercies, in thy word” on the subject of “The excellency of
the scriptures” – reflects her sincere Protestant faith, but also it performed a crucial authoris-
ing function in presenting her doubly marginal female and dissenting self to the reading public
as a respectable writer at a time when nonconformists faced social prejudice for their minority
identities.
It may be that the dual pressures of Steele’s identity as a woman and dissenter inhibited her
discussions in Poems on Subjects Chiefly Devotional. Certainly, her published discussions of hap-
piness are significantly narrower in scope compared with those of her hymnological forebear Isaac
Watts. Although Watts uses the word “happiness” rarely – it is used only twice in the Hymns and
Spiritual Songs (1744, fifteenth edition) – he uses the word “happy” frequently within a wider
range of possibilities than Steele. For instance, he writes of the happiness of people who hear

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the gospel: “How happy are our Ears / That hear the joyful Sound / Which Kings and Prophets
waited for / And sought, but never found” (Watts 1744, ii: 11). He also writes of the happiness of
the Church: “HAppy [sic] the Church, thou sacred Place / The Seat of thy Creator’s Grace” (Watts
1744: ii: 187); of the need for the saved to praise God in song: “Come, happy Souls, approach
your God / With new melodious songs” (Watts 1744, ii: 224), and of the happiness of taking holy
communion: “happy the men that eat this bread” (Watts 1744, ii: 297).
In contrast, Steele’s singular discussion of happiness as a heavenly condition in the published
writings may indicate a cautious strategy on the part of Steele and the friends who helped her enter
print culture. The importance of her publication to the dissenting community is revealed by the fact
that so many members were involved in the publication process. A letter by Steele to her brother,
William, recalls discussions with her friends about the publication of her works: “we had a great
deal of chatt intermingled with reading my papers & canvassing the printing affair” (Griffin 2011,
vol. 2: 284). Another letter by Steele’s sister, Mary Wakeford, dated 10 November 1757, reveals
that her husband was an agent in sourcing a publisher: “Mr W[akeford] safely delivered your
papers to Mr F[urneaux]” (Griffin 2011, vol. 2: 307). Other clergy who supported Steele’s writing
and helped secure Steele’s publication included John Lavington (c. 1690–1759) and James Fanch
(1704–1767), Baptist ministers from Exeter and Romsey respectively (1707–1767). All these fig-
ures were invested in promoting Steele’s literary and spiritual gifts to the public and presenting
her as an exemplary representative of their denigrated community. In this context, an unequivo-
cally devotional stance on happiness indicative of staunch faith would have been preferable to
diverse explorations which could be interpreted as whimsy or worldliness by those unsympathetic
to dissenters.

Private discussions about happiness

Steele’s writings which remained unpublished until this century offer different possibilities regard-
ing the nature of happiness. Specifically, they consider the happy condition in relation to earthly
experiences and modes of being. For example [“And where are now those happy times”], a short
single stanza poem, does not relate happiness with heaven or God:

Ah where are now those happy times

When I cou’d laugh and scribble rhymes?
Then Fancy thought the Muses nigh,
And shook her plumes and aim’d to fly.
Alas for my poor stupid head!
The Muses and the rhymes are fled.
(Griffin 2011, vol. 2: 182)

Here, the idea that mortal happiness is fleeting is articulated, but “those happy times” are not
associated with God. In fact, happiness is not deemed a religious state. In this poem about
the frustrations of writer’s block, happiness is associated with the delights of “scribbl[ing]
rhymes”. Significantly, the form is not devotional either. The tetrameter lines may at first glance
seem not very different to lines of hymnic long metre, but, in fact, these iambic tetrameter cou-
plets are not meditative and serious devotional lines. The closeness of the octosyllabic rhymes
create a “jingling” effect as Jonathan Sitter has discussed of the tetrameter couplet (Sitter 2011:
47). The poem’s brevity as a single sestet adds to the poem’s light-hearted wit in contrast to

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the gravity of Steele’s multi-verse poems which promote reflective meditation. The tone is also
informal and amusing in its self-deprecation; as such, the voice is more familiar than in the
published hymns.
In fact, in her published prose piece “The Journey of Life” discussed earlier, Steele also made
a connection between happiness and writing when she mentioned “tuning the lyre” as a sustaining
source of comfort on the way to the land of happiness:

[…] I often tuned the lyre to complaining notes or cheerful airs, according to my different
situation, and found it an agreeable solace […].
Now and then in a happy shining hour, fired with glorious description of the Land of
Happiness contained in the sacred book, I aimed a nobler song, and my thoughts, winged
with love and desire, seemed to rise above mortality, and longed to join the blissful natives
in strains of celestial harmony!
(Griffin 2011, vol. 2: 217)

However, while the reader of Poems on Subjects Chiefly Devotional could clearly identify the
“nobler song” as the hymn which lifts the soul to heaven, the “scribbled rhymes” of levity in [“Ah
where are now those happy times”] do not suggest the “noble song” that “seemed to rise above
mortality”. Strikingly, the happiness of “scribbled lines” as inscribed in the unpublished poem is
not religious.
A connection between happiness and writing is made in another poem that remained unpub-
lished in the eighteenth century which is quoted in full here:

Happy the Maid who scorns th’ ensnaring Wiles

Of specious, vain, insinuating Man;
In Solitude serene, content she smiles,
Nor with for Conquest blots her little plan.
To nobler, purer Joys her thoughts aspire,
For friendship harmonizes all her Soul;
For her the Muses oft attune the Lyre,
Exalt her pleasures and her cares controul [sic].
(Griffin 2011, vol. 2: 170)

Intriguingly, this short poem mentions a range of possibilities regarding how to be happy, but
happiness is not tied to heaven or religion. Happiness here is closer to a modern philosophical
understanding of the term “as a value term, roughly synonymous with well-being or flourishing”
(Dan Haybron 2020) and is explored in gendered terms. The third volume of Miscellaneous Pieces
includes a work entitled “The Happy Man (From the 23rd Psalm)” which uses “man” universally
to indicate the righteous believer in general:

I.
Happy the man of heavenly birth,
Beyond the proudest boast of earth,
Whom Mercy thus sustains:
To scenes of living verdure led,
Plenty and peace their blessing spread,
And not a thought complains.

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II.
Conducted by his gracious guide
Where streams of sweet refreshment glide,
And fed with food divine;
God is the guardian of his rest,
Beneath his smile, serenely blest,
He bids his soul retire.
(Griffin 2011, vol. 2: 20)

Revising the commonly used eighteenth-century phrase “Happy the Man” (taken from Horace as
discussed above) to “Happy the Maid” is a change that not only modifies gender but underscores
the importance of virginity or singleness to female happiness. The seriousness of this message is
intimated by Steele’s use of longer, more reflective iambic pentameter lines compared with the
levity of her tetrameter lines in “[Ah where are now those happy times]”. Steele asserts that the
woman who has rejected false and sly men and who remains solitary, is able to be satisfied sup-
ported by friendship and inspired to write poetry so that she can direct her thoughts to transcendent
joys. The implication is that the maid – the unmarried woman – is more often inspired by the muse.
This is likely to have been true in practical terms – an unmarried woman who did not have to look
after a family and manage a household would have had more time to devote to writing. Notably,
Steele chose to remain single throughout her life. As Cindy Aalders has discussed, “In several un-
published poems she refers to herself, in jest, as a ‘poor solitary Nun’”, a reference which should
partly “be understood as an allusion to her remaining single, despite as many as three marriage
proposals (from James Elcomb, an unnamed man discussed in correspondence with her sister, and
Benjamin Beddome)” (Aalders 2008: 21).
A similar correlation between singleness and happiness – and also conversely marriage and
unhappiness – appears in “A Dialogue” – a collaborative exchange written between Anne Steele
and her sister Mary Wakeford using the neoclassical pennames “Silviania” and “Amira”. The
discussion is jesting and the sisters engage in friendly sparring, yet a seriousness underlies the ex-
change. The following quotations are from two separate poems from the dialogue correspondence
expressing Steele’s arguments about the superior happiness of singleness.

Silviania
Ye happy kind Mortals, ye Married folks, say,
When the other dear half of your hearts is away,
If all the soft pleasures you talk of in Love
Can balance the pain which in absence you prove?
…
How great your anxieties, troubles and cares!
What endless perplexities torture your breast!
Can happiness dwell in the heart without rest?
…
Silviania
…
If spinsters with beauty must soon lose their sway,
Wives give up their freedom in one fatal day!
But tho’ pride, love, and beauty are equally vain,

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And unless I am fated to yield up my heart,

Can I wish to be wretched and double my part?
(Griffin 2011: vol. 2: 195,196)

Here, the connection between singleness and liberty from care is explicitly manifest. Although
the tone is good-humouredly teasing, Steele asks her married sister a serious question in the
fifth poem of their exchange:
Silviana
At length, dear Amira, all jesting apart,
Sincerely disclose the true sense of your heart.
…
But seriously say, can the pleasures you find
While friendship and Love of two make but one mind,
Compensate the troubles which fill the fond heart
Or balance the pain of that dreadful word part?
In one scale your losses, in th’ other your gain:
Say which will preponderate, pleasure or pain?
(Griffin 2011: vol. 2, 197–198)

In contrast to published works such as: “True Happiness to be Found Only in God” and “God my
Only Happiness”, these unpublished reflections on the nature of happiness are unexpected and
offer new insights about Steele as a woman writer. As Elizabeth Kraft has insightfully observed,

Eighteenth-century discussions of happiness were, of course, primarily discussions of the

happiness available to men. If pleasure and autonomy are vexed categories with regard to
the happiness of men who are capable of pursuing and achieving both, how much more
problematic are these categories (and therefore happiness itself) to women who have little
access to either pleasure or autonomy?
(Kraft 2016: 153–154)

The more vexing and elusive nature of happiness for women in the eighteenth century is recognised
and inscribed in Steele’s unpublished writings. Indeed, another layered meaning behind Steele’s
published view that happiness – contentment, satisfaction, and the conditions for ­flourishing – can
only be experienced in heaven is that women, and indeed all oppressed people including dissent-
ers, cannot secure happiness in the present fallen world.

Conclusion
Anne Steele’s varied writings published and unpublished on happiness provide a fascinating win-
dow into the range of perspectives that eighteenth-century women could have on a prominent En-
lightenment topic which has been largely explored in terms of men’s debates. Steele’s published
works provide illuminating evidence of women’s active engagement with contemporary philo-
sophical and theological ideas – discourse from which women were effectively excluded owing
to their exclusion from formal education – using the accessible and acceptable literary genres for
women including the English hymn. On their own, Steele’s published discussions of happiness
could lead readers to conclude that her beliefs were conservative and her authorial imagination
limited in scope – “chiefly devotional” as the title of her publication sought to persuade. However,

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the unpublished works reveal hidden dimensions to Steele’s intellectual curiosity and literary
creativity. These private musings inscribe revealing gendered thoughts about the possibilities for
women’s happiness in the world. The unpublished writings indicate that, in fact, eighteenth-cen-
tury women entered fully into contemporary debates regarding the possibilities for human happi-
ness on earth. Ultimately, Steele may have believed in accordance with her sincere faith that true
and lasting happiness was the outcome of union with God in heaven. However, away from the
scrutiny of the public and pressured need to be a female exemplar for the sake of the dissenting
community she represented, she also pondered what generated happiness in her subjective experi-
ence as a woman and these gynocentric explorations became the creative substance of her private,
more radical writings. Remarkably, the components she identified as facilitating her flourishing –
fulfilling work and autonomy – are startingly modern in their poignant relevance to women today.

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 19
“DEAREST NORAH…”
The professional and personal relationships forged
between an editor and her authors

Elizabeth West

As an industry, early-twentieth-century publishing counted many women amongst its workers.

Indeed, without the marriage bars that were in place in other professional organisations, including
the Civil Service and the BBC, publishing was an excellent place for a woman to find work within
a professional setting. However, the vast majority of women working in publishing in the years
preceding the Second World War were in administrative roles. As Sue Bradley observes in her
collection of oral history testimonies for the British Library’s Book Trade Lives project, “the old
publishing houses were run by men and serviced by badly paid women” (2008: xii). With a few
notable exceptions, the typing pool, rather than the editor’s office, was their accepted home. The
British publishing industry was a prime example of the ‘old boys’ network’ in operation, with ne-
gotiations and deals carried out in the male-only enclaves of the club and the bar, and recruitment
opportunities secured through nepotism and such trusted social signifiers as ‘the old school tie’.
However, change had begun, even in this bastion of tradition: as an older generation of publishers
retired, new ideas were creeping in. As David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery observe in their
work on the history of twentieth-century publishing, “New figures entered publishing after each
World War and in the generation afterwards, adding fresh vigour to the industry” (2019: 147).
Whilst fully acknowledging Krista Cowman and Laura Jackson’s assertion that the story of wom-
en’s incursions into the workplace – professional or otherwise – is one of “complexity, continuity
and gradual change rather than seismic shift” (2005: 1), the developing role of women within Brit-
ish publishing from the late 1930s onwards was an intrinsic part of this drive for reinvigoration.
During the Second World War, as men were conscripted, the number of women joining pub-
lishing houses, alongside other traditionally male-dominated professions, rose exponentially. At
Methuen, for example, by the end of the war, women “out-numbered men in the company by eight
to one” (Stevenson 2010: 122). Although, inevitably, many of these women were displaced after
the war when demobbed men returned to reclaim their positions, for some, the war years had given
them a unique opportunity to prove their worth in editorial and managerial roles. For those women,
therefore, a career in publishing in the post-war period promised much more than typing. Although
in a small minority, a significant group of women crossed the line from secretarial roles to editorial
responsibilities, and some went further still, to the top of the organisations in which they operated.
These women have largely been overlooked in general publishing history; their achievements
are relegated to a footnote. In Rebecca Lyons’ words, their roles have been “hidden, obscured or

293 DOI: 10.4324/9781003429951-24

 Elizabeth West

unacknowledged” (2019: 141). There are, however, exceptions: the best-known woman editor of
this period is Diana Athill, who worked at Andre Deutsch and who, in later life, wrote a series of
memoirs. Stet (2000), the fourth volume, gives a fascinating insight into her work as an editor and
is arguably the most complete first-hand account of a woman in this role. Other women publishers
who did not tell their own stories did not have anyone else to do it for them – unlike male counter-
parts such as Allen Lane of Penguin, who has, to date, three biographies to his name.
Work is being done to redress this imbalance. As Zoe Thomas and Heidi Egginton observe in
their study of professional precarity, “the landscape of ‘professional society’ has changed irrevo-
cably since the terrain was mapped out prior to the rise of women’s and gender history” (2021:
4). The impact of women on the development of twentieth-century children’s publishing, for ex-
ample, has been recognised, and it is certainly the case that for many women, children’s lists pro-
vided a fruitful route into an editorial career (West 2022). That this was largely due to the implied
and presumed affinity of women with children is undeniable, but women such as Grace Hogarth
(Constable Young Books) and Eleanor Graham (Puffin) used this assumption to their benefit and
forged long and rewarding careers as a result. But this assumption, and the traditional association
of women with nurturing, maternal roles, also stretches beyond the juvenile department, into the
wider field of publishing. As I will discuss, the qualities of a good editor could also be expressed
in highly gendered terms, and Norah Smallwood, the woman who is the focus of this chapter,
encapsulated some of the conflicting and contradictory ways in which professional women within
the publishing industry were viewed, remembered – and forgotten. Despite her position at the heart
of mid-twentieth-century British publishing, when Smallwood does make fleeting appearances in
conventional (male-authored) publishing history, she is portrayed as a ferocious figure, caricatured
as a harridan and a battle-axe. Yet her correspondence with the authors that she looked after reveals
an entirely different perspective: that of a gregarious and caring woman who crossed and recrossed
the boundaries between professional editor and friend.
During her tenure at Chatto and Windus, Smallwood supported the writing careers of some of
the twentieth century’s most famous women authors, including Iris Murdoch, Sylvia Townsend
Warner, and AS Byatt. Her support was not restricted to such high-profile stars, however. As will
be explored in more depth, her early mentorship of AL Barker exemplifies the way in which her
valorisation of less commercially successful authors gave them the encouragement to sustain writ-
ing careers in the face of self-doubt and insecurity. This chapter utilises individual case studies
of Smallwood’s professional relationships, with Barker and with other women authors and col-
leagues, to offer new perspectives on the history of women in publishing and more specifically the
role of women publishers in advancing the creative careers of women writers.

Norah Smallwood’s arrival at Chatto and Windus

Norah Smallwood joined Chatto and Windus, one of the United Kingdom’s most prestigious
­publishing houses, in 1936, at the age of 27. One of eight children of Howard Neville Walford, a
not particularly successful artist, and Marion Griffiths, Smallwood did not go to university, and
prior to joining Chatto, her only previous job had been in the library of Chatham House. She was
hired as a secretary to Ian Parsons, a partner at Chatto despite, according to one source, not know-
ing how to type (Buckman 1996). The fact that she got the job without qualifications or experience
gives an inkling of the force of her personality, which was to have such an impact on the firm.
In her early years in the job, Smallwood took every opportunity open to her, learning about the
­workings of a publishing house through involving herself in its many aspects, from publicity to
design and production. When war broke out, the male workforce was decimated. Parsons left to

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join the RAF, and Smallwood held the fort with one remaining partner, Harold Raymond, who
was too old to join up. As Smallwood recalled, with the exception of Raymond and herself, “there
wasn’t a soul in the building who knew the difference between one type-face and another” (Parfitt
1960: 350).
Keeping a publishing house afloat throughout the war was a challenge, and Smallwood demon-
strated her resilience. Bombs fell around the firm’s central London offices, paper shortages caused
difficulties in keeping up with an increased demand for books, and, tragically, she lost her husband
of three years in action over the North Sea in 1943. By the end of the war, Chatto had become
Smallwood’s life, and she devoted the rest of her career to its success. In return for her labours,
she became a partner in 1945, and, on Parsons’ retirement, was appointed managing director in
1975 before finally retiring herself in 1982. It was a stellar rise for a woman with relatively little
education and no prior connections within the publishing world. As a profile of Smallwood writ-
ten in 1960 observed, “Hordes of girls labour on the secretarial slopes of publishing. Only a few,
apart from those who take a short cut by reason of wealth or family connections, survive the long
climb to the boardroom” (Parfitt 1960: 350). Smallwood not only survived the climb, she thrived
on the challenge.
In attempting to create a full and accurate portrayal of Smallwood and her career at Chatto, one
continually comes up against two conflicting narratives: that of a fearsome, quick-tempered, in-
transigent termagant, countered by, in stark contrast, her portrayal as a caring, generous, thought-
ful, and empathetic champion of her authors and her colleagues. Her reputation is mediated by
gendered discourse and ideology which invites us to trace a linear path from a young secretary
seizing her moment in 1939 to an embattled older woman who, at the end of her career, rules by
fear to avoid the fact that she is losing her grip on the role to which she has devoted much of her
life. Jeremy Lewis, to give one particularly egregious example, paints an entirely speculative por-
trayal of Smallwood as he imagines she appeared in her early years at Chatto: “She was then, or
so I like to think, a pretty, bashful girl, with a slim and elegant figure, high colouring, penetrating
bright blue eyes and a cloud of curly, reddish hair, ambitious in a bashful way” (Lewis 1995: 165).
Contrast this with his description of her later in her career as: “an elderly and domineering woman
who was fully prepared to exploit her age, her femininity, her frailty and her strength of personal-
ity to get what she wanted” (178). It is vital, therefore, to discuss Smallwood’s professional career
without being drawn into such over-simplistic gender binaries.
An alternative approach might be to draw a dividing line between Smallwood’s relationships
with her authors and with her colleagues and subordinates. Her reputation for toughness in the of-
fice was a feature of a number of profiles of Smallwood, both during her time at Chatto and later.
Apocryphal tales of her temper often accompany these accounts, such as the opening of one such
profile in The Guardian (1982): “Norah Smallwood once threw an in-tray at a friend of mine”.
Smallwood denies this accusation, “adding crisply that no intelligent person would use such a
weapon, surely a more efficient projectile must have been used?” (Mackie 1982: n. pag.). So when
she writes soothingly to one of her less confident authors, AL Barker, following the erroneous
marking up of a proof: “I think those pestilential quotes are the work of the villainous printers
and I supposed they acted with the best intentions, but I shall have to reprimand them gently and
I know they will be contrite”, one can quite easily imagine that the reprimand would be anything
but ‘gentle’ (Smallwood 1949).
Such was Smallwood’s all-consuming approach to her work that the boundaries between her
personal and professional relationships are often blurred: friends become authors, writers are her
friends; colleagues and novelists mix at her legendary dinner parties, and holidays are spent work-
ing on manuscripts and visiting colleagues, authors, and professional associates across the world.

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Smallwood’s archive of correspondence contains many thank you letters from guests – from Ste-
vie Smith to Enid Marx – praising her hospitality, discussing holidays, and issuing reciprocal
invitations. What does become obvious, on close examination of the primary sources relating to
her life and career, is the story of a woman who was far more complex and interesting than the
rather reductive portrayal of her in what secondary sources are available. She was a woman with
a very wide circle of friends as well as an extensive professional network, and across the many
relationships she sustained, she embodied a number of roles, including nurturer, friend, and profes-
sional advocate. In order to paint a more nuanced picture of Smallwood, each of these roles will be
examined here in more detail, in each case using a particular woman friend, author, or colleague as
an example of the way in which she created and sustained these relationships throughout her life.

“I enjoy being a mother-figure!” – Norah Smallwood’s support

for her authors
In the space of one short newspaper article, reporting Smallwood’s retirement from Chatto in 1982,
there are no less than four analogies drawn between her work and its maternal, nurturing qualities.
The title of the article, published in The Sunday Telegraph, is “Norah abandons her infant”. The
piece goes on to quote her as saying that, following the death of her husband, Chatto “has been
my child ever since”. In reference to her early encouragement of Dirk Bogarde’s writing career,
she “acted as his midwife”, and the text quotes VS Pritchett’s identification of her as “infinitely the
Mother Superior” (1982: 6). Within 450 words, Smallwood’s character and role as publisher has
been equated with a mother, a nun, and a nurse – three archetypal female tropes, all associated with
nurturing and caring. Cowman and Jackson’s definition of women’s “social maternalism” with its
“assumptions about their maternal function”, although used in its original context to define roles
associated with caring professions, certainly resonates here too (2005: 2). Smallwood does not
appear to have disassociated herself from these maternal qualities: an interview with her in 1969
reports this stance, although, obviously, these are the journalist’s words not hers: “With human
relations she feels that women do have something special to offer; they can ‘mother’ authors; they
can give sympathy and comfort and thus provide a valuable ‘diplomatic corps’ for the publishing
house” (Leahy and Holland 1969: 21). While this nurturing facet of Smallwood’s personality was
particularly evident in her talent for supporting new authors attempting to make an impact on the
literary world, it is arguably a key attribute for any successful publisher, whatever their gender.
Smallwood continually sought out fresh talent to add to the Chatto list, whether it was spotting
Dirk Bogarde on the Russell Harty chat show in the 1970s or following up on a conversation at
a cocktail party in Oxford about an interesting novel (The Sunday Telegraph 1982: 6). This latter
hunch led to the publication of Iris Murdoch’s first book, Under the Net, in 1954, and the launch
of one of the most significant literary careers of the twentieth century. Barker was another young
author who was encouraged by Smallwood. Pat Bourne, a young BBC employee who wrote under
the name of AL Barker, submitted her first manuscript to Leonard Woolf, director of The Hogarth
Press and a partner at Chatto, in autumn 1946. He immediately recognised its potential; Small-
wood and Parsons agreed, and the book, a collection of short stories, was accepted for publication
by The Hogarth Press (an associate company of Chatto). Smallwood first met Barker for lunch
in March 1947; by the end of the summer that year, as archival correspondence reveals, the two
women were writing regularly and addressing each other as Pat and Norah. Barker’s short story
collection, Innocents, would go on to win the inaugural Somerset Maugham prize one year later.
Barker went on to write thirteen novels and six short story collections. Although she did not
achieve the commercial success or lasting recognition of other authors on the Chatto list, she was

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nominated for the Booker Prize for The Goose Boy in 1987 and was also published successfully
in the United States. Her entire oeuvre was reprinted by Faber for its Faber Finds imprint in 2014.
Smallwood was a staunch support to Barker as she navigated the process of becoming a published
author, both in practical and emotional terms. Practical help included recommending an account-
ant, giving an opinion on the appointment of a literary agent and seeking out opportunities for
publication in America. Barker, due to her self-professed lack of experience, was quick to enlist
Smallwood’s guidance: writing, for example, regarding payment for a short story acquired by Pen-
guin, “As I am quite unitiated [sic] in these matters, I leave the question of price entirely to you”
(Barker 1947: MS2750/14). This support continued throughout Barker’s career; the relationship,
as Smallwood saw it, was that she, as editor, would do everything in her power to facilitate and
promote Barker’s work, leaving Barker, as author, with the freedom to devote to her writing. As
Smallwood wrote to Barker in 1951, “the important thing is that you should have the minimum
worry and trouble over this side of your writing” (Smallwood 1951: MS2750/16).
Smallwood acted as a quasi-agent for Barker in the early stages of her career: as more requests
for short stories came in from anthologies and magazines, Barker asked Smallwood’s advice on
fair payment. When the editor of one literary magazine offered Barker four guineas for a story,
Barker hesitantly asked Smallwood’s advice: this seemed a rather small amount, she thought,
but she was wary of appearing greedy in asking for more. Smallwood, predictably, had no such
qualms, and wrote immediately to the editor to demand a higher payment: “We would point out
that the story is 4,500 words and that even before the war, a guinea a thousand words was the
lowest journalistic rate” (Smallwood 1947a: MS2750/14). Smallwood also lent her support to so-
liciting and handling publicity for Barker’s work, writing to leading literary editors to encourage
them to review her books, and advising Barker on how to handle media enquiries. An interview
with The Daily Mirror, for example was met with great trepidation on Barker’s behalf – “I can’t
think anything could appal me more” – but clearly Smallwood’s influence made her overcome her
reluctance: “if you hadn’t thought kindly of the idea, wild horses wouldn’t have dragged me to
telephone the man” (Smallwood 1947a: MS2750/14).
Smallwood’s relationship with Barker typifies the ongoing support she gave to her authors, and
the level of emotional ballast and energy she offered is particularly striking. She spent consider-
able amount of time reassuring Barker and encouraging her to keep writing in the face of what
appears to be crippling self-doubt. In a typical exchange, written at the beginning of 1948, Barker
says that reading her latest draft was “like nothing so much as having a bucket of cold sludge
emptied all over me” (Barker 1948: MS2750/14). Smallwood’s reply was typically bracing: “I
refuse to be dampened by the buckets of cold sludge that you insist on pouring into your letters
when the word ‘novel’ is mentioned” (Smallwood 1948: MS2750/1). Following the publication
of Barker’s first novel, Apologies for a Hero, in 1949, Smallwood was insistent that Barker read
her positive reviews. Barker wrote to express her gratitude: “As you know, I had bowed my head
well in advance for the storm of ridicule or, worse, the complete disregard of its existence” (Barker
1950: MS2750/12). Barker was the very grateful recipient of much of Smallwood’s wisdom and
advice. A trusted sounding-board, Smallwood reassured Barker and offered constructive criticism
in a way that was clearly welcomed: “I do appreciate the fact that from you I can rely on an honest
opinion – please never modify your criticism in the slightest for fear of wounding my susceptibili-
ties. Bluntness is all on such occasions…” (Barker 1949: MS2750/13). In 1953, Barker was again
struggling with her writing: “I wrote about thirty-thousand words which were about as sparkling
as a cold suet pudding” (Barker 1953: MS2750/16). Smallwood replied by return, with words of
reassurance: “You mustn’t be too discouraged, for, as you know, every writer goes through these
phases” (Smallwood 1953: MS2750/16).

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As a woman with a wide social network and seemingly unlimited reserves of self-assurance
and confidence, Smallwood made a point of inviting her authors to social engagements which
would enhance their profiles and provide them with useful networking opportunities. For example,
Smallwood arranged for Barker to have lunch with John Carter of American publishers Charles
Scribner’s Sons Ltd. Scribner’s were to publish a U.S. edition of Barker’s Innocents and Carter
wrote to Smallwood following the lunch, thanking her for introducing him to Barker. A hand-
written note at the bottom of the letter reads “She’s sweet” (Carter 1947: MS2750/15). Smallwood,
in reply, wrote that she was glad he had liked Barker: “I think she’s a most refreshing person, and
definitely one of the writers that it is a pleasure to publish, from all points of view” (Smallwood
1947b: MS2750/16). Such letters written after lunches and dinners show Smallwood at her most
reassuring and empathetic: she is quick to pass on compliments gathered and give her reassurance
that good impressions were made and received. These occasions did not always come naturally to
the more introspective of her authors but, again, Smallwood was on hand to reassure and bolster
where necessary, smoothing the wheels of social engagement. For authors such as Barker who
were not part of rarefied London literary circles, such entrées were invaluable. Undoubtedly, these
social interactions were an intrinsic part of a great many editor–author relationships, regardless
of gender. Significantly, however, Smallwood’s interventions offered an alternative to the “boys’
party” atmosphere of gentlemen’s clubs, such as the Garrick (Bradley 2008: 158).

Smallwood and her friendships with authors

Archival correspondence reveals the way in which professional relationships transmuted into
richer friendships over the years. As discussed, Smallwood provided unwavering professional
support and guidance to Barker, and the two women were friends too, exchanging gifts and en-
quiring after each other’s health and activities. Another close friendship traced through letters was
with novelist Sylvia Townsend Warner, and her partner, the poet Valentine Ackland. Townsend
Warner was a well-established Chatto author (her first book, Lolly Willowes was published in
1926), and the archives contain plenty of correspondence relating to rights negotiations and the
general editorial process which surrounded the submission, production, and publication of her
books. However, of even greater interest is the way in which the editor–author relationship seg-
ued into something more intimate. Townsend Warner and Ackland hosted Smallwood at their
Dorset home for weekends and holidays, and Smallwood returned the favour, offering Townsend
Warner a London pied-à-terre when she needed to come to the city for events. As Townsend
Warner wrote in March 1954,

It is very kind of you to give us the entrée to your spare bed. It could be a godsend and I
hope I may gratefully combine it with that historical lunch with Ian. We have a spare bed,
too; alas but a narrow one. It would be delightful to usher you into it, if you should be in
these parts again.
(Townsend Warner 1954: Smallwood/1–3)

There was a regular flow of gifts in each direction: thank you letters give a glimpse of an eclectic
range of presents given and received, from cheese to china jugs. One such example reads:

The shape of the parcel, I said to Valentine, is that of a cake-box. But it’s not a cake, it’s too
light for that. The spotted pink drum suggested a gigantic powder-puff, but I cast that hy-
pothesis aside, for you would not be sending us a joint powder-puff. Seeing such billions of

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tissue-paper, and finding the compact little parcel inside them, my mind naturally turned to
glass or china. But how far beyond objets de virtu was that truly virtuous tin of the authentic
foie-gras which gladdened our sight. Agreeing about so many things, we agree with a pecu-
liar fervour of single-sightedness about foie-gras. So far, we are still in the stage of caressing
it. Later on – ah! In short, dearest Norah, you have given us a most welcome present, and
we thank you very much.
(Townsend Warner 1955: Smallwood/1–3)

Townsend Warner made the most of Smallwood’s access to London shops, deploying her on
­various shopping missions, most commonly at the Army and Navy Store, to procure items not
easily secured in Dorset: a particular brand of pen, for example, special notebooks and silk
scarves.
On a deeper level, the two women provided emotional support to each other through dif-
ficult times. Smallwood suffered from ill-health throughout her life; she had debilitating arthri-
tis amongst other conditions. Townsend Warner was always on the lookout for new remedies
to suggest, and often wrote to Smallwood with her latest research findings: parsley, she had
heard, was an excellent source of iron to counter anaemia, and should be eaten by the handful
at every opportunity. She urged Smallwood to “scorn convention, and snatch the parsley out of
the butter-dish” in restaurants and buy bunches from the greengrocer (Townsend Warner 1957:
Smallwood/1–3). Eight years later, she is still caring passionately about the suffering endured
by Smallwood, in this case caused by rheumatoid arthritis: “I am always at a cross loss to under-
stand why people who are brave should always be put through hoops to give further examples
of it” (Townsend Warner 1965: Smallwood/1–3). She suggests a trip to Egypt to take advantage
of the dry heat, which would be advantageous to the joints. Smallwood displayed equal emo-
tional care for Townsend Warner. When Ackland died, Smallwood’s empathetic understanding
of Townsend Warner’s grief and loss is illuminated in a moving letter written following a visit
from Smallwood:

You were water in the desert. I so seldom have my loss admitted. Kind offices, yes, kind
poultices; but the plain truth, scarcely ever. I suppose people are afraid to remind one – as if
unhappiness, loneliness, were a sort of ‘lese-societe’ which it would be more tactful to pass
over. To hear you speak out about the vacancy of this house without her restored me to my
real life, restored the past, gave her back to me in her integrity.
(Townsend Warner 1971: Smallwood/1–3)

In many cases, when examining these letters – and, indeed, all Smallwood’s correspondence – it is
notable that there was not a clear division between professional and personal matters; the content
shifts from paragraph to paragraph. Interesting, too, is the fact that some letters were addressed
to Smallwood’s home on Vincent Square, SW1, and some to the Chatto and Windus offices. Al-
though, occasionally, ‘Personal’ is written on an envelope addressed to the office, largely the na-
ture of the content is not dictated by where it is sent. It is a material example of the way in which
Smallwood’s work life and personal life intersected. One explanation for this is that it reflects the
industry in which Smallwood was working: obviously the vast majority of authors do not operate
from an office – their homes are their working environments, and their writing is inextricably wo-
ven into their daily lives. Whether consciously or not, Smallwood mimicked this way of working,
and her empathy for authors such as Townsend Warner is a key to why her relationships were so
strong and productive.

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Industry relationships
During the course of her career, Smallwood also made lasting friendships with colleagues, both
at Chatto and across the industry. The number of letters she received when news of her retirement
filtered out attests to the strength of the networks she built, not only in the United Kingdom but in
America, Canada, and Australia too. Amongst the letters in Smallwood’s personal collection, there
is one from Grace Hogarth. A pioneering editor in her own right, Hogarth moved from America
to work at Oxford University Press and went on to found the Children’s Book Circle, worked
tirelessly to promote children’s publishing, and trained many editors in the process. She wrote to
Smallwood, having heard her interviewed on Radio Four: “I did not know that you were planning
to retire and I was sad to learn of it because you have always stood – firmly, too – for the essential
best in publishing. I have admired you for so many years”. Hogarth’s letter ends with a suggestion
that they might meet up once Smallwood is freer, to reminisce over “some of those adventures
we shared” (Hogarth 1982: Smallwood/1–4). Indeed, this friendship can be traced back to Small-
wood’s first days at Chatto, and some of the early correspondence between the two women during
the war is recounted here to provide a clear illustration of the longevity of Smallwood’s career, and
the strength of the associations she made.
Just before war broke out, Chatto and Windus had committed itself to creating a strong chil-
dren’s list, and poached Hogarth from OUP to create and guide this new enterprise. Events over-
took the firm, however, and Hogarth was forced to leave not long after she arrived, evacuating with
her family to Wales, initially, before returning to America for the duration of the war. She was keen
to finish what she had started, however, in terms of Chatto’s children’s books, and she remained in
contact with both Harold Raymond and Smallwood throughout the subsequent years, particularly
once she found work at Boston publishing house, Houghton Mifflin. Correspondence between
Smallwood and Hogarth gives an insight into the impact of the war on both their careers, and their
experiences of working in challenging circumstances.
Although the two women had worked together only briefly, their correspondence sustained and
reinforced their bond. In July 1942, Hogarth wrote to Smallwood:

You always write such good letters that I feel I am almost getting to know you a little better
from this side of the Atlantic than I did working next door to you at 40 William IV Street. It
would be nice though, to step down and have lunch with you at The Chandos, if indeed the
Chandos is still there.
(Hogarth 1942: CW146/1)

As well as exchanging professional news, they were both keen to hear reports of how things were
going on a more personal level. “I should like to hear how your family are getting on, if you ever
have time to write again”, asked Smallwood in the summer of 1941 (Smallwood 141: CW146/1).
Both women were keen to contribute to the general war effort as well as helping individuals who
were struggling as a result of the difficult times they faced. One example of the practical steps they
took to achieve this is a successful collaboration in early Spring 1941. Smallwood wrote to Hoga-
rth asking whether she would like to collaborate on the production of a picture book by illustrator,
Clark Hutton. As well as liking the book, Smallwood was also keen to publish it to help Hutton
out of the financial difficulties he was experiencing, as he was claiming funds from the Labour Ex-
change to make ends meet. Smallwood wrote: “knowing your liking for Mr Hutton and his work, I
feel that it might tip the scales in favour of a rather higher royalty than you would ordinarily have
offered him, should your firm be interested in the project” (Smallwood 1941: CW90/46). She was

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right in her assumption that Hogarth would want to help; although she refused Smallwood’s offer
of a joint publication deal (she was unconvinced about the book’s appeal to the U.S. market), she
wrote:

Yesterday I sent Clark Hutton a manuscript by airmail which is pretty dull and nothing you
would want, but it gave me a chance to offer him $200 for illustrations, which means dollars
for England and a little bread-and-butter money for him. I hope he will want to do it.
(Hogarth 1941: CW90/46)

This is not an isolated example of the way in which Smallwood combined business acumen with
an equally strong impetus for kindness and loyalty to both clients and suppliers.

Smallwood’s negotiating skills

Smallwood communicated with authors by letter and telephone, with an empathetic approach that
was much appreciated. A letter written by the author Elspeth Huxley to Smallwood demonstrates
this clearly: she had just submitted a manuscript and was writing to express her gratitude for
Smallwood’s promptness in calling her immediately to confirm that she had received it. Huxley
explains that the process of sending off a manuscript, after so many months of work, was a stress-
ful experience, but that Smallwood’s call, and her reassurance and enthusiasm for the writing, had
been greatly appreciated: Huxley is at pains to point out that this response was not to be taken for
granted, and she expresses her deep gratitude. It is, she writes, the sort of action that reinforces
loyalties and creates strong bonds. This was exactly why Smallwood’s relationships with her au-
thors were so enduring.
Within another longstanding association, Smallwood’s relationship with Iris Murdoch blended
her usual mix of friendship and professional advocacy. Following Chatto’s acceptance of her first
manuscript, in her correspondence with Smallwood Murdoch, like Barker, soon segued from “Mrs
Smallwood” to “Dear Norah, if I may please so call you”. This same letter, undated but written
sometime in the mid-fifties, also refers to the serious illness suffered by Smallwood’s sister, and
thanks her for both a cheque (presumably for royalties), and “a lovely party”. It is signed, “With
all affectionate wishes, yours, Iris” (Murdoch n.d.: CW 591/17). The letter encompasses all the
facets of Smallwood’s relationships with her authors – the sharing of difficulties, the commercial
dealings, and, always, parties and social events. Moving to look at the professional aspect of
Smallwood’s relationships with her authors, correspondence with Murdoch in 1979 shows the
mutual trust that has grown between publisher and editor over the course of more than twenty-five
years. Discussing the imminent publication of Murdoch’s twentieth novel, Nuns and Soldiers, it is
agreed that a decision about Murdoch’s royalty payment be delayed to allow time for Smallwood
to negotiate with the United States and to seek out book club support in order to increase the
potential market. Smallwood was keen to ensure the best possible deal for Murdoch: “you know
I want you to have the proper fair rate for the job” (Smallwood 1979: Smallwood/1–2). The prac-
tice of seeking out co-publishing deals with American publishers was well-established by Chatto
and other British publishers at this point. It was seen as a way of offsetting production costs and
increasing the potential for profit (Collini 2012: 640). Three years later, Smallwood re-entered the
fray on Murdoch’s behalf, negotiating hard with her American counterpart at The Viking Press,
New York, over the advance for The Philosopher’s Pupil. Although Alan Williams at Viking also
corresponded directly with Murdoch, Smallwood’s role was pivotal, as Williams wryly indicates
in a letter to Smallwood: “I have not failed to note your sotto voce indications that you would

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like material indications of our enthusiasm for Iris” (Williams 1982: Smallwood/1–2). Such was
Smallwood’s influence that Viking proposed doubling the advance paid to Murdoch on her previ-
ous book, from US$10,000 to US$20,000. However, the novel was a long one, and, in order to
cover its production costs whilst pricing it competitively, Williams asked Smallwood to consider
a reduced royalty payment starting at 10% for the first 15,000 copies:

I do earnestly hope that you can persuade yourself and Iris that this is not an effort to skin
the author but is instead a mark of our intense determination to bring Iris to the marketplace
as aggressively and attractively as possible.
(Williams 1982: Smallwood/1–2)

In the same letter, Williams moves on from the financial negotiations to an even more delicate
area: Murdoch’s prose. As he is quick to point out, “I have never of course presumed to ‘edit’ Iris”.
Neither, arguably, had Smallwood, who venerated Murdoch’s writing. However, Williams contin-
ued, Murdoch’s reluctance to re-identify her speakers in dialogue could lead to some confusion
on the reader’s part. Might anything be done? “I say this not to needle but to see if there might be
any answering echo from you as a friend”. Here, Williams has possibly misunderstood the nature
of Smallwood’s friendship with Murdoch, which would make it far less likely that she would raise
the issue than the reverse. Certainly, when Smallwood answered Williams’ letter (judging from
the dates, and allowing for transatlantic air mail, she wrote immediately on its receipt), she studi-
ously avoided engaging in any discussion over textual changes, sticking resolutely to the financial
negotiations: “… the royalty bothers me” (Smallwood 1982a: Smallwood/1–2). A week later, hav-
ing discussed the matter with Murdoch, Smallwood wrote in more detail. Again, her skills as a
negotiator shine through in the diplomatic way she frames her argument: “You must forgive me
if I am slow in understanding your royalty statements. Perhaps the best a publisher can hope for
is to understand his own and make it possible for his authors to do so also” (Smallwood 1982b:
Smallwood/1–2). It is a cleverly self-deprecating way to defuse the situation, whilst ensuring that
her point is made.
The contract was still being negotiated in January 1983, after Smallwood’s official retirement
from Chatto, but whilst she was still working for the firm as a consultant. A letter from Smallwood
to Williams queries a number of clauses and sub-clauses before moving on to the knotty subject
of paperback rights: “Firstly, we would like any offer received put to Iris before a sale is made…”
(Smallwood 1983: Smallwood/1–2). Williams capitulates to the majority of Smallwood’s points,
although the question of paperback editions, and the increasing need for titles to promise large
paperback sales, was not so easily resolved. Williams’ assessment of the increasingly fraught state
of the U.S. mass paperback market, coupled with the indisputable fact that Murdoch’s more liter-
ary output was not an easy sell within a market where “almost 40% of the rack space is devoted
to Harlequin, etc., original romances”, encapsulates a feeling that, increasingly, Smallwood, and
her devoted band of authors, were operating on borrowed time (Williams 1982: Smallwood/1–2).

Conclusion: the end of Smallwood’s reign and her legacy

Smallwood’s last years at Chatto were marked by an increasingly futile battle to maintain power
and control against a turning tide. Publishing as an industry was changing dramatically and Small-
wood’s school of publishing, which centred on relationships, personal attention, and a long-term
investment in authors, was coming to seem out of step with the commercial impetus that favoured
big advances, overnight success, and headline-making deals. When she finally retired, there was a

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flurry of activity to mark this momentous event. Several parties and receptions were held, includ-
ing a grand dinner at the Garrick Club (the menu included Mediterranean prawns with tomato and
basil dip, roast saddle of lamb, and vanilla souffle, washed down with Chablis and magnums of
Chateau La Mission Haut Brion 1977). The guest list featured authors – including Murdoch with
her husband John Bayley – and other key figures within the publishing world. Another notable
event was convened at Bertorelli’s restaurant by the Trade department at Chatto; a menu from the
evening was signed and annotated by the guests, who included Chatto’s sales reps from Australia,
Canada, and New Zealand, commemorating “a great lady in publishing”. The media also acknowl-
edged the fact that Smallwood’s retirement marked an end of an era, with several interviews and
profiles in the national press, including The Guardian and The Telegraph, and an appearance on
BBC Radio Four’s Bookshelf programme, interviewed by Frank Delaney.
Smallwood did not enjoy a long retirement. She died in October 1984 and her passing was
marked by obituaries in the major newspapers. Her funeral, at St Martin-in-the-Fields, London,
included an address by Chatto author, Lauren Van Der Post. Jill Balcon, widow of Cecil Day Lewis
and a close friend of Smallwood, delivered one of the readings. The cover of her Funeral Service
featured two cherubs: the famous ‘Chatto twins’ designed by Smallwood’s friend and illustrator,
Enid Marx. Although fondly remembered by her friends and authors – Bogarde mentioned her as
one of his greatest supporters in a speech he gave on receiving an honorary degree at St Andrews
University in 1985 – her professional impact was soon reduced to passing references in authors’
biographies and histories of publishing.
Despite this lack of attention, Smallwood’s legacy is considerable: she left behind an impres-
sive body of work, and many of the authors she discovered and nurtured are still being read and
re-editioned today. Smallwood did not think of herself as a pioneer, or as a woman at the vanguard
of a new wave of female empowerment; she shared a similar attitude to that of her close contempo-
rary, Diana Athill, who, when considering the difference in male and female attitudes towards their
jobs, posited that women chose “work they would enjoy and the satisfaction of doing it well” over
more ‘masculine’ preoccupations with pay and promotion (Athill 2000: 57). She frames this period
as a time during which “all publishing was run by many badly-paid women and a few much better
paid men: an imbalance that women were, of course, aware of, but which they seemed to take for
granted” (56). Be this as it may, both Athill and Smallwood displayed considerable determination
and ambition to succeed in such a male-dominated profession, whether or not they acknowledged
it themselves.
While there is no documentary evidence that Smallwood viewed it as part of her remit to
progress the role and status of women within the publishing industry, there is no doubt that she
was instrumental in furthering the careers of women with whom she interacted during her long
tenure at Chatto. To give just one example of the career trajectories enjoyed by Smallwood’s
staff: in 1951, when Barker asks Smallwood’s opinion of the Richmond Towers literary agency,
Smallwood recommends the firm on the basis that her one-time secretary, Ursula Winant, now
works there: “I would like her to handle your stories, as I know you would like her, and she, being
the most conscientious person I have ever known, would spare no pains to do her best for you”
(Smallwood 1951: MS2750/16).
While she may not have been, as a 1960s magazine profile succinctly put it: “a Pankhurst of
publishing”, Smallwood undoubtedly contributed in less formal ways – through her training and as
a role model – to the creation of a pathway that subsequent women were able to follow (Leahy and
Holland 1969: 21). The next generation of women publishers were to carve out a more distinctive
niche for themselves – Carmen Callil, Smallwood’s successor at the head of Chatto and the creator
of the Virago Press, is a case in point. This new wave of women, bolstered by the development

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of more structural support from industry organisations such as Women in Publishing, founded in
1979, created a higher profile for women in the industry. A continuum stretches from Smallwood
and her small band of British contemporaries, including Athill at Andre Deutsch and Eunice Frost
at Penguin, through Callil and her Virago colleagues, Harriet Spicer and Ursula Owen, to the situ-
ation today, where women out-number men in the publishing industry. The twenty-first-century
publishing world is now a very different environment to the one in which Smallwood operated, but
it is certainly well-populated with women at high levels. Figures from 2007, quoted by Finkelstein
and McCleery, revealed that up to three-quarters of the publishing workforce are female (2019:
183); statistics published by the UK Publishing Association in 2021 showed that 78% of editors
were women. Whilst Smallwood’s contribution to the development of women’s careers within
publishing might not have been widely acknowledged, it is undoubtedly significant.

Works cited
Athill, Diana (2000) Stet: A Memoir, London: Granta Books.
Barker, A.L. (1947) Letter to Norah Smallwood, 27 October. CW MS2750/12.
Barker, A.L. (1948) Letter to Norah Smallwood, 6 January. CW MS2750/12.
Barker, A.L. (1949) Letter to Norah Smallwood, 11 June. University of Reading Special Collections, Chatto
and Windus Archive CW MS2750/13.
Barker, A.L. (1950) Letter to Norah Smallwood, 19 October. CW MS2750/12.
Barker, A.L. (1953) Letter to Norah Smallwood, 7 June. CW MS2750/12.
Bradley, Sue (2008) The British Book Trade: An Oral History, London: The British Library.
Buckman, David (1996) “Obituary: Winifred Wilson,” Independent, 13 June. Available at: https://www.­
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 20
FEMINIST CITATION IN BUCHI
EMECHETA’S EARLY FICTION
AND AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Publishing race, class, and gender

Nicola Wilson

Nigerian writer Buchi Emecheta (1944–2017) was a trailblazer. As the author of ten novels, an
autobiography, books for children and young adults, as well as plays for radio, television, and
many essays, Emecheta became over the course of her lifetime “one of Africa’s most acclaimed
women writers” (Umeh 1996: xxiii). Published initially by Barrie & Jenkins, then Allison and
Busby in the United Kingdom and George Braziller in the United States, Emecheta set up her
own press, Ogwugwu Afor, with her eldest son in the early 1980s to counter some of her frustra-
tions with the western publishing industry, before her work was relaunched the following decade
for the trade paperback market in Heinemann’s African Writers Series. Translated into fourteen
languages, Emecheta has been heralded as a crucial role model to women writers of the African
and Caribbean diaspora. Jamaican-born Joan Riley (1958–), author of The Unbelonging (1985),
cited Emecheta as an important exception in “the development of an indigenous literature based
on the experience of black people in Britain” (1994: 547). “Buchi Emecheta was the foremother
of black British women’s writing” writes Bernardine Evaristo (1959–) in a blurb for Penguin
Modern Classics edition of Emecheta’s second novel, Second-Class Citizen (2021). “We are able
to speak because you first spoke”, Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (1977–) wrote
upon learning of Emecheta’s death: “Thank you for your courage. Thank you for your art. Nodu
na ndokwa” (2017).
This chapter draws on Emecheta’s autobiographical writing, essays, and early fiction to ex-
plore her emergence as one of the first Black women novelists to depict the lives of immigrants
and their families living in working-class Britain in the early 1970s (other literary pioneers in-
clude Una Marson [1905–1965], Claudia Jones [1915–1964], Beryl Gilroy [1924–2001]). In the
Ditch (1972) and Second-Class Citizen (1974) – republished in one volume as Adah’s Story
(1983) – alongside her memoir, Head Above Water (1986), show how Emecheta and the fic-
tionalised Adah negotiate life in London as an educated Igbo woman, mother, and worker in the
face of “multi-layered systems of oppression” (Fongang 2013: 43). Following Emecheta’s desire
in writing Head Above Water to show “the way a woman is treated by the publishers” (Boss
1988: 100), this chapter explores Emecheta’s encounters with literary publishing as one of those

DOI: 10.4324/9781003429951-25 306

 Feminist citation in Emecheta’s early fiction and autobiography

potential “systems of oppression” and considers how Emecheta’s writing and publishing journey
as a “Nigerian Writer Living in London” (Emecheta 1982) was intersected by class, gender, and
race. In her early London novels and autobiography, Emecheta employs what Sara Ahmed calls
citation as “feminist memory” (2017: 15), highlighting the significance of both individual writ-
ers as role models and specific women agents and publishers to the production and possibilities
of her work. The formative interest in feminist criticism with finding foremothers and literary
traditions has been contested; genealogies are complex and often non-linear (Gilbert and Gubar
1979; Christian 1980; Olsen 1980; hooks 1984; Walker 1984; Courtman 2012; Aguirre 2020).
But the web of models and agents that Emecheta calls our attention to in Head Above Water
have not been explored in relation to the material production of, or the literary influences in, her
work, and this is a curious omission in view of the emphasis she places on citing these figures in
her autobiography. “Citations can be feminist bricks”, as Ahmed writes, “they are the materials
through which, from which, we create our dwellings” (2017: 16). Enacting a praxis of concern
with feminist archives and citational practice, this chapter tries to correct this (Micir 2019; Abram
2020b; Ozment 2020).
A few further points of clarification on Emecheta’s contribution to literature and feminism
may be helpful. Firstly, in chronological terms, the existence of Emecheta’s published writing
from the early 1970s is an important antidote to conventional narratives of literature and femi-
nism in the United Kingdom during the Second-Wave feminist movement that implicitly depict
a largely white, coherent, 1970s feminist project becoming “much more complex, fragmented
and often fraught” in the following decade “as black and minority ethnic (BME), working-
class, lesbian and disabled women started to give voice to their feelings of disenfranchisment”
(Riley 2018: 64). The 1980s was a seminal decade in Black feminist culture and politics in
Britain, as wider political realities in the Thatcher era (Fischer 2014: 416) and the conscious
construction of Black as “a political identity shaped by the shared experience of racialisation
and its consequences” (Mirza 3) contributed to a vibrant Black women’s movement. (OWAAD,
perhaps the best known of the many British Black women’s groups, founded in 1978 as the
Organisation of Women of Africa and African Descent, became the Organisation of Women
of African and Asian Descent in 1979 (Thomlinson 2016: 89)). Along with seminal publica-
tions including Hazel V. Carby’s “White woman listen! Black feminism and the boundaries
of sisterhood” (1982), Beverley Bryan, Stella Dadzie, and Suzanne Scafe’s The Heart of the
Race – Black Women’s Lives in Britain (1985) and Scafe’s Teaching Black Literature (1989),
the 1980s saw a range of Black feminist institutions and collectives set up to support and en-
able some of the major writers who emerged in this decade (including Barbara Burford (1944–
2012), Beryl Gilroy, Jackie Kay (1961–), Bernardine Evaristo, Joan Riley) along with many
others who published for the first time (Abram 2020a). As Fischer points out, Buchi Emecheta
stands out among this later wave of her contemporaries by publishing with independent presses
a decade earlier, outside of the feminist publishing industry and women-only presses set up
during feminism’s Second Wave to disseminate women’s writing (2014). Emecheta’s struggle
and publishing journey point to the longer history of Black women’s writing and activism in
the late 1960s and 1970s – an important recovery project (Benjamin 1995; Thomlinson 2016;
Sobande 2021) – while also pointing to some of the forgotten tensions around class, race, and
poverty in the early women’s movement that have been neglected.
Secondly, Emecheta’s relationship with feminism is an important example of the controver-
sies and erasures the term contains (hooks 1984; Carby 1982/1997; Mirza 1997). Despite the

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woman-centred focus of her texts and continual desire to write about African women – “My back-
drop may shift slightly, from real Africa to the African diaspora. But I think I’ll still be seeing
everything through the eyes of women” (Boss 1988: 100) – Emecheta distanced herself and her
work from the feminist movement she encountered in the west. This was grounded in her personal
experience and interactions with the WLM in Britain in the late 1960s and 1970s. Though her
work was taken up by feminist critics around the world and – as her publisher Margaret Busby
pointed out – this was and continues to be an important part of her critical longevity as a writer,
Emecheta, like many other Black women in the 1970s and 1980s, found the assumptions and ra-
cial attitudes embedded within the term ‘Feminism’ either racist or predominately focused around
white women. The final part of this chapter takes up this tension, looking at the development of
Emecheta’s framing of feminism as an international spokeswoman in the 1980s and her position-
ing of herself as an African feminist “with a small f!” (1986). As she states in the opening to Head
Above Water:

my hope for us all […] [is] that the white European woman from the North will regard the
black woman from the South as her sister and that both of us together will hold hands and try
to salvage what is left of our world from the mess the sons we have brought into it have made.
(Emecheta 1986: 1)

In the Ditch and Corinna Adam

[S]he had dreamt that she would be writing African short stories, but her attempts in the past
weeks had resulted in nothing but the constant appearance of rejection slips. She had had
so many of these nicely worded rejection documents that her dream of being an author had
vaporised.
(Emecheta 1972 and 1979: 35)

In Emecheta’s first published novel, In the Ditch, the protagonist Adah is persuaded to seek as-
sistance from the state and go on the dole after she is forced to give up her job at the British Mu-
seum for lack of childcare. “‘I may not have to be on the dole for long’, she thought. ‘I may still
become a writer, a writer of a best-selling book’” (1972 and 1979: 36). The desire to write and
communicate with a wider audience propels Adah’s bildungsroman in both early London novels
and is a structural motif in Emecheta’s memoir, Head Above Water. Indeed, while In the Ditch and
Second-Class Citizen offer searing depictions of the structures of subordination Adah encounters,
Emecheta’s autobiographical stories are ultimately tales of self-definition and empowerment and
“refuse to represent her purely as a victim” (Dawson 2007: 100; Fongang 2013). Writing and
literary production are a key part of this empowerment, as well as a crucial source of pleasure for
Adah. In Second-Class Citizen for instance, when Adah has joined her husband Francis in England
and begun writing, the reader shares in the protagonist’s journey of writerly fulfilment. Buying
herself a copy of Teach Yourself to Write from Foyles, Adah begins to write her first manuscript
in “four school exercise books” bought from Woolworths off the Crescent (Emecheta 1994: 174):

Her books might not be published until she was forty, but her first story had been completed.
She could not go back now. She had known the feeling she had when she finished the story,
she had tasted the fulfilment of seeing others read her work, and had an inner glow that was
indescribable when other people said how much they had enjoyed reading it.
(1994: 179)

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 Feminist citation in Emecheta’s early fiction and autobiography

Writing is imaginative escape and recognition for Adah as well as validation of her own worth
and life experiences in dialogue with others. Importantly, her writing self also co-exists with her
maternity and sexual reproduction. Unlike many contemporary media accounts and sociological
literature that demonised Black women’s sexuality (Patterson 1963; Webster 1998; Procter 2003),
Adah validates her writing in positive reproductive terms as her “Brainchild” (1994: 176). It is the
final blow in her relationship with her husband, Francis, when he destroys her first manuscript,
The Bride Price (Emecheta rewrote and published this as her third novel in 1976): “Francis could
kill her child. She could forgive him all he had done before, but not this” (1994: 181). There is a
productive maternal praxis in Emecheta’s theorisation of writing, where children become the place
of possibility for literature, rather than its obstacle (Walker 1976). This is especially made apparent
in the paratexts to her work, as in the dedication to Second-Class Citizen: “To my dear children
Florence, Sylvester, Jake, Christy and Alice, without whose sweet background noises this book
would not have been written” (1994: viii).
In essays and lifewriting, Emecheta locates the creative desire she explores through the char-
acter of Adah in her first novels in the oral tradition she grew up in. “It was at home that I came
across real story tellers” she told the second African Writers Congress in 1986:

The Ibo storyteller was […] always one’s mother. My Big Mother was my aunt. A child
belonged to many mothers. Not just one’s biological one. We would sit for hours at her feet
mesmerized by her trance like voice. […] It was a result of those visits to Ibuza, coupled
with the enjoyment and information those stories used to give us, that I determined when I
grew older that I was going to be a storyteller, like my Big Mother.
(1988: 173–174)

This desire to communicate through storytelling “like my Big Mother” is exposed to public and
private censure – premised in colonial and patriarchal oppression – during formative moments of
trauma in Emecheta’s autobiography. In school for instance, where she first articulates her plan
to be a writer, the young Emecheta is shamed by a white missionary teacher from England who
mocks her pupil’s desire. It is also as a schoolgirl in Lagos in the 1950s, where she has fought with
her parents to allow her to attend the Methodist Girls’ High School, that the colonial and linguistic
power structures and imbalances of literary culture and publishing become manifest: “If I wanted
to tell stories to people from many places I would have to use a language that was not my first –
neither was it my second, or third, but my fourth language” (1988: 174). In Second-Class Citizen,
where Adah realises that “she could not write in any African language, so it must be English al-
though English was not her mother tongue”, Adah declares her intention to write “her own phrases
her own way. Adah’s phrases, that’s what they were going to be” (1994: 177). While a certain
line of critique on Emecheta has “problematically equate[d] documentary fiction with aesthetic
poverty” (McLeod 2004: 101), both the oral tradition her work comes out of and the realities of
colonial and postcolonial Anglophone publishing that saturate her style need to be acknowledged
(Thiong’o 1986; Davis 2018).
In Head Above Water – written at the height of her global success – Emecheta calls out the gen-
dered, racialised, colonial, and socio-economic contexts that shaped her path to becoming a writer,
narrating in detail the publishing journeys of In the Ditch and Second-Class Citizen. The title of her
autobiography refers directly to the difficulty of sustaining writing as a profession when you are
from a non-privileged, minority background: “Living entirely off writing is a precarious existence
and money is always short, but with careful management and planning I found I could keep my head
and those of my family, through God’s grace, above water” (1986: 243). She also calls attention to

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the material difficulties facing the working-class writer, including difficulties in presenting submis-
sions and publishers’ expectations that authors could pay for professional typing themselves:

Well, one could call them manuscripts, because the typing was the worst I have ever seen.
As I could not and still cannot afford a professional typist, I type my ideas myself. […]
Sometimes the red ribbon would come instead of the black and many a time some letters
would not show at all and I’d have to rewrite them in ink – oh, my manuscripts in those
days looked odd! But I sent them to editors all the same. And religiously every Friday they
would return them.
(1986: 49–50)

In exposing some of the structural barriers in publishing that still beset Black women’s writing
and working-class cultural production (see Sobande 2021), Head Above Water also emphasises
the importance of access to literary and publishing networks. Emecheta’s first publications were
autobiographical pieces “about our plight” (1986: 43) for local papers. But her breakthrough as
a professional writer was the serialisation of three scenes from the novel she was working on as
“Life in the Ditch” in the New Statesman in January 1971. The New Statesman was a leading
left-wing periodical and an important home for realist stories marked by class preoccupations of
poverty and struggle (Abu-Manneh 2011). Regular contributors in the late 1960s included Polly
Toynbee, A. J. P. Taylor, Colin MacInnes, V. S. Pritchett, and J. B. Priestley, with columns on
“Poverty in Britain” and a “London Diary”. In her memoir, Emecheta narrates the unlikely way in
which this serialisation deal came about: from her friend’s suggestion that she approach “a funny
Englishman who has taken over a paper called the New Statesman” (1986: 69), to her decision
– after a six week wait following an “encouraging note” from the editor, Richard Crossman – to
go down to his offices without an appointment and demand a decision. From this, editor Corinna
Adam (1937–2012) came out to Emecheta’s flat to work with her in person on “the scattered sheets
of paper that formed my ‘Observations of London’” (1986: 71).
As with any publishing history, there is a certain amount of serendipity in these connections,
but what underscores Emecheta’s narrative of her publishing breakthrough in addition to her
perseverance is the significance of sympathetic periodical networks and her fortuity in encoun-
tering Corinna Adam in this context. Adam – London-born and Cambridge educated – was a
well-­connected journalist (in 1950, her father became Director General for the BBC) who reported
on the Cold War in the 1960s from Germany. A regular contributor to the New Statesman and the
Observer, Adam was a socialist feminist, sensitive to some of the contradictions in the contempo-
rary WLM, who believed first and foremost that “all forms of oppression are basically economic”
(Adam 1970b: 72). In her report for the New Statesman on the first Women’s Liberation confer-
ence in Britain at Ruskin College in March 1970, for instance, Adam began with the gap between
those who had organised the conference and the cleaners who would have to wash the meeting’s
slogans off the walls:

It reflected, as any such occasion is bound to do, the contradiction always present in wom-
en’s movements: the question whether they are part of existing political and ideological
structures, or something separate and essentially different.
(1970a: 323)

In an earlier article on “Britain’s Submerged Sex”, Adam focused on the necessity of equal pay
and on working-class women’s educational disadvantages, calling attention to the significance

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of the Ford women’s strike (1968) and Barbara Castle’s determination to adopt equal pay as her
next cause (Castle introduced the Equal Pay Act in 1970). Here again, Adam puts the difficulties
facing poor and working-class women over and above the dominant causes championed by the
mainstream WLM:

It is a situation besides which middle-class problems – the boredom of graduate wives stuck
with very small children, difficulties with the au pair, the very small chances of ending up
as a boss or lunching downstairs at Simpson’s – pale into near invisibility.
(1970: 72)

It is striking that Adam was the first publishing insider that Emecheta worked closely with. Shortly
after her visit to Emecheta’s home and assessment of the drafts, three episodes of Emecheta’s “Life
in London” that show clearly the links between women’s oppression and “economic inferiority”
(Adam 1970b: 72) were serialised in the New Statesman: “Baptism by Socialisation”; “Down to
the Dole House”, and “The Ministry’s Visiting Day”.
Appearing in the New Statesman was the break Emecheta needed. As she explains in Head
Above Water, “Agents wrote to me, journalists wanted interviews, and there followed a series
of talks over the radio at Bush House and Langham Place” (1986: 71), along with a second
serialisation, “My Life in Pussy Cat Mansions”, reaching a different demographic through the
glossy women’s magazine, Nova (August 1972). Emecheta was taken on by literary agents
Curtis Brown who sold In the Ditch to Barrie & Jenkins. This was a small firm (formed in 1964
out of the mergers of Herbert Jenkins and Barrie & Rockcliff) specialising in non-fiction (one
of their contemporary bestsellers was Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee [1971],
first published in the United States). Barrie & Jenkin’s first hardback edition of Emecheta’s In
the Ditch was packaged to readers in a way that stressed its non-fictional genesis, including a
preface by Emecheta citing personal authenticity as a way of reading the story: “Everything
in this book really happened: it happened to me” (1972: ix). She explains her choice to write
in the third person “as if I were an outsider peering through the windows of my experiences,
an eavesdropper listening to my own conversations” (1972: ix). Anticipating some of the
criticism around probability that the novel did in fact receive – “My publisher tells me that
readers will expect to be told how Adah came to be in the predicament with which the story
is concerned” (1972: ix–x) – Emecheta also stresses in this foreword the impact of class and
poverty:

My experiences were not, I feel, much affected by the fact that I came from another country
and am black. They might well have been (indeed they were) shared by many women, white
and black, living in an over-industrialised society.
(1972: ix)

This chimes with various moments in the story where gender and class solidarity take precedence
over racialised differences and divisions: “Differences in culture, colour, backgrounds and God
knows what else had all been submerged in the face of greater enemies – poverty and helplessness”
(1972 and 1979: 71).
In addition to calling the readers’ attention to her publishing mentors, Head Above Water also
suggests a way of reading In the Ditch through the literary and sociological frameworks that
poverty was understood within at the time. On the literary side, Emecheta cites finding a form for
what she wanted to say about her life in London through reading Nell Dunn’s Poor Cow (1967)

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and Monica Dickens’ One Pair of Hands (1939) and One Pair of Feet (1942) – “books based on
‘social reality’” (1986: 62). Poor Cow was Dunn’s first novel, following her collection of short
stories, Up the Junction (1963), also initially published in the New Statesman (Wilson 2015: 163).
A short novel, told in sparse prose, Poor Cow tells the story of Joy, a young single mother with
“slum-white legs” (Dunn 1988: 9), and the efforts she makes in the face of unsuccessful hetero-
sexual relationships to make a home for herself and her son. The novel is largely narrated in the
third person with “an unselfconscious elegance that conceals its craft” according to contemporary
Margaret Drabble (1988: xi), but includes powerful first-person narration, often focused on the
domestic:

I wipe the gas stove down and wash the tray and fill the sugar basin up, after that I get the
hoover out and hoover the fucking carpet, then I brush me chairs down and I brood over the
row and I listen to the wireless – after that I go in the bedroom and fold all the clothes up
then dust down me dressing table.
(Dunn 1988: 122)

Monica Dickens’ autobiographical novels were lighter, entertaining reads, relating the picaresque
life of a debutante who becomes a cook below stairs, exposing the lives of the upper classes she
moves amongst. Written in the first person, the realities of domestic labour are intimately narrated
in these novels:

I was dumped into the scullery the moment I arrived, with strict instructions not to stir from
the sink. Starting with cocktail glasses, I ploughed my way through the mountains of stuff
that were hurled at me by a procession of cheerfully indifferent maids as the dinner upstairs
progressed.
(Dickens 1978: 111)

But Dickens’ protagonist has the social and financial capital to move on and choose how long she
stays with her employers. This is a long way from the “social reality” depicted by Dunn or expe-
rienced by Emecheta.
The sociological frameworks informing In the Ditch that Head Above Water explains have
been little discussed in critical work on Emecheta’s writing style (for important exceptions see
Dawson and Husain). As a sociology student at the University of London, Emecheta specialised
in sociological theories of poverty and race – “I was always quoting Peter Townsend and Sami
Zubaida” (1986: 101) she confesses – and after its publication, In the Ditch became known as
“Buchi’s poverty book” (1986: 101) among her University peers. Townsend was a sociologist
and campaigner who redefined how poverty was conceptualised and measured in the 1950s and
1960s, introducing new understandings of “relative poverty” amidst so-called post-war affluence,
and was a co-founder of the Child Poverty Action Group. Zubaida co-founded the Department of
Politics and Sociology at Birkbeck in 1972 and his early work was on race and racialisation. In
Head Above Water, Emecheta observes that

the more I went into sociological theories the more I could find their equivalent or what I
termed their interpretation in real life. My life at Pussy Cat Mansions only a few months
back could be regarded as ‘anomie or classlessness’.
(1986: 62)

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It becomes clear when reading In the Ditch how such interlocking frameworks of poverty and race
percolate throughout the novel. The text is suffused with the language of sociological theory, its
distinctive terminology often highlighted by speech marks:

Ah, yes, the Mansions were a unique place, a separate place individualised for “problem
families”. Problem families with real problems were placed in a problem place.
(1972 and 1979: 21)

Recognising how In the Ditch was “shaped sociologically” (1986: 109), with Emecheta working
out theoretical concepts through the language of documentary fiction, helps nuance readings of
her debut novel.

Second-Class Citizen and Margaret Busby

Now I was not just an eighteen-year-old black girl looking for work, but a twenty-seven-
year-old woman who, as well as being a graduate with some library qualifications, five kids
and no husband, was also a failed writer.
(1986: 112)

While the citational practices of In the Ditch are explained in Emecheta’s lifewriting outside of
the narrative, Emecheta’s second novel, Second-Class Citizen embeds citation directly within the
story. Flora Nwapa (1931–1993), the first African woman writer to publish a novel internationally
(Efuru was published by Heinemann Educational Books in 1966) is an important model for Adah
as a first-time writer:

Francis laughed. Whatever was he going to hear next? A woman writer in his own house, in a
white man’s country?
“Well, Flora Nwapa is black and she writes,” Adah challenged.
“I have seen her books in all the libraries where I worked.”
Francis did not reply to this.
(1994: 178)

Part of Adah’s story “of personal development” (Porter 1996: 268) in the novel is to be educated
in the politics of Black power and a wider Black literary movement. It is when she is working in
the Chalk Farm Library and becomes friends with a Canadian man, Bill, that this literary political
education begins. The reader is told that “Adah did not know any black writers apart from the few
Nigerian ones, like Chinua Achebe and Flora Nwapa, and she did not know that there were any
other black writers” (1994: 160). Bill introduces her to African-American writer James Baldwin
and provokes her to seek empowerment through politicised collective action: “did she not know
that black was beautiful?” (1994: 161). As John McLeod argues, the “positive images of black
identity” that Adah discovers through her reading make the Chalk Farm Library “an imaginative
subaltern space of multicultural inclusiveness and equality that offers an alternative to the social
divisions of London beyond its doors” (2004: 108). Like the challenges raised by Black feminists
to a predominantly white-focused movement, this solidarity is not exclusively gendered female
(hooks 1984; Mirza 1997; Thomlinson 2016).

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In Head Above Water, Emecheta describes the difficult journey from debut novel to second
book that shaped Second-Class Citizen. Personal and professional difficulties in her relationship
with editor John Bunting at Barrie & Jenkins – refracted through differences of race, age, gender,
and class – coupled with low sales of In the Ditch after its initial success, made Emecheta doubt
her future as an author and she took on teaching and youth work through rounds of rejections be-
fore finding another publisher willing to take on her second book. When her new agent, Elizabeth
Stevens, eventually took the manuscript to Allison and Busby in early 1974, she told Emecheta
that she was “sure they would like it because they were mildly radical, just like the manuscript”
(1986: 155). In Head Above Water, Emecheta makes a clear distinction between Clive Allison and
Margaret Busby and her previous encounters with the publishing industry:

The publishers I had had previously were John Bunting, and later one Christopher Ma-
clehose who took over his job at Barrie & Jenkins, and of course I met people like Corinna
Adams [sic] and Mr Crossman of the New Statesman. When those people spoke to you over
the telephone, you could feel their detachment. Allison and Busby, however, allowed their
interest to show over the phone.
(1986: 161–162)

Allison and Busby had been co-founded by Clive Allison (1944–2011) and Margaret Busby
(1944–) in 1967 to produce poetry in paperback at affordable prices. Two years later, they pub-
lished Sam Greenlee’s The Spook Who Sat By The Door, a powerful African-American story of
institutional racism that became an international bestseller and sold rights in many languages
(Ladipo Manyika 2020: para 27). Allison and Busby developed eclectic lists, publishing “writers
of all ethnicities and backgrounds” that included authors C. L. R. James (1901–1989), Rosa Guy
(1922–2012), Colin MacInnes (1914–1976), and Margaret Thomson Davis (1926–2016) (Ladipo
Manyika 2020: para 28). Emecheta was struck by their youth and differences in class and social
capital: “they were not rich or too sophisticated like my early publishers. Those early ones were
too far above me” (1986: 163).
Moving to Allison and Busby in 1974 brought Emecheta into an editorial relationship with
Ghanian-born Margaret Busby (1944–), at that point Britain’s youngest and first Black woman
publisher. Describing herself as responsible for the “back-room editorial grind” (Busby 2011),
Busby, like Corinna Adam, worked closely with Emecheta on her manuscripts. Busby has said of
their working relationship:

happening early upon her writing, I resolved to help make Emecheta’s courageous voice as
widely heard as possible, and was privileged to become her publisher, where we developed
a close editorial relationship; I reciprocated her trust in my judgement by doing whatever
necessary – from retyping manuscripts to producing cover artwork – to communicate her
words to the world.
(2017)

Emecheta would publish her next seven works with Allison and Busby before setting up her own
publishers, Ogwuwu Afor, in the early 1980s with her son. The Slave Girl (1977), which won the
New Statesman’s Jock Campbell Award for writers born in Africa or the Caribbean, is dedicated to
Busby “for her believing in me” (Aguirre 2020: 199).
Busby’s intervention in sustaining and championing Emecheta’s literary and publishing career
as she moved from precarious to major writer through the 1970s and into the early 1980s cannot

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be overstated. Now an icon herself (appointed a CBE for services to publishing in 2021), in 1992,
Busby edited Daughters of Africa, a ground-breaking anthology of women’s writing covering
over 5,000 years and including more than 200 women writers from over 60 countries around the
world (25 years later, Busby edited a new volume, New Daughters of Africa; Lacey 2017). In her
introduction to Daughters of Africa, Busby points to the nexus of Black women’s writing and ac-
cess to publishing, critiquing the belated interest of mainstream publishing houses in Black women
writers and the importance of representation:

Rarest of all are thriving ventures run by/for Black women, such as Kitchen Table: Women of
Color Press, or the British-based Black Womantalk and Urban Fox Press, all founded since
the 1980s. Crucial to the proliferation of the writings of Black women, and their right to the
critical attention they deserve, is the continuing existence of publishers such as these – and
above all the encouragement of Black women to enter the publishing industry to build on the
efforts of those brave women (among them New York literary agent Marie Dutton Brown,
and Toni Morrison in her role as senior editor for Random House) who have stood the storm.
(1992: xxxii–xxxiii)

In 1996, when the first collection of critical writing on Emecheta was published, edited by Marie
Umeh, Busby provided a crucial foreword. In this, Busby points to “the absence of women writers
from most early anthologies of African writing” (xiii) and then to the difficult publishing relation-
ships of South African Bessie Head (1937–1986) and Sengalese Mariama Ba (1929–1981) “whose
brilliant first novel Une si longue Lettre (1980, translated as So Long a Letter) was the only book
she saw published in her lifetime” (xiv). In addition to the role of the publishing establishment in
enabling – or working against – the visibility of the writing of African women writers in this fore-
word, Busby points to the role of academic criticism: “[T]he first step towards ensuring that our
future writers receive the lifeblood of critical attention while they are still creating depends pre-
cisely on such serious consideration” (1996: xiv). Significantly, Busby cites Florence Stratton’s as-
sessment in Contemporary African Literature and the Politics of Gender (1994) that “Emecheta’s
literary upward mobility has been due largely to the attentions she has received from feminist crit-
ics” (Busby 1996: xv). Again, Busby is at pains to stress the wider recovery and support for Black
women writers at stake transnationally, cautioning “That Buchi Emecheta’s work has been more
successful than that of her foresisters is a phenomenon that must be placed in context” (1996: xv).
Despite the significance of her relationship with Busby over the crucial decade that established
her as an internationally successful author, the dominant note in Head Above Water is the difficulty
Emecheta experienced in working with Allison and Busby as a publisher. This included delays in
payment and production schedules that seriously impacted on Emecheta’s family finances. Look-
ing back on this period from a position of relative affluence, Emecheta is candid about her fiery
relationship with the firm:

Allison and Busby are not by any means the ideal publishers. Clive would never pay one’s
royalties on time, but I never felt intimidated by him. As for Margaret, at one time I was
beginning to see her as the sister I did not have. The relationship we all had in those early
days was funny. It was like a hurricane. Always fights over money.
(1986: 188)

Speaking to Adeola James in an interview the same year Head Above Water was published in the
United Kingdom, Emecheta stressed that “the financial question is still a determining factor in

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being a writer” (James 1990: 40). Commenting on the Nigerian writer, Ifeoma Okoye (1937–),
who was given an advance of 1,200 naira to write a novel, Emecheta argues in response to a ques-
tion about the artist’s commitment:

It is nice to write out of commitment. I like to be committed, we all like to be committed, but
I can’t stay here and judge my fellow writers in Africa, because perhaps the society doesn’t
allow them this kind of commitment you are talking about.
(James 1990: 41)

James and Emecheta go on to discuss the tragic example of Bessie Head whose difficult rela-
tionship with her European publishers was widely seen to have contributed to the financial and
mental distress that led to her suicide (Busby 1996: xiv; Davis 2018). In this interview, Emecheta
and James discuss the importance of setting up an African Women Writers association to share
knowledge about publishing contracts and “discuss these matters so as to prevent their individual
exploitation” (James 1990: 41). Despite Emecheta’s status by this point in her career, Head Above
Water was not taken on by her American publisher, George Braziller, who told her that typical
American women readers were not interested in the nuances of literary publishing (“And this
decision is always made by one man […], who’s 68 or something like that, and he stays in Park
Avenue thinking he knows what every American woman can appreciate” [Boss 1988: 100]). But
Emecheta’s conversations with other women writers in the United Kingdom, United States, and
Nigeria told her that finances and the structural politics of the publishing ecosystem were impor-
tant tools of feminist knowledge. “Feminism is at stake in how we generate knowledge; in how we
write; in who we cite”, writes Sara Ahmed (2017: 14). Emecheta’s memoir is a handbook to what
Caroline Davis calls “the hidden power structures and endemic inequalities in the Anglo-American
‘writing world’” (2018: 506). This was hard-won knowledge from lived experience that Emecheta
wanted to share.

Feminism with a small ‘f’

The problem of the black woman is beyond feminism. If the black woman is going to be a
feminist, she would have to be a feminist-plus. Her cultural burden is the type the average,
over-educated, middle-class, well-fed white woman can never begin to understand.
(Emecheta 1984: 249)

In interviews across her career, Emecheta was asked about the feminist content of her work.
Her answers on this varied, but consistently point to the absences and erasures within what she
experienced in the contemporary Second-Wave feminist movement in Britain and the United
States. In a 1982 interview, given after a visit to the United States where she talked to what she
described as “real ‘Feminists’ with a capital ‘F’”, Emecheta captures some of the nuances in
her critical reception and the consistent alienation she felt from a transnational movement that
adopted her work:

I did not start as a feminist. I do not think I am one now. […] What I am doing is writing so-
cial documentary novels, based upon what I have seen and experienced in my part of Africa.
If the men folk think this is Feminism, then I am a Feminist.
(1982: 116)

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 Feminist citation in Emecheta’s early fiction and autobiography

Writing Head Above Water in the context of a more visible Black feminist movement and the
growing ideological influence of postcolonial studies, Emecheta’s critiques of feminism “with a
capital F” became more pronounced (Fischer 2014; Horton et al 2014). Two essays are especially
important in this regard. In the first, “Culture Conflict”, written for New Society in 1984, Emecheta
criticises how Second-Class Citizen was read as a feminist book (“That was the first time I had
heard the word”, she says), portraying this as a western imposition contrary to the aims of the text:
“its original concept was the conflict of cultures. […] what caused the problems of the couple in
my book was not sexism but racism” (1984: 249). Decrying the development of women’s studies
as a discipline within sociology and contradicting the comments she made in her author’s preface
to In the Ditch at the time, she writes:

In 1973 and 1974 in England I was living ‘in the ditch’ – a ditch I knew I had been thrown
into not because of my ignorance, but because of my colour. […] I thought Women’s Studies
were stupid, because what was more relevant to me then was racism and poverty. The two
go hand in hand.
(1984: 249)

The edition of New Society in which this essay appears includes a long photo-essay from writer
Caroline Blackwood on the women campaigning against nuclear missiles at Greenham Common –
part of a series on the position of women in the contemporary women’s movement. So, it is telling
that Emecheta articulates her alienation from that movement through its women-only focus in the
campaign for peace. Sharing a personal story of domestic violation and confrontation with a local
feminist centred on her grown-up son, Emecheta writes:

Only a few years ago, here in England, I heard raised voices downstairs in my house. I saw
an angry woman arguing with my son, who was then 19 and an undergraduate. He wanted
to join the peace movement, but this woman would not let him. […]
“We don’t want men. We don’t want men”, she shouted, her face going red.
(1984: 249)

In Hazel V. Carby’s influential 1982 essay, “White woman listen!: Black feminism and the bound-
aries of sisterhood”, Carby reclaimed “the black family […] as a prime source of resistance to op-
pression” (1997: 46). Emecheta’s rejection of her white neighbour’s aggression towards her son,
as recounted in this essay, becomes an important moment in her critique of the WLM and her de-
fence of the role of men and “the black family […] as […] a site of political and cultural resistance
to racism” (Carby 1997: 46). This defence and inclusion of individual benevolent men – like the
“old friend” (Emecheta 1994: 186) who appears at the end of Adah’s story in Second-Class Citizen
– has consistently puzzled readers of Emecheta’s work. Yet her willingness to include men – and
particularly sons – within a broader critique of colonialism, sexism, and patriarchy is indicative of
the roots and interventions of the Black feminist movement as well as Emecheta’s interest in Black
womanist theories of the early 80s, influentially developed by African-American author Alice
Walker (1984). In her definition of womanist: “1. from womanish […] A black feminist or feminist
of color”, Walker includes those who are: “Committed to survival and wholeness of entire people,
male and female. Not a separatist” (Walker 1984: xi). A decade later, Emecheta would disassoci-
ate herself from Walker because of the latter’s perceived exoticisation of Africa (Ogundele 1994:
454), while others would argue that Walker’s womanism denied some of the “difference in black
feminist identity” ((charles) 1997: 285).

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 Nicola Wilson

The second essay which is important to understanding Emecheta’s feminism comes via a key-
note speech she made at the second African Writers Congress in 1986 (the first, held in 1967,
included no women), where she made a longer, public statement situating herself as an African
feminist:

Being a woman, and African born, I see things through an African woman’s eyes. I chronicle
the little happenings in the lives of the African women I know. I did not know that by do-
ing so I was going to be called a feminist. But if I am now a feminist then I am an African
feminist with a small f. In my books I write about families because I still believe in families.
I write about women who try very hard to hold their family together until it becomes abso-
lutely impossible.
(1988: 175)

As in the earlier essay, “Culture Conflict”, Emecheta uses a personal incident to frame her differ-
ence from the predominantly white WLM. Again, this takes place within a domestic setting and
strikes at the heart of her understanding of the praxis of work, motherhood, and family. Recalling
how a photo-journalist from the women’s movement, “a staunch feminist” once visited her at her
home to take photos for an article and objected to her workspace, Emecheta writes:

She was so angry that my office was in my kitchen and a package of cereal was in the back-
ground. I was letting the woman’s movement down by allowing such a photograph to be
taken, she cried. But that was where I worked. Because it was warmer and more convenient
for me to see my family while I put my typewriter to one side. I tried to tell her in vain that
in my kitchen I felt I was doing more for the peace of the world than the nuclear scientist.
(1988: 179–180)

In this speech, Emecheta also criticises the white feminist movement’s concern with sexuality and
the body. “[S]ex is part of life”, she writes, “it is not THE life”, and pushes further against cultural
and ethnic prejudices by defending how “some women now make polygamy work for them”
(1988: 177, 176). There are traces of this attitude in Second-Class Citizen when Adah feels some
relief that her abusive husband Francis has taken up with other women: “Adah was quite happy
about this; she even encouraged him. At least she would have some peaceful nights” (1994: 39).
“Polygamy encourages her to value herself as a person and look outside her family for friends”
(1988: 178), Emecheta argues in this essay (for further nuance of how this plays out in her texts,
see Husain). The debate that followed Emecheta’s speech in the hall was heated. “[S]o we recog-
nize the possibilities in the feminist movement and whilst we disagree on certain points we are not
denigrating feminism”, South African writer Lauretta Ngcobo (1931–2015), then in exile, summed
up. The white feminist movement in England had helped bring African writers like Flora Nwapa
and Ama Ata Aidoo (1942–) to wider audiences, Emecheta added. But as a “Nigerian Writer ­Living
in London”, feminism was not a home she found comfortable. As Bibi Bakare-Yusuf, founder of
Cassava Republic Press, writes in a contemporary context: “in a place like Nigeria where the
F-word seems to provoke perspiration and anxiety, it was important to give people feminist con-
tent unencumbered by labels”. She continues:

While it is important for people to claim the feminist label, because these identity catego-
ries matter in terms of solidarity and movement building, I would rather people’s lived

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 Feminist citation in Emecheta’s early fiction and autobiography

experience and ethics of being follow feminist principles rather than mere rhetoric. Femi-
nism is both a verb and ethics of being.
(Bakare-Yusuf and Dosekun 2021: 438)

The difficulties that Buchi Emecheta encountered in trying to find a publisher for her work
about the lives of poor Black migrant women in Britain in the early 1970s have not gone away.
Though the mainstream success of Alice Walker and Maya Angelou the following decade “helped
to financially sustain feminist publishers such as the Women’s Press and Virago in the 1980s and
beyond” (Sobande 2021: 400), contemporary work on mainstream media has shown how “black
women continue to be structurally excluded from publishing in many ways” (Sobande: 399). This
chapter has uncovered Buchi Emecheta’s own early publishing trajectory and the emphasis she
places on the agents, networks, and literary and sociological models that enabled her writing as
part of a feminist materialist reading that argues that the structural politics of publishing ecosys-
tems cannot be overlooked in how we read and assess literary texts. As a migrant to the colonial
“motherland” in the early 1960s, Emecheta forged a path into literary publishing via independent
publishing houses, before the emergence of a specifically feminist and Black feminist press in the
1970s and 1980s dedicated to support women writers. And in her autobiography, Emecheta takes
pains to educate her readers on how influential mentors and editors including Corinna Adam and
Margaret Busby enabled her to reach wider audiences transnationally through writing than her Big
Mother might have dreamed of.

Acknowledgement
I would like to thank my “Class Matters” students at the University of Reading who have taught
me many things about Buchi Emecheta’s writing as we have shared and discussed her work to-
gether over the years.

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 21
“WORKING WITH THE CLOTH”
Materialising women’s creative labour
in the work of Rosamond Lehmann, Beryl
Bainbridge, and Joan Riley

Rachel Carroll

As an instrument of creative labour, the needle has played a significant but ambivalent role in the
closely related histories of women’s work and women’s rights. The gendering of demarcations
between private and public domains, formations of paid and unpaid labour, and hierarchies of
art, craft, and design all converge in the practice of sewing, an ideologically freighted occupation
with a complex relationship to the history of women’s education, employment, and creativity.
Subject both to principled renunciation and subversive appropriation by different generations of
women writers, artists, activists, and scholars in varying historical, class, and colonial contexts,
the needle has been understood as a signifier both of women’s unpaid labour in the home and
of women’s enforced leisure in the domestic sphere, as a vehicle of women’s exploitation in the
capitalist economy and as an enabler of women’s economic agency, as a barrier to women’s educa-
tion and professional advancement, and as a medium of artistic fulfilment (Cherry 1983; Hedges
1991; Alexander 1999; Fitzwilliam 2000). Feminist scholars have been at the forefront of the
historical recovery and critical reappraisal of women’s work with the needle (Callen 1979; Parker
1984/2019; Burman 1991; Dowdell 2021) and its representation in women’s writing, especially
in the Victorian era (Harris 2005; Kortsch 2009; Zakreski 2009). Centrally concerned with ques-
tions of visibility and value in relation to women’s work, this chapter directs new critical attention
to the twentieth century, bringing a special focus to representations of home-based professional
dressmaking. Spanning historical settings from the 1920s to the 1980s, the novels considered in
this chapter depict dressmaking as a creative vocation, a source of professional identity and a
form of embodied labour. The legacies of Victorian discourses of distress are examined in Rosa-
mond Lehmann’s Invitation to the Waltz (1932/1981), in which relations of power between up-
per class women consumers and reduced craftswomen are refracted through fraught economic
transactions. A marginal figure in Lehmann’s novel, the independent seamstress takes centre stage
in Beryl Bainbridge’s The Dressmaker (1973/2010), set in working-class Liverpool during the
wartime mobilisation of women workers and state regulation of cloth and clothing. The labour
of first-­generation British Caribbean migrant women is at the forefront of Joan Riley’s Waiting
in the Twilight (1987), in which the social and economic mobility promised by the protagonist’s
induction into Jamaican traditions of dressmaking is systematically thwarted by the combined
forces of gendered and racial oppression in post-war Britain. In each narrative, dressmaking as
a form of paid employment plays a pivotal role within the domestic economy of female-headed

DOI: 10.4324/9781003429951-26 322

 Materialising women’s creative labour

households, dramatising in different ways the tensions at play in women’s relationship to creative
labour, ­economic agency, and property ownership.
The historical mapping, critical interrogation, and conceptual transformation of women’s la-
bour can be seen as a defining imperative in founding works of feminist history in British contexts,
with the labour movement, class politics, and legacies of British Marxist historiography providing
enabling but problematic formative frameworks. Pioneering works of feminist historiography set
out to interrogate the equation of work with men’s paid labour in the nineteenth century and be-
yond, delineating the extent to which women’s work has been historically degraded by the dynam-
ics of industrial capitalism and the ways in which women’s unpaid labour, in the home, the family,
and beyond, has been rendered invisible (Rowbotham 1973; Alexander 1995; Hall 1995). In her
book, Representing Female Artistic Labour 1848–1890, Patricia Zakreski observes that sewing,
whether domestic or industrial, constituted “one of the most central experiences of work […] for
all women regardless of class or economic status” (2009: 21). Indeed, the emergence and evolu-
tion of the “iconic figure of the distressed seamstress” (Harris 2005: 8) in the Victorian period
offers a crucible through which competing discourses of gender and class in relation to women’s
work can be examined. The Second Report of the Children’s Employment Commission (1843)
brought public attention to the long hours, low pay, and exploitative conditions in which women
laboured in the needlework trades, with Thomas Hood’s poem “Song of the Shirt” (published in
Punch in the same year) providing a “perfect example of a modest and reluctant worker who can
be unproblematically pitied” (Zakreski 2009: 26). However, while waged needlework was not
perceived to compromise women’s gender identity in the same way as employment in factories
or mines, the location of ‘outwork’ within the domestic realm of the home transgressed gendered
distinctions between public and private spheres. Moreover, the realisation that this work was in
part being undertaken by women of middle class birth rendered the “daughters of professional
men” who “nevertheless work for a living” (Cherry 1983: 27) a particular object of public unease
and philanthropic attention. As Nicola Wilson has argued, in her book Home in British Working-
Class Fiction, one of the legacies of Victorian discourses of separate spheres is “a long-standing
representational tradition of depicting the home as a place outside of ‘work’” (emphasis in origi-
nal, 2015: 28); in this context, this chapter will investigate the location of professional dressmak-
ing within the home, examining the distinctive ways in which it shapes the relationship between
women practitioners and the household spaces they inhabit.
In Invitation to the Waltz, the location of Kate’s “crammed basket” (Lehmann 1932/1981: 95)
on the schoolroom table in the upper middle class Curtis family home might at first sight seem to
reinforce a class-based association between sewing, ‘feminine’ accomplishment and leisure, its
compressed contents making minimal demands on its environs. The reality of home dressmaking
– as evidenced elsewhere in the narratives considered in this chapter – is that it is an enterprise that
commands space. The cutting out of patterns and fabric, piecing of parts, and fitting to bodies all
require room and there is little scope for compromise. In contexts in which the home also func-
tions as a workplace – with living spaces doubling as workshops and fitting rooms – the capacity
to requisition domestic space proves pivotal in determining the extent to which the women de-
picted in these novels can sustain their livelihoods as professional dressmakers. Women’s creative
authorship of material artefacts with aesthetic, social, and economic value within these texts both
necessitates, and is determined by, their capacity to exercise spatial agency within the home. While
the meanings of the domestic sphere in relation to gendered ideologies of motherhood, family, and
marriage are not absent from these narratives, close attention to the figure of the dressmaker – and
her position within material culture – brings the status of the home and its contents as property
and possessions into new focus.

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“This room … she had won for herself”: textile transactions and the legacies
of distress in Rosamond Lehmann’s Invitation to the Waltz (1932)
Miss Robinson, dressmaker to the fictional Buckingham village of Little Compton in Rosamond
Lehmann’s novel Invitation to the Waltz – published in 1932 but set very specifically in 1920 - is
not the only “gentlewoman in reduced circumstances” (80) to feature in the narrative, “ek[ing]
out a totally inadequate income in various painful and ladylike ways” (81). Compelled by circum-
stance to earn a living in arts and crafts occupations ranging from lace-making to pokerwork, their
numbers include both spinsters without access to familial support and unmarried daughters work-
ing to provide for widowed or invalid mothers and dependent siblings. The sentiments of “dismay”
and “guilt” which Miss Robinson’s seventeen-year-old client, Olivia Curtis, experiences when the
reality of the dressmaker’s life “rose up objectively and faced her” echo the moral dynamics of
Victorian discourses of distress, which often found their target in the upper class women consum-
ers of the labours of the sweated seamstress, rather than in the social and economic causes of her
plight: “She made frocks for other girls to dance in. She would stay in this awful house, seeing the
seasons change over this view of allotments, as long as she lived” (48–49). In this context, Olivia
attributes a consolatory, even therapeutic, function to the pleasure which Miss Robinson takes in
the materials of her work: “for colours revived her spirits, textures soothed her” (59). However,
Olivia’s pity does not remain “unproblematic” (Zakreski 2009: 26) for long, as both the suffering
and skill of the needleworker is subject to sceptical treatment in this narrative, with the dignity,
expertise, and authenticity of women’s creative labour seemingly sacrificed to the irreverent de-
bunking of the philanthropic pieties of the preceding century. And yet, while the “disaster” (130)
of Miss Robinson’s dress at first seems to sabotage Olivia’s prospects at her first society ball,
its idiosyncratic properties – the outcome of Miss Robinson’s “profuse and inconsequent” (132)
scissors – can ultimately be read as anticipating Olivia’s growing alienation from the normative
gendered roles to which the invitation of the novel’s title would seem to lead.
In Invitation to the Waltz, Miss Robinson’s very location marks her out for philanthropic in-
tervention. Her family occupies one of three cottages whose “slate roof, gable, tile and stucco
façade” (60) resemble that of the adjacent Parish Hall, having been designed and built by Olivia’s
grandfather with the wealth generated by a paper mill founded by his own father; “Grandpapa’s
houses” commemorate his standing as a “beneficent potentate” (60) and fix their inhabitants in the
role of charitable objects. Following the death of her father, Miss Robinson (known as Iris only to
her immediate family) is conscripted by her sister Connie’s injunction that “We must all look after
Mother now”, with Gertie, the eldest sister, losing “what head she had” and “need[ing] special
care” (52). The thwarting of her ambition to train as a singer, combined with the obligation to sup-
port dependent relatives, extinguishes Miss Robinson’s prospects of an independent life: “Never
would she do now what once she had almost done: walked out of the house … and gone to London
to earn her living” (52). However, in a departure from the assumed passivity and silent suffering
conventionally associated with the seamstress’ distress, Miss Robinson is a figure of exuberant
energy and a vivid vocal presence in the narrative, her rapture at the sight of Olivia’s birthday bolt
of silk resounding as a “kind of bray” (45) and her singing as a “wild warbling” (44) to her cli-
ent’s ears. The practice of her trade lends Miss Robinson unusual intimacy with the bodies of her
neighbours, and she offers candid and indiscreet commentary on the varieties of the female form
and the effects of pregnancy, menopause, and ageing on women’s bodies, from the challenges to
modesty presented by the “‘frontispiece[s]’” (50) of the young Martin sisters to the “[u]gly shape”
and “very queer turns” (58) of the older Mrs Uniack. In this novel, Miss Robinson’s character is
filtered through the perspective of her young clients and social superiors, Olivia and Kate Curtis,
in ways which unsettle conventional class and gender dynamics, especially as they apply to the

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overlapping territory of employment and charity. While unpredictable power relations and affec-
tive torments attend the open-hearted Olivia’s interactions with women’s paid labour – intuiting
herself to be both Miss Robinson’s “first favourite” and also her “juiciest prey” (44) – her shrewd
older sister subjects women’s paid work with the needle to unforgiving scrutiny.
The transactional tension between women needleworkers and their upper class clients is given
agonising expression in Olivia’s encounter with an itinerant lace-seller in the space of her own
home. The appearance of the unnamed young woman might seem to invite sympathy: a “rather
pretty anaemically pink-and-white girl” with “blue circles round her eyes” (84), she is “dressed
neatly and shabbily in a fawn hat and coat” (83). Yet despite her “appealing air of goodness” (84),
she is received “grudging[ly]” and “coldly” (83) by the household staff, her “voice and smile
anticipat[ing] antagonism” (84), and her explanation for her presence seeming to rouse rather
than disarm resistance: “‘You see, I have my mother to keep. She’s a total invalid, of course –
­paralysed…’” (85). Struggling to assert the authority her absent mother would undoubtedly mar-
shal, Olivia berates herself for failing to bring the encounter to a decisive close: “And instead of
coldly glancing before handing it back, one found oneself examining it, murmuring sympatheti-
cally: ‘Doesn’t it tire your eyes?’” (85). In giving voice to this hazard, Olivia raises spectres of
distress with a long history, imagining the lace-seller returning home to a “weak voice from the pil-
low, whispering anxiously: Well?” (90). Whether the textiles on offer are genuinely wanted or not,
their quality and authenticity is implicitly bound up in the assumption that they are hand-crafted.
A “highly prestigious” if “gruelling” craft, lace-making was a “major area of philanthropic inter-
est” (Callen 1979: 5) in the late nineteenth century, with a historic association with the location of
Lehmann’s narrative (following an influx of skilled artisans fleeing persecution in the Low Coun-
tries in the sixteenth century). This is an assumption which Kate later questions to devastating
effect, her judgement betrayed wordlessly at first sight of the offending lace collar which Olivia
feels morally obliged to purchase: “Faintly Kate’s nostrils dilated” (92). Olivia bravely attempts to
defray her folly by converting it into a gift for Nannie: “‘Little will she guess what I’ve spent on
her. She’ll think it came from Evans, one and eleven three’” (93). When Kate ventures “‘Perhaps
it does’”, the possibility that Olivia has been the victim of a calculated “‘swizz’” unleashes the full
depth of her resentment: “I never disliked anyone so much, she thought. The worst was the lack of
gratitude…” (93–94). The drama played out in these scenes casts the creative labour and bargain-
ing power of working women as suspect and manipulative; in a similar spirit, the quality of Miss
Robinson’s skills in dressmaking design, cut, and execution are contrasted unfavourably with the
amateur expertise of Olivia’s older sister Kate, whose “taste was law” (23).
Kate is scathingly dismissive of Miss Robinson’s professional ability, issuing a stern warning
when their mother instructs Olivia to take her birthday silk to the family dressmaker to “make it up
in some very simple way” (23): “‘You take care. Remember what she did to your velveteen… She
hasn’t any more idea than you have when a thing fits’” (91). Kate is nonchalant about the striking
success of her own “airy apple-green frock”, with “little floating cape” attached “by a band of min-
ute flowers, buds, leaves of all colours”, remarking “‘I just took it straight from Vogue’” (133). The
purposeful proficiency with which she undertakes her craft is in striking contrast with the more
improvisatory approach – and less predictable outcome – which marks Miss Robinson’s practice.
Where Kate seeks to replicate the style directives of a leading fashion periodical, Miss Robinson
draws on the freehand style of construction, employing a strategy – draping – which predates the
mass production of readymade paper patterns, which found a lucrative platform for dissemination
in women’s magazines. Working in time-honoured fashion “directly on the client’s body” (Dowdell
2021: 192), Miss Robinson incorporates her technique into her design, which features asymmetric
draping at the hip. When Kate’s forebodings appear to have been vindicated, her exasperation

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with both her susceptible sister and the wayward dressmaker is vehemently ­expressed: “‘Why
on earth couldn’t you force her to cut them properly? It’s always the same with your clothes. You
never could control her’” (emphasis in original, 132). Olivia’s disappointment with the outcome of
Miss Robinson’s labours borders on rage: “a painful constriction from chest to forehead started to
scorch and suffocate her” (131). Indeed, while the “red frock” appears “smooth, inviting, brilliant”
(129) when freshly pressed and laid out on her bed, Olivia is reduced to a “leaden-stillness” of
dismay at her first sight of herself in the mirror: “Uneven hem; armholes too tight; and the drap-
ing … the clumsy lumpish pointless draping …” (131). The situation is partially mitigated by the
discovery that Olivia is wearing the dress back to front, but Kate continues to administer corrective
“sharp twitches” as she “hook[s], tweak[s]” and “pat[s]” Olivia “into shape” (130–131):

It was not so bad. It dipped at the back; and there was a queer place in the waist where,
owing to a mistake in the cutting, Miss Robinson had had, in her own words, to contrive it.
But still, but still … if one didn’t look too closely, it was all right. Certainly the colour was
becoming.
(Ellipsis in original; 132–133)

The passage of the “roll of flame-coloured silk” (22) from its appearance at a birthday breakfast
to Miss Robinson’s parlour fitting-room, and from Olivia’s bedroom in The Lodge to the Spencer
ball at Meldon Towers, tracks a much more ambivalent journey than the narrative structure of a
‘coming of age’ story might suggest. The rituals of forced intimacy embodied in the formalities
of the dance serve as an unrelenting induction into the conventions of heterosexual courtship and
romance for Olivia; her ordeal is acted out through a sequence of dance partners ranging from
the indifferent and the unsuitable to the predatory and openly misogynistic, culminating with the
pronouncements of Oxford student and modernist poet, Peter Jenkin: “‘It takes a man to teach a
woman how to dress. The majority of them don’t develop a clothes-sense till they’ve had a lover.
Or a face either, for that matter’” (199). While the social success of Kate’s dress design is sig-
nalled by her invitation to a local hunt ball, furthering her romance with the son of a neighbouring
landowner and hastening her path towards marriage and motherhood, the shattered Olivia emerges
from her encounters “bleed[ing] secretly in her self-esteem” (200). Moreover, her experience gives
rise to a disturbing, but ultimately liberating, revelation: “I’m different from them, though they
don’t know it. She felt the cleavage, deep, uneasy. I’m not going to do the things they’ll do” (214).
In this context, the “signature” (Dowdell 2021: 199) of Miss Robinson’s needle takes on a presci-
ent role. When Olivia embarks on her first dance of the evening, the narrative perspective shifts to
her sister, who notes the inelegant grasp by which her partner steers her: “He held her by a loose
handful of dress in the small of the back. The stuff would be damp and crumpled when he let her
go” (166). The “loose handful” might seem to be suggestive of the shortcomings of Miss Robin-
son’s dressmaking, as foregrounded by Kate’s critical eye, but here the “clumpy, lumpish” (131)
effect is created by a man’s hand, assuming the prerogative to ‘lead’ mandated by the highly gen-
dered traditions of the ballroom. Mirroring the “queer place in the waist” (133) at the front of the
dress, the effect which it creates is not the contrivance of Miss Robinson but is rather symptomatic
of an objectifying attitude to women’s bodies within the marriage market, with the fabric of the
dress acting as a kind of ‘scruff’ by which its wearer can be commandeered. The exquisite scarlet
silk, received with ecstatic admiration by Olivia and Miss Robinson alike, is unthinkingly crushed,
leaving its bearer to unwittingly carry the imprint of masculine disdain.
If the “mobile display” of women’s evening dress “demonstrat[es] the wearer’s comprehen-
sion of norms or her inability (or unwillingness) to follow them” (Marshik 2017: 29), then the

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“flame-coloured” (22) silk dress in some ways anticipates Olivia’s flight from gendered norms.
Indeed, the novel ends with Olivia in dramatic motion, grief at the gulf opening up between herself
and her sister mingling with wild energy as she runs towards a different future, the “landscape as
far as the horizon … begin[ning] to move” (301) with her. However, while the dress circulates in
social spaces which its maker cannot access – and plays a significant role in propelling its wearer
beyond the frame of the narrative and the limits of the ‘marriage plot’ – Miss Robinson is left
behind. She can “escape no further than to the front room” (44), home to the piano with its “fret-
wood and fluted pink silk face” (43) which symbolises her thwarted ambitions: “This room, called
now the fitting-room, she had won for herself: these four walls held the remnants of her humour,
her hope, like a wistful and dwindling presence within them” (44). Indeed, as Olivia departs, the
Robinson family home, the dressmaker’s spatial realm progressively dwindles in her imagination,
ultimately reduced to a “darkened room, the shutters drawn, the key turned; and old Mrs. Robinson
on guard, outside the door” (61).
The vital role played by the space of the home in determining the extent to which the profes-
sional dressmaker is able to pursue her profession takes on even greater significance in Beryl Bain-
bridge’s 1973 novel The Dressmaker. While Miss Robinson offsets the “parky” (45) temperature
of the “chilly buff front sitting-room” (40) which serves as her fitting-room by “negligently swing-
ing a smoking Valor Perfection” (45) into place, in the context of wartime scarcity in 1940s Liver-
pool, Nellie “grudge[s] every morsel of coal burned in summer time” (Bainbridge 1973/2010: 18).
Her kitchen doubling as a fitting-room – with her niece reading a book by the fire as her client Mrs
Lyons stands in her slip on the hearth – Nellie’s careful stewardship extends to the very quality of
the air: “She hated sewing with the smell of food in the air. It lingered, penetrated the fabric of the
material” (52). In this context, the home and its contents become the object of fierce protection.

“A square of red brick”: wartime austerity and the currency of clothing

in Beryl Bainbridge’s The Dressmaker (1973)
Virginia Richter has observed that Beryl Bainbridge’s fictions often “culminate in unexpected acts
of violent damage and death which seem inadequately motivated by the requirements of the plot”
(1997: 159); her 1973 novel The Dressmaker would seem to be no exception, ending as it does
with the sudden death and furtive disposal of an American GI posted to wartime Liverpool. Where
the actions of Miss Robinson’s dressmaking scissors are “profuse and inconsequent” (132), Nel-
lie’s blades find a lethal destination in Ira’s neck, when he is discovered in an illicit sexual encoun-
ter with her sister Marge in their shared family home, his nominal courtship of their young niece,
Rita, cruelly forgotten. The sound of “buttons scratching across the wood” (176) of a rosewood ta-
ble, stored for safekeeping by Nellie in the box-room in which the liaison takes place, is presented
as triggering this act of inexplicable violence, which causes Ira to lose his footing on the stairs
and succumb to a fatal head injury as he falls. Nellie’s response to the inadvertent damage done
to this cherished item of “Mother’s furniture” (176) is dramatically disproportionate in the sense
described by Richter. However, I would argue that Nellie’s attachment to matrilineal property and
her management of the interior spaces of the home are symptomatic of her struggle, as the head
of a cross-generational household of women, to protect herself and her family from the fearful
prospect of being ‘turned out’ of house and home, whether by bombs or by poverty. Nellie’s labour
with the needle, as a working-class woman and professional dressmaker, is central to this struggle.
Clothed in the apparatus of her practice, Nellie embodies the integration of creative labour and
professional identity, the tape measure routinely “dangling about her neck” (1; 183), pins “stuck in
the bodice of her black dress” (11), and “strands of Silko adhering to her skirts” (43) and stockings.

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Where Miss Robinson’s labour in Invitation to the Waltz is all but invisible, Nellie’s Singer sewing
machine – immediately identifiable by its trademark livery of “[b]lack Japan, nickel plating, gold
lining and ornament” (Oddy 1991: 295) – takes centre stage within the domestic interior of the Vic-
torian terraced house on Bingley Road. Described by Karl Marx in Capital as a “decisively revolu-
tionary machine’” (cited in Burman 1991: 11), the invention of the industrial sewing machine was
one of a series of “revolution[s] in the mode of production” which both exploited and reinforced
women’s position in the capitalist economy as an industrial reserve army and “source of cheap la-
bour power” (Alexander 1974/1995: 22). With the entry of its domestic counterpart into the home,
accelerated by Singer’s innovative adoption of “a company-controlled sales force and purchase by
instalments” (Godley 1991: 257), the “outer world of technology and industry met the inner world
of home in a head-on collision” (Douglas 1982: 20). Design historian Nicholas Oddy describes
the home sewing machine as an “an unprecedented piece of equipment-cum-furniture not easily
related to anything else in the home” (1991: 296). Whereas the hand-operated version was designed
to be stored in a bespoke case out of sight when not in use, the treadle-operated machine – as used
by Nellie – was incorporated into a table and assumed the status of a “permanently-sited piece of
furniture”, albeit one whose “use of cast iron was more akin to hall or conservatory furniture than
parlour or boudoir” (Oddy 1991: 292). In the context of Bainbridge’s narrative and the domestic
design of Nellie’s home, this family resemblance forges a telling link between the machine which
Nellie “play[s]” (25) in the functional space of the family kitchen, and the cast iron umbrella stand,
set into the floor at the foot of the stairs, against which Rita’s father Jack “crack[s] his ankle” at the
start of the narrative – predicting it will one day “‘break me blooming neck’” (20) – and against
which Ira “bashe[s] his head” (177) at the end. Nellie’s sewing machine can be aligned with the
industrial technology of the factory and of war, her employment at its needle mirroring both her sis-
ter Marge’s war work in a munitions factory and her own mobilisation against domestic invasion.
It is in the context of wartime rationing and austerity that Nellie embarks on a dual mission: to
furnish her unprepossessing niece, Rita, with a wardrobe of suitable clothes to advance her mar-
riage chances, and to complete to her own satisfaction an engagement dress for Valerie Manders,
the glamorous daughter of her illicitly affluent neighbours. The informal and often invisible econ-
omy of home dressmaking was explicitly drawn into public view during this period, subject both
to government regulation and political propaganda; variously extolled, admonished, and mobilised
as housekeepers, consumers, and needleworkers, the value of women’s creative labour in the home
acquired a new price. With the introduction of the Utility Clothing Scheme in 1941 (controlling
the quality and cost of readymade cloth and clothing) followed by the austerity regulations of 1942
(imposing strict restrictions on the number of seams, pleats, and pockets permissible per garment
as well as prescribing the maximum width of stitches and seam allowances), the status of the na-
tion’s wardrobe as an “asset” (Reynolds 1991: 330) and the role of clothing as “currency” (Howell
2019: 122) became newly explicit. The ‘Make Do and Mend’ campaign found its target in women
of all classes (overlooking the longstanding needlework skills of tailors, sailors, and fishermen),
its implicit interpellation of women as potentially profligate “culprits” reinforcing longstanding
constructions of women as “fashion-hungry, impulse-driven” consumers (McNeil 1993: 291). Sig-
nificantly, while fabrics were coupon pointed, patterns taxed, and “home dressmaking from new,
often scarce, materials” discouraged (Magill 2018: 21), garments made at home remained exempt
from austerity regulations, a situation that gives rise to morally ambiguous territory for Nellie,
despite her stern disapproval of the black market. When Rita is invited by Valerie to the party at
which she will meet Ira, Nellie sets out two options, neither of which entail the employment of her
dressmaking skills in the creation of a new outfit for her niece: to alter an existing garment or to
“pool their clothing coupons and go to George Henry Lees’ for a new frock” (18). However, when

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the prospect of a future marital home for Rita presents itself to Nellie’s mind as a safe harbour for
“Mother’s furniture”, she is galvanised to construct an entire new wardrobe for her niece:

dresses for the winter, a costume, a new coat with a fur collar… She spent several evenings
poring over pattern books looking for ideas. Jack was astonished when Nellie asked him if
he could lay his hands on some extra clothing coupons.
(88)

In her study of dress culture in late Victorian women’s fiction, Christina Bayles Kortsch observes
that “textiles, along with other ‘movables’ such as china, silver, and furniture, were traditionally
part of a girl’s inheritance” (2009: 8); indeed, historically such artefacts might be the only property
which women could hope to transmit to a future generation or inherit through the maternal line
(prior to the passage of the Married Women’s Property Act in 1870). Nellie’s painstaking main-
tenance of “Mother’s furniture” (53, 134, 168, 176, 179) is a source of pride and satisfaction, ex-
pressed in the conviction that there is nothing at which her departed parent “could take umbrage”
(1). Her sense of responsibility towards this maternal inheritance becomes an all-consuming pre-
occupation, prompting interventions ranging from the strategic (moving the “good furniture” into
the front room and replacing it with “cheap utility stuff bought at Lewis’s” [76]), to the covert
(stealthily relocating items from the “British Museum” of the front room [130] to the greater safety
of the upstairs box-room) and finally to the desperate, when this last refuge is violated by Marge
and Ira. The “pain in the region of her heart” which Nellie suffers at the thought of “Mother’s
things in a sale-room, or worse in the junk shop on Breck Road” (54) is suggestive of a deeper
anxiety, given displaced but vivid expression in Rita’s recurring dream of a home turned inside
out: “out on the front lawn among the dahlias the pieces of furniture … the polished chairs … the
grandfather clock …” (ellipsis in original, 86). This nightmare recalls the destruction by bombing
of Blackler’s department store, home to the haberdashery in which Nellie had formerly worked,
where she took proprietorial “pride in the great bales of cloth, smoothing them with her hands,
plucking with disapproval at the minute frayed ends” (8):

When the roof split open, the prams and bedding spilled from the top floor to the next,
mingling with Auntie Nellie’s rolls of dress material, snaking out wantonly into the burning
night, flying outwards higgledy piggledy, with the smart hats hurled from their stands, the
frail gauze veils spotted with sequins shrivelling like cobwebs, tumbling down through the
air to be buried under the bricks and the iron girders ….
(8–9)

Signifiers of displacement and destitution, the junk shop and the street reveal what is at stake in
Nellie’s protection of the home whose survival makes possible the pursuit of her livelihood. In the
denouement of the narrative, Nellie, a “dressmaker to her bones”, improvises a “bag” (179) for
Ira’s corpse, sewing his body directly into a “shroud” (180) constructed from the chenille curtains
behind which the pattern books and tailor’s dummy are stored beneath the stairs. Already practised
in “carrying the dummy about” (181), she and Marge manoeuvre his body into the outdoor wash-
house in readiness for collection in Jack’s butcher van and disposal in the docks, mitigation for her
actions offered in the following way: “‘We haven’t had much of a life … We haven’t done much
in the way of proving we’re alive. I don’t see why we should pay for him’” (179).
While Nellie’s words conjure the economic and class conditions which have shaped her violent
defence of the domestic parameters of her home, her siblings give voice to views which suggest

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that other kinds of boundaries might be at stake. Set in a port city with a historic role in the triangu-
lar trade, Bainbridge’s novel gives voice to racially constructed anxieties centring on reproductive
sexuality as expressed by some members of the white working class in response to the arrival of
American troops. A staunch bigot who “couldn’t stand gipsies or Jews, or Catholics for that mat-
ter” (104), Jack sees the nominally white Ira as the “product of a race of mongrels, the blood of
every nation in the world mingling in his veins”, remarking that “It was astonishing he hadn’t a
touch of the Jew or the black in him” (135). This prejudice is echoed by his sister, Marge’s, convic-
tion that “You could never be sure until it was too late” (30), spitefully commenting on her neigh-
bour’s daughter’s engagement to a white GI that “It would serve Mrs Mander right if she became
the proud grandmother of a bouncing piccaninny” (31). Indeed, The Dressmaker and Invitation
to the Waltz are both narratives centring on white women in contexts where gendered identities
are implicitly shaped by discourses of racial othering. In the rural England of Lehmann’s interwar
novel, the limits of social respectability are marked by signifiers of “colonial exotica” (Roy 2002:
141), ranging from the “luscious”, “richly trimmed”, and “brilliant” cushions, shawls, and embroi-
dery which adorn the interior of ‘Chota-Ghurr’, the “dark little Tudor cottage” (71–72) belonging
to retired colonial Major Skinner and his twice divorced and “absolutely taboo” wife – the “cause
of at least one suicide among Indian army subalterns” (70) – to the “deep oriental drumming” (55)
of Miss Robinson’s rendition of the popular Edwardian parlour song sequence, Indian Love Lyrics
(1901) (a musical arrangement by Amy Woodforde-Finden [1860–1919] of poems first published
by Violet Nicholson [1865–1904] under the pseudonym Laurence Hope), with its lyrical sugges-
tion of a “forbidden relationship in the context of the British Raj” (Ghuman 2014: 172). In both
texts, the legacies of slavery and colonialism are evident in the use of offensive racial epithets in
the everyday speech of white people of all classes, whether in relation to the colour of Olivia’s
“less dependable” brown belt (Lehmann 1932/1981: 11) or the naming of the black family cat at
Bingley Road (Bainbridge 1973/2010: 4). It is in this context that women workers from the British
Caribbean, such as Adella Johnson in Waiting in Twilight, seek to make both a home and a living.

“Working with the cloth”: dressmaking in a hostile environment in Joan

Riley’s Waiting in the Twilight (1987)
In The Dressmaker, the “old landmarks” of the city have been “cleared away” (54) by the Blitz, but
domestic interiors too are transformed in the name of modernisation and social mobility; Marge is
disorientated when entering the home of her socially aspirational neighbours: “No landmarks any-
where. Everything old had been ripped out and replaced by something modern, unfamiliar” (38).
In Joan Riley’s 1987 novel Waiting in the Twilight, Adella’s early morning bus journeys from her
home in Brixton to her cleaning job in the City of London, “riding through the silent streets seeing
the landscape change”, enable her to witness dramatic transformations in the urban environment:
“She had seen the big sprawling estate go up, creeping across what had been streets of elegant
houses fallen into disrepair like her house” (Riley 1987: 121). Whatever the limitations of the ac-
commodation she occupies, the ability to command her own space remains vital to Adella, from
the wooden rented room in the Kingston township of Denham (“Small and cramped as it was, it
was hers and she could come and go as she liked” [112]) to her London property in Eldridge Road
(“She could live with the dampness now … It was her place, her damp” [emphasis in original,
28]) and even the “government house” (127) in which she is forcibly resettled by the city council
(“This was her place where she could wait and rest” [7]). In this context, Adella’s quest to secure
and retain home ownership – achieved through hard work, assiduous saving, and carefully planned
borrowing – becomes pivotal in the narrative.

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Waiting in the Twilight opens with Adella Johnson engaged in the kind of “institutionalised
housework” (Bryan, Dadzie and Scafe 1985: 25) which characterised the employment of many
first-generation British Caribbean women migrants, women whose work was instrumental in fa-
cilitating white women’s role as “primarily wives and mothers, centred on domestic and familial
life” (Webster 1998: xi) in the post-war decades. Employed as night cleaner in a social security
office, her working conditions counterpointed by the “horror of standing out there on the other side
of the counter” (4), Adella finds her cleaning apparatus paradoxically used “as a mobile rubbish
tip, the rust-streaked silver bucket like a magnet, attracting litter wherever it came to rest” (1) and
is addressed with disrespectful “insolence” (2) by a young white woman civil servant. Indeed, as
a skilled dressmaker, Adella is subject to the “downward mobility” (Webster 1998: 145) experi-
enced by many post-war migrants from the Caribbean in the face of systemic racism within the
public and private employment sectors, including her friends and co-workers, Lisa and Cheryl,
who have abandoned nursing careers in the health service as a consequence of the intolerable
“rudeness” (23) and “name calling” (95) of white staff and patients. Moreover, Adella’s location
within a variety of housing environments – from the yards of rural Beaumont Springs to the new
housing developments and urban townships of Kingston and from the derelict inner city housing
stock of London to the ‘slum’ clearances and dispersal of communities into council housing –
serves to directly determine the conditions in which she can or cannot exercise her professional
skills as a dressmaker.
Davinia Gregory finds a close connection between the “long-standing Caribbean tradition” of
women’s central role within community life and the role of the dressmaker “in the oldest Jamai-
can sense” (2018: 133–134). Historically, the production and circulation of textiles has played
a crucial role in the development of industrial capitalism, transatlantic slavery, and British co-
lonialism, and the role of cloth and clothing within the Caribbean is shaped by these legacies in
different ways. While Jane Schneider describes plantation slavery as effecting the “most dramatic
collapse of cloth traditions” (2006: 210) in relation to the textile heritage of enslaved West African
people, Danielle Skeehan testifies to the ways in which “enslaved women used cloth and cloth-
ing as conduits to memorialize personal and collective histories” (2015: 106). Indeed, Gregory
affords the Jamaican dressmaker a central role in “creating, sustaining, educating, and providing
for a community” (2018: 141), with sewing schools playing an important role in the practices of
“supplementary schooling” (Kehinde Andrews cited in Gregory 2018: 134) by which Caribbean
communities have remedied the deficiencies of colonial education. The woman-centred culture
of Beaumont Springs is the location of the young Adella’s apprenticeship in needlework in Wait-
ing in the Twilight, where she attends her Aunt Vi’s “dressmaking class” (35), “under her auntie’s
Bombay mango tree, perched precariously on an upturned water can” (7). Sitting “very still, bent
over the fine linen, putting in the tiny embroidery stitches with practised precision” (35) Adella
only loses concentration – “driving the needle into her finger” (36) – when she is singled out as
having the “boldness” (35) and skill required to thrive in the capital. While Adella’s departure for
Kingston is made possible by her expertise with the needle (her talent exceeding that of the aunt
who instructs her), it is also hastened by the abusive attention of Pastor Brown, a known sexual
predator of young girls, who is the first in a sequence of men whose violence, both physical and
sexual, she is compelled to escape.
Lodging with her cousin Bryan and his wife in Kingston, Adella builds a reputation as the
“best dressmaker in town”, not only “crossing the gully” (114) to visit wealthy clients in their
own homes but also hosting “several rich women who came to her from the hill” (103) in the
shared domestic space of her cousin’s home, located “in one of the new low-cost housing develop-
ments that the colonial government had started building in the twenties” (42). However, the social

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mobility made possible both by her skill and her location is rapidly curtailed when the unmarried
Adella becomes pregnant, is expelled from her cousin’s home, and is compelled into a relationship
of economic dependence and sexual coercion with Beresford, the father of her child. A key mo-
ment in the narrative occurs when Adella finds herself in a rented room in the downtown district
of Denham:

She felt small and lonely in the empty wooden room, light coming from an open shutter
in the glassless window. Her precious sewing-machine and bundle of cloth piled up with
her grip and the straw basket she had brought up from the country looked out of place and
pathetic.
(113)

The displacement of the “precious” (113) apparatus of her trade signals Adella’s spatial vulner-
ability in her new accommodation. Far removed from the “brick house that had been her father’s
pride” (20), the wooden construction of her new abode is indicative of the apparent arrest and
reversal of the social mobility promised by her skill and expertise with the needle. Indeed, the
reputation of her new location, combined with her status as an unmarried mother, adversely affects
her capacity to make a living; Adella recognises the necessity of “gradually going to her clients’
houses rather than have them round, knowing they would desert her if she had to live in the places
downtown where the very poor lived”, but is nevertheless abandoned by once loyal customers
despite their claims that “they would always stand by her if she ever needed help” (114). In this
context, the “bundle of cloth” (113) serves not only to signify her capacity to make her own living
through her creative labour but also provides safe harbour for the savings with which she plans to
escape Beresford’s sexual violence: “She would tie [the money] carefully in a piece of cloth and
push it right under the clothes in the small drawer …” (143–144). Similarly, the straw basket is not
simply a poignant memento of the hand-crafted traditions of Adella’s rural childhood; as a vessel
for the movement and display of goods, it also evokes the potent figure of the African Jamaican
market trader, or ‘higgler’, women whose “contribution to the country’s economy” was “integral
to the development of a black Jamaica, and the island’s economy since slavery” (Tulloch 2016:
23–24). The desire to “wander among the market women … feeling closer to Beaumont among the
tie-heads and shouting gossip of the traders” takes Adella and her basket to the markets of King-
ston where “[b]olts of local cloth rubbed shoulders with imported material from far-off Canada
and the USA, spilling on to cookware, and dutchpots that flowed into the stalls of ground provi-
sions and dried fish” (81). The market women embody a tradition of Caribbean women’s economic
agency that Adella will tenaciously battle to sustain in the face of significant adversity when, like
the bolts of cloth before her, she experiences the wharf as a portal to a transatlantic journey, leaving
Jamaica to join her new husband, Stanton, in the United Kingdom.
While the modernity and suburban respectability of Adella’s cousin’s home in Kingston signi-
fies the promise of social mobility, the landscape in which it is located speaks to the politics of
colonial underdevelopment and in subtle ways anticipates the role of housing as a “key arena of
racial contestation” (Procter 2003: 22) in the United Kingdom in the post-war decades:

Like so many other places in the city, it had been left unfinished when money ran out or had
to be diverted to other areas of the Empire and, later, to the war. In places the development
was like a bombsite, shells of buildings with abandoned heaps of building materials like
rubbish tips, attracting bulky waste from nearby homes.
(42–43)

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Living in a single rented room in London with her husband and two small children, with two older
children awaiting recall from Jamaica and pregnant with a fifth, Adella experiences the “racism
of the housing market in all sectors”, not only as a tenant “concentrated into a declining private
rented sector … in overcrowded, multi-occupied houses” (Webster 1998: 150) but also as a prospec-
tive home-owner excluded from the newly built estates “generally accessible only to white people”
(Webster 1998: 173). Procter describes the “South Asian ‘mortgage clubs’, Jamaican ‘pardner’ and
Trinidadian ‘sou sou’ systems” – collective saving and lending schemes by which migrant commu-
nities sought to bypass the racism of the banking and housing sectors – as “some of the first instances
of a black communal politics” (2003: 30). Indeed, Adella’s foresight and determination in commit-
ting her savings to such an endeavour is reflective of the leading role played by Caribbean women in
these initiatives (Bryan, Dadzie and Scafe 1985) and she purchases the new family home in Eldridge
Road in her name alone. The inequities of the property market leave Adella with no choice but to in-
vest in a “broken-down, half-dead place in the middle of a rotting street” (16), one of a row of “dark
and dismal” houses, “testifying to a long-past glory” (14). The chronic damp creates conditions
which are incompatible with the practice of her trade, with even freshly laundered clothes quickly
“attacked and discoloured by mildew” (55); Adella instead employs her skill with the needle within
the industrial setting of a factory where she “sew(s) the fine embroidery on rich women’s clothes”
(12), her hands working to the pace of the “rush order” (51), her body “bent almost double over the
fine stitches” (19), and her eyes “ach[ing] from lack of sleep and the dim light in the room” (19).
The survival of the “precious” (113) sewing machine in the course of Adella’s passage from
Kingston to London is confirmed when, following a stroke, Adella is summarily dismissed from
her workplace of six years; in pursuit of new employment, she teaches herself to handle the ma-
chine with reduced mobility, “practic[ing] long and hard, training her left hand on her sewing
machine at home using the crippled hand for balance” (85). However, her willingness to “shift to
piecework” in order to “stay working with the cloth” (84) cannot overcome the effects of com-
bined discrimination, which deprive her both of her income and her identity as a highly skilled
practitioner: “There would be no satisfaction in selecting the delicate strands of finely coloured
silk and watching patterns form under her hands” (84). Adella is the only one of the three dress-
makers explored in this chapter to create an outfit for herself – the “new white frock … fitting snug
and crisp” (104) which she wears to her first rendezvous with Beresford – but she is also the only
one to experience clothing poverty, hurrying to her work as a cleaner in “plastic shoes already
fraying at the toes” (86) and a “thin canvas coat”, the wind finding “all the holes and patches” (5)
and “pushing icy fingers down her neck and through gaps where buttons had fallen from her coat”
(6). Moreover, as the narrative progresses, material metaphors are increasingly used to convey
the “hostile environment” (Riley 1994: 1) with which Adella contends in the United Kingdom,
whether in relation to the racialised inequities of the property market and the welfare state or the
sexual and physical violence of men: the penetrating damp at Eldridge Road which “fold[s]” (17)
and “wrap[s]” (18) itself around her; the stroke which cloaks her in “suffocating layers” (51) and
leaves her at the mercy of a health service which does not prioritise her needs; the “soft suffocating
weight” (63) and “nightmare softness” (64) of the pillow with which Stanford attempts to extin-
guish her life when she challenges him over his infidelity; and the “suffocating folds of a heavy
cloth draped over her” (76), when she is thrown to the ground by white youths using a “good coat”
(78) as a weapon of street robbery. Ultimately, following the loss of her property and all it signi-
fied to a compulsory repossession order, Adella’s horizons begin to retreat – much like Lehmann’s
Miss Robinson before her – diminishing to the “tiny world” (142) of the “small front room” (129)
of her council house; by the close of the narrative, this space has become both a refuge and a
“prison” (148) in which Adella is “locked” (142).

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The “walls” which “enclose a world” (Lehmann 1932/1981: 4) in Invitation to the Waltz, The
Dressmaker and Waiting in the Twilight alike, serve to signify both the promise and the limits of
the dressmaker’s trade as an avenue to economic autonomy. As feminist scholars have demon-
strated, the value and visibility of women’s creative labour with the needle has suffered both from
the gendered hierarchies of ‘fine art’ and ‘craft’ – which Rozsika Parker identified as a “major
force in the marginalisation of women’s work” (1984/2019: xii) – and from the invisibility which
has attended women’s work in the home more broadly. As an occupation, dressmaking, “like much
work accomplished by women”, has been “largely anonymous” (Burman 1991: 1–2), its prac-
titioners “barely remembered” (Buckley 1991: 66) and “leav[ing] few records” (Palmer 1991:
218). A figure seemingly on the periphery of broader trends in women’s training, education, and
employment as the twentieth century progresses, the dressmaker can nevertheless be recovered in
significant ways through close attention to her sometimes intermittent and often oblique presence
in the fictional landscapes of women writers. By foregrounding the material conditions of creative
labour, this chapter has sought to go beyond the questions of identity, consumption, and fashion
which more often frame the analysis of representations of women’s dress in twentieth century
literature; through a focus on the social, economic, and political forces which shape women’s ex-
ercise of creative agency as makers and designers, a new agenda for the investigation of women’s
relationship to the textile arts and industries can emerge.

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 22
“TO THE SISTERS I ALWAYS
WANTED”
Women, writers’ groups, and print culture in
Glasgow, 1980–1988

Kate Wilson

In the 1970s and 1980s, the writers’ group movement had broadly liberatory aims, pushing to cre-
ate solidarities and raise class consciousness through increased literacy and shared experiences
(Worpole and Morley 2009; Woodin 2018). In Scotland, and Glasgow more specifically, women
played a central role in delivering these aims, making vital contributions as facilitators, activists,
readers, and writers. Yet, as writer and workshop facilitator Valerie Thornton noted in Chapman
magazine, gender was a site of tension within mixed-gender workshops, with regressive attitudes
to women and women’s writing often undermining the movement’s egalitarian ambitions; as she
noted: “gender is an issue in writing, publishing and more particularly, in writers’ workshops”
(Thornton 1994: 54). In response to similar dynamics, in the 1980s, the writers’ group movement
intersected with the Women’s Liberation Movement to provide spaces in which women could not
only explore critical issues relating to their personal lives, gender and creative development, but
could feel safe and supported when doing so. Accordingly, women’s writing groups in Scotland
flourished in the 1980s and 1990s and became bound up with the broader movement for women’s
rights and spaces (Browne 2017).
Yet the 1980s was also a period of turbulence for the women’s movement in Scotland. In the
introduction to Grit and Diamonds, a chronicle of women-led projects in the 1980s, Shirley
­Henderson and Alison MacKay recall “a decade of determination and struggle” (Henderson and
McKay 1990: viii). In contrast to what Henderson and MacKay term the “heady days of Women’s
Liberation in the 1970s”, feminists of the 1980s faced an increasingly hostile political climate, in
which women were “desperately trying to hold on” to the gains they had made in the preceding
decade (Henderson and McKay 1990: viii; see also Breitenbach 1990: 219). Furthermore, as has
been widely documented, the Thatcher government undertook a devastating and sustained assault
on Scotland’s industrial economy and trade union movement, which had a profoundly detrimental
impact on employment and health in working-class areas, and limited possibilities for organised
political struggle (see, for example, Collins and McCartney 2011; Perchard 2013; Gibbs 2016).
It is in light of these developments and restraints that this chapter frames the function and capacity
of women writers’ groups and associated print cultures for working-class women writers in 1980s
Glasgow. The chapter first provides a contextual account of the linkages between the adult edu-
cation movement and the feminist movement, and the rise of Scottish feminist publishing in the

DOI: 10.4324/9781003429951-27 336

 Writers’ groups and print culture in Glasgow, 1980–1988

1980s more broadly. It then uses these insights to examine a single writers’ group, the Castlemilk
Women Writers and Readers. Drawing on writing published in the group’s only anthology, as well
as oral history interviews with the group’s participants and tutor, the chapter explores how class
and gender intersected for the women who took part in the writers’ group and highlights the ways
in which the format of the women writers’ group enabled feminist explorations of selfhood in the
context of a post-war urban housing scheme in Glasgow.

Women’s writing groups and adult education

In the 1970s and 1980s, a new generation of educators deviated from the traditional, liberal model
of adult education in their eagerness to apply fresh, ideological approaches, such as pedagogy
inspired by Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, to raise students’ political and class consciousness
(Kirkwood 2001; Kirkwood and Kirkwood 1989/2011; Lavender and Tuckett 2020). As Kelly
Coate notes, even as early as 1968, this radical strand of adult education, with its emphasis on
active learning, had “surprisingly similar aims to the later feminist pedagogies” (Coate 1999:
22). Indeed, in tandem with university extramural departments, organisations like the Workers
Educational Association (WEA) helped to establish many of the United Kingdom’s first women’s
studies courses in the 1970s (Bird 2003). By the 1980s, the inclusion of women’s studies in adult
education was a site of tension and “constant debate”, with traditionalists perceiving its presence
as “threatening” to the sense of balance in liberal education (Aird 1985). Nonetheless, owing to the
efforts of feminist tutors, women’s groups and the “rare sympathetic man” (Hughes and Kennedy
1983: 265), women’s studies spread throughout adult education curricula. The WEA published
education packs with titles like “Getting Started with Women”, which posited that women’s educa-
tion was “radical and innovative”, and therefore required the application of novel pedagogies, with
an emphasis on participatory teaching and learning (Aird, Crane and Gooneratne 1986). Unlike
the rigidity of the academy, feminists found the flexibility of adult education, along with its radical
undercurrents, well-matched to the aims of the Women’s Liberation Movement (Bird 2003: 267;
Worth 2019: 7). Furthermore, the relative lack of emphasis on qualifications within adult educa-
tion meant that women’s inner lives, rather than solely their intellectual achievements, could be
foregrounded (Thompson 2017).
The format of the writers’ workshop was perhaps uniquely suited to realising this aim.
­Community-based writers’ workshops, by nature, involved elevating and sharing individual expe-
riences (Woodin 2018: 2). As a result, a number of practitioners sought to locate writers’ workshops
as a mainstay of women’s studies (Aird 1986). In particular, the emphasis on the transformative
power of “articulating our own experience” (Aird, Crane and Gooneratne 1986) within writers’
workshops echoed the aims of feminist consciousness-raising groups. Originally formed in New
York in the late 1960s, such groups encouraged women to share their everyday experiences – of
life, home, family, and trauma – in a women’s group setting (see, for example, Sarachild 1978;
Hanisch 2020). The aim of this shared dialogue was often to help women reach a collective un-
derstanding of their societal experience. In the Scottish context, similar groups were “a key entrée
for most women who ‘joined’ the WLM in Scotland in the 1970s” (Browne 2017: 45). Crucially,
while consciousness-raising was not explicitly geared towards political organising, nor was it di-
vorced from it. Indeed, many of those involved in establishing and organising such groups often
viewed these as a stepping-stone to further activism (Sarachild 1978). Consciousness-raising, with
its marriage of the personal and the political, is a useful framework for understanding the interplay
between feminist subjectivities and the themes and ideas which emerged from Glasgow-based
writers’ groups.

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 Kate Wilson

Inclusions and exclusions in Scottish women’s writing in the 1980s

The 1980s was also a prolific and transformative period for women’s literary culture in Scotland
more broadly. As Eleanor Bell notes, “in the 1980s […] a shift began to take place in Scottish
literary culture, leading to the need for a broader recognition of women’s voices” (Bell 2020: 215;
see also: Hendry 1993: 3; Alexander 2020). While Bell contends that this shift was due, in part, to
feminist interventions in literary and cultural magazines such as Chapman (1970–) and Radical
Scotland (1983–1991), it is also important to consider the spaces and conditions which enabled
women to create this work. Outwith adult education programmes, women’s writing groups were
emerging across Scotland’s central belt, with groups such as Hens in the Hay and Pomegranate
Writers Group forming in Edinburgh in 1978 and 1980, respectively. Both groups subsequently
published work with ascendant Scottish feminist publishing collective Stramullion, including
Stramullion’s first volume, the self-titled Hens in the Hay (1980), Pomegranate: Poems by Pome-
granate Women’s Writing Group (1992), and Fresh Oceans: An Anthology of Poetry by Scottish
Women (1989). The groups also had broadly similar aims to the writing groups formed in the
adult education movement, providing a space for women to support one another and develop their
voices. However, in contrast to adult education-affiliated women’s writers’ group, which most
commonly ran in school buildings or community halls, groups like Pomegranate met “in each oth-
er’s homes, to share their work and offer constructive criticism and support” (Pomegranate Writers
Group 1992: 127). In this sense, these writing groups closely resembled consciousness-raising
groups in Scotland, which, as Sarah Browne notes, were often hosted in member’s homes. While
this location bred familiarity and therefore a necessary sense of trust, it also created tensions; new
members often found it difficult to gain a foothold in existing groups owing to the “shorthand form
of communication” they used. As such, accusations of exclusionary or cliquey behaviour were
sometimes levelled at the groups (Browne 2017: 56). Similarly, while holding writers’ group meet-
ings in participants’ homes could aid the formation of close, trusting relationships, certain groups
of women may have been excluded from these spaces. As well as presupposing an existing rela-
tionship between members, meeting in each other’s homes requires close geographical proximity
or ability and funding to travel. Membership of these women’s writers’ groups was therefore, to an
extent, dependent on existing geographical and social networks.
The divergences between groups like Hens in the Hay and Pomegranate and the women’s writ-
ers’ groups of the adult education movement are also evidenced in the professions and experience
of the Edinburgh-based groups’ membership. Many of the writers already had degrees and middle-
class professions in fields such as psychology and journalism (Ransford 1989: 40). Significantly,
many of the writers featured in volumes like Pomegranate and Fresh Oceans in particular had
already published substantial bodies of work, such as the then-university lecturer Margaret Elphin-
stone (Ransford 1989: 127), and Scottish novelist and poet Naomi Mitchison (Ransford 1989: 66).
Therefore, in contrast to the “beginner” readers and writers of the workshops often affiliated with
the adult education movement (Woodin 2008: 219), many contributors to Pomegranate, Fresh
Oceans, and Hens in the Hay had already accumulated a significant degree of cultural capital.

Literature and gender in the Castlemilk, 1986–1990

In the 1980s, the WEA established a number of projects using Urban Aid funding, a programme
which ran in the Strathclyde region from 1968 until 1995 (Robertson 2014). Areas of Prior-
ity Treatment were demarcated by Strathclyde Regional Council, and specifically targeted with
Urban Aid funding, as part of “an explicit area-based focus” designed to address multiple

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deprivation (Robertson 2014: 4). Castlemilk was one such Area of Priority Treatment and, as a
result, the WEA received Urban Aid funding to implement a programme of adult education in
the area. At the request of a local male resident, a writers’ group, the Castlemilk Writers’ Work-
shop, began in 1984 as part of the project (Alison 2019). As Tutor Organiser Alison noted, the
mixed-gender group was conducted according to principles of student autonomy and classroom
democracy, encouraging students to find value in their own perspectives and experiences. As she
recalled, “we would read Paulo Freire and people like that, and y’know, it wasn’t about filling
empty vessels up with knowledge, it was about working with what they knew already, which was
a lot” (Alison 2019).
Following the successful establishment of the mixed-gender group in 1984, an offshoot
­women’s group, the Castlemilk Women Writers and Readers Group, began in 1986. The separate
women’s group met in a different, nearby location within Castlemilk, and was also led by Alison.
While distinct, there was a degree of overlap between the two groups: some female participants
were already members of the mixed-gender group and continued to attend both, while some came
only to the women’s group (Alison 2019). In her testimony, Alison reflected on why the women’s
group was created:

We had a, a filing cabinet in the group and they each had a folder and they could put their
stuff there when they had done it. And we had read work by Brian, and work by John, and
we’d discussed it very fully, and then Karen was going to read her poem, or whatever it
was at the time, and em, the two men who had been reading got up and went over to the
filing cabinet and started putting their stuff back in the filing cabinet and I said, “get your…
excuse me a minute, Karen’s about to read her work here”. And, there…but it wasn’t con-
scious, it wasn’t deliberate, wasn’t done out of nastiness, it was just gender relations y’know.
Women’s voices weren’t regarded as em important. So that was why I started it up. It was
controversial. I mean, the men in the group didn’t…weren’t very happy with it. But it was to
give a space for women to talk about the kind of experience that is not generally regarded as
the stuff of literature. If male working class experience isn’t regarded as that, female work-
ing class experience is even less regarded as the stuff of literature. So em that was why we
started it.
(Alison 2019)

Karen, who was a member of both the mixed-gender and women’s writing group, echoed Alison’s
considerations:

I think there was a women’s group because, I…first of all I think it was quite “in” in the
eighties to have kind of (laughs) women’s groups, em…but also I think that, I think that
some women would have flou…there was quite a lot of women who didnae go to the mixed
group, em I think some women may have floundered in the mixed group, I think that’s prob-
ably the best way to describe it, so. You see the point of women’s spaces.
(Karen 2019)

Alison and Karen’s testimonies are each significant in demonstrating that, in practice, the eman-
cipatory Freirean principles which were central to the WEA’s philosophy had limits for female
participants (see: hooks 1994: 6, 50; Weiler 1999). While many men in the Castlemilk group
faced significant structural inequalities and place-based stigma, a dialogic classroom environment
did not negate their ability to oppress or exclude their female, working-class counterparts. Karen

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directly acknowledged this dynamic, noting that while some of the women had experiences with
domestic abuse, their ability to work through such issues in their writing and in class discussion
was hampered by the presence of male participants, around whom they felt less comfortable dis-
cussing their experiences. As she noted, “we tended not to try and talk about the issues of women
and men in the mixed group, cause I think that would have been crazy (laughs)” (Karen 2019).
Inequalities of class and gender therefore dovetailed for Castlemilk’s women writers, placing them
in a double-bind and necessitating their own space in which they could work through issues relat-
ing to their inner lives.
The bifurcated dismissal of working-class women’s inner lives, and by extension their writing,
was also felt beyond the confines of the classroom. For example, a sense of reluctance to share
writing prior to joining the writers’ group was pervasive in almost all of the women writers’ testi-
mony. Karen, a working-class woman born and raised in Castlemilk, recalled a long-held percep-
tion that literary tendencies were something to be concealed, rather than celebrated. Karen recalled
that prior to joining she was “a secret writer”, clarifying:

I had been writing poetry since I was a child, and it was…nobody knew, because it was not
the sort of done thing, if you like. Em, and I’d always did it, and I was the same with books.
I was a voracious reader, and I kept a lot of it secret.
(Karen 2019)

Karen pointed to a specific gendered element to this reluctance numerous times when reflecting
on the differences between the mixed-gender and women’s group, stating “Men have got a differ-
ent…a woman would bring in half a, bring up half a poem and… ‘I’m really (imitates mumbling)
…I’m a wee bit apprehensive about this’. The men would put down a collection (laughs)” (Karen
2019). In Karen’s account, there was a marked difference in the levels of outward confidence dis-
played by men and women in relation to the production and sharing of their work.

Building shared experience: reading, writing, community, and solidarity

From 1986, the Castlemilk Women Writers and Readers began to meet regularly over a two-year
period. To transcend the idea that women’s working-class experience had limited literary value,
the group looked to existing writing depicting experiences which bore similarities to their own.
Texts were selected for discussion on the basis of their relevance to women’s lives, with a par-
ticular emphasis on those which concerned “working-class women’s lives”, in the hope that this
would in turn valorise participants’ own experiences (Alison 2019). As the group’s tutor outlines
in the ­introduction to the group’s only anthology, Out in the Wash: Poems and Stories from the
Castlemilk Women Writers and Readers Group (1988), the group read and found resonance in
those “writing out of poverty and oppression suffered by black people” like Maya Angelou (Miller
1988: 1), as well as work by Scottish women writers, such as Liz Lochhead and Jessie Kesson
(Alison 2019).
The emphasis on personal resonance shaped relationships between the group’s participants. As
Alison notes in the introduction of Out in the Wash,

the women who took part created a close and intensely supportive group in which it was
possible to explore and share the most painful experiences and take heart from one another
in the struggle to survive from day to day.
(Miller 1988: 1)

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Karen, who attended both groups, reflected on the “supportive” and “beautiful” elements of the
women’s group at various points in her testimony, contrasting this against the “pretty sexist”
mixed group:

Again, the women’s group and the men’s group were very, very different. The women’s
group was a nurturing experience, em cause some women had never written, so there was
quite a lot of the stuff with the women’s group where, where you were kind of helping…no
helping, that’s the wrong word, but em, you were kind of supporting women to bring that,
that whole part, parts of them out. The men’s group was a, was a, was much more structured,
much more, em…where people would bring in, maybe think up an issue, a subject matter
or an issue, and they would bring in, people would bring in stuff. I found it really difficult
to write to order. I don’t find that all that easy. They were very different, it’s, it’s very hard
to explain, women would be all looking at a woman, and encouraging her, and in the men’s
group it werenae like that, they would, they turned into grammar nazis and stuff like that,
d’you know what I mean (laughs).
(Karen 2019)

This sense of shared personal experience is also reflected in Out in the Wash. According to
Alison, the collection of poetry and short stories was, at the behest of the group’s participants,
hand-typed to maintain a consciously “homemade” look (Alison 2019). The volume’s hand-
drawn cover also signifies the domestic, with “Womens Words” spelled out in washing hanging
from a line. According to Alison, while diverse, the majority of the work created in the group was
“very female orientated, and very much about motherhood and daughterhood” (Alison 2019).
For example, work such as Bernadette Lees’ poem “Sandie” offers an unashamed celebration of
motherhood, with a speaker addressing her daughter to convey the depth of her maternal love:
“I smile and say I love you too/And I thank god he gave me the gift/of you/my own little angel”
(Castlemilk 1988: 14). In contrast, Margaret Mary Swindon’s visual poem “Christmas Tree”
acknowledges the singular pressure on mothers during the festive season (Castlemilk 1988: 33).
While Swindon’s work hints at gender inequalities, it also universalises women’s experiences,
awarding “the gold star at/the top of the tree/to all women”, drawing a commonality between
them.
The importance of shared experience is also reflected in Karen Thomson’s “To the Sisters I
Always Wanted”:

We are a rock
Our tears bring colour to the stone,
Our hearts tattoo pictures on the surface,
We see
what we are
and the world
as it should be.
We wrap arms around each other
and instantly we know
what the heart searches for
we are changelings
we are we.
(Castlemilk 1988: 1)

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As Catherine Hall recalled in 2012, by facilitating the sharing of personal, often traumatic,
­experiences, consciousness-raising groups allowed women to experience liberation through the
recognition that “the things we felt were social phenomena” (Hall 2012). As Karen’s poem here
attests, the emphasis on the sharing of self could similarly produce a sense of the collective, “tears”
transmuted into “colours” and the fragility of experience made solid as “rock”.
Despite this sense of solidarity, there were also tensions within the group, even around com-
mon, unifying experiences such as motherhood. Karen recalled one such tension, with reference to
a fellow writers’ group member she “loved”:

That’s where the poem, I don’t know if you’ve seen it, “The Rope Bridge”, that’s what that
came fae. I loved her wae all my, wae every fibre of my being, but we clashed, because she
was all woman. Or what I’d been…I think we were both all woman, we were just all dif-
ferent women, she was like what I had never, never been and couldn’t attain tae, I couldn’t
attain tae it. I loved her, but I…we clashed. I think we actually had a stand up fight aboot
cleaning the stairs once (laughs) for she did it religiously, and I was like that I think the
weans are mare important, I’m, I don’t care.
(Karen 2019)

The poem which Karen refers to in her extract further illuminates the fraught nature of female
friendships, their precarity signified by a “rope bridge”:

We met
on the rope bridge
you did not
I did not
move.
We stood
stared
dared not smile
unsure.
Who will be the first to draw out the sweetly
camouflaged axe?
(Castlemilk 1988: 29)

Work by feminist historians like Carolyn Steedman and Sally Alexander which has excavated
women’s subjectivities helps caution against monolithic understandings of working-class wom-
en’s lives (Steedman 1986; Alexander 1995). In a similar way, considered alongside her testimony,
Karen’s work highlights that despite the solidarities it engendered, the group was by no means
homogeneous or all-encompassing. Instead, the dual consideration of literary perspectives and
oral narratives offered in this chapter illuminates how participants approached issues of domestic-
ity from radically different perspectives, the tensions this created, and how these nuances were
explored in creative work.
Janette Shepherd’s first-person short essay “Growing Pains” similarly reflects complex perspec-
tives on motherhood and writing. While affirming the joys of the mother–daughter relationship,
Shepherd’s work also highlights the pressures to be the “perfect mother”, and gently challenges
such normative ideals. In particular, shifting perspectives on motherhood are highlighted through
the narrator’s relationship with her daughter, who encourages her to rediscover her agency by

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writing, drinking pints, and socialising, all of which the narrator previously deemed to be incon-
gruous with her maternal responsibilities: “The more mental I behave the more my daughter likes
it. If I want to write stories and poems all day that suits her fine” (Castlemilk 1988: 22). In this
reading, women can use writing to reclaim a sense of agency in motherhood, without rejecting
maternal responsibilities and strengthening, rather than damaging, familial bonds.
Writing on cultural representations of motherhood, Gill Rye, Victoria Browne, Adalgisa Gior-
gio, Emily Jeremiah, and Abigail Lee Six offer support for the contention that there is manifest
pressure to be “the perfect mother”. More generally, they note how the interventions of external
actors and discourses can rob mothers of a sense of agency, and perpetuate discourses which “po-
lice mothering […] making individual agency difficult to realise” (2017: 5). The writers from the
group explored, and challenged, this removal of agency. For example, Mary Ryan’s “Maternity”
takes aim at intrusive maternal healthcare experiences. In Ryan’s poem, a woman in childbirth is
ignored and, despite her protestations, given a “needle” (“Just lie still dear/this won’t hurt a bit”)
(Castlemilk 1988: 11). Ryan’s poem affords the silenced woman of the maternity ward the op-
portunity to voice her own experience, ignored by medical professionals. In this way, her poem
constitutes the type of “resistance to dominant discourses”, which is argued to be necessary for the
reclamation of maternal agency (Rye et al. 2017: 5).
Other works in the volume also explore the structural inequalities which compound the difficul-
ties of motherhood. Lynda Henderson’s poem “Mother Love”, for example, highlights the bearing
of economic inequalities on the role, as well as the fissure between idealised images of mother-
hood and its lived reality (Castlemilk 1988: 7). Similarly, Janette Shepherd’s “Christmas Party”
offers a visceral exploration of poverty and motherhood. In Shepherd’s work, a single mother,
burdened with debts and refused help by neighbours and social security kills herself and her young
children. The taboo nature of the subject matter and its presentation of the mother’s perspective is
significant in itself. As Ruth Cain’s study of representations of filicide notes, stories of filicide are
often “told only in the cold tones of officialdom (via medical case studies or legal judgements) or
through popular­media accounts that are sensational, stereotypical, and judgemental” (Cain 2017:
224). In contrast, the “layered, complex emotionality” of a literary narrative allows for representa-
tions reflecting the intricacies of a mother’s struggle which other official accounts may preclude.
Shepherd’s short story is focalised through the mother, Margaret, as she throws a final party for her
children before taking her own life and theirs, offering them sandwiches, hot chocolate, and danc-
ing, in contrast to their everyday life in which Margaret cannot “feed them decent meals or dress
them warmly” (Castlemilk 1988: 32). Following the suicide–filicide, the focalisation switches to
the young woman in the social security office who had initially refused Margaret’s application
for further help, but finally grants it; the story’s final line – “She would be pleased to receive her
letter – poor soul” – highlighting the futility of their deaths, and the systems which have caused it
(Castlemilk 1988: 33). As prose like the “Christmas Party” shows, women writers’ groups often
produced work centred on difficult, class-based experiences of womanhood, inviting empathy on
challenging subjects.
Other work in the collection offers a more hopeful reclamation of agency, with female speakers
and narrators challenging authority and facing down harmful structures of power. For example,
“Monday Morning” by Mary Johnston details the homecoming of an unnamed narrator’s abusive
partner, who has just been released from prison. On his return, he goads the narrator about her
“depressing” circumstances:

He looks round him. “You’ve come down a lot,” He says “really scraping the bottom,” he
says.

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Yes I know – thanks to you. But what I’ve got now is mine. It might not be much but it’s
mine and I’ve scraped for everything I have, so don’t criticise me. Everything was bought
back honestly, not stolen, so at least I’ve got some of my self respect back – because you took
that along with everything else. So now I want you to go. You’re not welcome here. I don’t
want to see or speak to you again.
(Castlemilk 1988: 17)

While acknowledging the harm wrought by the abuser, the passage also affords the survivor the
opportunity to confront him. The confrontation constitutes a turning point in the narrative; follow-
ing his departure, the story’s narrator expresses little of the fear she recounted before his return.
As such, the female narrator is positioned as the central hero of the narrative, offering a refram-
ing of ideas of victimhood and stigmatisation to which some women in Castlemilk were doubly
subjected.
Poetry also offered the women of the Castlemilk group an opportunity to radically reimag-
ine everyday situations. For example, Margaret Mary Swindon’s poem “Is it incurable?”, a free
verse narrative poem, reimagines the relationship between a woman and a health professional. The
poem’s speaker visits a doctor’s surgery to discuss her latest ailment: reading and writing poetry.
She directly addresses her male doctor to outline her condition, focusing on the ostensibly negative
impact this has had on her relationship with her male partner:

I’m no sure how to explain it

See I’ve started reading and writing poetry
And noo I cannae stop
An ma man’s goin aff his heid
Well it’s nae wonder.
Cause sometimes I’m da’en it through the night
And then I cannae get up to make his breakfast
An he says the hoose and the weans are sufferin tae.
(Castlemilk 1988: 4)

The speaker outlines that following involvement with “this wumman, Alison” and the group, she
began to lose interest in “Dynasty an’ Dallas an’ Benny Hill” and began forgetting to do dishes or
make dinner for her partner, to his vexation. The speaker then recalls the doctor’s advice as she
writes it down. This is the only section of the poem in rhyme, and the only section not in Glasgow
dialect:

This will do for a start

learn the adverts off by heart
If you want a cure you must
clean and polish, hoover and dust,
And when you feel you want a rest
read the Record, it’s the best.
(Castlemilk 1988: 3)

The speaker ultimately rejects the doctor’s advice, stating “Right Doctor, thanks a lot and/Sorry
for takin up yir valuable time/But I’ve made up ma mind/Ah’m just gonnae go hame and tell him/
It’s incurable” (Castlemilk 1988: 3). In the 1970s, Second-Wave feminists like Adrienne Rich

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 Writers’ groups and print culture in Glasgow, 1980–1988

foregrounded the transformative capacity of literature for women, highlighting its ability to “tran-
scend and transform experience”, helping “to question, to challenge, to conceive of alternatives”
(Rich 1972: 23) through the processes of renaming experience. Swindon’s poem provides evi-
dence that similar processes of writing as imaginative feminist “renaming” were being undertaken
by the writers’ group.

Personal transformation and political consciousness

For some women, joining the group catalysed personal transformation. Karen, for example, lo-
cated her experiences at the writers’ group as a turning point in her life, leading her to other local
activists who identified her as an “embryonic anarchist”:

So we, we aw became, we…and from that there was like, like loadsa branches came ootae
these groups, where people, the rent strike in Castlemilk, the poll tax, aw these different
things, all came from these wee groups, to outsiders it might look like nothing, but what
became ootae it was aw these people changing.
(Karen 2019)

As this extract highlights, Karen remembered participating in the writers’ group as a pivotal event
which vastly altered her own trajectory, bringing her into contact with housing and community
activism in her area (see, for example, McGinn 1988: 112–116; Wright 2021). In addition to place-
based campaigns, Karen also participated in feminist activism. She was involved in setting up
Women’s Aid Castlemilk and joined explicitly feminist groups, like “Sister Resisters”, who, she
recalled, “would go in to shops that selt porn and we would put pieces of fish in between all the
papers, in between the magazines (laughing)” (Karen 2019). However, as she recalled to me, after
an intense period of engagement with feminist groups, Karen realised “class wisnae part of that,
and no matter what I did, I…I am working class” (Karen 2019).
In a similar recollection, Karen emphasised the bearing of class on her engagement with
the wider feminist literary world. As well as publishing work through her own imprint, Smed-
dum Press and West Coast Magazine, Karen’s writing also featured in Scottish feminist an-
thologies, such as Fresh Oceans (Thomson 1989: 82–83), discussed earlier in this chapter.
However, her forays into this world brought up feelings of class displacement, a sentiment
she illustrated with a memory of a launch event for an anthology by a “feminist collective in
Edinburgh”:

It was a book I had read years and years ago called Hens in the Hay, which was a, a feminist
anthology a poetry. And they put oot a call for contributions for women from Scotland, so I
put a wee hing in and they’d agreed, that…I canny even remember the name ae the anthol-
ogy. But I went to the book launch…and I felt alien. Absolutely alien to the women who
were there, wae their wee glasses of this and their canapes and their fuckin…I just felt like,
whit, whit am I doing here. They’d already accepted it was aw done, and that’s fine. But
I just thought…I felt working class, I felt absolutely alien to what was, what was…even
though I felt feminist in my head, this was a different thing, it was in one of the big giant
hooses, sortta places in Edinburgh. The kinda places that Glaswegians, even if you wentae
Edinburgh you wouldnae go there (laughs). They’d phone the polis (laughs). And I went
sortta, shit man. And I think I might’ve tripped going in the door as well, sortta just to make
it a hundred times worse (laughs). Oh no, it wisnae, it wisnae a very…so I think I made

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a decision then that I wouldnae that, they kinda anthologies am, am, am really no getting
­involved in it again. I felt working class.
(Karen 2019)

While writing on feminist oral history practice, Abrams introduces the concept of “feminography”.
According to Abrams, women’s self-narration which concerns the “quest for the authentic and
fulfilled self” has been made possible in part by the feminist expressive revolution exemplified in
collective practices like consciousness-raising groups (Abrams 2019: 211). That Karen’s narration
of her own life story – from her “embryonic” political beginnings and tentative involvement in
community action, to realisations of the primacy of her own class identity – hinged on the turning
point of the expressive space of the writers’ group lends credence to Abrams’ theory. Furthermore,
Karen’s “self-determining narrative” (Abrams 2019: 221) bolsters the importance of wider net-
works in the realisation of this authentic self, with Karen identifying other groups and activists
– many of whom she recalled “came fae they wee groups” (Karen 2019) – as crucial to the devel-
opment of her political views, class consciousness, and sense of self-worth.

‘Couldnae protect us oot there’: limitations of writers’ groups

While, as this chapter has argued, the Castlemilk Women Writers and Readers afforded women
a space to centre themselves in their own lives and writing, and for some became a springboard
for personal growth and political development, it is also important to acknowledge the group’s
limitations. Reflecting on the turbulent lives of some of the participants of the group, Karen
recalled:

Aw no…maybe that happens in groups. I don’t know, maybe that happens, I don’t know.
I just thought, I just thought that the way a a lotta them died when they were quite young
or had terrible fuckin lives that was something to dae wi wur environment as well. That no
­matter what that wee safe room, both they wee safe rooms and safe zones couldnae protect
us oot there, that that…so you went back, you were still daein all the things that were hap-
pening in your life were still there but that was your wee safe place where you could, so
maybe that’s what it was, I don’t know.
(Karen 2019)

Thus in Karen’s account, while the writers’ group acted as a “safe zone” in which women could
share their experiences and develop their sense of self in the process, for some, it had little impact
on the wider context of their lives; it was ultimately unable to “protect” them from structural
difficulties.
Similarly, when considering the supportive function of the writers’ group, it is also important to
acknowledge that, for some, the group was their only outlet for these emotions, heightening their
intensity. For example, Karen recalled that facilitators and group members sometimes took on
roles for which they were not adequately equipped:

It was fraught with difficulties sometimes as well, because I was very, I could easily em…
get very em…overwhelmed at other people’s pain. And that could be very, very difficult,
and I think that, I would love to think that Alison had had some form of outlet counselling
if you like, because she, she kind of knew who we all were and what we were aw aboot,
em, but I also think that the people in the group were maybe left a wee bit high and dry. I,

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sometimes, I got very overwhelmed with other people’s pain and trauma, em…and I don’t
think I was alone, I, I don’t think I was alone […] I wisnae a fem…I was a feminist in here,
but I wisnae a feminist that I could fix the world. But I thought I could. And I think that’s
where we started to run away with wurselves a wee bit. And I think that’s where things like
that can get a wee bit dangerous.
(Karen 2019)

Similarly, tutor Alison also reflected on the deeply “challenging” nature of her job, and remem-
bered assuming responsibilities which were beyond her emotional capacities and professional
boundaries:

It was the most intense work I’ve ever done, without exception, and…em, and I know I
was criticised for that very thing […] being over involved. But, I couldn’t, I just couldn’t
do it any other way, I didn’t know how to […] It was all, all, all-consuming I would say
[… ] But at the time I remember em, y’know I can’t remember what the occasion was, but
being involved in somebody’s situation which I did sometimes get involved in, and em,
trying to help them in some kind of way that wasn’t strictly part of my job, but it was very
hard not to.
(Alison 2019)

As Marjorie Mayo observes, whatever their aims, community organisations “operate within the
contexts of wider constraints” (Mayo 2000: 112). Indeed by the 1980s, exacerbated by deindus-
trialisation and residualisation of housing, deprivation had accelerated across Glasgow (Pacione
1993). Furthermore, already limited urban funding had become increasingly exiguous in areas like
Castlemilk, and its allocation was often deeply contentious (Keating 1988: 151; Brown 2018).
Both Karen and Alison’s testimonies emphasise that the few projects which did secure funding
were in many ways insufficient in their scope, with participants and facilitators forced to intervene
when other group members found themselves “high and dry”, filling apertures in state service
provision, sometimes at personal cost.
Similarly, against a Thatcherite political landscape which had forcefully repurposed self-
help as an alternative to state support, rather than its complement, it is perhaps understandable
that women writers’ groups were critically appraised as ephemeral, inadequate cultural pallia-
tives to wider social issues. For some, like Paola Merli, community arts can be a depoliticised
and depoliticising practice under the conditions of neoliberal hegemony. Critiquing Francois
Matarasso’s work on the social impact of the arts which was to become a cornerstone of New
Labour’s arts-led regeneration strategy in the 1990s, Merli writes: “Social deprivation and ex-
clusion arguably can be removed only by fighting the structural conditions which cause them.
Such conditions will not be removed by benevolent arts programmes” (Merli 2002: 113). In a
similar way, Alison critically reflected on the inadequacies of the programme she oversaw, out-
lining misgivings about a creative programme conducted in the midst of intensifying structural
inequalities:

I have some sympathy for that view, y’know. I, I think…the poverty industry, it was Urban
Aid at the time, and instead of giving people decent houses, decent jobs, they put people in
to do the sort of thing that I was doing, which was sort of get them to, em, air their voices,
and so on, so.
(Alison 2019)

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 Kate Wilson

Alison here touches on a central paradox surrounding projects like WEA-led writers’ groups in the
1980s: in spite of their emancipatory, Freieran pedagogies, such groups relied on the machinery
of state funding and were sometimes perceived as a “a poverty industry”, providing few material
benefits aside from jobs for facilitators. When uncoupled from wider political shifts, even radi-
cally inflected pedagogies can be, in the words of Mary Hughes and Mary Kennedy, “education
for frustration”. As they write, for all its “mind-extending, mind-blowing” potential, under exist-
ing material and patriarchal conditions, adult education, no matter how radical, “gives women the
desire for change but the world remains the same” (Hughes and Kennedy 1983: 261).

Conclusions
The 1980s was, by all accounts, a fertile period for women’s writing in Scotland, with a notable
upsurge in women’s literature, writers’ groups, and publishing. Nevertheless, many of these groups
and publications were based on the east coast, coalescing around the nation’s capital, Edinburgh.
Moreover, in some cases, these groups and publications – whether intentionally or ­otherwise –
privileged the voices of women who occupied more middle-class positions in society, suggesting
at least a partial oversight of Glaswegian, working-class women’s voices and work in literary
feminisms. As this chapter has demonstrated, adult education went some way to redressing this
imbalance. Writing in Spare Rib in 1980, Chris Aldred posited that adult education was a way to
bring women’s studies to “elusive women from the housing schemes and working-class women
rather than the well-read women from suburbia” (Aldred 1980: 24). As work by Wright (2021)
demonstrates, many women in schemes like Castlemilk were, by the 1980s, already immersed in
intrinsically feminist practices, exploring non-hierarchical working practices and claiming auton-
omy through community action which foregrounded social reproduction, somewhat challenging
Aldred’s framing. Nonetheless, the burgeoning Scottish radical adult education movement created
new opportunities for the dissemination of feminist ideas. Specifically, the women-led, dialogi-
cal structure of writers’ groups like the Castlemilk Women Writers and Readers – which in many
ways paralleled the format of consciousness-raising groups – brought a new wave of women into
contact with some of the central tenets of the Women’s Liberation Movement. Women used read-
ing and writing as a tool to share and validate their experiences and sense of self, and to reimagine
prescribed gender roles.
While much of the writing considered in this chapter concerns the development of individual
agency, it is important to note that this sense of selfhood often grew in tandem with a sense of
collectivity, reflecting broader trends in left-wing “individualism” in the 1970s which posited that
“personal liberation could be best realised through collective responsibility, not in opposition to
it” (Robinson et al. 2017: 278). Testimonies in particular evidence the group’s social nature; at
its core, it fulfilled a basic, albeit deeply valuable, need: helping women to meet other women
in their area, and to form friendships. For certain women, like Karen, the group also acted as a
catalytic spark, prefacing a lifetime of participation in wider political action. As her testimony
shows us, connections forged in the writers’ groups could help women to reframe their worth and
validate selfhood through recognition of shared identities. In her work on feminist memoir, Lynne
Segal critiques recent trends of individualism in contemporary feminism, contrasting these with
the “alternative dreams of mutuality” put forward in feminist activism and writing in the long
1970s (Segal 2009: 129). Testimonies like Karen’s, as well as work in the group’s anthology like
Margaret Mary Swindon’s “Stand Still”, show how writers’ groups could facilitate the creation of
work which adhered to the traditions set out by Segal. As Swindon writes:

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 Writers’ groups and print culture in Glasgow, 1980–1988

Stand still
and feel
the pain
Use it
It links
you
to all of us.
(Castlemilk 1988: 6)

Through an examination of testimonies and literature produced by the group, this chapter has
shown that the experiences, feelings, and values of its participants were by no means homoge-
neous. Yet as we see in work like Swindon’s, the group became a space for women to find and
express a “grounding of self in shared political struggle”, a type of subjectivity which can be
contrasted with the pursuit of individual betterment at the expense of collective liberation (Segal
2009: 127).
Whatever its capacities for facilitating personal transformations, the group’s limitations cannot
be overlooked. In many ways, the story of the women’s Castlemilk WEA project serves to accen-
tuate the ephemerality and singularity of regeneration of funded writing projects. In the context
of widespread and increasing poverty and the absence of wider state support, the groups appear
insufficient, a fact emphasised by writers and facilitators who recalled the difficulties of sup-
porting others. In critical readings, arts groups which operate in the midst of right-wing political
contexts can be framed as assuasive measures built on an exploitative “poverty industry” (see, for
example, Mooney 2007: 11–13). Accordingly, in the 1980s, community programmes sometimes
found themselves in unhappy convergence with a hegemonic emphasis on self-help, serving to
distract from, rather than ameliorate, the structural ills wrought by decades of urban policy (see,
for example, Alexander 2015).
The writing and testimonies included in this chapter, however, make the positive impact of
these writers’ groups on the lives of women involved undeniable. As such, claims about the power
of writers’ groups should be contextualised and in some cases tempered, rather than wholly dis-
missed. As this chapter has evidenced, groups which relied on ephemeral state funding were,
for all their transgressive and transformative potential, not capable of enacting radical political
change in and of themselves, particularly in the Thatcher era. Rather, I argue, it is important to
view women’s writers’ groups in this period as another link in the chain of community action.
Though they did not undertake explicit feminist campaigning, they worked to build women’s self-
confidence, encourage shared perspectives on issues which affected neighbourhoods, and, in some
cases, strengthen gender and class solidarities, helping some to find their way to broader feminist
and political networks.

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349
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 23
MOTHER COUNTRY
Leonora Brito writes Wales – black British identity,
maternity, and memory in the Welsh short story

Bethan Evans and Jenni Ramone

Black British Welsh short story writer Leonora Brito produced a single collection of stories in her
lifetime, titled Dat’s Love. Originally published by Seren Books in 1995, Parthian reissued the
text in 2017 as part of the Library of Wales series, in an attempt to position the text in the contem-
porary national canon. According to Michelle Deininger, the Welsh short story is “as enmeshed
in constructions of national identity and the scars of industrialization as the Victorian novel was
for England” (Deininger 2019: 428). Echoing traditions of women’s short story writing in Wales
(Gramich 2007; Peach 2007), Leonora Brito’s stories engage in a strong feminist voice with the
recurrent themes of domesticity, familial and personal relationships, the everyday lives of women,
motherhood and maternity, memory, and autonomy. However, Dat’s Love extends the reach of
these issues of Welsh women’s writing by illuminating the ways in which they intersect with the
author’s black Welsh identity, made visible in work, agriculture, industry, heritage, history, and
race. Brito employs the national literary form to write Wales through an intersectional feminist
perspective, ultimately giving a voice to the black women whose roles in the nation’s history of in-
dustrialism and its aftermath have been neglected by conventional historical records and fictional
representations.
Brito was born in Cardiff’s dockland area, Tiger Bay, in the 1950s. While Brito’s mother and
maternal grandmother were also born in Cardiff, her father and maternal grandfather were seamen
from the Cape Verde islands, both of whom settled in Tiger Bay in the twentieth century. The Bay
has been, since the nineteenth century, a site of racial and cultural mixing in Britain distinct from
the London-centric model of post-Windrush multiculturalism in the twenty-first century. The ex-
portation of materials from Cardiff Docks to other locations around the world meant that the Bay
was central to industrialism, modernity, and colonisation. As such, the location was frequently
visited by merchants, seafarers, and workers from around the globe and became home, temporarily
or permanently, to many of those that passed through. As a result, Tiger Bay also became, as Gill
Branston discusses, an example of an “earlier, often painful but also zestful ‘cosmopolitanism’”
(Branston 2004: 127) in Britain long before the Windrush generation’s migration to England.
While Windrush settlement in the mid-twentieth century is often reputed to be a pivotal moment
for black Britain and a significant catalyst for twenty-first century multiculturalism in the United
Kingdom, Tiger Bay offers its own model of cultural and racial mixing. Brito’s stories represent
this location as marginalised by, yet in charged relation to, black Britain more broadly.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003429951-28 352

 Mother Country: Leonora Brito writes Wales

Many of the stories illustrate a specifically Cardiffian experience of multiculturalism, such as

the relocation of black families from the Bay to council houses in outer Cardiff during the 1960s
and 1980s, following two separate efforts to redevelop the docks for a new, middle-class commu-
nity. In “Gone for a Song”, for example, the family at the centre of the story have been relocated
“far away from Town”; out in the “fresh air”, the young protagonist considers how the cows on
the field outside her home look as though they have “fifteen Africas painted in ink on their creamy
white backs, like maps” (Brito 2017: 50–58). The image evokes the idea of a Cardiff punctuated
by its black citizens, the multiculturalism of the Bay now scattered throughout the capital. The im-
plication of cartography draws the relevance of nationality directly into the story – the landscape
of Wales, its fields and farming, is encountered via reference to the map of Africa, positioning one
within the other and therefore unsettling the borders of both nations. Such blurring of national bor-
ders calls attention to the involvement of Wales in the British Empire, to the imprint of the African
diaspora on the Welsh landscape. Furthermore, the impression of blurred national borders also
destabilises the dominant conception of Britain as a mother country distinct from its reliance on
colonisation overseas; as explored in this chapter, the notion of a stable dichotomy between centre
and periphery is undermined by a focus on black Britain. The African map superimposed upon the
agriculture of Wales, Brito’s story resonates with Deirdre Osborne’s suggestion that Britain has
“never been a mono-racial enclave”; rather, Britain’s black citizens have “profoundly transformed
British national culture, leading to a more complex and inclusive sense of its past” (Osborne 2016:
2–3, original emphasis).
Charlotte Williams, Neil Evans, and Paul O’Leary (2015) note that it is only recently that the
role of Wales in imperial practices and ideology has been explored. The more common line of
research traces the extent to which Wales itself can be described as a postcolonial nation (Wil-
liams 2005). Perceptions of the position of Wales within colonisation and industrialism vary
from the description of the nation as an internal colony (Hechter 2017), used by the British state
for extractive industry but culturally and economically subordinate to the metropolitan centre,
to a dependent periphery (Evans 1991), reliant upon a state which marginalises its people and
culture. Both positions agree that Wales has been and continues to be marginalised and subju-
gated by England in the British nation state, in a manner that likens the nation’s relation to the
metropolitan centre to that of the formerly colonised nations overseas. However, Chris Wil-
liams differentiates between reading Wales as “post-colonial” and the notion of a “postcolonial
Wales”. The hyphen in the former – “post-colonial” – relates to a specific epoch after European
colonisation, and Williams suggests that conceiving of Wales in this manner would be “poten-
tially offensive”, given that “Welsh people made money out of slavery: they were not slaves
themselves” (Williams 2005: 10). He ultimately argues that if “Wales is […] ‘post-colonial’, it
has been so since the sixteenth century and in ways unlike those experienced by any other post-
colonial society of more modern times” (Williams 2005: 7). If it is to be read as postcolonial,
Wales must be understood along the lines of black Britain more broadly, as a hitherto imperial
‘centre’, whose culture, values, and representational strategies and reflections are ultimately and
significantly changed by the presence of its commonwealth citizens in this ‘centre’. This is what
Williams indicates by suggesting that Wales can be usefully perceived as a postcolonial – without
the hyphen – location.
In “Gone for a Song”, Brito presents an image of blurred national borders within the agricul-
tural landscape of Wales which resonates with this conception of postcolonial Wales, the story’s
imagery supporting the notion that the capital’s black citizens have long held a constitutive role
for its culture which has been suppressed by dominant perceptions of the nation’s identity. Bri-
to’s collection, though, writes postcolonial Wales as distinct from black Britain more broadly,

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 Bethan Evans and Jenni Ramone

emphasising how Wales itself has been culturally and conceptually marginalised by England in
the nation state. Such a dynamic is illustrated in “Digging for Victory”, a story which reimagines
the sailing of “Mr Churchill’s war-ship […] into Cardiff Docks in the spring of 1955” (Brito 2017:
59–66). The narrative details the activities of a group of “coloured people, Docks people” helping
to clear the blocked canal and reclaim the iron lost by the crash, “[o]n behalf of the nation” (65).
However, while the group work to gain the attention of Churchill, who they believe is visiting the
docks for the duration of this emergency, thereby putting their town on the map of the nation, their
efforts are erased when the national newspapers praise Churchill himself for clearing the canal,
publishing pictures of him celebrating the next day in “the doorway of Number Ten” (66). The
subtleties of the story liken these overlooked efforts of the black citizens of Cardiff to the state’s
dependency on its colonised subjects for its economy and war efforts, “when Britain would have
stood alone, if the Empire hadn’t rushed to her aid” (64). That is, the story implies that there is no
“Us!” (60) – black Welsh people – in the state’s perception of its national identity, regardless of
their working as a “purposeful army” (63) in the state’s name for the continuing success of its in-
ternational trade. In this depiction, Wales is presented as postcolonial in the same vein as the other
nations of the empire – Britain’s economy is dependent upon its activities yet detached from it, and
Churchill, representative in the story of the centre of power, calls out directions from a recorded
message, his voice “tremulous” (63).
As in “Gone for a Song” and “Digging for Victory”, many of the stories in Brito’s collection
are set in the Cardiff of her youth. At the time of her death in 2007, Brito was writing a second
collection of stories for Seren, Chequered Histories. Though this collection was never published,
a few of its stories were disseminated in magazines and anthologies,1 and two are included in
the Parthian reissue of Dat’s Love. These stories – “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe” and “The Last
Jumpshot” – demonstrate Brito’s shifting focus, away from representations of the Cardiff of her
childhood and the possible lives of earlier generations of black British women, and towards what
Linden Peach suggests is a “global and conceptual reach” (Peach 2007: 18). Both stories illustrate
contemporary multiculturalism and racial tensions in terms of post-Windrush black Britain more
broadly, rather than offering the Cardiff-specific focus of the majority of stories in Dat’s Love.
For example, in “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe”, hybridity and ambivalence as defined by Homi
Bhabha – the former being the legacy of colonialism present in the modern world in the shape of
new, mixed cultures, and the latter being the status of the (post)colonised subject as neither (or
both) belonging to the colonising or colonised culture – can be traced in the protagonist Aleisha’s
search for a sense of belonging in either the white family of her mother or the black family of a
father that she has never met. The story shares its name and themes with Hortense Spillers’ 1987
essay, which approaches the trope of the absent African American father in terms of the traumatic
legacy of colonisation and dispossession; Brito’s “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe” creatively ima-
gines the significance of Spillers’ theory in the form of literary narrative. “The Last Jumpshot”
conveys the experiences of a multiracial group of young male basketball players, demonstrating a
departure from Brito’s formerly woman-centred narratives. Dat’s Love, on the other hand, is a fun-
damentally feminist and black Welsh text, but the maturation of Brito’s writing towards a global,
multigendered scope correlates with a changing image of multiculturalism in Wales, one no longer
bound to the reputation and representations of Tiger Bay, but resembling a global black identity
more broadly, as influenced by pan-Africanism, black America, and black Britain.
Such a duality of black identity in Wales, one specifically Cardiffian and the other global in
reach, may be most plainly demonstrated by reading across the two collections, but both are
clearly present within Dat’s Love. Unlike Brito’s newer stories which embrace global identities, a
sense of tension is created by Dat’s Love between the local experiences which define black Welsh

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 Mother Country: Leonora Brito writes Wales

identity and international influences of blackness and racial solidarity; such influences are shown
to be problematic and restrictive for black Welsh women. This tension is played out in the open-
ing, titular story of the collection. Through Dat’s Love, the collection illustrates a model of black
identity for Welsh citizens which is imported from America, yet at the same time, the story desta-
bilises this model in order to enable a specifically black Welsh identity to be developed and given
representational space by the stories that follow.
Dat’s Love tells the story of Grace, a “‘godly’ singer” who has “never put red to her lips, […]
does not smoke, or blaspheme, or take strong drink” (Brito 2017: 1–14), preparing to perform
at the funeral of Dooley Wilson. Dooley is a fellow performer from Cardiff who found success
only when he adopted “an American sounding name”, an act which Grace perceives as “step-
ping into someone else’s shoes and trying to make them fit” (3). Dooley’s brief career in film has
a lasting effect on the way that he presents himself as a musician and a black man. Previously
known as “Archibald something or other [who] played […] wonderful piano”, Dooley becomes
his stage persona – eventually falling “into a more comic routine” when opportunities to play
piano become fewer. In Grace’s eyes, Dooley adorns “black taffeta” in place of his skin as he
performs his black identity for the sake of his white audience in a manner that Grace perceives
as disingenuous (2–4). Grace’s narration implies that media and other external influences have
encouraged Dooley to adopt an Americanised conception of blackness, involving the internalisa-
tion of a white gaze which moulds the performance of his black identity both on stage and off.
This reaches a peak in the last memory that Grace has of Dooley, in which he is preparing his
costume, “prettifying himself” and, according to Grace, “wav[ing] his hands like a minstrel in
front of the glass, laughing at his own reflection” (12–13), suggesting that he has become the
audience for his act.
Indications of similar influences on the black community of Cardiff Docks are scattered
throughout the text via references to various instruments of representation. Films, songs, and the
stage, as well as the agent responsible for creating such media – “people imaginations” (6) – are
reoccurring motifs throughout the story, and Grace sees in her husband’s eyes the “greenish-grey
sort of gleam” of a television that “hasn’t been switched on yet” (5), suggesting that his expression
of identity is likewise dormant, waiting to be roused. Furthermore, the story is not plot-driven, but
revolves around Grace’s memories of Dooley’s performance as she prepares for her own at his
funeral – the narrative begins and ends with Grace’s singing. Everything in between is “memories
[which] spin around [her] head like a big roulette wheel” (4). This means that on a narrative level,
the story is a performance, mimicking and reinforcing the status of the short story on a formal
level, as a platform of representation, a medium of expression, similar to those referenced through-
out Dat’s Love. The relevance of this emphasis is realised when the dynamic between the agents
of the narrative – its characters, setting, imagery and symbolism, and the story’s position within
the collection – is considered.
The design of Brito’s characters, for example, interacts with the shape of the narrative of Dat’s
Love to elucidate its overall effect. The relationship between Grace and Dooley, for instance, is to
a certain extent a romantic one; though anxious that he is the same age as her father, Grace “ad-
mires” him, keeping his compliments “close to [her] heart”, and becomes jealous when her friend,
Sarah Vaughn, begins a relationship with Dooley (4). The romantic attachment is presented by
the story as part of a complicated dynamic between the three, whereby Dooley is desired by both
women, but is also a role model, a father-figure to them; “almost a god” in their eyes (3), he sym-
bolises a deific model of behaviour for the two women. The dynamic between the three characters,
then, also signifies a generational arc, with Dooley representing an older generation of black Car-
diffians which has established a particular culture for the black community, a certain expression

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of black identity developed in response to the norms of the dominant culture and the influence of
international racial solidarity. This is a patriarchal model of identity, but Grace and Sarah in turn
represent the next generation of black Cardiffians with whom the collection is concerned, treading
the line between this established culture and their own needs as black women in an ever-changing
present. The setting of Dat’s Love, Dooley’s funeral, means that the time frame of the story is on
the precipice of a generational shift, a moment when Grace and Sarah’s expression and experience
of identity will become the established model after the passing of Dooley’s generation. But the
memories that make up the body of the story tell of the charged generational dynamic, of Grace
and Sarah choosing two opposing life scripts, both of which branch from Dooley’s patriarchal,
Americanised expression of his black identity. Ultimately, it is Sarah that Dooley coaches into her
successful singing career, and Grace comments that Dooley “will be remembered as the man who
discovered Sarah Vaughn. That will be his epitaph, discovering her. Like finding something valua-
ble and precious that no-one else had ever realised was there before. Mr Columbus” (8). The irony
in Grace’s narration here indicates that Dooley’s coaching involved encouraging Sarah to mirror
his own Americanised performance of black identity, “imitat[ing] some Hollywood film star” and
“blacking her face up and acting comical” (8–9). The sense that Sarah is imitating a performed
black American identity is reinforced by the fact that her name is almost identical to that of New
Jersey jazz singer, Sarah Vaughan; in this way, the Sarah Vaughn of the story can be conceived of
as a representational copy of the American performer, a fictional echo of Sarah Vaughan without
substance beyond the text. Grace, on the other hand, believes that she has rejected her elder’s
model of black identity, instead choosing a “steady and responsible” path guided by the church
(9). However, Grace has adopted a different expression of black identity influenced by America,
that of black respectability.2
Grace’s respectability, and the performance of black identity for a white gaze enacted by Sa-
rah and Dooley, are presented as the “shadowy opposites” (14) of the same model, each one
“provok[ing]” (9) the other to embody and exhibit traits of the opposing part of the binary. Such a
binary is presented throughout the story as the only available expression of identity for the black
community in Cardiff; there is no space in Grace’s narration, and therefore in Dat’s Love more
broadly, for the articulation or representation of black identity that does not fit into this American
model. However, this constrictive narration is challenged by the lyrics of the hymn which Grace
sings at Dooley’s funeral, which feature at the very close of the story. The hymn is “His Eye is
on the Sparrow”, and the lyrics presented in the text are: “a bird […] flies where it will […]. And
I sing because I’m happ-ee, and I sing because I am free!” (14, original emphasis). By the time
Grace recites the song at the funeral, she has attempted to sever herself from the influence of
Dooley after realising that she has also performed her identity through the binary model offered
by Dooley’s generation. The protagonist’s endeavour to separate herself from Dooley’s model is
achieved when she remembers seeing herself and Dooley in a different kind of reflective medium:
the mirror. He embraces her in front of the mirror so that she is standing in front of him, her face
just below his, and the doubles – the “shadowy opposites” representing two generations – become
one. After seeing herself this way, as a reflection of Dooley, Grace cuts him with a blade, making
a small incision in his chest. Grace’s attack on Dooley is not justified by the narrative; the lack of
explanation instead allows the impression of symbolic significance to prevail. It is “only a flesh
wound” (13), an incision which interrupts and disrupts the performance presenting the self to
others reflected in the mirror. Therefore, when the lyrics are recited at the close of the story, they
are weighted by the significance of Grace trying to establish freedom for the next generation – by
extension, Dat’s Love establishes expressive liberty for the chorus of black Welsh women’s voices
to follow in the collection.

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Having separated herself from Dooley’s influence in this symbolic manner, when Grace takes
to the stage to sing, the hymn’s affirmation of freedom has new relevance. During her perfor-
mance, Grace sees her friend Baby Cleo in the crowd, “smiling, smiling and crying at the same
time” (14). Baby, in her name, represents a potential future generation; she is the third member of
Sarah and Grace’s band, but she does not follow the Americanised stage presence of Sarah, nor the
respectability-focused church-singing career of Grace. In fact, Baby is given little textual space,
beyond Grace’s remark that things are “different for Baby” (8). In this way, Baby stands in for an
identity that does not yet have space for expression in the accepted articulations of black Welsh
identity, the story itself being a paradigm of such articulations. When Grace sees Baby at the end of
the story, she begins to cry, though it does not seem that she is crying for Dooley’s passing. Rather,
Grace has established the potential for herself and Baby to express their own black Welsh identity,
bolstered by seeing Baby cry and then allowing herself to cry, after which she proclaims the need
to “sing!”, and the story ends as her “voice veers out of control, and cr-a-ck-s” (14).
Grace as first-person narrator provides a limited perspective, and her voice cracking on the one
hand refers literally to her crying. On the other hand, though, the cracking is also suggestive of her
perspective – her understanding of the binary, “shadowy opposites” of black identity influenced
by the media and platforms of representation – beginning to shift, a breaking of the binary to al-
low space for other, not-yet-represented expressions of black Welsh women’s identity to emerge.
This more symbolic reading of the close of this story is supported by the presentation of the word
“cracks” – it is separated out with hyphens, the space between the letters suggesting that repre-
sentational, textual space is being opened up for experiences beyond Grace’s perspective. Such a
reading is compelling because of the way this story interacts with the narratives that follow, where,
in Dat’s Love, a sense of entrapment between binary expressions of identity is established, the fol-
lowing stories provide multiple articulations and experiences of black Welsh women’s identity that
are not bound by this binary, as if the opening story has created space for these in the pages that
follow. That is, Dat’s Love can be understood as carrying out a particular function as the opening
story of the text. It establishes the representation of black Welsh women to be almost absent from
popular understanding, dependent upon and limited to the archetypes of black American male
performers. Yet it ends by collapsing this dependency, making space within the text that contains
it, to present black Welsh women who are not constrained by the same Americanised model that
envelops Dat’s Love.
Dat’s Love provides a contextual background from which the collection can progress: refer-
ences to the tools of representation – cameras, lenses, film, television, written text – remain a
feature of the entire collection, bolstering the sense that the text is directly addressing neglected
identities. As such, the collection, through a series of narratives, illustrates the lives of black Car-
diffian women, writing the Welsh capital as a multicultural, feminist place and thus illuminating
the diversity of a location that has often been written through a white, androcentric gaze.3 The
stories are above all concerned with the depiction of black Welsh women and their experiences of
nationality, race, gender, and platforms and forms of representation. For example, “In Very Pleas-
ant Surroundings” recounts the experience of an elderly woman fighting a battle with cancer – this
battle is presented as not only against her death, but also as a struggle to carve out a representa-
tional space for black Welsh women’s experiences of such a fight for life. The woman is told to
fight the illness “like a man!” (Brito 2017: 24–33), and this involves her searching for influences
on how to do so through a variety of literary references from Hamlet to The Unbearable Lightness
of Being – literary contemplations from a white, male-centred canon on how to live, how to be, in
the face of death. Her battling through these references highlights the absence of representation
modelling her own identity in these circumstances. In “Dido Elizabeth Belle – a Narrative of Her

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Life (extant)”, a similar effect is achieved in terms of highlighting and addressing the lack of vis-
ibility of black British women, in historical records as well as literary texts in this instance. The
story takes a short excerpt from an eighteenth-century white-male-authored diary describing Belle,
a black British heiress born into slavery in 1761 but brought to England by her father, John Lind-
say, and raised by his uncle, William Murray, first Earl of Mansfield. The excerpt is taken from
the diary of Thomas Hutchinson, a governor of Massachusetts, who visited Mansfield in 1779.
In the passage, Hutchinson relays Mansfield’s lie that his nephew did not father Belle, and the
story builds a fictional narrative around this historical document in order to highlight that “what
had been set down by this diarist was but a wicked fabrication, a tissue of lies and half truths!”
(Brito 2017: 40–49). Delivered through an imagined first-person narration from the perspective
of a fictional Dido, the historical Belle’s voice is reconstructed via narrative fiction since official
records of her life are filtered through the lens of colonial and patriarchal structures. In doing so,
Brito’s story demonstrates how any representation of such women is subject to the operations of
these structures, and how agency of the kind bestowed upon the reimagined Dido can now only be
imagined through “the tale”; through fiction, Dido can “set down [her] history” in order to “pos-
sess, rather than be possessed by it” (48).
Such aspects of identity and representation are explored with specific reference to place and
locality, in opposition to the American model established by the opening story – references to the
influence of America on the realities of the Welsh capital, though, are scattered throughout the
text, suggesting that Welsh regional specificities are written in defiance of a “universal” model.
For example, Jock in “Stripe by Stripe” is frustrated by the “American style” décor of his local
pub, and by the suggestion that this décor harks back to “those good old hey-days, down the Bay
days – when this one square mile […] was like, the New Orleans of a great coaling Metropolis”
(Brito 2017: 104–114, original emphasis). Likewise, “Michael Miles Has Teeth Like a Broken-
Down Picket Fence” assumes the naïve perspective of a young girl coming to terms with her
“monochrome” identity in a “black and white […] world” (Brito 2017: 15–23). The girl’s com-
prehension of her mixed racial and cultural heritage is filtered through the imagery of grey-scale;
like in Dat’s Love, the child’s reference for the projection of her identity is taken from mass media,
but this time it is from British television adverts between her favourite gameshow, Take Your Pick:
“like a housewife [she is] disappointed by the whiteness of her wash. Mine looks grey, she thought,
using the voice of the woman on the advert” (15). The backdrop of these references to American
projections of black identity has the effect of reinforcing the collection’s illustration of particular
black and postcolonial Welsh experiences and circumstances, and articulating the need to create a
representational space for such experiences since such a space is absent.
Above all, though, Dat’s Love seeks alternative life scripts for black Welsh women which un-
settle the masculine focus of black Welsh representation. Given the industrial origins of Tiger
Bay’s cultural and racial diversity, it is still often remembered through, as Gill Branston describes,
“dominantly masculinist histories and heritage displays” (Branston 2004: 127). Brito responds to
this masculinist historicising of the Bay and its multiculturalism by engaging with the themes most
associated with feminist and women’s writing in Wales: memory, maternity, domesticity, family,
and relationships, but by addressing these through the lens of the industrialism which brought her
family to Cardiff. This means that work and industry, themes which, according to Deininger, are
typically featured in Welsh men’s short stories, are significant narrative elements of Brito’s stories.
“Gone for a Song” comments on blurred national borders through a depiction of agriculture in
Wales; “Digging for Victory” filters its account of the crash of Churchill’s war-ship through the
perspective of a black woman at work who is anxious to “get paid[, ] whatever happens” (63); and
Dat’s Love positions Grace’s potential career as a performer as an alternative to her day-job at a

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cigar factory. As such, the connection between industrialisation, race, and masculinity in Cardiff
is disrupted when the collection addresses such issues through a framework of themes more com-
monly associated with women’s writing in Wales in the late twentieth century.
Brito is, according to Deininger, a significant contributor to what “seems to be a renaissance in
women writing the short story” in Wales during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries
(Deininger 2016: 196). Deininger finds the Welsh short story to be apt for “exploring belonging,
loss, childhood, and alienation”, and in women’s writing in particular, for exploring “loneliness,
exile, and dislocation” – claims which are supported by her analyses of the short fiction of Glenda
Beagan, Catherine Merriman, Rachel Trezise, Jo Mazelis, Susie Wild, and Brito, among others
(Deininger 2019: 428). Exploring the works of these writers, Deininger begins to unpack the
ways in which the short story tends towards characteristics which enable the expression of the
oppressed voices and experiences of Welsh women. Deininger follows Clare Hanson’s definition
of the form as “a vehicle for different kinds of knowledge, knowledge which may be in some way
at odds with the ‘story’ of dominant culture” (Hanson 1989: 6). According to this characterisation
of the form, the short story is capable of conferring a voice to the women historically silenced
by society because of its association with alterity, its cultural marginalisation against the novel
and the correlation of this marginalisation with the expression of other – that is, non-dominant –
forms of knowledge and experience. Hanson continues: “The formal properties of the short story
– ­disjunction, inconclusiveness, obliquity – connect with its ideological marginality and with the
fact that the form may be used to express something suppressed/repressed in mainstream litera-
ture” (Hanson 1989: 6). Here, Hanson affirms the way that the cultural marginality of the form
interlaces with its apparent capacity for alterity, but she also delineates certain formal approaches
characteristic of the short story which uniquely enable its unearthing of that which is suppressed.
Deininger concentrates on the first point that Hanson makes regarding the correlation between
the cultural marginality of the short form and its embrace by marginalised peoples – she connects
Hanson’s theory of the form as a “vehicle” for suppressed and alternative knowledges with Frank
O’Connor’s proposition that the short story appeals to “submerged population groups” (O’Connor
2004: 17), those that are in some way marginalised by or on the fringes of the dominant society and
culture. Following Deininger’s assessment of these properties as defining the Welsh short story
in general, and Welsh women’s short stories in particular, it is useful to build upon her premise
by considering Brito’s stories alongside those specific formal approaches which Hanson suggests
characterise the short story’s ideological marginality and its capacity to expose the suppressed and
repressed: disjunction, inconclusiveness, and obliquity. These qualities can intersect with the task
of chronicling the experiences of women in Wales, acknowledging that this place has historically
been conceived of through a masculinist lens, and that the task is therefore a necessarily inter-
rupted, continuing, indeterminate, and uncertain one. That is, the short story’s tendency towards
fragmentation and partiality – what Hanson suggests is the short story’s ability to remain “lim-
ited” in comparison with what is often thought of as the “inclusive, universal power of the novel”
(Hanson 1989: 24–25) – enables Welsh women’s stories to foreground how women writers and the
representation of Welsh women’s experiences have historically been repressed and oppressed. The
formal approaches highlighted by Hanson enable the impact of such oppression to be preserved
at a textual level, even while the important task of etching a tradition of Welsh women’s writing
is achieved.
Brito’s stories represent Wales as a multicultural, feminist place through these formal quali-
ties, at once recording the lack of textual representation for black Welsh women, and at the same
time creating space for such representation. To take an example, the impact of “Digging for Vic-
tory” is its overall sense of the marginalisation of Wales in the nation state despite the country’s

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significance to British industrialism and imperialism via its extractive industry. This is achieved,
not through the direct narration of events, which follow a single character’s experience of the day,
but rather obliquely, in the way that Churchill’s voice haunts the story even while he is physi-
cally absent from the location of the emergency, a voice directing events and their interpretation
rather than interacting unambiguously with them. In terms of formal disjunction, “Dido Elizabeth
Belle” critiques the patriarchal, colonial writing of official records by positioning the historical
document against narrative fiction, revealing the constructed nature of the former by juxtaposing
it with the latter, which offers scope for reinterpreting history. Dat’s Love functions as an intro-
duction to the chorus of voices to follow in the collection, establishing how inconclusiveness
operates in Brito’s writing. The story’s ending is also a beginning, an invitation for the collection
to begin the project of redressing the lack of representational space for black Welsh women to
which it draws attention.
Brito’s destabilising of the binary between men’s and women’s themes in the Welsh short story
by approaching the former through the framework of the latter, her attention to postcolonial Wales
as both subjugated by the British nation state and complicit in its history of colonisation and im-
perialism, her alertness to the ways in which Welsh women have written of their marginalisation
through the formal techniques of the short story, and her own occupation of these techniques to
distil a sense of the lack of representational space for black Welsh women – all of these elements
come together through a single story within Dat’s Love: “Mother Country”. “Mother Country”
depicts a black Welsh woman’s experience of childbirth, specifically a moment of emotional trans-
formation from her initial anxiety and disbelief over her new status as a mother into her amaze-
ment at her ability to create life and nurse it to health. This moment of maternal bonding structures
the story, which opens with the mother “repelled” (Brito 2017: 34–39) by the life of the child and
closes with her “[e]ntranced” (38) by her and the child’s physical and emotional connection upon
breastfeeding. In between, the narrative provides an image of the mother giving birth, but this is
obliquely rendered via references to the history of slavery and colonisation since the child is “an-
other country”; the body is a “Panamanian birth-canal”, and the new mother is a “two headed doll”
giving birth to her own “African mammy” (37, original emphasis). Formal disjunction and incon-
clusiveness are established by this blurring of the identity of the narrating voice between self and
other, her position as both mother and child creating the impression of a generational unity rather
than linearity. As such, the story interlaces the physical act of giving birth, of creating new life,
with a symbolic notion of the way in which the history of slavery endures in the former colonising
centre, the weight and memory of such history carried by the descendants of colonised subjects in
the “centre” while it is repressed in the ideology of the dominant culture. The story, therefore, by
obliquely rendering its depiction of maternity through the metaphor of empire, literalises the idea
of the political mother country.
The term “mother country” in the context of the British Empire generally refers to the met-
ropolitan centre, a home away from home which will one day open itself up to the people of the
colonies, a promised and protective land, and a reference point of identity and belonging for the
colonised. However, as black British writer and journalist Charlie Brinkhurst-Cuff describes in
her recently published edited collection of life writing essays by Windrush migrants, the United
Kingdom “was not maternal” for its migrants who arrived in 1948 or their descendants. According
to Brinkhurst-Cuff “[m]otherhood in our society still represents nurture and love”, but at the same
time as it publicly celebrated this conventional idea of motherhood, the United Kingdom behaved
as an uncaring maternal figure, “encouraging hard work and reverence of British society, all the
while failing to extend protections to those new residents from the tarbrush of racism and later,
deportation orders served by the Home Office” (Brinkhurst-Cuff 2018: xxiv–xxv). Therefore,

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Britain’s black communities are denied the political “maternalism”, the kind of protection and
belonging evoked by the concept of a motherland, and the notion of Britain as the “mother coun-
try” emerges as a fallacy. Here, Brinkhurst-Cuff draws on the comparison between a hostile and
neglectful mother country and the rejection and discrimination suffered by black women in Britain
addressed in one of the founding works of black postcolonial feminism, The Heart of the Race:
Black Women’s Lives in Britain by Beverley Bryan, Stella Dadzie, and Suzanne Scafe. Bryan,
Dadzie, and Scafe refer to black women’s work in the “Mother Country” as “labour pains” (2018
[1985]: 28) and signal the “uncaring” (2018 [1985]: 97) state which had promised its former colo-
nial subjects security and meaningful work (2018 [1985]: 33). Brinkhurst-Cuff refers to an ideal-
ised, patriarchal notion of maternity to reveal the paradoxes central to the concept of the political
mother country. Such an idealisation, though, is a symptom of the ideology in which the metaphor
developed. As discussed by Louise Falconer:

The ideological space created by the British Empire provided opportunities for explorations
into the meanings of Victorian femininity. Woman could be the intrepid missionary, bringing
light to dark Africa […] or a vulnerable piece of her husband’s property to be defended from
the “other”. She could also be the heroic mother responsible for the preservation of the race,
or, simply, an object of intensifying legal control over her reproductive capacities.
(Falconer 2003: 149)

Brinkhurst-Cuff’s exploration and occupation of the metaphor reveals the ways in which such ide-
ologies persist into the present. Similarly, Brito’s “Mother Country” engages with such ideology
of femininity and motherhood in a way that illuminates the hollow reality undergirding Britain’s
promise of home and belonging for its commonwealth citizens.
The story opens with a sense of “dissociation” (35) when the mother is handed her child for the
first time, and because “Mother Country” blurs its depiction of the act of giving birth with imagery
relating to postcoloniality, such dissociation can be interpreted in terms of the uncaring mater-
nal figure of the political mother country. Brito’s story, by inflating the representation of a black
mother with that of the colonial centre, reveals the ways in which Britain and the colonies cannot
be dichotomised as ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’, but are rather fundamentally entwined. A focus on the
metaphor of the mother country in a black British context necessitates a conception of Britain as
historically diverse, in terms of race and culture – Tiger Bay has indeed been a historically multi-
cultural location due to its involvement in extractive industry. In the beginning of Brito’s story, the
mother appears as a figuration of the motherland that is colonial Britain, and her child represents
the (post)colonised subject: much like the empire’s attitude towards the enslaved, the mother ap-
proaches the newborn in a “detached, impersonal” (35) manner and is “bloated with power”, an
“overwhelming power” which asserts its control through violence: “… could crush – just use my
arm like a vice and crush its head, its skull, in the crook of my arm… Or I could take it by the legs
[…] and dash its brains out” (36). Attempts to justify such violent authority imposed by the empire
upon its colonised subjects took place through an ideology which strove to dehumanise the en-
slaved. In Brito’s story, a sense of this dehumanisation is achieved in the opening section through
the suggestion that the mother perceives her child as a “doll”, a “boneca” with “[l]egs made out of
laminated plastic” and fingers and toes “stuck together” (34). However, upon nursing, the mother
realises the humanity of the child and the responsibility of nurture that accompanies her power
and control over its life. Upon this realisation, the mother transforms from a representation of the
colonial motherland and turns to perceive herself as her own “African mammy” (37). The bodily,
filial act of breastfeeding makes the mother aware of her own maternal lineage, and with this, she

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becomes a representation in the story of the colonised rather than the coloniser, calling to question
the parallels between the supposed maternalism of the political mother country and the reality of
sustaining life in a postcolonial nation. The mother is taken aback by the “fair[ness]” (38) of the
child; the child is representative of the colonised subject in the centre of colonial power, when
the motherland has “shut” itself “off” (38) from its responsibility of care for its commonwealth
citizens. The story’s depiction of motherhood ultimately merges the political and the personal; in
the end, the mother calls for her child to “know me!” (38), to know of its lineage and prevent the
mother and the representation of coloniality which she embodies from “receding into history”
(38), where it would be forgotten by cultural memory.
The uniting of the personal and the political in Brito’s “Mother Country” extends and produc-
tively complicates Katie Gramich’s demarcation of the formal and thematic approaches of Welsh
women’s short story writing. Primarily, Gramich finds the interaction between representations
of maternity, the Welsh landscape, and memory to be the most prevalent and effective in women
writing Wales as a “feminist place” (Gramich 2007: 146) during the mid-to-late twentieth century.
A significant agent of this writing of the feminist place is the figure of the “Welsh mam”; like the
symbolic idea of the political mother country, but unlike its lived realisation, the “Welsh mam”
establishes a sense of home through the love and nurture of both kin and land. While representa-
tions of the “Welsh mam” have been prevalent since the nineteenth century, it is during this period
that she is given a voice. With this voice, throughout the many examples offered by Gramich’s
analysis, the Welsh mam “traces her roots back” to the Welsh land through “the coalescence of
the personal and cultural memory, embodied in the almost forgotten female ancestor” (Gramich
2007: 158). Resultingly, the Wales of the maternal line is grasped as a past that is “inscribed on
the landscape of today” (Gramich 2007: 179). The “Welsh mam” is, in this period, “also a poet,
who responds to the literary echoes of the Welsh landscape” (Gramich 2007: 147). Literary form
becomes a kind of device for chronicling memory, a means of imagining and uncovering the
“foremothers” of the Welsh women’s tradition of writing via its bridging of the personal, domestic,
cultural, and political. When Brito writes of the political mother country through a representation
of motherhood, she similarly bestows a literary voice upon the figure of the “almost forgotten”
black Welsh mother.
Through its formal techniques, therefore, Brito’s collection is aligned with the interests and
approaches of Welsh women’s short story writing as described by Deininger, but these formal
approaches are practised with a difference in Dat’s Love. Where Deininger finds the themes of
industrialisation and working-class life to be mostly absent from Welsh women’s short stories but
prevalent in their male-authored counterparts, Brito explores these ‘men’s’ themes through the lens
of colonisation, race, and identity. At the same time, though, these issues are approached through
a framework which occupies women’s writing in Wales, as delineated by Gramich, one which
bridges the personal and the cultural and political. Through Brito’s “Mother Country”, writing
similarly becomes an act of remembering, a means of reconciling past and present via a narrat-
ing voice that fluidly moves between mother and child, between generations. That is, by making
platforms and forms of representation a recurrent theme of her stories while imagining voices for
black Welsh and British women stretching from the eighteenth century to the present, Brito maps
a similar kind of network of “foremothers” to that of the “Welsh mam”, but one that is inclusive
of issues regarding race, colonisation, and industrialism via the unification of the political and
personal “Mother Country”. Ultimately, Brito, through Dat’s Love, becomes a literary foremother
for writing black Wales, by tracing the ways in which these postcolonial issues variously intersect
with the tradition of Welsh women’s writing.

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Notes
1 For example, in Dai Smith (ed.) (2014) Story: The Library of Wales Short Story Anthology, Cardigan:
Parthian; Lewis Davies and Arthur Smith (eds.) (1999) Mama’s Baby (Papa’s Maybe): New Welsh Short
Fiction, Cardigan: Parthian; and the short story magazine Cambrensis.
2 Daniel Williams explores the ways in which the “ethnic and gender struggles of Wales and African Amer-
ica” have been connected by a shared history of “the ideology of racial uplift” since the second half of
the nineteenth century. This is reflected in the “Blue Books” of Wales which represent a “‘universal’
­civilizationist mission in which women were the disseminators of […] morality, sobriety, [and] temper-
ance” via their position within “the domestic and religious realms” (Williams 2012: 4–7).
3 Such as in the writings of Howard Spring and John Williams. Linden Peach describes Williams’ perspec-
tive of Tiger Bay as “typical of the representation of the Bay, perceived as an enclave and written about
from the point of view of a male outsider looking in” (Peach 2007: 21).

Bibliography
Branston, Gill (2004) “What a Difference a Bay Makes: Cinema and Welsh Heritage,” in Jo Littler and
Roshi Naidoo (eds.) The Politics of Heritage: The Legacies of Race, London and New York: Routledge,
pp. 127–140.
Brinkhurst-Cuff, Charlie (ed.) (2018) Mother Country: Real Stories of the Windrush Children, London:
Headline.
Brito, Leonora (2017) Dat’s Love and Other Stories, Cardigan: Parthian.
Bryan, Beverley, Stella Dadzie and Suzanne Scafe (2018 [1985]) The Heart of the Race: Black Women’s Lives
in Britain, London: Verso.
Deininger, Michelle (2016) Short Fiction by Women from Wales: A Neglected Tradition, Cardiff: Cardiff
University.
Deininger, Michelle (2019) “The Short Story in the Twentieth Century,” in Geraint Evans and Helen
­Fulton (eds.) The Cambridge History of Welsh Literature, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
pp. 428–445.
Evans, Neil (1991) “Internal Colonialism? Colonization, Economic Development and Political Mobilization
in Wales, Scotland and Ireland,” in Graham Day and Gareth Rees (eds.) Regions, Nations, and European
Integration: Remaking the Celtic Periphery, Cardiff: University of Wales Press, pp. 235–264.
Falconer, Louise (2003) “The Mother Country and Her Colonial Progeny,” Law Text Culture 7: 149–185.
Gramich, Katie (2007) Twentieth Century Women’s Writing in Wales: Land, Gender, Belonging, Cardiff:
­University of Wales Press.
Hanson, Clare (ed.) (1989) Re-Reading the Short Story, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Hechter, Michael (2017) Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in British National Development:
­1536–1966, London and New York: Routledge.
O’Connor, Frank (2004) The Lonely Voice: A Study of the Short Story, Hoboken, NJ: Melville House.
Osborne, Deirdre (ed.) (2016) The Cambridge Companion to British Black and Asian Literature
(1945–2010), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Peach, Linden (2007) “Unspoken Histories: Groundbreaking Short Fiction,” in Contemporary Irish and
Welsh Women’s Fiction: Gender, Desire and Power: Writing Wales in English, Cardiff: University of
Wales Press, pp. 18–43.
Williams, Charlotte, Neil Evans and Paul O’Leary (eds.) (2015) A Tolerant Nation? Revisiting Ethnic
­Diversity in a Devolved Wales, Cardiff: University of Wales Press.
Williams, Chris (2005) “Problematizing Wales: An Exploration in Historiography and Postcoloniality,”
in Jane Aaron and Chris Williams (eds.) Postcolonial Wales, Cardiff: University of Wales Press,
pp. 3–22.
Williams, Daniel (2012) Black Skin, Blue Books: African Americans and Wales 1845–1945, Cardiff: ­University
of Wales Press.

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 PART V

Activism
 24
IN A CIRCLE WITH MARY HAYS
Writing novels to reform society in the 1790s

Eliza O’Brien

Mary Hays (1759–1843) thought in circles. She provides us with a remarkable way of understand-
ing the lives and ideas of radical English writers in the aftermath of the French Revolution of
1789. For a long time, she was associated with the now celebrated feminist Mary Wollstonecraft
(1759–1797); Hays was seen as Wollstonecraft’s ardent disciple, rightfully recognised as one of
her earliest biographers, and thought to be a faithful attendant at her death bed. Hays has also
been seen as a somewhat derivative follower of the proto-anarchist philosopher William Godwin
(1756–1836) (see Adams 1940). While Hays still occupies a fairly marginal place in studies of
Romantic literature, her main novels are nevertheless available in critical editions (Ty 1996, Hays
1799/1998, 1998; Brooks 2004), her letters have been gathered (Wedd 1925; Brooks 2004), and
her editors have been thorough and dedicated (Walker 2013–2014; Whelan 2022). It is this posi-
tion as both marginal and notable that I take as my starting point for an exploration of Hays’ over-
lapping ideas of religious enquiry, resistance to the social and intellectual confinement of women,
and reformist influence, in which the image of the circle (important to Hays in her writing as well
as in her personal and professional development) plays a central role.
The 1790s was a vivid period of political and literary debate. The upheaval of the French Revo-
lution and the hope it promised for political and social reform that could lead to increased (if not
total) personal liberty encouraged some significant politically and socially progressive writers in
Britain. These include the poet and novelist Helen Maria Williams (1762–1827), who moved to
Paris to witness and report from the front wave of the revolution from 1790 onwards, the poet and
orator John Thelwall (1764–1842), arrested and imprisoned in Newgate prison on a charge of high
treason in 1794, and the poet and campaigner for religious and social equality Anna Letitia Bar-
bauld (1743–1825). In the 1790s, the novel became a useful forum for political debate; writers like
the poet Charlotte Smith (1749–1806) and the dramatist Thomas Holcroft (1745–1806) took up
novel writing to reach a wider audience and to make money in a lucrative market for fiction. These
political novels engaged with issues of personal liberty. Such an engagement was often achieved
by taking the popular Gothic theme of imprisonment and using it as the basis for an exploration
of the forces that restricted and imprisoned people in metaphorical and literal ways. The result
was a rigorous political and social critique, which we see in novels like Wollstonecraft’s Maria,
or The Wrongs of Woman (1798) and Smith’s Desmond (1792). This is the literary environment
into which Hays launched herself as a novelist. As an emerging writer who gained approval for a

367 DOI: 10.4324/9781003429951-30

 Eliza O’Brien

public letter defending communal worship at a time of religious discrimination, who wrote two
burningly topical novels in quick succession – Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796) and The Victim
of Prejudice (1799) – and who then disappeared in seeming disgrace, Hays’ life and works reward
a closer look than her marginal position may suggest.
In this chapter, I hope to present Mary Hays to a wider audience as a figure of real interest
whose significance in the Romantic period has undergone some valuable revision in recent years.
Hays’ scholarly champions Gina Luria Walker and Timothy Whelan have painstakingly uncovered
her life, letters, and wider works. Summaries of Hays’ career have tended to end with her apparent
silence for the second half of her life, but thanks to the work of Walker and Whelan, this view has
been substantially revised and Hays’ literary engagements beyond the 1790s have come into focus
(Whelan and James 2020; Chen 2021). An interesting area for current critical attention is Hays’
Female Biography (1803), six volumes of essays which vary considerably in length and cover
centuries’ worth of women’s experience. Susan Civale (2019) demonstrates the broader literary
significance of Hays’ writing beyond the world of political novels and argues that when we begin
to pay attention to the wider career of Hays, who as a writer was once seen as “(t)oo womanly, too
scandalous, or too ridiculous”, we see her as someone who “shaped the genre of life writing for
decades to come” (16). Elsewhere, Ian Ward (2009) has explored the rigour of Hays’ attack upon
antifeminist jurisprudence in the 1790s, and in a period of renewed critical interest in the role of re-
ligion in Romantic literature, Whelan (2019) and Felicity James (2012) have produced vital schol-
arship on Hays within the world of Dissenting women writers and their devotional genre of life
writing. My scholarly interest, however, is in the development of the political novel in the 1790s.
I hope that by returning to Hays’ novels with a fresh perspective on her seriousness as a writer and
political thinker, rather than viewing her as someone who simply fell into line with contemporaries
she admired, we can view Hays and her novels with a deeper appreciation.

Circles of enquiry
Hays was involved in a vibrant and sincere world of religious correspondence that became “her
avenue to intellectual growth” (Ty 1996: ix). She pursued the intellectual development available
to her, as a woman whose religious beliefs as a Dissenter placed her on the outskirts of society. A
Dissenter’s social, religious, and professional worlds could overlap tightly:

in this period, the circle of Dissenters, rationalists and, especially, avowed Unitarians was
both very small and constantly in contact and debate with each other, through mutual ac-
quaintances, correspondence and published writings which, as in the Wakefield and Hays
pamphlets, often constituted a kind of “public correspondence.”
(Purdie and Oliver 2010: 94–95)

The story of the life and career of Hays looks a lot like the stories of other women writers in her
time, particularly women on the reformist or radical side of the political and religious divides
common in the period. She was from a middle-class Dissenting family near London, and her
mother worked as a wine merchant to provide for the family after being widowed when Hays was
in her teens (Brooks 2000: 30; Whelan 2022). Dissenters were Protestants who existed outside
the official state religion of the Church of England. Dissenters were often also described as non-
conformists, as they did not conform to all the beliefs of Anglicanism as established by the Test
and Corporation Act of 1673; distinct non-conformist sects within this broader category of Dissent
included Baptists, Quakers, Methodists, and Unitarians. Dissenting men were barred from certain

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 Writing novels to reform society in the 1790s

professions and the political system until 1829, and from university education in England until
much later in the nineteenth century. Dissenting academies were established in the seventeenth
century to educate men widely for their religious ministry, “and the ministry and education re-
mained the defining factors in Dissent” (Haakonssen 1996: 10).
The religious life and the intellectual life were both situated in a wider network of self-­
development rooted in community. Many of these educational communities, while not always
radical, had hopes of political engagement and national reform. Some Dissenting academies were
renowned for their political ambitions, such as New College Hackney which “emerged at the
very centre of the tight network of metropolitan organisations which inspired reformist initiatives
throughout the 1780s and ’90s” (Burley 2011: 9). The importance given to intellectual develop-
ment and independent thought proved beneficial for women. From hearing preaching and sermons
at religious services and being encouraged to read the Bible in order to engage with it rather than
to follow it obediently, many Dissenting women had access to wider and more thorough intellec-
tual stimulation than what was typically available in the eighteenth century (Watts 2010:14–15).
It is significant that a number of notable reformist women writers from the Romantic period either
emerge from or engage with a clear and critical (in the sense of oppositional, but also essen-
tial) realm of religious thought (Watts 2010; Hutton 2021). Mary Wollstonecraft moved from an
Anglican upbringing to something more questioning but still sincere; Amelia Alderson neé Opie
(1769–1853) was from a prominent Unitarian family in Norwich and became committed to the
Abolition movement, joining the Quakers later in life; Elizabeth Hamilton (1758–1816) grew up
in a mixed household in Scotland that was both Presbyterian and Episcopalian.
The most celebrated woman writer of this period and one of its greatest poets, was Anna Letitia
Barbauld, neé Aikin, a Dissenter who benefited most clearly from the separate, distinct educational
environment established to support Dissenting beliefs. Barbauld gained an excellent education by
close association with the Warrington Academy in Lancashire, where her father was a noted tutor.
It enabled her to meet, and engage with, wide-ranging intellectual figures such as the Unitarian
minister Joseph Priestley (1733–1804), who was active in science and politics as well as religion
and who was associated with the academies of New College Hackney as well as Warrington.
Thanks to her father’s education and experience as a minister and tutor, Barbauld had direct ac-
cess to a wide range of books, received tuition in Greek and Latin, and was immersed in a world
of religious debate. All of this helped her to develop the idea that women’s “mental cultivation”
mattered and spurred her to work towards making that cultivation more widely available (O’Brien
2009: 205). Barbauld reached a wide audience and was a poet of national importance until one of
her finest works, Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, A Poem (1812), criticised the war with France
and the suffering it caused in terms too powerful for a conservative readership: “(s)he made no
effort to flatter, soothe, or entertain; on the contrary, she issued stern, even frightening, judgments”
(McCarthy 2008: 476). The virulent, conservative, gendered backlash Barbauld received made her
cease writing for publication, although she continued to write privately.
Hays had a quieter life, a very modest education and was in no way a literary celebrity like Bar-
bauld but for her, too, Dissenting culture had a beneficial effect upon her education and talent, and
she went on to support other women such as her sisters and particularly her niece, Matilda Mary
Hays, to write (Whelan and James 2020: xxxix; Whelan 2022). Various pupils within Hays’ im-
mediate and wider family, and in other households and schools, benefited from Hays’ knowledge
and skills and her occasional periods of teaching (Whelan 2022). Her early hope of marriage to
John Eccles from her local Baptist chapel ended with his death in 1780 when she was twenty-one.
They had written to each other frequently as part of their courtship, and by 1782, Hays had begun
to correspond on religious subjects with notable figures in the wider Dissenting world such as

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Robert Robinson (1735–1790). Robinson seems to have been a major influence upon Hays’ move-
ment from Baptism towards Unitarianism as an adult, and he is thought likely to “have influenced
her, by his words of encouragement, to become a writer” (Whelan 2019: 321). Hays corresponded
with Priestley, John Disney, and a range of other ministers at Unitarian chapels, who became “avid
readers” of Hays’ first major published works, Cursory Remarks on an Enquiry into the Expedi-
ency and Propriety of Public or Social Worship (1792) and Letters and Essays, Moral and Miscel-
laneous (1793) (Whelan 2019: 321). Hays’ early attempts at writing were conventional little scraps
of poetry and prose in magazines from 1781 onwards, but Cursory Remarks was a “bold venture”
(Kelly 1993: 83), marking Hays’ first public intervention in a debate about private versus public
worship in which Priestley and Disney had also engaged.
Written in response to Gilbert Wakefield’s An Enquiry into the Expediency and Propriety of
Public or Social Worship (1791), Hays, like Barbauld in her own Remarks on Mr Gilbert Wake-
field’s Enquiry into the Expediency and Propriety of Public or Social Worship (1792), disagreed
eloquently with Wakefield. One of the main features of Wakefield’s Enquiry is that it calls for the
abolition of public prayer. It is telling that both Hays and Barbauld refute his argument and show
that as writers and religious thinkers, they had gained much from communal religious life. Reli-
gious communities had enabled remarkable spiritual as well as intellectual development, as Hays,
writing under the pseudonym “Eusebia” makes clear:

I have myself experienced so much satisfaction, intellectual entertainment, and improve-

ment, from an attendance on the public ordinances of religion, that I cannot without concern,
see an institution which I am persuaded has been productive of consequences the most salu-
tary, treated with acrimony and derision.
(as cited in Walker 2006b: 123)

Barbauld went much farther than this, using her response to attack the aristocratic and hierarchi-
cal structure of British society, but she also identifies why community is essential for human
happiness:

There cannot be a more striking proof of the social tendency of those feelings, than the
strong propensity we have to suppose auditors when there are none. When men are wanting,
we address the animal creation; and rather than have none to partake our sentiments, we find
sentiment in the music of the birds, the hum of insects, and the low of kine: nay, we call on
rocks and streams and forests to witness and share our emotions.
(Barbauld 1825: 458–459)

Barbauld understands the deep human need for fellowship, which Wakefield’s argument ignores in
his preference for solitude. It is a similar need that Hays explores in her first novel, which examines
the destruction caused when an individual is driven to despair by an isolation, not of her choosing.
This need for fellowship and its benefits are some of the features of literary life in this period
which have gained increasing critical attention in recent years in discussions about the role of
networks that can be founded upon business, sociable, intellectual, religious, or political interests.
Hays is always discussed in relation to a network of other writers, but recent critics have begun
to argue in favour of this, seeing it as a virtue rather than weakness. Jon Mee provides an engag-
ing account of the network which Hays, Godwin, and Wollstonecraft contributed to, describing it
as “a nexus of […] conversation, politeness and sociability that each of these writers developed
in distinctive ways in their writing and in their relationships with others” (Mee 2011: 137). The

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 Writing novels to reform society in the 1790s

framework for these three writers’ network is much richer than previous notions of a brief period
of friendship in the mid-1790s suggest, lending a new depth to critical appreciation of writers who
exist and bloom in literary circles rather than in isolation. As Mee writes:

Their ideas on conversation were borne out of participation in a particular kind of conversable
world located in the expanding metropolis of London. They mixed primarily among literary
and professional people of the middling sort; many disposed to Dissent, often ­reform-minded
in politics, eager to debate the news of the day as well as various larger issues.
(2011: 137)

Any writer, and especially one who makes their a living as a writer and reviewer, must seek em-
ployment, patronage, and professional contacts, and exploring the flexibility and productivity of
those networks is rewarding. When Hays began to move in those literary circles in London, which
we now celebrate for their connection to Godwin and Wollstonecraft and their radical, dauntless,
much-prosecuted publisher Joseph Johnson (who also employed Hays as a reviewer for the Ana-
lytical Review in 1796–1798 and published The Victim of Prejudice), she received encouragement
and support. Yet the idea of a circle – literary, social, or otherwise – is not a straightforwardly
positive one in her writing.

The magic circle of confinement

Perhaps it was precisely this contrast between her early isolation and her later involvement in
literary circles that made Hays so attentive to the idea of the ‘magic circle’ in her two novels in
the second half of the 1790s. She uses the idea of a circle in two contrasting ways, as an image of
restriction but also as a place of desired (but delusive) shelter. The idea of confinement, in particu-
lar, described as a ‘magic circle’ is an important one. In Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796), when
faced with her inheritance of a “small pittance” and her financial dependence upon others, Emma
agonises: “[w]hy are we bound, by the habits of society, as with an adamantine chain? Why do we
suffer ourselves to be confined within a magic circle, without daring, by a magnanimous effort,
to dissolve the barbarous spell?” (Hays 1796/2000: 67, 66). This image of the “magic circle” has
received rewarding critical analysis (Kelly 1993; Ty 1993, 1996; Chen 2021). It presents an expe-
rience of shelter, or restriction, which seems like “magic” or enchantment but from which escape
may not be possible; if the “barbarous spell” does break, it reveals further harshness for women.
Wollstonecraft uses the image of the magic circle in her Letters written during a short residence
in Sweden, Norway and Denmark (1796) which predates Hays’ use of it in Emma Courtney later
that same year (Ty 1996: 204). Its appearance in Wollstonecraft’s travelogue features in a reverie
of happiness:

Phantoms of bliss! ideal forms of excellence! again inclose me in your magic circle, and
wipe clear from my remembrance the disappointments which render the sympathy painful,
which experience rather increases than damps; by giving the indulgence of feeling the sanc-
tion of reason.
(1796/2009: 67)

The richness of this image rewards us in our pursuit as much as Hays found it rewarding to re-
sist and later remake. From her exploration of women’s literal and metaphorical confinement by
men, to her experimentation with composite narratives, Hays’ novels represent the full range of

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possibilities for a radical writer concerned with personal liberty as it relates to form and reform.
Both novels contain a variety of discourses within their retrospective first-person narration, featur-
ing letters as well as inset narratives in written and recounted form. Both novels feature a similar
protagonist: a young woman of limited financial means living in a quiet way with few family and
friends to support her. She seeks her independence and happiness outside of the marriage market,
loses her loved ones, cannot earn a living, and is judged, frustrated, and persecuted every step of
her way. The novels detail the struggle of women who long to escape from the confinement of their
social position and from society’s judgement, but Hays also discusses and critiques the more literal
scenes of confinement within the legal and penal spheres, and in both novels, we see the image of
the magic circle closely analysed.
In Memoirs of Emma Courtney, Emma’s attempts to break out of her punitive circle of fi-
nancial and social confinement draw her into humiliation and shame. She pursues her romantic
desire for Augustus Harley without any clear reciprocation. Ultimately Emma suggests a sexual
relationship with Harley that forgoes any expectation of marriage as a way of creating some way
for them to unite, which was a radical step in 1790s fiction. This decision stems from Emma’s
profound isolation and unhappiness, which has gathered pace throughout the narrative and for
which she once again uses the image of the “magic circle” as an expression of her sense of
confinement:

Hemmed in on every side by the constitutions of society, and not less so, it may be, by my
own prejudices – I perceive, indignantly perceive, the magic circle, without knowing how
to dissolve the powerful spell. While men pursue interest, honor, pleasure, as accords with
their several dispositions, women, who have too much delicacy, sense, and spirit, to de-
grade themselves by the vilest of interchanges, remain insulated beings, and must be content
tamely to look on, without taking any part in the great, though often absurd and tragical,
drama of life.
(Hays 1796/2000: 116)

Her offer to Harley is not a collapse into vile “interchange” but an attempt to strike out of the circle
by establishing a new mode of romantic satisfaction. It proves to be disastrous: Harley rejects her,
announces he is already married, and Emma ends up having to marry another man, Montague,
out of financial necessity. That marriage ends in a spiral of Montague’s jealousy and infidelity; he
makes their servant Rachel pregnant and enforces an abortion, and then kills himself in despair.
By contrast, in The Victim of Prejudice (1799), the heroine Mary Raymond dreams of a circle as a
more nurturing and protective zone:

Why cannot I, with sweet magic, draw into one circle all I revere and love? Why cannot I
increase and multiply, a million-fold, these delightful sympathies? – My heart, with inex-
pressible yearnings, continually prompts me to unite, to bind, myself to my fellow-beings
by every social and relative tie
(Hays 1799/1998: 44)

Mary’s struggle echoes but reverses Emma’s “magnanimous effort” to resist the “habits of soci-
ety” as she wishes to create a protective circle in which she can resist society’s judgement of her
and break free of the circle it has already devised for her. As the daughter of an unwed mother
who was executed for a crime, Mary is more vulnerable than most women to judgement and per-
secution. She finds herself pursued by her neighbour Sir Peter Osborne, who seeks to trap her in a

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 Writing novels to reform society in the 1790s

circle of his desire where she will exist only as a sexual plaything. Osborne steadily destroys the
livelihood and security of Mary and her friends, creating a circle of confinement that she resists
continually but cannot free herself from.
Yet before Osborne’s pursuit becomes inescapable, an attempt has already been made to write
Mary into confinement. As her elderly guardian, Mr Raymond gently informs her:

I wish not to see the name of my girl enrolled in the tragic list either of martyrs or of victims:
solicitous for her happiness, I would have prudence temper her heroism. Need I enlarge?
Must I add – You can never be the wife of William Pelham?
(Hays 1799/1998: 32, emphasis in original)

This is the first Mary has heard of her illegitimacy, and it is also unknown to her childhood sweet-
heart, William. Mr Raymond, who once loved Mary’s mother, and who has raised Mary and given
her his name, has to warn her about the prejudices of the world beyond his quiet household. He
provides Mary with her mother’s memoir, written from her prison cell and addressed to Mr Ray-
mond. Hays has Mary describe this memoir as a “fatal narrative” (Hays 1799/1998: 71) but even
before she has read it, or it has become widely known, and before Mr Raymond dies and leaves
Mary unprotected, she finds herself at risk from Osborne; that risk becomes inescapable once
Mary is alone in the world. Osborne, who has first pursued her in her guardian’s home, finally
kidnaps her. From then on, Mary’s reputation is destroyed.
As a writer, Hays shares something of the fate of her heroines, seeing her own reputation
blasted as a result of trying to resist literary convention. Having used her private life and private
letters as the basis for the radical love plot in her first novel, she was ridiculed for it. Her physical
appearance was mocked and her ambitions were parodied by female and male writers from both
the progressive and the conservative sides of the literary world. A particularly cruel response came
in the form of another novel, Memoirs of Modern Philosophers (1800) written by the reform-
minded Elizabeth Hamilton, whose character of Bridgetina Botherim was widely viewed as a
portrait of Hays. With this caricature, Hamilton takes a writer of perseverance and innovation and
depicts her as a fool who has become intoxicated by contemporary radical philosophy, which her
scant understanding scarcely allows her to grasp. Before this rewriting of Hays, there were two
separate attempts to malign her by Charles Lloyd, an acquaintance of Hays’ brother who had been
her friend and correspondent for a while. In 1798, Lloyd produced the novel Edmund Oliver which
featured a caricature of Hays, and he also circulated a scurrilous rumour in real life which slan-
dered Hays’ modesty and sexual behaviour. As Whelan notes in his detailed chronology of Hays’
life, Lloyd’s lies about Hays’ virtue effectively rewrote Hays as a “libertine” and was “one of the
primary reasons for her retirement from the literary circles in which she had moved so fluidly the
previous five years” (Whelan 2022).
Hays had used her private letters from her correspondence with Godwin and with the con-
troversial Unitarian figure William Frend (1757–1841) as the main sources for her epistolary
material in Memoirs of Emma Courtney. This decision infused the novel with real-life despair at
the limited opportunities available for women, as well as the sincere advice offered by a philo-
sophically minded man in the character of Mr Francis, the fictional portrait of Godwin. In the
novel’s preface, Hays states clearly that she presents Emma’s actions as a “warning” rather than
as something to emulate (Hays 1796/2000: 36, emphasis in original), but, nonetheless, the plot
caused moral unease amongst its reviewers with regard to both the text and its author (Whelan
2022). As one of Hays’ most perceptive critics has noted, “life writing provided the vehicle
for her experiments” (Walker 2006a: 143). The literary audacity which Hays demonstrates in

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combining reflective memoir, personal experience, and original letters sprang from Hays’ deep
despair at her romantic rejection by Frend and her desire for greater progress in art as well as in
life. This audacity was met with the suspicion that Hays herself must have made the same offer
in reality that Emma makes in the novel (which she regretfully recalls), to live with her lover
outside of wedlock.
It was William Frend who initiated a correspondence with “Eusebia” in 1792 on the grounds
of religious debate, who then developed a personal interest in Hays (which she reciprocated) who
broke off what relationship there was by at least early 1796, if not before, and who may have re-
sumed contact irregularly with Hays until a definitive break in 1806 (Whelan 2022). A relationship
with Frend seemed to promise a harmonious overlapping of religious, literary, and radical interests
for Hays in ways that she believed would have led to great happiness for her. Writing to Godwin
in February 1796, she grieves that she has been plunged back into isolation:

I cannot love mankind collectively – they are a mere abstraction to me – why shou’d I love
them? – they do not make me, nor can I make them, happy. But I cou’d have encreas’d the
felicity & improvement of a small circle of individuals – & this circle, spreading wider &
wider, wou’d have operated towards the grand end, general utility. Every person is not in-
tended for a hero, neither wou’d this be necessary! The only true morality is that which tends
to encrease the bulk of felicity – my plan had this tendency, I am put out, & now perhaps
shall do mischief – The placid stream, turn’d out of its channel, lays waste the meadows.
(Brooks 2004: 431–33)

We see the “circle” here as a simple image of community and one which spreads its beneficence
as it widens, before Hays uses it as the negative image in Memoirs of Emma Courtney later that
year. In that novel, Hays uses letter writing as a forum for Emma’s self-development as she tries
to turn her character back into its own “channel”. Long, detailed, and agonisingly self-exposing as
some of Hays’ letters to Godwin are, Emma’s letters overwhelm the reader as she obsesses over the
mystery of love felt but undeclared in her relationship with Harley. For Emma, writing these letters
becomes a way in which she engages with, expresses, and eventually understands her feelings. But
the excess of those feelings produces an excess of letter-writing, catastrophic for Emma in that
they lead her to openly state her proposal to Harley to try and make him respond to her, and thank-
less for her implied reader; Hays’ description of the novel as “a warning” feels hammered home by
the narrator’s obsessive circling around her mistakes and her grievances. The novel is short, but it
is weighed down by what Emma describes as her “paltry expedients of combating error with error,
and prejudice with prejudice, in one invariable and melancholy circle” (Hays 1796/2000: 192),
and by the terrible narrowness of Emma’s life.
The limits of the narrative structure of Memoirs of Emma Courtney, at once detailed and mo-
notonous, are contrasted dramatically by The Victim of Prejudice, similarly short, but dazzling in
its focus. It is as if the personal attacks Hays endured for her first novel caused her to redouble
her own attack on society. This time, instead of the torrent of emotions from a narrator within a
suffocating world, the narrative gains great energy from its writer and its peerless heroine. Here
Hays is relentless in her pursuit of her novel’s aim, which is to present a forceful critique of so-
cial prejudice against women, rather than depicting a character who is relentless in her pursuit of
a beloved as Emma was. Mary, the protagonist of The Victim of Prejudice, is vulnerable due to
her orphaned state, her guardian’s old age, her lack of money and powerful male protection, her
beauty, and simply and most significantly, her proximity to a lecherous aristocrat who lacks all
restraint and who fears no reprisals. She refuses Osborne’s kisses, his sexual attention, his money,

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 Writing novels to reform society in the 1790s

his protection (if she will agree to become his mistress), and his name as her husband (after he
has kidnapped her, raped her, and had her imprisoned twice for debt). She resists him constantly,
and consistently, but is disbelieved by a society that does not want women to resist. When she
fights off an assault from a later employer, he jeers: “Sir Peter Osborne […] found less difficulty,
I have a notion, with my charmer. It is time you abated a little of this theatrical coyness” (Hays
1799/1998: 140).
A further element in the structure of Hays’ novels of resistance, and one which chimes with her
own experiences, is that her heroines’ reputations are dominated by fiction. Rumours are spread
about them, letters are circulated that malign them, and each woman sees her character rewritten
by society. In Memoirs of Emma Courtney, Emma is partly successful in her attempts to write
herself out of the narratives that control her. By 1799, Mary seems doomed to rewrite her mother’s
tragic memoir, but doomed by other people’s knowledge of it in conjunction with Osborne’s at-
tacks. It is society’s prejudice against Mary that decides her fate, rather than any error or crime she
has committed. Hays’ commitment to rethinking what it is to be a written or narrated subject, and
what it is to be a writing subject, means that her novels, regardless of their plot conclusions, can
in some way defeat the system of control by representing it: enquiry is the beginning of liberation.
Emma partially frees herself from social contempt and social control. Bolstered by her deceased
husband’s fortune, she rescues her servant Rachael and takes her back into her household, and con-
cludes her memoirs in a position of authority over her complete account. Mary cannot free herself
from prison, but dies understanding why she has been confined, and by whom, and for what; she
dies writing and still resisting.
My point here is not to say that Hays’ second novel was more pessimistic, as critics have argued
(Ty 1993: 60; Watson 1994: 49), but that as a novelist, Hays has moved thoroughly from the self-
involved and narrow world of Emma’s experience into a clear, concise, and devasting social attack
upon everything that works against women in a male-designed and male-controlled world. As we
see with Osborne and a range of minor characters in The Victim of Prejudice, a man can destroy a
woman’s reputation and can make it impossible for her to live, supported by other men and women
who are variously and wilfully complicit in her downfall. But in this novel, Hays shows that a
woman can maintain her resistance, can maintain her virtue (in its truest sense, beyond a mere idea
of public reputation), and can live in intellectual freedom despite being imprisoned in every other
way. Mary’s mind and character have developed so well, so securely, and so clearly that she is
never confused about which version of herself is the true one. She rejects the socially constructed
role she is expected to play as a sexually available temptress, which is trumpeted at her from her
very first encounter with her aggressor Osborne, who labels her at the age of fourteen as “a true
daughter of Eve” (Hays 1799/2000: 14) and which then defines how she is treated by her wider
society. If Hays intended Emma Courtney to act as a warning for her readers, Mary Raymond is
clearly not only their victim, but their judge.
This is what Hays does with the novel form in the 1790s: she rewrites it as an enquiry
into systems of confinement, and it becomes an enquiry which continues irresistibly once it
has begun, and which no attempt to ridicule, either within or outside the novel, can defeat.
The reception her novels received has cast a shadow over their formal and thematic innova-
tion, making them seem more negative, more certain to fail than they in fact are. Indeed, they
cannot wholly succeed due to their subject matter and intent. Hays’ novels are in the model
of Godwin’s fiction, which was committed to representing “things as they are” rather than
presenting fictional solutions to real sorrow. This model was inspired by the title and approach
of Godwin’s highly influential novel Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams
(1794). His novel depicts a corrupt society in which those who struggle against oppression

375
 Eliza O’Brien

are destroyed, and justice is impossible. Godwin shows how Caleb becomes the victim of his
master Falkland, and that this persecution becomes a form of inescapable confinement. When
Hays follows this model in The Victim of Prejudice, we see how Mary’s whole life descends
into the same sort of confinement that has been created so easily by a relentless male aristocrat.
In a bold move on Hays’ part, however, in Memoirs of Emma Courtney, she rewrites the typi-
cally male role of pursuer as a female role when Emma sets off in pursuit of Harley, and Hays
demonstrates how destructive this model is in eighteenth-century fiction irrespective of the per-
secutor’s gender. As much as Caleb or Mary is confined as a victim of persecution, Emma, like
Falkland, becomes confined by her role as persecutor. Hays’ two stories about women struggling
for independence in the 1790s attempt and partially achieve a lasting enquiry into systems of
confinement aimed at women, which are constructed and perpetuated by society. What might
seem like shelter to an individual seeking refuge is instead revealed as a further twist within
society’s confinement of her:

(T)he painful sense of my misfortunes, of my wrongs, seemed as on a sudden obliterated. I

felt guarded as by a talisman, encompassed in a magic circle, through which neither danger
could assail nor sorrow pierce me. Absorbed in the present, the past and the future were, for
a period, alike forgotten. My soul, formed for love, felt, in that exquisite moment, its sensi-
bilities, infinite, exhaustless!
(Hays 1799/1998: 122, emphasis in original)

In The Victim of Prejudice, the image of the magic circle appears here as the delusive haven which
Wollstonecraft once dreamed of. William seems to offer justice and security to Mary after she has
freed herself from Osborne’s domestic confinement, but his judgement in this scene makes Mary’s
fate clear, at least from the perspective of general society: he asks Mary to become his mistress.
Once again Mary has to make her own way, alone and unguarded but still with her clear resist-
ance. Throughout the novel, Hays never loses the clarity and focus of Mary’s first-person narra-
tion. The narration contains Mary’s mother’s tale, and letters from other characters, but Mary’s
voice is never displaced by these. Some critics have suggested that the mother’s inset tale writes
her daughter’s fate, and makes explicit the script that awaits Mary as the known daughter of the
publicly disgraced mother (Kelly 1993: 122; Watson 1994: 50). But if we look at the novel again,
we can see how Mary writes her own narrative with complete authority. Like Emma, Mary has
retained control of her tale in her telling of it, even if the details within the tale demonstrate the
strength of other’s opinions and misjudgements, including Emma’s own errors. But Mary does
not err. She reads her mother’s tale and continues to write her own, deals with her despair, and
maintains her own dignity and virtue. Her character demonstrates such strength and purpose that
this becomes another way in which Hays creates resistance to the script written by others. Mary’s
resistance carries her through and is maintained right to the end, when her narrative breaks off in
her final prison cell:

the powers of my mind wasted […] my virtues and sufferings alike unrewarded, I have lived
in vain! unless the story of my sorrows should kindle in the heart of man, in behalf of my
oppressed sex, the sacred claims of humanity and justice.
(Hays 1799/1998: 174, emphasis in original)

Her narrative ends, but her resistance never ends, because these crimes can never be accepted, and
because her story lives on.

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 Writing novels to reform society in the 1790s

Conclusion: waves of influence

My ardent sensibilities incite me to love – to seek to inspire sympathy – to be beloved! My
heart obstinately refuses to renounce the man, to whose mind my own seems akin! From the
centre of private affection, it will at length embrace – like spreading circles on the peaceful
bosom of the smooth and expanded lake – the whole sensitive and rational creation. Is it
virtue, then, to combat, or to yield to, my passions?
(Hays 1796/2000: 149–150)

In Memoirs of Emma Courtney, Emma uses the idea of the circle in quite a different way. Here,
with its “spreading circles”, rippling towards happiness, we have the contrasting image that Hays
frequently uses when attacking or lamenting the confines of the magic circle. This is the alter-
native existence that she believes needs to be worked towards, one which can be illustrated by
the beneficial “spreading circles” based on love and sincere affection, instead of the destructive
confinement of the magic circle as we have seen. The practice Hays gained in writing letters in
the early days of her education and career had a clear effect upon her emergence as a writer of
literature, as it was this that led to a rippling or “spreading” effect in her engagement with the
world for both its own improvement and for her greater happiness. Beginning with her personal
letters to influential Dissenters, moving on to her engaging public Letter as Eusebia and then to
her letter-writing fictional heroines, Hays wrote her way into becoming a target for the attacks she
experienced, but found a way to write past them and to find new readers. Thus Hays herself moved
from a circle of confinement to a circle of influence. Through the repetition of the image in her
novels, her objection to restriction gains clarity and strength, until finally she recasts the circle as
one of beneficial influence. Hays tried to write her way beyond the magic circle to a certain degree
in her personal life. She wrote beyond it to a remarkable degree in her professional life, which
Emma, repeating Hays’ despairing letter to Godwin from 20 February 1796 almost verbatim,
eloquently expresses here:

Should I, at length, awake from a delusive vision, it would be only to find myself a comfort-
less, solitary, shivering wanderer, in the dreary wilderness of human society. I feel in myself
the capacities for increasing the happiness, and the improvement, of a few individuals – and
this circle, spreading wider and wider, would operate towards the grand end of life – general
utility.
(Hays 1796/2000: 148)

In 1803, Hays produced her substantial Female Biography (1803) in six volumes, which she had
begun in the late 1790s and for which her brief obituaries of Wollstonecraft in the Monthly Maga-
zine (September 1797) and Annual Necrology (1800) seem to have been a spur in stimulating Hays
to understand how crucial it was for a woman to write the life of another woman (Kelly 1993: 234).
This was especially important given the damage done to Wollstonecraft’s reputation by Godwin’s
memoir in 1798, whose critics wilfully misread his account of Wollstonecraft’s life and work.
Writing real lives had an interesting result for Hays. In 1806, she wrote the material for what be-
came the third volume of Charlotte Smith’s The History of England, from the Earliest Records to
the Peace of Amiens; in a Series of Letters to a Young Lady at School, published that year along
with Smith’s first two volumes and all under Smith’s name; in a curious way, Hays briefly became
Charlotte Smith herself, as if the fraught fictional path by which Hays arrived at history and biog-
raphy allowed her to achieve a subtle mastery of her subject by disappearing into it.

377
 Eliza O’Brien

If we view Hays’ later works as the continuation of her writing in the 1790s, rather than as scat-
terings in the aftermath of her defeat, we can learn to see her ambition at work in a new field: that
of the “feminization” of two whole genres as she turned increasingly to history and biography in
the nineteenth century (Kelly 1993: 250). In some way, her exploration of her own struggle and
emotions via letters and epistolary fiction prepared the ground from which she was able to reap
this harvest. Hays was to spend another twenty years writing, going on to publish such works
as Historical Dialogues for Young Persons (1807) and Memoirs of Queens, Illustrious and Cel-
ebrated (1821) as well as didactic works for children. And these were merely her published works;
as educator and letter-writer to family and friends she helped to pave the way for other women
to write. Her 1790s novels showed how difficult it is to uphold virtue, truth, and knowledge, but
what Hays had found out in her private and professional lives is that support is the element which
makes a thinker, which makes a writer, and which makes a free woman. A circle can confine, but
in resetting it, a writer can create small ripples of influence. The ripples that emerged from Hays’
education, her supporters, and the networks she went on to establish, irrespective of how small in
scale, continue in their outward motion.

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 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

By 1851, when Eliza Lynn (later Lynn Linton) published Realities: A Tale, her third and most
overtly feminist novel, she had already made history.1 In 1848, following the publication of her
well-received second novel Amymone: A Romance in the Days of Pericles (1848), in which she
had championed women’s education through the character of Pericles’ learned mistress Aspasia,
she had joined the staff of the Morning Chronicle, becoming the first woman to obtain a salaried
post on an English national daily (Onslow 2009). Such early and impressive strides into profes-
sional authorship would have been especially encouraging to Lynn, who had moved to London
from Crosthwaite in Cumbria to become a writer. However, she soon found herself losing ground
as both novelist and journalist. In April 1851, she quit her job at the Morning Chronicle following
a quarrel with her editor. Her latest novel Realities, set in contemporary London and offering a
strikingly sympathetic account of actresses, prostitutes, and needlewomen, had been declined by
many publishers, including the radical John Chapman, who was so shocked by its tone and treat-
ment of sexual relations that he reneged on his initial undertaking to publish it (Anderson 1989:
134; Broomfield 2001: 281n2).
Although Kathryn Gleadle had long identified Realities as “one of the most important and ne-
glected feminist novels” of its time, it has remained understudied (1995: 111). This chapter aims
to fill this gap by placing it within the context of emerging feminist debates of the 1840s and the
1850s and offering a close analysis of its critical contribution to the mid-century discourse on
working women. As a Victorian theatre novel, Realities offers a remarkably early representation
of the challenges faced by women in male-dominated lines of work and also engages with some
aspects of what is now recognized as gender harassment in the workplace. Even more strikingly,
Lynn suggests as a solution, not women’s flight into the safety of marital domesticity but a resil-
ient professionalism. Her heroine Clara, an actress whose career is ruined by her theatre manager
and former lover Vasty when she challenges his authority, continues to work on the stage. Her
experiential knowledge of the gender hierarchies of the theatrical world give her a new measure
of intellectual and ethical independence. No longer aspiring for stardom, she takes up small parts
to stay self-sufficient while also charting a new life as a social reformer. I examine Lynn’s radical

DOI: 10.4324/9781003429951-31 380

 Actress as an independent woman and social reformer

deployment of the Godiva myth to contest contemporary notions of women’s social work and
­professional authorship. In examining Lynn’s early radical novel, this chapter also adds to our
understanding of the feminist origins of Lynn Linton’s later career as a conservative woman of
letters.
Indeed, when Realities was eventually brought out by Saunders and Otley in May 1851, Lynn
claimed it as an affirmation of her brand of gritty, reformist writing. However, she was also acutely
anxious about having published, in her own name, a book that many established publishers had
considered too radical for their imprint.2 In the novel’s dedicatory preface addressed to her mentor
Walter Landor, Lynn tries to keep her readers from being swayed by potentially adverse reviews by
suggesting that these, like the censure that had greeted the manuscript, were driven by conserva-
tive literary taste and politics. She claimed that the book’s advocacy of divorce, non-sectarianism,
and the “Social Doctrines Taught by Christ” had already drawn wide-ranging criticism (Lynn
1851: vi). Some condemned the book’s ideas while others thought it failed “as a work of art”, and
even friends considered it “a species of literary Caliban – a monstrous thing of wickedness and
deformity – advocating all that was abhorrent to reason and good morals” (iv). Many had sought
to scare her from publishing it with “dark pictures of evil consequences to my reputation” (iv).
“Few women could have withstood such a battery of condemnation”, but she had stood firm in her
belief in the social and aesthetic value of her writing long before it had any established cultural and
market value (v). In claiming to have exposed herself to calumny and condemnation in service of
authorship as a Christian and civic duty, Lynn implicitly associates herself with female Christian
martyrs as well as the legendary Lady Godiva, who had ridden naked through the city to save her
people from unfair taxes.
Contrary to Lynn’s claims, her novel was no isolated literary protest. It emerged from a wider
social and political movement mobilized by a group of middle-class writers and reformers in the
1830s and 1840s which, as Kathryn Gleadle has shown, focused centrally on literature as a tool for
social transformation (1995). This group originated from William Johnson Fox’s Unitarian Chapel
at South Place in Finsbury, London, which attracted a wide spectrum of progressive intellectuals,
including many from outside the Unitarian faith. It also had close links with contemporary social-
ist, secularist, Unitarian, and utilitarian movements (Gleadle 1995: 4). At the heart of their ideas
of social reform lay a shared commitment towards undoing the subordination of women by men.
In fact, the term by which they are now commonly identified, “radical Unitarians”, was first used
by Gleadle in order to distinguish them from the mainstream Unitarians who held more traditional
views on women (1995: 4).
Historically, the radical Unitarian critique of existing gender norms, along with the sexual radi-
calism advanced by contemporary Owenite and communitarian groups, constitutes a crucial link
between the late-eighteenth century feminism of Mary Wollstonecraft and the organized women’s
rights campaigns of the mid-nineteenth century (Taylor 1983; Gleadle 1995: 2). Although the radi-
cal Unitarians, like most of their contemporaries, rarely claimed an allegiance to Wollstonecraft
in public for fear of getting associated with the sexual laxity that she had come to signify for the
Victorians, their feminism had in common with hers, the Unitarian regard for rationality, educa-
tion, and a conception of the individual as shaped by their environment (Gleadle 1995: 58; Caine
1997). William Godwin and Leigh Hunt’s participation in Fox’s coterie provided another link to
Wollstonecraft’s thought and context (Gleadle 1995: 38).
Lynn was closely associated with this group in the 1840s, which also included several other
women writers: the feminist novelist Mary Leman Grimstone, the radical editor Mary Howitt, and
Mathilda Hays, who translated the work of the French feminist writer George Sand into English.

381
 Teja Varma Pusapati

In a retrospective account of her career, Lynn claimed she had been, in these years, “one of the
most ardent and enthusiastic of the advanced guard” who “thought that the lives of women should
be as free as those of men” (Layard 1901: 140). Lynn went on to marry a prominent member of
this set, the engraver and journalist William James Linton, who also founded and edited the radi-
cal periodical, the English Republic (1851–1855). In it, Lynn published a remarkably appreciative
article on Mary Wollstonecraft, hailing her as “one of the first, […] one of the ablest, defenders
of the Rights of Woman” (1854: 418). She also published in Douglas Jerrold’s Shilling Magazine
(1845–1848) and Howitt’s Journal (1847–1848), which had been set up by fellow radical Unitar-
ians Douglas Jerrold and William and Mary Howitt and had a wider audience than the English
Republic, spanning artisan and middle-class families.3 These journals were part of a wider line
of journals that Brian Maidment has termed the “magazines of popular progress” (1984). These
journals sought to build support for a wide range of social and political reforms and also enabled
women writers to play a prominent role in Victorian print culture as editors and journalists. Lynn’s
first novel, Azeth the Egyptian, was hailed by Howitt’s as “an extraordinary book”, purposefully
written with “deep thought, study and research” to expose “falsehood, in all its multiple shapes”
rather than “to fill up idle moments” (10 April 1847: 210). Realities carried forward the radical
Unitarian aim of transforming the reading public by writing fiction that exposed the falsities and
limitations of conventional attitudes towards women. Most of these journals had shut down by the
time Realities was published, with its but it is unlikely that the novel, with its marked departure
from convention, would have been reviewed positively in such family-oriented publications. Eliza
Cook’s Journal, one of the few “magazines of popular progress” still running at the time, which
published articles and fiction in support of women’s work, carried a brief extract from the novel,
entitled “Petsy-Wetsy”, about the heroine’s healthful infancy, noting the novel’s existence to its
readers but eliding its radical themes and content (2 August 1851: 224).
As a critical and commercial failure, the novel had limited immediate impact. However, the
very terms on which it was dismissed indicate its radical transgression of the gendered constraints
of women’s writing. The influential Athenaeum warned readers that Lynn raved “like a Pytho-
ness”, and like other contemporary “ladies” prone to “prattle” about things of which they had
no knowledge, she had addressed such serious masculine topics as urban poverty, divorce, and
women’s reputation with “great flippancy, great inconsistency, and a conspicuous ignorance of her
premises and of the facts by which they are illustrated” (14 June 1851: 626). The Critic praised
Lynn’s “moral courage” but found her, regrettably, to be a “rank Socialist – a Red Republican in
petticoats” with a “sickly ambition to be an English George Sand”, whose attempt to propagate
the French feminist’s vision of radical social change violated “our notions of propriety” (1 June
1851: 261, emphasis in original). Even the Literary Gazette, which strikingly echoed Lynn’s self-
image in commending her for showing “the courage of Una [...] the confidence of Godiva” in
depicting the “implacable social problems of our troubled and diseased civilization”, regretted her
“want of self-restraint” (7 June 1851: 393). As I will show, it is precisely Lynn’s presentation of
women’s emancipation as a solution to pressing social issues that makes her novel a crucial source
of ­Victorian literary feminism.
This chapter also contributes to a developing revaluation of Lynn’s status as an “anti-feminist”
writer. The failure of Realities is said to have not only put off Lynn from writing novels for more
than a decade but also to have driven her to make a dramatic volte-face from radical feminism
to popular and conservative gender politics (Anderson 1989: 134; Broomfield 2001: 267, 2004:
263–264). Lynn’s notorious and wildly successful “Girl of the Period” series, published in the
Saturday Review in 1868, wherein she lampooned contemporary women for departing from their
traditional roles as mothers and wives, has sealed her image as a woman writer who made a

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 Actress as an independent woman and social reformer

career out of denouncing the contemporary women’s movement (Anderson 1987; Sanders 1996;
Broomfield 2001). This image of Lynn as a vehement anti-feminist has been revised by recent
scholarship that has drawn attention to her continuing support for more progressive divorce laws
and has shown the conservatism of her later writings as having been shaped in part by the publish-
ing avenues for which she wrote (Sanders 1999: 36; Easley 2018). This chapter draws attention to
another surprising strand of continuity in Lynn’s career: her support of women’s work, especially
in theatre. In March 1885, she published “The Stage as a Profession for Women” in the National
Review, wherein she questioned the popular prejudice against actresses and asked that they take
upon themselves the onus to “bell the cat of prejudice, and prove that to be an actress, even not
of the first strength, is not necessarily to be virtually a dévergondée” (19). Almost three decades
earlier, when the respectability of the stage was far more suspect, Lynn herself had attempted such
a revision of public opinion in Realities, whose heroine offers a model of the ordinary actress as
both a self-sufficient professional and a spirited reformer.

The actress as an independent woman

Between 1841 and 1911, women entered the stage in large numbers, initially matching and then
overtaking the number of their male counterparts (Kent 1977: 94; Davis 1991: 9, 77). Theatre per-
formers were “only nominally classifiable as a group” since their skills, salaries, and public image
all varied greatly depending on their location within theatre’s internal gradations (Davis 1991: 3).
For example, London’s West End was more specialized and prestigious than provincial theatre,
a leading role was considered more respectable than a part in a chorus or ballet (Zakreski 2006:
143). The profession was stratified into a small upper-class of successful leading men and women,
­expansive middle ranks of ordinary actors, and the lower lines of ballet dancers and choral singers
(Zakreski 2006: 143). Although the stage grew in public esteem in the mid-nineteenth century,
its claims to ­professional status remained shaky due to its lack of autonomous and standardized
norms of recruitment, evaluation, and advancement that characterised other established middle-
class ­professions (Kent 1977: 95).
It also remained the least respectable of the artistic professions and discussions of its legitimacy
as a source of entertainment for the middle classes pivoted centrally on the propriety of actresses
(Zakreski 2006: 141). While theatre work at the highest levels offered women the prospect of
fame, fortune, and a public vocation of their own, the actress’ transgression of the cherished norm
of feminine domesticity in entering a markedly public line of work and assuming myriad perso-
nae and even, on occasion, masculine roles, all enhanced the public perception of the theatre’s
problematic otherness to the world of ordinary social convention (Powell 1997: 4–7, 27). The
common association between the actress and the prostitute indicated that no level of skill or fame
could entirely safeguard a woman’s public performance from being perceived as a form of paid
sexual display. Although ballet dancers and other ill-paid theatre workers were the usual targets
of the ‘whore’ metaphor, “a ripple effect implicated all other female performers” (Davis 1991:
78). Actresses combated such unsavoury associations by adhering to the codes of conventional
femininity in their personal conduct and emphasizing such conformity in their autobiographical
writings (Corbett 1992).
The uncertain respectability of women’s theatrical careers also put the propriety of all female
paid, public work in question. Recuperating the social image of the actress thus became important
not only for those within the profession but also for those attempting to win wider social acceptance
for women’s employment (Zakreski 2006: 145). Amongst these were the radical Unitarians, who
sought to break the cultural consensus against women’s work by offering positive representations

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of working women. Mary Howitt’s article on the American Actress Charlotte Cushman in the
People’s Journal was especially influential in constructing a positive public image for the actress
in England (Merrill 1999: 120, 139). Howitt hailed Cushman as one of the “noblest representa-
tives” of the stage who, through her skill, earnestness, and vocational commitment, disproved the
common notion of acting being an inherently degraded occupation (18 July 1846: 30). The article
and the accompanying portrait by the radical artist Margaret Gillies emphasized Cushman’s devo-
tion to her sister Susan, also an actress. As Lisa Merrill has shown, Howitt interpreted Cushman’s
inclination for male roles, whose unconventionality was augmented by her adoption of male dress
offstage, as part of her sisterly devotion by stating that she did so in order to secure and reserve the
female parts for Susan (1999: 125). In Howitt’s Journal, Mary published a celebratory memoir of
another American actress, Anna Cora Mowatt, to illustrate the journal’s belief that the stage was
“capable of becoming one of the great means of human advancement and improvement” (4 March
1848: 146). The organ of the mid-century women’s movement devoted to expanding women’s
paid work, the English Woman’s Journal (1858–1864), underlined that most actresses were “ir-
reproachable women and patient workers” rather than depraved sinners (S February 1859: 387).
As Patricia Zakreski has noted, in describing the actress’ performance as an act of labour, rather
than bodily display, such writings “shifted the issue of the commodification of the actress from
the sexual to the industrial economy” and helped to recuperate the actress as an exemplar of the
Protestant work ethic (2006: 147).
Lynn’s novel makes a crucial contribution to this developing feminist discourse. Its main plot
charts Clara Clayton’s development from a young girl who flees a life of provincial aristocratic
privilege for the London stage and who, by grappling with its dangers, rigours, and privileges,
finally emerges as a respectable, self-sufficient actress. Lynn extends the inherent radicalism of
many Victorian theatre novels which showed their actress heroines transitioning successfully from
the stage to a domestic life. As Lauren Chattman has argued, in foregrounding the link between
performance and femininity, such novels suggested that “gender […] is part of an assumed identity
and is performed according to culture’s script” and thus anticipated twentieth-century feminist
theorizations of gender as performance (1994: 85). Half-Sisters (1848) by Geraldine Jewsbury
has been widely noted for challenging stereotypical notions of actresses as unfit for domesticity
by depicting the heroine Bianca as having been trained for matrimony by her career on the stage
(Chattman 1994: 76, Zakreski 2006: 148–161). Lynn’s novel goes even further – while Jewsbury’s
Bianca eventually abandons the stage to become a proper, married lady, Clara marries a colleague,
her theatrical tutor, and continues her professional career. The stage, in Lynn’s novel, is shown to
be a training ground not for a domesticating marriage but for marriage as a professional and intel-
lectual partnership.
As heir to the “great De Saumarez family of Shorne”, Clara is a complete misfit (I: 2).4 A
Republican at heart, she swears by the principles of the French Revolution, and has more faith in
François Mignet’s History of the French Revolution than in the Bible (I: 43). Even as a thirteen-
year-old, Clara rebels against the “cold authority” of her parents and pines for a more direct role
in public and political life (I: 4). She idealizes Joan of Arc and female French revolutionaries such
as Madame Roland and Charlotte Corday (I: 42–43). She dreams of running away from home
and serving the Irish revolutionary John Mitchell as “cookmaid, secretary, or generalissimo, she
did not care which” as long as it provided a medium to “advance the good work” (I: 57). At six-
teen, she first encounters the world of theatre through Miss Lucretia Kemble, the daughter of a
cheesemonger and a minor actress from London who visits Shorne on a provincial tour and falsely
claims to hail from the famous Kemble family (I: 61; I: 128). Clara is so enamoured by Lucre-
tia’s description of “the excitement and the glories of a theatrical career”, especially the “vivid

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delight” of having the power to make “the hearts of […] hundreds […] beat and throb as you chose
and willed”, that the stage soon displaces politics as her desired sphere of public action (I: 75,
emphasis in original). As an established and emphatically public line of work, theatre appears to
the convention-hating Clara as the only feasible opening to a life “of freedom and of action” (I:
81). Thus, although her mother Mrs. Saumarez promptly exposes Lucretia’s fraudulent claims to
theatrical eminence and though Lucretia herself soon alerts Clara to the many pitfalls of the stage,
Clara continues to be drawn to a theatrical career. She escapes home to join Miss Kemble’s theatre
in London, firmly convinced that the stage will provide an avenue to greater liberty and autonomy
(I: 87–88; I: 91–93).
This view, however, is exposed as reflecting the very naivete that Clara must outgrow in ­order
to benefit from the precarious and stratified, yet crucial avenue of employment that theatre offers
women. While minor actresses from lower middle-class backgrounds, like Lucretia, earn enough
to make ends meet, those further down the line of theatrical work, such as “the depraved little
ballet-dancer”, are pushed to drunkenness and prostitution from poor pay and crushing ­working
conditions, much like the needlewomen in the novel’s subplot (I: 106). Echoing contempo-
rary commentators who were concerned about the theatre’s geographical proximity to sites of
­solicitation, Lynn shows the promenades surrounding Clara’s theatre as frequented by prostitutes
(II: 190; Davis 1991: 81–82). Female workers also face sexual threat from the theatre’s predatory
and “­omnipotent manager”, Vasty Vaughan (I: 97). In a remarkably early account of how gender
­hierarchy in the workplace enables men to exploit and harass women with impunity, Lynn shows
Vasty using his power over women’s theatrical careers to have “the pick of […] established actresses”
(I: 119). When Vasty takes Clara under his wing, Lucretia understands that his patronage comes
with the threat of seduction but is so enthralled to the man “in power, and dispenser of reputation
and position to his actress world” that instead of safeguarding Clara, she entrusts her to his care
(I: 97). Rather than ascribing Lucretia’s complicity to personal cowardice, Lynn presents it as a
systemic problem, common to all institutions with deeply unequal power relations:

The curse of subordination had fallen on her, as on us all in more or less degree; and from
her chief – she would have borne profligacy, tyranny, and insult and deemed it only in the
way of her profession; part of the daily bread which the gas-light and its false world gave
her. The theatrical population is not alone in this subservience to its leaders; it is the brand
stamped on most of those who are dependent on others.
(I: 97–98)

Here, Lynn draws on the radical Unitarians’ distinctive formulation of female enslavement to
­elucidate the problem of men’s domination of women at work. Unlike the Chartists and other
working-class radicals who likened the drudgery of factory work to slavery and aimed to free
female labourers by restoring their right to stay at home, the radical Unitarians perceived female
enslavement as deriving “not from their labour, but […] from a historically distorted culture”
that naturalized women’s domestic subservience to men (Gleadle 1995: 91). For them, women’s
employment was key to female emancipation and even female factory workers and miners could
be truly free only by taking up alternative, safer lines of work. Lynn deploys this idea to ex-
pose the implications of women’s cultural subjection on their professional lives. A theatre novel
proved an ideal medium of exploring this issue since unlike other artistic professions, like writing
and painting, which women could undertake in relative isolation and by themselves, acting
­required women to work with, and often under, men. Gender hierarchy in theatre is so naturalized
that Lucretia accepts Vasty’s “profligacy, tyranny, and insult” as an unquestionable aspect of work:

385
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it all seems “only in the way of her profession”. By emphasizing that Lucretia remained under
the “curse of subordination” despite earning her own “daily bread”, Lynn suggests that financial
independence was a critical but not sufficient condition of women’s emancipation. To attain true
freedom, she suggests, women must recognise and reject their subordination to their male profes-
sional superiors. Clara’s development from a vulnerable ingénue to a seasoned actress marks the
rise of a new fictional model of the female professional as a consummately “independent woman”:
one who not only earns her own livelihood but also challenges gender inequities in her profes-
sional and personal life.
Like other Victorian theatre novels, Realities charts Clara’s early rise to stardom through the
trope of inborn talent and overnight success (Powell 1997: 8). Her theatrical tutor Perceval Glynn,
“as all the rest”, is struck by her prodigious talent, a combination of “power of character and grasp
of intellect” that enables her to debut with only a few months’ training (I: 100). His prediction of
her future success boosts Clara’s professional zeal, making “the worst drudgery of her education”
seem to her like “pure poetic pleasure” (I: 100). Her debut is a triumph of what Victorian theatre
critics such as G.H. Lewes praised as “natural” acting, wherein a performer threw themself so fully
into character that they could let go of the conventional style of acting in favour of an intuitive
emoting that seemed more authentic to the character (Lewes 1875: 109–125; Zakreski 2006: 150).
In playing the titular Ianthe, a young Greek wife whose beloved husband fights in the Greek War
of Independence, Clara identifies “entirely with her part” and forgets “that this was acting only”
(I: 254). Through her performance, she infuses the “coarse and poor” script with a “rare delicacy
and rich eloquence”, and in one scene, fully lost in her role, Clara forgets the script’s demand for
an “orthodox conventionality of stage revenge” and shows mercy instead, “a more feminine ac-
tion and the spontaneous expression of nature” (I: 251; I: 255). Applauded by audience and critics
alike, her debut catapults her to stardom.
Soon after, Clara discovers that she is, in fact, the illegitimate daughter of Martha Clayton,
whose father Hugh is a servant of the Saumarez’s. With no family to fall back upon, she accepts
that she now has only “my brains between me and the workhouse” but claims that this knowledge
makes her feel “more womanly, more strong and independent” than ever before (II: 74). Lynn
draws on ideas of inherent sexual difference to suggest that since gender was indelible, women’s
professional lives could only enhance their femininity by enabling them to fully develop their
inborn womanly qualities. In revealing that “Clara Clayton”, the stage name that Clara had chosen
out of fondness for her former servant Hugh, was her true identity, the novel not only suggests
that she was predestined for a professional life but also presents the stage as a space of refuge
from where an illegitimate daughter of a servant may chart a new, untainted life of her own. This
is part of the novel’s emphasis on the stage’s ability to serve as an enabling, conducive space to
those ­rejected by conventional society. The novel’s hero and the mouthpiece for its radical Uni-
tarian ideas, Perceval, is of genteel birth and “educated with the leading men of the day” but is
shunned by high society for “unconventional opinions” (I: 106). He finds a footing in the “lax
theatrical world”, wherein he not only earns his livelihood as a tutor but also helps a large class
of distressed working women, including ballet girls and needlewomen, with money and advice
(I: 106). Throughout, he functions as a foil to Vasty, honing Clara’s professional skills as well as
her ideas on social and political reform, and offers an alternative model of the theatre worker as a
radical social reformer.
For all her talent and success, Clara’s agency as a professional actress is shown to be severely
impaired by her inability to gauge the inequities and dangers of her workplace. Oblivious to the
problems of Vasty’s authoritarian mode of patronage, she falls in love with him and intuitively chan-
nels her romantic feelings to play Ianthe. While other theatre novels like Jewsbury’s Half Sisters

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presented their actress heroine’s unconscious direction of sexual passions into her p­ erformance
as enabling her to remain modest by providing a harmless outlet for her sexual energies, Lynn
presents such channelling as crippling professional dependence (Zakreski 2006: 154–155). Clara
suffers the adverse effects of her artistic reliance on Vasty at a later point when, with Vasty turning
against her, she finds that “the lamp by which she had lighted her young soul had gone out in dust
and ashes”, leaving her so incapable of taking “pleasure” in the role that she plays it “very badly”
(II: 99). In submitting entirely to Vasty’s control, both professionally and personally, she fails to
negotiate her rightful income or secure the professional freedom to move to another theatre. Imme-
diately after her spectacularly successful debut, Clara unthinkingly signs an exploitative contract
that legally binds her to “remain in Vasty Vaughan’s theatrical company for the next five certain
years – at a fixed but not sufficiently remunerative salary of so much a week” (I: 259–260). This
enables Vasty to “keep her dependent on himself” and she, unaware of having been financed by
him throughout her training period, does not realize that she has practically become his mistress
(I: 262; I: 239). Vasty even robs her of ethical and intellectual autonomy, forbidding her from
meeting Perceval and insisting that she must obey him “against your own ideas [...] even against
your firmest principles” (I: 271). He establishes “a strict authority and surveillance” over her, never
allowing her to leave her lodgings unattended or do anything “without his sanction, and less
­without his knowledge” (I: 297).
Clara is jolted into realizing and rebelling against her subjection to Vasty when Perceval
­provides undeniable proof of Vasty being a married man. For Clara, the discovery of Vasty’s
marriage not only drives home how close she had come to being seduced but also enables her to
see her profession in a new light. When Vasty tries to prevent her from leaving him by sneeringly
­reminding her that she has nowhere to go, she asserts, for the first time, her ability to rebuild
her life as a working woman: “I will make myself a home […] I will work, and so live” (II: 87).
­Moreover, Vasty’s persecution of Clara for rejecting him also opens her eyes to the ways in which
her current working conditions restrict her freedom. Her professional contract is also a “bond”
that, for its full term, allows Vasty to keep her as “my servant, my hired jester, my paid mime – a
thing that paints and dresses and mouths to the gaping multiple as I would have her” (II: 89–90).
She can ­reject him in her personal life but, as he asserts, “your theatrical life at least belongs to
me!” (II: 89).
In a remarkably early account of male abuse of power in the workplace, Lynn shows Vasty
punishing Clara for thwarting his authority by wrecking her career: he reduces her debut play to
an afterpiece and when the theatre launches a new play, Clara is replaced from the main role at the
last minute and is demoted to a part so minor that it was “not even a character” and should have
been “properly given to the very lowest of the supernumeraries” (II: 148). With Vasty withdraw-
ing his patronage, other men “about the theatre” become “more and more insolent in manner” and
some even make “open love to her” (II: 127–128). Vasty damages Clara’s reputation in the pres-
ence of her colleagues by insinuating that she is sexually lax. Feigning concern for the reputation
of his theatre, he warns her to mend her ways (III: 83–89). Clara realizes that she is “irretrievably
lost in the world’s esteem […] and that her own imprudence, her very innocence, had given such
colour to the worst accusations as all the explanations of a thousand volumes could not clear
away” (III: 89–90).
In taking cognizance of her own naivete, Clara also realizes the shallow, superficial basis on
which her professional world, like wider society, judges people, especially women. This enables
her to stop craving the approbation of her peers and the public alike, and to gain instead, an inde-
pendent perspective on her own social status. When spurned at the theatre, she feels “great and
proud and independent in her disgrace”, strong in her conviction that she is right to reject Vasty

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(II: 148). Clara continues to work as a supernumerary, choosing “the miseries of a low, a very
low walk in the theatrical profession” to the dubious honour and safety of Vasty’s patronage (III:
255–256). Lynn suggests that in a theatre helmed by an immoral and abusive manager, stardom
could only be gained through sexual compromise but emphasizes that women could still make an
honest living if they gave up the ambition of stardom and reconciled themselves to merely earning
a living wage. Such an individualistic resolution of a systemic problem is unconvincing, especially
given that early in the novel, a ballet dancer is shown as supplementing her income through pros-
titution. Lynn attempts to bypass readerly scepticism by presenting Clara’s difficult negotiation of
her professional space as part of her heroism.
In its assertion of the dignity of labour and the benefits of theatrical work experience in enlarg-
ing women’s view of the world, the novel strikingly anticipates what the feminist English Woman’s
Journal presented as the common experience of a virtuous actress: in theatre, a “woman of pure
life” would “often […] find herself in silent conflict with evil, set aside for those whom she cannot
respect, and deprived of the fair change of exercising her abilities and receiving their due reward”;
such dangers notwithstanding, the experience of having “to grapple with real, hard facts, to think
and work and depend upon themselves” would give actresses a “larger experience of life” than was
available to most women (“A Few Words” February 1859: 392, 396–397). Lynn’s novel, however,
charts a remarkably radical trajectory for the actress’ enlarged experience of the world. Through
Clara, it not only challenges the assumption that all lower-line theatrical workers were sexually
compromised but also reinvents the existing cultural association between the actress and the pros-
titute by showing the actress as a rescuer of ‘fallen women’.

The actress as rescue worker

Clara’s increasingly sober view of her profession leads her to seek fulfilment in the avenues of
reform work, to “go among the poor, and know all about their condition, and what could be done to
relieve them” (III: 79). Maligned at work, Clara now fully adopts Perceval’s dictum that it does not
“signify if we are spoken against for doing our duty” and ceases to care “how much I am abused
if I know that I am doing right. And it is right to help the poor, and to try and recover the fallen”
(III: 80, emphasis in original). When Perceval becomes ill, Clara provides critical financial aid to
two women whom he had been helping, Jane Walcott and her elder sister Sarah, and saves the lat-
ter from having to resume occasional prostitution, in Perceval’s absence, to survive (II: 195–196).
More remarkably, she visits Vasty’s wife Emma, who has been reduced to prostitution because of
being abandoned by the lover that she took in desperation, as a means of coping with her bad and
legally interminable marriage to Vasty.5 Clara visits Emma in her disreputable lodgings and even
offers her refuge in her own home to help her get off the streets.
To cast Clara in this role, Lynn was drawing, as Gleadle has noted, on one of the most progres-
sive aspects of the radical Unitarian efforts in addressing prostitution: their extension of women’s
role in the penitentiary movement from the evangelical model of womanly philanthropy to direct
action as rescuers reclaiming women from brothels and streets (Gleadle 1995: 132–139). Through-
out the 1840s, there was a growing public concern about prostitution as a public health issue, with
the poor urban prostitute being widely considered as a “conduit of infection” from the unsanitary
and dissipated lower classes to respectable society (Walkowitz 1980: 4). Writers and reformers in
the radical Unitarian circles believed that the prostitute, although corrupted by environment and
circumstances, was inherently good and could be reformed under changed social and legal con-
ditions into a hard-working, socially useful member of society. Some of them sought to achieve
such changes by supporting the Associate Institution for Improving and Enforcing the Laws for

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the Protection of Women, founded in 1844, which lobbied in Parliament for stricter laws against
brothels and procurers (Gleadle 1995: 132–133). Elizabeth Gaskell, who had published her early
work in the Howitt’s Journal, also reflected this belief in her famous fictional reclamation of the
fallen woman in her 1853 novel, Ruth (Mitchell 1981: 30–38). At a time when it was considered
“discreditable”, as W.R. Greg noted in the Westminster Review, “to a woman even to be supposed
to know” about the issue (July 1850: 450), progressive journals linked to the radical Unitarians,
like Douglas Jerrold’s Shilling Magazine and Howitt’s Journal, published Eliza Meteyard’s sto-
ries such as “The Worm Toward the Sun” and “The Angel of the Unfortunate”, which celebrated
women’s active participation in the upliftment and social rehabilitation of their “fallen sisters”.
Realities provides one of the most extended mid-century fictional representations of the physi-
cal dangers and social risks involved in women’s rescue work. Clara’s visit to Emma tests, and
provides “good proof”, of her Christian values of “duty and self-sacrifice” as it takes her through
“the worst localities in London”, through streets that are “scarcely safe for solitary women” and
“exceedingly undesirable for respectable women to be seen in” (II: 269–270). In venturing into a
“tainted quarter” of Westminster, she not only risks her reputation but also opens herself to physi-
cal and sexual attack (II: 270). People stare at her as she passes through “horrible neighbourhoods
of disease and vice”; a policeman, noticing that she had “the unmistakable bearing of a gentle-
woman” attempts to stop her from going any further by warning her that the local inhabitants
“might strip you of all you had [...] take all your clothes from you” and states that even the police
did not “dare go down” to those parts “singlehanded” (II: 272–273).
Clara’s walk in Westminster unmistakably invokes and enhances the trope of Godiva’s ride.
Whereas Godiva is protected by her husband’s edict against people watching her as she rode naked
through public streets in order to save her people from an unjust tax, Clara puts herself in even
greater danger by venturing unprotected, unaccompanied, and on foot into unsafe territory, where
she is stared at with impunity, and faces the prospect of being stripped and robbed of “all” she had:
her material possessions and her modesty. Indeed, Clara comes frighteningly close to this situa-
tion. On entering Emma’s neighbourhood, she is mobbed by the children in the alleys, mostly boys,
who “jostle[d] up against her” and beg aggressively by pressing “her gown close to her person,
to feel where the pocket and the purse might be” (II: 274). For a while, she finds herself “entirely
in the power of the men and boys surrounding her” (II: 275). Yet, the novel also emphasizes that
these dangers can all be overcome by those armed, like Clara, by Christian values and commitment
to social reform. The “people round her” realize that she is “no chicken-hearted fool” and ­ceasing
to harass her, follow her to Emma’s house, enchanted and “subdued” by the “purity” of her ­purpose
(II: 275, II: 278–279).
Lynn’s usage of the Godiva myth for women’s rescue work anticipates its deployment by
­Josephine Butler, the leader of the campaign against the Contagious Diseases Acts, to win public
acceptance for her own work in visiting and reclaiming prostitutes. In her work The New Godiva,
Butler depicts a husband who defends his wife’s rescue work to his brother by representing the
female rescue worker as “the new Godiva”, who like the “Godiva of old” is required to sacrifice
something even more precious than her life – “her reputation” (1883: 28, emphasis in original).
In this work, Butler also contests the image of feminists as a “shrieking sisterhood”, a label that,
ironically, Lynn Linton herself had popularized in her 1870 Saturday Review article “The Shriek-
ing Sisterhood”, wherein she mocked those campaigning for women’s social and legal reforms as
noisy and ineffective (Linton 1870: 341; Butler 1883: 3).
Although the staring crowds in the slums are socially and culturally distinct from the the-
atre audiences, Clara’s own status as actress and reformer suggests that her experience as a
performer has offered some preparation for this task. Before setting out, she tries out various

389
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clothes, “several of them” in “all sorts of ways”, as if trying on a costume (II: 268). At a later
point, Perceval points out to Clara that her “anomalous […] position” as a minor theatre actress
enabled her to “learn a great deal of the realities of life” while conventionally genteel women,
who were “hemmed in” all their lives, would know “nothing at all of what really exists” (III:
111–112). Having witnessed the false prejudices and conventionalities of the world in her profes-
sional sphere, Clara becomes capable of undertaking difficult and risky reform work. As Dorothy
Mermin has shown, the legend of Godiva offered a key paradigm for Victorian women writers
to express and vindicate their desire for literary success (1993). Lynn uses it here, in a strikingly
direct mode, to justify not just her ingression into the literary market but to emphasize the value
of radical feminist writing.
The stage also gives Clara access to Perceval and his radical ideals and in committing herself
to them, she becomes capable, by the end of the novel, to enter a new model of marriage. When
Perceval proposes to Clara, he dismisses her reservations about whether he might want to marry an
actress in such a “painful position at the theatre”, who continues to be bound by contract to Vasty,
by emphasizing the “necessity of work” for both of them, even after marriage: he underlines that
the difficult conditions of theatre work will only make her “doubly strong” (III: 262). He offers
her a marriage that is both a professional and a reformist partnership: while having him by her side
at the theatre would decrease its “ghastliness”, her participation in his reform work amongst the
urban poor would not only help him but would also make her see how “comparatively slight” her
own professional troubles are (III: 262). The inherent paternalism of Perceval’s rhetoric notwith-
standing, this view of marriage radically revises conventional notions of wifehood by presenting
it as an intellectual, professional, and political alliance with the husband. It reflects the kind of
partnership that Lynn herself attempted in marrying W.J. Linton and which was contemporane-
ously exemplified by the radical editorial couple Mary and William Howitt who jointly conduced
their reformist magazine.
As this chapter has shown, Lynn’s novel engaged with some of the central themes of mid-
century feminist discourse. Lynn herself would continue to write in support of making the stage a
respectable employment avenue for women, long after her adoption of an ostensibly conservative
authorial persona. Realities resoundingly challenged contemporary cultural conceptions of wom-
en’s social, political, and professional roles, including and especially, women’s writing. While its
marked transgression of social and cultural norms had little immediate market appeal, it not only
provided important lessons to later feminists on the need to temper radical rhetoric in order to
reach a wider audience but also put into early circulation positive tropes and images of women’s
professional and political work that would have a long and influential afterlife in feminist dis-
course and activity.

Notes
1 I follow Philippa Levine (1987), Kathryn Gleadle (1995), and others in applying the terms “feminist”
to those who made a concerted effort to undo women’s social, cultural, and political subjection to men.
Despite their anachronism, these terms are especially helpful in tracing the histories of feminist thought
and practice in the nineteenth century. I am deeply indebted to Gleadle’s ground-breaking scholarship
on the feminism of the radical Unitarians. I draw on her insights into their conceptual frameworks and
reformist activities to examine the distinctive contribution of Lynn’s novel to the developing discourse of
Victorian feminism.
2 Although the cover page attributed authorship to “E.Lynn”, Eliza signed the preface and was thus publicly
identifiable as the novel’s author.
3 For more on the audience, sales, and aims of these journals, see Fryckstedt (1986), Maidment (2009), and
Roberts (2009).

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 Actress as an independent woman and social reformer

4 Realities is a three-volume novel with discontinuous pagination. Throughout the paper, I use roman
­numerals to indicate volume numbers.
5 As Gleadle has shown, Lynn follows Robert Owen and radical Unitarians like W.J. Linton in linking the
issue of divorce to prostitution and suggesting that the legal and cultural injunction against divorce that
kept people stuck in bad marriages led to a rise in prostitution (1995: 110–111, 153–154).

Works cited
Anderson, Nancy Fix (1987) Woman Against Women in Victorian England: A Life of Eliza Lynn Linton.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Anderson, Nancy Fix (1989) “Eliza Lynn Linton, Dickens, and the Woman Question,” Victorian Periodi-
cals Review, 22(4): 134–141 [Online]. Available at: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20082411 (Accessed: 4
May 2021).
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 26
“RICE PUDDINGS, MADE
WITHOUT MILK”
Mother Seacole reforms “home habits”
in the Crimea

Sarah Dredge

Watching foreign men being “charmed” out of their money by dancers in Panama, Mary Seacole
calls them “susceptible travellers” and this term resonates throughout her 1857 autobiographical
narrative Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands (Seacole 2005: 53). Seacole was
the daughter of a Scottish father and Creole mother and spent her adult life making her living
as a nurse, hotelier and provider in sites of empire-building, including Jamaica, Panama and the
Crimea, recreating several times her “British Hotel”. In her adventurous career, Seacole variously
served many ailing travellers, but it was her care of British imperial forces in Crimea that made
her name and gave an audience for her selective life story. Wonderful Adventures was published
swiftly after the end of the Crimean War (1854–1856), in order to capitalise on the fame that news
reports of her war-time exploits caring for the British Crimean forces had generated, and her text
culminates in the Crimean battlefields. Throughout her book, she tells stories of tending to the
men who suffer outside of their home element, but the issue of British men and their attachment
to the home that seemed to be failing them becomes a central theme, both within the book and in
the context of its publication. More than any previous conflict, the actions and consequences of the
Crimean War were held up to public scrutiny as on-site war reporters and telegraphing technology
brought dispatches into British homes (see Collins 2013: 900), and – in the context of public anger
at the mismanagement of food and medical supplies – Seacole’s mothering of British men abroad
turned her into a “heroine” (Seacole 2005: 71). Describing the Christmas celebrations that she
catered for in Crimea, Seacole asks:

I wonder if the people of other countries are as fond of carrying with them everywhere their
home habits as the English. I think not. I think there was something purely and essentially
English in the determination of the camp to spend the Christmas-day of 1855 after the good
old ‘home fashion’.
(Seacole 2005: 159)

Seacole’s ability to provide Christmas fare to the British army in the Crimea in the Christmas
season of 1855–1856 was noted by the British newspapers as a key factor in the improved condi-
tions for the nation’s fighting men from the dreadful previous winter, in which poor conditions and
disease seemed like the real enemy, and this won her the popularity that made an audience for her

393 DOI: 10.4324/9781003429951-32

 Sarah Dredge

narrative. C.A. Windham in the Morning Post of 8 January 1856 makes the comparison, saying
“Now, happily, all is changed for the better” and goes on to talk about the “celebrated old lady,
Mrs. Seacole[’]s” pudding book (“War in the East”). These reports were widely read: Helen Rap-
paport notes that the circulation of The Times increased by a third over the year after war broke out
in 1854, and so “it was a war that would change for ever the public conception of what war really
meant, brought home as it was to the front parlours of every Victorian household” (Rappaport
2008: 2). This war inextricably linked the front line to British homes.
Written just after the war, Seacole’s narrative plays on this emotive connection. With her
“British Hotel” and her nickname of “Mother” at the Crimean front, Seacole prides herself
throughout her narrative on her ability to provide home comforts on the battlefront. But in the
process, she presents the British soldiers she feeds and tends to needy, home-sick children.
­Seacole tacitly contrasts her own moral and physical fortitude with the vulnerability of British
men when ­exposed to the rigours and attractions of imperial interaction. While many contempo-
rary commentators identified a source of particular aptitude for Empire in the domestic tastes of
British men, Seacole implies a weakness in their “home habits”, one that she is uniquely placed
to redress. British men, her narrative reveals, are susceptible to a form of home-sickness in the
dual sense that their bodies are prone to sickness away from home, and that they miss home
comforts when abroad, with critical implications for their ability to maintain – or survive – their
Empire. Seacole throws into doubt her readers’ veneration of the concept of ‘home’ as a space
of quasi-mystical regeneration by implying that its native ‘heroes’ are inadequate to defend the
“mother country” (Seacole 2005: 58). She thus pulls herself in from the marginal position with
which she begins her “adventures” – as a middle-aged, bankrupted Jamaican Creole widow – to
offer herself, in the guise of “Mother Seacole”, as the cure for a malaise born in the ideological
core of the Empire: the British home.
This chapter has benefited from the excellent research that has been done since the relatively
recent rediscovery of Seacole as a key character in the narratives of the Crimean War (see, for ex-
ample, Rappaport 2008), as a mixed-race Jamaican woman writer and an energetic female Victo-
rian traveller (see, for example, Gunning 2001; Poon 2009; Rappaport 2022), and as an important
figure in the history of nineteenth-century nursing (see Staring-Derks, Staring and Anionwu 2015).
Seacole crosses many apparent divides: of genre, border, nation, race and gender. But it is the way
that she is able to not only exploit what several critics have usefully termed her “hybridity” (see
for example Silkü 2008; Howell 2010), but also use her liminal status to recreate and – she implies
– improve some key constituents of the British home that I focus on here, in particular by draw-
ing attention to Seacole’s colonisation of the British culinary staples for want of which Crimean
troops were weakening. As she does by using the title of “Mother”, by naming her establishments
“British Hotels” and in her assertion that she can make rice puddings “without milk” (Seacole
2005: 123), Seacole both lays claim to and reforms key attributes of the British home, to better fit
its sons for the wider world in which she finds them. As a mixed-race “Creole” hotel keeper and
nurse in spaces subject to imperial exploitation, Seacole owed both her existence and her living
to the processes of Empire. Rezzan Kocaöner Silkü argues that Seacole “mediates between the
black and white cultures by redefining her identity in terms of Englishness rather than blackness”
(Silkü 2008: 126); likewise, Simon Gikandi argues that Seacole “assumes that it is only within the
dominant codes of Victorian England that she can inscribe herself as a subject” (Gikandi 1996:
131). I am more in agreement with Jessica Howell, however, that “Seacole manipulates elements
of several discourses to script an alternate identity” (Howell 2010: 3). Where Seacole substitutes
for “English” mothers and sisters, she makes clear that it is by not being identical to them that she
is able to be in place to help these men at all.

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 Mother Seacole reforms “home habits” in the Crimea

According to contemporary British imperial ideology, this peculiarly domestic character of the
middle-class British was part of their manifest fitness to rule an Empire. In an article, “Lady Travel-
lers”, Elizabeth Rigby focuses particularly on the wives of British men abroad, and rhetorically asks:

What… is the secret of that facility with which the Englishman adapts himself to a residence
in any remote corner of the world? — why do we so often find him settled happily among
scenes and people utterly uncongenial in climate and habit? Simply because he takes his home
with him; and has more within it and wants less beyond it than any other man in the world.
(Rigby 1845: 103. Emphasis in original)

What symbolises this English home is the idea of the domestic Englishwoman, as Rigby makes
clear. Even when these wives are also travelling (which is the context of Rigby’s review article),
it is by virtue of their British moral characters that they serve their husbands best: “We see her
with her national courage and her national reserve, with her sound head and her tender heart, with
the independent freedom of her actions and the decorous restraint of her manners” (100). Angelia
Poon, in Enacting Englishness, notes that conduct books of the period credited British women
with being “distinguishable from their female counterparts in other nations both civilized and
‘barbarous’ by their superior ability to provide the comforts of home” (Poon 2009: 22), and thus
ensuring the strong moral foundation from which foreign exploration can safely be undertaken.
This connection between British home habits and Empire can be seen in the contemporary ico-
nography of Queen Victoria. A portrait of Queen Victoria and her family in 1846 by Franz Xaver
Winterhalter, “The Royal Family in 1846”, for example, emphasises Victoria’s triple role as impe-
rial monarch, wife and mother. Victoria is both enthroned and surrounded by her children, whose
attitudes convey warm interaction to create a domestic scene. The backdrop shows a beach and
shore, and the view of the sea stretches off into distant skies suggesting the reach of her dominions,
but this conduit to the wider world and Empire starts out from the bosom of the family. An 1856
painting by Jerry Barrett representing Victoria meeting the Crimean invalids at Chatham also pre-
sents her as a wife and mother as well as monarch: she meets her injured forces from the midst of
her family (“Queen Victoria’s First Visit to her Wounded Soldiers”).
The fiction of the period often makes the same connection, offering the white woman as the
implied solution to problems of Empire. Replacing the Jamaican (white Creole) Bertha Mason
with the pale British Jane Eyre is the remedy for the sullied soul of Edward Rochester in Jane Eyre
(Brontë 1847, 1973), and Charles Dickens’ Dombey and Son (1848) also ties colonial trading suc-
cess to the health of the virtuous British home, centred on the domestic woman. The happy ending
of the latter novel links the renewal of the family trading firm to the proper acknowledgement of
Florence Dombey, who throughout the novel has been associated both with love – as the resident
angel of the domestic and the trading house – and the British homes she supports; the acceptance
of Florence’s love allows for the regeneration of the family and family firm in Dombey and Son:
“‘Thus’, said my wife, ‘from his daughter, after all, another Dombey and Son will ascend’—no
‘rise;’ that was Mrs Toots’s word—‘triumphant!’” (Dickens 1848/1970: 974).
Such attitudes, connecting the middle-class domestic British woman to the moral and hence
physical health of the nation and Empire, also fed into the developments in nursing that were tak-
ing place in this period, made famous by, and best reflected in, Florence Nightingale’s reforms of
military nursing in the Crimean War, with her establishment of a body of female nurses, where
previously nursing care was provided by male orderlies. As Anne Summers describes in “Pride
and Prejudice: Ladies and Nurses in the Crimean War”, two types of female nurse were sent out –
working-class women who had had nursing experience and were paid for their work, and unpaid

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middle-class ladies whose fitness for nursing depended on their class and moral position – and
authority was given to the latter category. The moral influence of the middle-class woman, derived
from evangelical notions of domestic ideology, was her prime qualification for nursing (Summers
1983: 36). This corresponds to Elizabeth Rigby’s claim of British women in “Lady Travellers” that
“we see her the finest production of the finest country upon earth – man’s best companion, whether
in the travels over this world or the voyage through this life” (Rigby 1845: 101). Rigby then chal-
lenges readers to find otherwise: “where is she, whatever may be the difference of talent or taste,
who ventures to bring forward an infidel opinion or a questionable moral?” (Rigby 1845: 101).
Nightingale was anxious to uphold these gender expectations of women as ministering angels
rather than medical professionals: carrying ‘home’ with them and extending care, rather than toil-
ing as paid workers. Her prospective nurses were rigorously vetted for their good character more
than relevant experience (Summers 1983: 35), and it was emphasised that their work was always
performed under the instruction of male doctors, maintaining the gender ideology that cast middle-
class male work as professional and salaried, and middle-class female work as deriving from
innate sensibilities, and performed for love not money. Mary Seacole’s narrative both acknowl-
edges and resists the gender expectations that the fame of Nightingale was busy reinforcing. She
demands her right to go to the Crimean front based on what she claims as proven expertise, and
she presents herself as at once a businesswoman, a “doctress” and a surrogate mother. At the same
time, she exposes the implicit whiteness of the British female ideal and draws attention to her dif-
ference by calling herself a “yellow doctress” and identifying her medical expertise as Jamaican.

“Susceptible travellers”: the British abroad

British ideas of national identity relied on the sense of its people as naturally possessing the at-
tributes that created and justified their Empire: energy, ingenuity, intellectual and industrial de-
velopment, love of liberty. An integral part of this was particular enjoyment of domesticity: what
Henry Brougham in his 1803 An Inquiry into the Colonial Policy of the European Powers called
“the virtuous pleasures of domestic life” (Brougham 1803: 70). And – as Rigby’s comment shows
– such self-identification depended on an assumed difference from other nations and subjects, and
especially colonised ones (see, for example, Colley 1984; Hall 1992).
But in the time leading up to and encompassing the period in which Seacole enacts and writes
of her adventures, there were signs that the British national self-perception was under pressure –
signs of which Seacole’s text makes use – suggesting a faltering confidence in the foundations of
Britain’s power in its own domestic character. The Abolition campaigns of the previous decades
(the time when the early action of Seacole’s Wonderful Adventures is set) that argued for and dem-
onstrated British moral superiority, equally exposed the brutality and domestic degeneracy of the
white British plantation owners in the Caribbean, and so undermined this justification of Empire.
Catherine Hall in White, Male and Middle-Class quotes missionary reports comparing unfavour-
ably the “oppressed” “sons of Africa” with the “debauched white population” (1992: 217). Their
failings are often those of proper domestic behaviour and are not restricted to the plantation-­
owning class: stories of sexual impropriety were endemic concerning white men in the colonies,
such that missionaries (like St John Rivers in Jane Eyre, written in 1847) were encouraged to
marry before they left, to guard against the temptations of baser masculine nature (see Hall 1992:
222). Henry Brougham had expressed such concerns in his 1803 Inquiry, arguing that:

The want of female society, while it brutalizes the mind and manners of men, necessar-
ily deprives them of all the virtuous pleasures of domestic life, and frees them from those

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 Mother Seacole reforms “home habits” in the Crimea

restraints, which the presence of a family always imposes on the conduct of the most ­
profligate men.
(Brougham 1803: 70)

These examples all focus on the British abroad, and suggest the (implicitly) white domestic woman
as cure, but Jennifer Howell in her article “Mrs Seacole Prescribes Hybridity” shows that social
commentators like Charles Kingsley and Thomas Carlyle also feared that, at home as well, the
middle classes were succumbing to the previously aristocratic malady of excessive luxury, becom-
ing less “hardy” and – as a corollary – less “valiant” (Howell 2010: 117). Disease epidemics had
swept through the nation in the first half of the nineteenth century as they had done through the
camps and hospitals of the Crimea, killing huge numbers, making clear that disease was not just
found abroad. Domestic conditions of industrial society as well as a physically weakened popu-
lation were blamed. Meanwhile, the agricultural poverty and industrial unrest of the 1830s and
1840s brought fears of ‘uncivilized’ mob rule in the imperial centre, with the British under-classes
as the ‘other’ within. This again challenged ideals of the British as models of constitutional and
moral vigour, and hence natural rulers of a less-cultivated world (see, for example, Evans 2001).
The reporting of the Crimean War (which determined for Seacole that her services there were
needed) brought to the fore the fears of decline in Britain’s imperial management. A new species of
independent war reporter (famously William Howard Russell of The Times, who wrote a Preface
for Wonderful Adventures) suggested that British forces and British society – not just the fighting
men but the system that produced them – could not live up to their claims of martial and moral
supremacy (see Goldie 1987; Lambert and Badsey 1994).1 Seacole’s autobiographical narrative
is published in the acrimonious aftermath of the Crimean War and as rebellion is breaking out in
India. At a time of anger and deep concern about Britain’s ability to maintain national physical
and moral health, and hence its supremacy abroad, Seacole takes the opportunity to offer her own
prescription – or recipe – to regenerate the British subject and home, and cure the weakness that
Empire did not cause, but exposed.

“Illness and weakness make these strong men

as children”: Wonderful Adventures
Wonderful Adventures is full throughout of references to home and homeliness, but especially the
Crimean section where Seacole’s focus is explicitly on her interactions with British men. The Brit-
ish idea of ‘home’ is the pattern she always tries apparently to replicate; during her ‘adventures’,
she repeatedly sets up establishments that she calls ‘British Hotels’ in sites of Empire (Jamaica,
Panama, Crimea), and she reports that even before these adventures began, she had longingly
watched British ships leaving Jamaica “homeward bound” (Seacole 2005: 13): ceding the term
“home” to the place she has never at that point seen. However, this recognition was not equally
returned by white British society: even favourable press reports, Punch articles and letters cannot
help but make clear her difference from expectations of ‘Britishness’, commenting on her colour,
noting her birthplace, or transcribing her accent.2 However, if she cannot fit into the dominant
ideal she finds of the British home, the version of it that Seacole recreates reveals a critique of
the original by focusing on the infantilised men it produces, and the domestic women who have
shaped them this way. It must always be borne in mind that Seacole’s readership is British, and
that she wrote to make money after going bankrupt due to the sudden end to the Crimean War,
so her identification of Britain as “home” is not neutral, but under such circumstances, where her
defensive wounded pride over her bankruptcy must be tempered by an awareness of the need not

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to alienate her readers, her affectionate but clear criticisms are the more marked. In this context,
Seacole’s emphasis on her own form of “mothering” and determination to present the British men
as her sons, looks more like an assertion of authority than an appeal to British charity.
The newspaper reports of the war from Seacole’s first Christmas-time in the Crimea in
1855–1856 are full of her plum puddings and festive provisions. Of their determination to cel-
ebrate Christmas in the style of home, Major-General C.A. Windham in the Morning Post wrote:
“Were all else wanting to prove our true John Bull descent, the pertinacity with which the
customs instilled into our minds from boyhood are so energetically carried out alone would do
so” (Windham 1856: 5).3 It is this nursery-bred habit that Seacole can feed. In a telling boast,
Seacole notes:

had you been fortunate enough to have visited the British Hotel upon rice-pudding day, I
warrant you would have ridden back to your hut with kind thoughts of Mother Seacole’s
endeavours to give you a taste of home. If I had nothing else to be proud of, I think my rice
puddings, made without milk, upon the high road to Sebastopol, would have gained me a
reputation.
(Seacole 2005: 123)

In this passage, Seacole has claimed the “British” identification with her hotel name, while the
British reader – “you” – is relegated to a hut. She implies that here at last is the “Mother” who
could provide the taste of the absent home where British agents could not, and in so doing, cre-
ates a home fit to defend Britain’s imperial reach. The shift to the direct address to the reader as
“you” for this extended passage stands out and emphasises Seacole’s distinguishing herself here
from her British readers, to her own advantage. Her assurance of British readers’ fortune and “kind
thoughts”, plus her own “endeavours” and pride, demand readers’ gratitude. The curious use of
the past conditional tense both places readers within her hotel, and insists on their agreement with
her claims: if they had been there, they would have enjoyed the comforts she describes. Her later
direct comment that the British more than any others love their “home habits” only confirms what
she had already made apparent: away from home, the British miss the familiar comforts that only
“Mother Seacole” could provide. Newspaper reports agree: The Standard of 29 January 1856 re-
ports that Seacole provided wine, mince pies, and plum pudding and was received with “Immense
cheering” (“The Crimea” 1856: 3). By noting this national characteristic in a context where native
Britons had proved incapable of providing the means to satisfy their fighting sons’ “home habits”,
Seacole challenges Rigby’s complacent view of the British man abroad that he was armoured and
strengthened by his love of home.
Seacole tells stories of British men in the Crimea stealing her tarts from the oven and begging
for her home cooking, which seem to echo school-boy stories of pranks inspired by a constant
desire for sweet treats:

The officers, full of fun and high spirits, used to crowd into the little kitchen, and, despite
all my remonstrances, which were not always confined to words, for they made me frantic
sometimes, and an iron spoon is a tempting weapon, would carry off the tarts hot from the
oven.
(Seacole 2005: 123)

She treats this with a tone of motherly indulgence, but by interspersing such tales with narra-
tives of her medical interventions and unique nursing skills, she implies that this need for home

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 Mother Seacole reforms “home habits” in the Crimea

infantilises and constitutes a weakness in the army of a colonial power. The need has been created
by the British home, but at the frontiers of Empire, she alone can satisfy it:

What a shout there used to be when I came out of my little caboose, hot and flurried, and
called out, “Rice-pudding day, my sons”. Some of them were baked in large shallow pans,
for the men and the sick, who always said that it reminded them of home. You would scarcely
expect to finish up your dinner with pastry, but very often you would have found a good
stock of it in my larder. Whenever I had a few leisure moments, I used to wash my hands,
roll up my sleeves and roll out pastry. Very often I was interrupted to dispense medicines;
but if the tarts had a flavour of senna, or the puddings tasted of rhubarb, it never interfered
with their consumption. I declare I never heard or read of an army so partial to pastry as that
British army before Sebastopol.
(Seacole 2005: 123)

This passage exemplifies Seacole’s tone, and the complex relation of both motherly care and doc-
torly authority that she claims, and again the reader is drawn in by the direct address. Her descrip-
tions of puddings and pastries and calling “sons” in for their food, invoke the ideal of the nurturing
maternal figure at home. The idea that she might more resemble a servant than the lady of the house
is refuted by her reference to “sons” and her pointed use of pronouns of ownership: this is her
space. This mother can do more than mop the brows of ailing sons though: she is equally keen to as-
sert her medical abilities. And unlike the Nightingale nurses, she is neither trying to heal via moral
influence alone, nor relying on a doctor to prescribe and treat. In the chapter that begins the relation
of her Crimean efforts, Seacole describes her role in the camp as “doctress, nurse and ‘mother’”
(Seacole 2005: 110). Better than the mother at home, or the doctor in his hospital, Seacole’s hotel
combines (quite literally she jokes!) the comforts of both nursery treats and medicinal treatments.
Again here, Seacole emphasises the particularly British love of home foods: as the Crimean ep-
isodes are the culmination of her “Adventures in Many Lands”, this, by this point in the narrative,
has comprised a number of different places and peoples. Where Rigby had argued that the civilised
home habits of British men enabled their imperial duties, Seacole suggests this has instilled the op-
posite: the enervating “disease of civilization” that Howell discusses, quoting physicians Thomas
Beddoes and Thomas Trotter, and “resulting from the consumption of too many luxuries” (quoted
in Howell 2010: 10). This is reinforced as Seacole notes in the Crimea that, “illness and weakness
make these strong men as children” (Seacole 2005: 80). Far from proving manliness, their imperial
exploits reveal the inadequacy of British men abroad, with their love of sweets and need for a sur-
rogate mother. The British home with its presiding mother has formed the taste for a specific kind
of nursery homeliness, and in so doing made a demoralising dependency in the soldier of Empire
who needs to be able to leave this home behind. This can only be redressed by Seacole, the mother
on the front line, with her ability to produce rice pudding in a warzone. She draws the comparison
with British mothers at home very explicitly:

Don’t you think, reader, if you were lying, with parched lips and fading appetite, thousands
of miles from mother, wife, or sister, loathing the rough food by your side, and thinking
regretfully of that English home where nothing that could minister to your great need would
be left untried—don’t you think that you would welcome the familiar figure of the stout lady
whose bony horse has just pulled up at the door of your hut, and whose panniers contain
some cooling drink, a little broth, some homely cake, or a dish of jelly or blanc-mange?
(Seacole 2005: 111)

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While that British home is far away, on the battle front, Seacole herself has become “familiar”. But
then she becomes the “woman-comrade”, who, sharing the “barren heights” on which he now finds
himself, can tend to the soldier whose eyes “moisten” as her “woman’s voice and woman’s care”
remind him of “those happy English homes”. It is in these moments that she feels her designation
as “mother” takes on full significance – both of their need and her ability to meet it:

Then their calling me “mother” was not, I think, altogether unmeaning. I used to fancy that
there was something homely in the word; and, reader, you cannot think how dear to them
was the smallest thing that reminded them of home.
(Seacole 2005: 112)

There are several instances like this, where she offers herself as a substitute for the British mothers,
sisters, wives, and daughters who were not strong enough to tend their menfolk abroad. Seacole
invokes the privileged ideology of home at once to beg sympathy for the wounded soldiers, and to
insist that her own efforts be seen in this context: she presents herself as the selfless mother, not the
profit-seeking sutler or waged servant. The references to home repeat and multiply in this extract,
insisting that readers see the soldiers (and imagine themselves) as sons and brothers by exploit-
ing the discourse of feeling, rather than as valiant fighting men via a martial discourse of honour
and sacrifice. This emphasises Seacole’s unique fitness for the role she has given herself: she calls
herself “the right woman in the right place” (Seacole 2005: 71). She is the only person who could
be “comrade” as well as “mother” at the front – unlike both the British mothers at home, and the
professional doctors at the front (and the Nightingale nurses at a safe distance away). The contrast
between “home” and “hut” here, with Seacole representing the “home” side of the comparison
with the British men imagined in “huts”, refutes again any suggestion that her position might more
resemble the servant in the British home than its mistress – the roles she ascribes herself are not
subordinate.
This representation of Seacole sweeping in to feed and tend the wounded also requires the
reader to see that while the war has made a “heroine” of Seacole, it has turned the British fight-
ing men back into children: sons in need of their mother. The British men need her tending: they
are home-sick and sick away from home – and only a “Creole” woman in her specialised role of
mother and “doctress” can assuage both these ills. There are two processes here: she demonstrates
the frailty of the prime agents of Empire, the British men she feeds and tends, and also implies her
superiority over the domestic British woman to look after them. She recounts so many examples of
such surrogacy that the reader cannot help but take from it the awareness of the weakness of these
would-be colonisers and soldiers, so reliant upon the habits of home.
The home that Seacole (re)creates and labels “British”, in her attempt to revive these ailing
sons, both meets the homely desires of British men abroad and attempts to invigorate them by
reflecting her own difference from the British domestic norm: the difference that allowed her to
make rice pudding without milk. A report from August 1856 in the Morning Chronicle – after she
has returned to London to face bankruptcy – confirms both this ability and difference. It tells of
Seacole attracting almost more attention than the general at a celebration at Surrey Gardens, refer-
ring to her as “the celebrated Mrs Seacole, whose store relieved so many of the wants of the allied
armies”. It goes on: “The Lady, who has dark blood in her veins, and whose eyes lack none of the
vivacity of the tropical races, held quite a court of her old acquaintances” and notes that her fea-
tures show “energy, vigour and decision, quite sufficient to account for her extraordinary success
in her mercantile venture in the camp” (“Dinner to the Guards” 1856: 5). Seacole’s “blood” differ-
ence is carefully noted, before being associated with the virtues the British usually associated with

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themselves: the “energy, vigour and decision” required for an imperial campaign that enabled her
to supply the “want” created in this case by failing British supply lines. Both her own narrative and
the Crimean news reports tell of her West Indian recipes (for both food and medicine), but also,
as with the rice pudding, emphasise her creation of British favourites reconstructed from what she
can find or acquire at the front line: meat-pies (“I grew as familiar with the mysteries of seasoning
as a London pieman”), “A good Irish stew”, “Welch rabbits” and also “something curried” – a sign
of a new taste from another colony (Seacole 2015: 122–123). Her cuisine reflects her own process
of colonisation and adaptation of the British home comforts, like a kind of inoculation against
illnesses the British were vulnerable to away from home. Seacole’s rice pudding “made without
milk” is a symbol of her ability to make a better home for the British soldier abroad through her
hybrid modifications.
This requires a strategy of positioning herself initially neither fully in nor out of a British iden-
tity before triumphantly claiming her central place, employing what Silkü refers to as her “strategic
liminality” (2008: 113). Where it suits her, Seacole uses colour as a racial identifier to demonstrate
her variance from British ideals and suggest her own superiority. In her capacity as doctor, a
role from which women were excluded in Britain by professional restrictions, she is happy to high-
light her difference by reporting her nickname of “the yellow doctress” (2005: 38). But the differ-
ence often equated to treatments that worked versus those that did not; Seacole confidently recalls
that her popularity in the Crimea was due to her ability to acquire supplies, her familiarity from
previous experience with the diseases the men were contracting, and her successful treatments
(Seacole 2005: 111). This plays upon comments in the British press reports from the Crimea that
Seacole’s medical attention was often preferred over that of the army doctors.4 The role of “doc-
tress”, which she had previously in her narrative identified as a particularly Jamaican female role,
was one she learned from her own mixed-race mother (Seacole 2005: 12; see also Gunning 2001).
Early in her narrative, Seacole boasts that her mother “was, like very many of the Creole women,
an admirable doctress; in high repute with the officers of both services, and their wives, who were
from time to time stationed at Kingston”. She adds that “It was very natural that I should inherit
her tastes; and so I had from early youth a yearning for medical knowledge and practice which has
never deserted me” (Seacole 2005: 11–12). And implying that racism prevented her acceptance as
an official nurse, she states: “Now, I am not for a single instant going to blame the authorities who
would not listen to the offer of a motherly yellow woman to go to the Crimea and nurse her ‘sons’
there” (Seacole 2005: 72). Here she situates herself not only as a mother to the troops but actu-
ally as a better mother through her difference from their white mothers at home, who are unable
to take their mothering care where it is needed by their susceptible sons. She claims possession of
(and infantilises) these British “sons” based on both her hybrid constitution and her now proven
ability, which she associates with her ‘colour’ as not-white. She shows herself to be more resilient
and skilled than the white British of both sexes. Functions that are largely split between profes-
sional medical men and domestic women in Britain (even the Nightingale nurses were meant to act
strictly as unpaid ‘ladies’ not professional women, and explicitly were instructed not to challenge
the authority of the male doctors), the motherly “yellow doctress” Seacole can encompass in her-
self. Rappaport also describes the range of medical skills that Seacole was able to exhibit, drawing
from her years of experience, and with medical traditions other than the current Western methods
and treatments (Rappaport 2008: 192–193). Unlike British nurses, Seacole was prescribing, creat-
ing her medicinal treatments, and applying them. She also points out that she can do her doctoring
“three or four days nearer” to the front line than the Nightingale nurses (Seacole 2005: 82).
Countering the ideological implication that the white woman is the solution to problems of
Empire, Seacole presents the white British woman as part of the problem. Seacole’s description

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of Florence Nightingale presents her as opposite to Seacole’s own “plump person” (Seacole 2005:
83) and “duskier” complexion, describing her as: “A slight figure, in the nurses’ dress; with a pale,
gentle, and withal firm face, resting lightly in the palm of one white hand” (Seacole 2005: 82).
Seacole seems to echo in this description the conception of the ideal British woman produced by
domestic ideology: her moral strength and ministering capacity are measured in inverse proportion
to her physical delicacy (the comparison between the ethereal Jane Eyre and the large, very physi-
cal Bertha Rochester exemplifies this also). The deceptive strength of the ministering woman’s
hand, used by Seacole of Nightingale, is a feature of domestic ideology that Seacole imitates
and improves upon. Whereas Nightingale’s “white hand” supports her own pale face far from
enemy lines, Seacole imagines hers being the required “woman’s hand” at the front (again, “the
right woman in the right place” [2005: 71]). In tending the ailing soldier, she shows that she can
combine a doctor’s skill with an improved version of British womanly care and the British home.
A front-line report from W.H. Russell backs this up:

I saw the good old woman actively engaged in succouring the wounded after the battle of
Tchernaya, and was on the ground in front of the camps on the 8th of September, with a huge
plum-pudding, wine, and other creature comforts, to give gratuitously to those in need of
them. The number of navvies and Land Transport Corps men who have been cured by her
of the head-aches, stomach-aches, fevers, and other maladies, rendered the doctors almost
jealous of her.
(Times 16 May 1856: 10)

This report echoes Seacole’s own depictions of herself providing care with both domestic and
medical skills, and the reference to her giving this “gratuitously” continues the association of
Seacole’s work as performed for love and duty like a mother or a doctor, rather than as a business-
woman seeking profit. But the report then goes on to repeat a joke that marks out Seacole’s dif-
ference: “Mrs Seacole’s partner is called Day, and the wags of the camp have irreverently termed
the firm ‘Night and Day’, in allusion to the fine mahogany hue of the warm-hearted West-Indian”
(Russell 16 May 1856: 10). Though the tone here is clearly warm, Seacole’s skin tone is evidently
presented as something that jokes can be made of – an attribute marking her difference negatively.
But while in other circumstances Seacole’s narrative frequently resists presenting her colour as
non-white (she relates the racial mockery of a darker companion by contrasting her skin to Sea-
cole’s own, which she terms only “a few shades duskier than the brunettes whom you all admire
so much” [Seacole 2015: 13]), in the context of her medical care, Seacole herself is happy to note
her difference, and present this difference as a positive. This had earlier also been the case, when,
on being congratulated for her efforts treating cholera in Panama, an American man toasts her with
the wish that she could be bleached white.5 She firmly rejects both his desire to make her white and
the wish to gain admittance to American society that this would allow: “as to his offer of bleaching
me, I should, even if it were practicable, decline it without any thanks” (Seacole 2005: 49). Being
the “yellow doctress” marks her out as neither the white domestic woman at home, nor the white
male doctor at the front, but something better than this: the woman who combines both sets of
­attributes and so can tend to the vulnerable British “sons” on the battlefield.
Finally, just before leaving the Crimea, Seacole gets to stand in for the most important white
British woman of them all:

My companions were young and full of fun, and tried hard to persuade the Russians that
I was Queen Victoria, by paying me the most absurd reverence. When this failed they fell

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 Mother Seacole reforms “home habits” in the Crimea

back a little, and declared that I was the Queen’s first cousin. Anyhow, they attracted crowds
about me, and I became quite a lioness in the streets of Simpheropol.
(Seacole 2005: 162)

While on the one hand here, there is racist humour directed at Seacole, the point of which is her
difference from the Queen, on the other hand, because of this difference, it is “Mother Seacole”
who has been on the spot, representing the care of the British Empire for her fighting sons. The
closest the actual Queen gets is her visit to the hospital at Chatham, recorded by Barrett’s paint-
ing and taken into British homes as prints (“Queen Victoria’s first visit to her wounded soldiers”).
Seacole relates this story of her representing the Queen despite its racism because it coincides
with elements of her self-presentation. In figuring Seacole as a surrogate for the absent monarch,
the joke reinforces that absence, leaving Seacole being paraded in triumph.6 She also claims for
herself the symbol of the lion that was used to represent Britain, often in the context of its colonial
strength and racial superiority (see, for example, Punch 8th April 1848: “The British Lion and
the Irish Monkey” and Punch 22nd August 1857: “The British Lion’s Vengeance on the Bengal
Tiger”). If Queen Victoria symbolised to the world the resolute and nurturing rule of the British
Empire, based on its domestic virtues, it is Seacole who is on the spot to embody this care in the
Crimea. Seacole shows herself as both quintessentially British and yet also productively different
from the frail white woman; while the latter safely tends the home fires, an improved mother for
the imperial nation provides the susceptible white soldier with a home and care in her “British
Hotel”, at the front line of Empire.
Wonderful Adventures relates the coming into being of its protagonist in the central role she
feels she should inhabit in society, through comparisons with British women and men in the
­context of Empire. For Seacole, this involves offering herself as the solution to the problem
­Empire had presented for the British home and its flawed defenders. Ultimately, the corrup-
tion lies not within these foreign lands and peoples who tempt, challenge and ultimately pun-
ish British men, as contemporary reports declared and many contemporary novels suggested,
but in the ­British ­themselves, who prove inadequate to the role of imperial masters that they
have assumed. In ­Wonderful Adventures, Seacole highlights the failings of the British male as
agent and representative of the British Empire, and indicts the ‘home habits’ that produced him.
Seacole identifies the insular and white British home, not as the symbol of British civilisation
and justification of Empire, but as itself the problem. Though the ambition was never fulfilled,
she tells The Times newspaper that her next goal is to travel to post-uprising India and tend her
“sons” in that next site of British failure to survive its Empire. As the news reports of the Indian
uprising of 1857 focused so much attention on the vulnerability, the sufferings and the rescue
of the British women caught up in the violence, it is another sign of the difference of “Mother
Seacole” that she identifies this place of British ­imperial ambition as the next “Land” in need
of her particular skills.

Notes
1 Howell also notes contemporary concerns that “British militaristic failures might indicate a weakening of
the British constitution” (Howell 2010: 10).
2 Among many available examples, Punch magazine’s poem “A Stir for Seacole”, written in support of her
on her return to Britain, and which Seacole quotes, refers to Seacole’s “berry-brown face” (Seacole 2005:
112); after the end of the war, a review of a Crimean memoir in the Morning Post’s literature section
quotes Edwin Galt speaking of “that mulatto lady, Mrs Seacole” (25 August 1856: 3); W.H. Russell notes
the “fine mahogany hue of the warm-hearted West Indian” (The Times 16 May 1856: 10).

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 Sarah Dredge

3 The Standard also reports on 21 January 1856 that Seacole provided women’s clothes to aid soldiers’
­attempts at theatrical entertainments (“The Crimea”: 3). N.B.: London papers such as the Standard,
­Morning Chronicle, Morning Post and Morning Herald, often carried the same reports from the Crimea
on the same day. The Morning Chronicle also printed this same piece.
4 A report from W.H. Russell in The Times notes that “The number of navvies and Land Transport Corps
men who have been cured by her of the head-aches, stomach-aches, fevers, and other maladies, rendered
the doctors almost jealous of her” (Russell 16 May 1856: 10).
5 “…Providence made her a yaller woman. I calculate, gentlemen, you’re all as vexed as I am that she’s not
wholly white——, but I du reckon on your rejoicing with me that she’s so many shades removed from
being entirely black——; and I guess, if we could bleach her by any means we would——, and thus make
her as acceptable in any company as she deserves to be——” (Seacole 2005: 49).
6 Seacole had also stood in for Queen Victoria when the Queen sent a plum pudding to the commander-in
chief of the French forces, Marshal Pélissier (as opposed to her own lowly soldiers), and Seacole had to
be appealed to for instructions on how to “warm it for the table” (“The Crimea,” Morning Herald, 22
January 1856: 5).

Works cited
“A Stir for Seacole” (1856) [Cartoon]. Punch, 6 December, p. 221.
Barratt, Jerry (1856) Queen Victoria’s First Visit to Her Wounded Soldiers [Painting]. London:
The National Portrait Gallery. https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portraitExtended/mw08509/
Queen-Victorias-First-Visit-to-her-Wounded-Soldiers
Brontë, Charlotte (1847/1973) Jane Eyre, edited by Margaret Smith, Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics.
Brougham, Henry (1803) An Inquiry into the Colonial Policy of the European Powers, 2 vols. London:
Longman.
Colley, Linda (1992) “Britishness and Otherness: An Argument,” Journal of British Studies, 31(4): 309–329.
Collins, Bruce (2013) “Defining Victory in Victorian Warfare, 1860–1882,” The Journal of Military History,
77(3): 895–929.
Dickens, Charles (1848/1970) Dombey and Son, edited by Peter Fairclough, London: Penguin.
“Dinner to the Guards” (1856) Morning Chronicle, 26 August, p. 5.
Evans, Eric J. (2001) The Forging of the Modern State: Early Industrial Britain, 1783–1870, 3rd ed. Harlow:
Pearson Education Limited.
Gikandi, Simon (1996) Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism New York:
Columbia University Press.
Goldie, Sue M. (ed.) (1987) “I Have Done My Duty”: Florence Nightingale in the Crimean War 1854–56,
Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Gunning, Sandra (2001) “Traveling with Her Mother’s Tastes: The Negotiation of Gender, Race, and ­Location
in ‘Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands’,” Signs, 26(4): 949–981.
Hall, Catherine (1992) White, Male and Middle Class: Explorations in Feminism and History, Cambridge:
Polity Press.
Howell, Jennifer (2010) “Mrs Seacole Prescribes Hybridity: Constitutional and Maternal Rhetoric in
‘­Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands’,” Victorian Literature and Culture, 38(1):
107–125.
Lambert, Andrew D. and Stephen Badsey (1994) The War Correspondents: The Crimean War, Stroud: Alan
Sutton Publishing.
Literature (1856) Morning Post, 25 August, p. 3.
Poon, Angelia (2009). Enacting Englishness in the Victorian Period: Colonialism and the Politics of
­Performance, Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing.
Rappaport, Helen (2008) No Place for Ladies: The Untold Story of Women in the Crimean War, London:
Aurum.
Rappaport, Helen (2022) In Search of Mary Seacole: The Making of a Cultural Icon, London: Simon &
Schuster.
Rigby, Elizabeth (1845) “Lady Travellers,” Quarterly Review, 76(June): 98–137.
Russell, William Howard (1856) “The British Army,” The Times, 16 May, p. 10.
Seacole, Mary (2005) Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands, edited by Salih, S. London:
Penguin.

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Silkü, Rezzan Kocaöner (2008) “Wonderful Adventures: Transcending Liminality and Redefining Identity in
Mary Jane Grant Seacole’s Autobiography,” Ariel, 39(1–2): 113–127.
Staring-Derks, Corry, Jeroen Staring and Elizabeth Nneka Anionwu (2015) “Mary Seacole: Global Nurse
Extraordinaire,” Journal of Advanced Nursing, 71(3): 514–525. https://doi.org/10.1111/jan.12559
Summers, Anne (1983) “Pride and Prejudice: Ladies and Nurses in the Crimean War,” History Workshop
Journal, 16(1): 33–56.
“The British Lion and the Irish Monkey” (1848) [Cartoon]. Punch, 8 April, p. 147.
“The British Lion’s Vengeance on the Bengal Tiger” (1857) [Cartoon]. Punch, 22 August, pp. 76–77.
“The Crimea” (1856) The Standard, 21 January, p. 3.
“The Crimea” (1856) Morning Herald, 22 January, p. 5.
“The Crimea” (1856) The Standard, 29 January, p. 3.
Windham, Charles Ashe (1856) “War in the East,” Morning Post, 8 January, p. 5.
Winterhalter, Franz Xaver (1846) The Royal Family in 1846 [Painting], London: Buckingham Palace.

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 27
“YOUR GREAT ADVENTURE IS
TO REPORT HER FAITHFULLY”
The centring of women’s voices and stories in
suffrage theatre

Naomi Paxton

On 28 May 1911, American actress and playwright Elizabeth Robins spoke at a public meeting held
by the Women Writers’ Suffrage League (WWSL) in the Criterion Restaurant in the heart of Lon-
don’s West End. Robins, a founder member of the WWSL and its first President, took as her theme
the “power of Suggestion” (Robins 1913: 231). Boys and men, she argued, saw themselves mod-
elled as heroes in fairy tales, adventure stories, in history books and the literary canon, and so grew
up with a sense of agency, legacy, and confidence in their innate physical and mental capacity. Girls
and women, however, were excluded from seeing themselves reflected as powerful and positive and
were instead taught about the world as a place where “not only where all the great deeds are done by
men - but a place where all the great qualities are said to be masculine.” The problem was not solely
in the one-sidedness of both popular and academic histories, but how they were told, to whom, and
by whom. Robins did not blame individual male authors or historians – “I do not complain of men
in this connection. We all write best what we know best” (1913: 235) – instead encouraging the
women writers in the room to seize the opportunity and break the pattern for future generations:

Fellow-members of the League, you have such a field as never writers had before. An almost
virgin field. You are, in respect of life described fearlessly from the woman’s standpoint -
you are in that position for which Chaucer has been so envied by his brother-poets, when
they say he found the English language with the dew upon it. You find woman at the dawn…
there she stands - the Real Girl! - waiting for you to do her justice. No mere chocolate-box
“type,” but a creature of infinite variety, of curiosities and ambitions, of joy in physical ac-
tion, of high dreams of love and service…
(Robins 1913: 236)

Robins’ idea of the potential and complexity of “the Real Girl” was already being reflected and
championed within the suffrage movement, alongside strategies to include and celebrate a variety of
examples of creativity and women’s labour in and out of the home. By 1911, the suffrage campaign
had been active in the United Kingdom for forty-five years and although the political gains had been
slow and erratic, the tactics of direct action and militancy begun by the Women’s Social and Political
Union (WSPU) and the formation of many new suffrage societies in the first decade of the twentieth

DOI: 10.4324/9781003429951-33 406

 Centring of women’s voices and stories in suffrage theatre

century increased the visibility of the campaign. The swell of support and energy from suffragists
and feminists in the arts helped to shape the branding, marketing, and reframing of the movement
for new audiences, with the formation of suffragist theatre groups, the publication of suffrage news-
papers and the establishment of suffragist and feminist presses giving writers the chance to create
bold activist content, develop their own creative voices, and challenge negative stereotypes of cam-
paigners and the campaign. The WWSL and Actresses’ Franchise League (AFL) were founded in
1908 to harness the skills of professional creatives and practitioners. Membership was open to those
with professional industry credits – the WWSL required members to have been paid for the writing
or publication of a “book, article, story, poem, or play” (Robins 1913: 106) and the AFL was open
to anyone who was or had been “connected with the theatrical profession in any of its branches”
(A.J.R. 1913: 10) including singers, musicians, and dancers. Both organizations offered assistance
and support to all other suffrage societies, meaning that neither league explicitly condemned or en-
dorsed militancy and violent direct action. This chapter will consider examples of the work of three
suffragist playwrights, Elizabeth Robins, Cicely Hamilton, and Christopher St John, linked by the
networks of creative professional practice formed by the WWSL and AFL. As well as producing
work for the suffrage campaign, they supported themselves financially as writers, speakers, and per-
formers through freelance portfolio careers in the commercial theatre and entertainment industries,
in journalism, literature, and the arts. None were born into theatrical families, or had formal drama
school training, but all balanced their political activism with their professional lives and brought
stories of the suffrage activism they had seen and been part of to their work for the stage.
Women born in the latter half of the nineteenth century had had access, albeit restricted by many
intersecting social and economic privileges, to greater educational and employment ­prospects than
their mothers, aunts, and grandmothers could have hoped for. Many female and male suffragists
in the theatre did not use their work to reinforce traditional, patriarchal ideas of female domestic
roles, instead choosing to expose dysfunctional economic and social circumstances that dispropor-
tionately affected women and girls, and to challenge “the ideology that asserted the separateness
of domestic and public life” (Holton 1992: 13). Suffragist playwrights like Robins, Hamilton, and
St John who were not married and did not have children chose to focus much of their work around
female friendships and working relationships, and to explore the blurred lines between women’s
political, economic, and social agency inside and outside of the home. The Edwardian suffrage
campaign encouraged all women to see themselves as of value to the movement regardless of
their skills, socio-economic background, or political literacy, as Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence
­emphasized in a speech in 1907:

Can you speak? Can you organize? Are you inventive and resourceful? Come, then and help
us. Come and teach us. The work is great and so growing, we are desperately in need of more
good speakers, good organisers, inventive and resourceful initiators. Do you say, “I have no
gifts, I cannot organize, I cannot speak, I cannot do anything!” Come and join us; we will
teach you. We will organise your work, and develop in you some gift. You will soon see how
much help you can give us.
(Nelson 2004: 69)

A year later, Robins spoke about the reciprocal benefit of becoming involved in the suffrage
movement:

Join in this movement, give it your special gift, whatever that gift may be - give it your
time and your influence (everybody has some), give it pounds or give it pennies, or give it

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 Naomi Paxton

defence - do your share with the sure knowledge that you are not only doing, but receiving,
good.
(Robins 1913: 89)

Equating participation with the idea of goodness was just one strategy used by suffragists to reach
out to potential supporters who might be swayed or reassured by a moral rather than political
approach. Sylvia Pankhurst used Christian religious imagery of nurturing, self-sacrificing moth-
erhood, and womanhood in her murals for the WSPU Women’s Exhibition and Sale of Work in
1909, and in 1910, the Women’s Freedom League (WFL) produced a series of postcards entitled
Suffragettes at Home, featuring posed pictures of their most prominent members undertaking
domestic tasks such as cleaning and preparing food. Keen to “offset the negative image cre-
ated by the opposition of suffrage activists as ‘the other,’ genderless creatures who had little or
no relation to women’s daily lives” (Florey 2013: 137), yet also challenge traditional ideas “of
femininity and domesticity that had long been the basis of women’s political dependency and
social subordination” (Finnegan 1999: 112), suffrage societies tried to make themselves acces-
sible and appealing to all women. For example, young women growing up in the late Victorian
period were taught artistic crafts and needlework at school and where working-class girls, such
as those in the Espérance Girls Club founded by Pethick-Lawrence and Mary Neal in the 1890s
had learned to sew by hand and machine as a necessary skill for gaining employment, for middle
class girls, this education was part of their training for their future domestic life as wives and
mothers.1 In 1909, the Board of Education declared that needlework was essential for a girl “to
reach woman’s estate”2 and suffrage societies like the WSPU wove politics into their displays of
domestic craft-making at public events, in shops, and as part of fundraisers, careful not to dismiss
or diminish the contribution of those who had not been previously able to exhibit or profit from
their creativity and artistry. WWSL member Evelyn Sharp reflected whilst attending one exhibi-
tion and sale of work that:

Every fine piece of embroidery, every baby garment… represents the woman’s answer to
the silent centuries in which she has been overworked and underpaid. Here you may find the
readjustment of that picture of womanhood so dear to the past… Here…is the new picture
of the woman.
(Votes for Women 21 May 1909: 688)

New creative representations of women and womanhood in the movement were, crucially, being
formed and tested by women themselves. Suffragist artists, designers, performers, and writers who
had undertaken formal or informal professional training and who supported themselves through
their work were uniquely positioned to articulate their experiences for an audience that craved
representation and the modelling of female-centred stories. The theatre was the perfect medium
for these stories because, as Sheila Stowell has noted, within both militant and constitutional suf-
frage societies, “theatre was seen to offer a platform for powerful dissent, a literal stage for the
criticism of current orthodoxies” (Stowell 1996: 169). Suffrage plays and entertainments could
not only acknowledge the gendered hierarchies and class structures woven through the realities of
women’s labour in and out of the home, but by filling the stage with a variety of female characters
and performers, suffragist playwrights were able to bring potentially conflicting representations of
women and womanhood together to co-exist in the same creative space and therefore be examined
and reframed as part of performative propaganda of the movement. The playwright who started it
all was Elizabeth Robins.

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“Not only a pioneer, but an innovator” (Gale and Bush-Bailey 2012: 208) –
Elizabeth Robins, Votes for Women!, and the birth of suffrage theatre
Elizabeth Robins’ encouragement to her fellow writers in 1911 to express themselves without
fear and to seize the opportunity to tell woman-centred stories speaks to her profile in the suf-
frage campaign and as a producer and facilitator of New Woman drama. Robins was born in
Kentucky, United States, began her acting career in New York and moved to London in 1888 at
the age of 26 to embrace new opportunities. She produced and played the leading role in the first
English production of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler in 1891, and co-produced and appeared in a num-
ber of Ibsen plays in London during the 1890s, developing a significant and respected profile in
the independent theatre industry as a performer and as a feminist. Embodying Ibsen’s characters
on stage politicized Robins, and “had a profoundly ratiocinative impact on her consciousness”
(Joannou 2010: 180). In 1902, she made her last professional stage appearance in Eleanor by
Mrs. Humphrey Ward, a writer who did much to improve educational opportunities for women
and underserved communities but would go on to be one of the most prominent anti-suffragists
in the United Kingdom. Robins herself had little sympathy with suffrage campaigners until 1906
when she began developing a three-act play that would become Votes for Women! Commissioned
by actress-manager Gertrude Kingston but eventually produced by Harley Granville Barker at
the Court Theatre, Robins undertook extensive research for her play by attending suffrage meet-
ings and spending time with suffrage speakers, and although she had only just become seriously
interested in the suffrage movement, she was quickly recognized as an influential and important
ally, moving in “powerful social circles” that suffragists hoped could be used to achieve their goal
(Hill 2018: 132). At a suffrage banquet held at the Savoy Hotel in December 1906 and chaired by
Millicent Garrett Fawcett, she was placed at the top table with suffragist writers George Bernard
Shaw and Charlotte Shaw on one side, and Israel Zangwill on the other.3 Other attendees present
included Christabel, Sylvia and Adela Pankhurst, Charlotte Despard, and future members of the
AFL and WWSL Beatrice Harraden, Gertrude Kingston, and Evelyn Sharp.
The speeches in the second act of Robins’ play, which is set at an open-air meeting in Tra-
falgar Square draw directly from key voices and individuals in the movement. WSPU member
and Manchester-based suffragette Hannah Mitchell recalled spending time with Robins whilst
campaigning in Huddersfield in late 1906 and claimed that Robins’ writing included “one or two
incidents” from her life (Mitchell 1968: 163). Angela V. John considers the characters of Ernestine
Blunt and the unnamed working-class woman speaker to have been modelled on WSPU stalwarts
Teresa Billington-Greig and Minne Baldock, and asserts that “the process of writing and research-
ing this play turned Elizabeth… into a committed suffragette publicly identified with the cause”
(2007: 201). Robins donated a quarter of her fee and royalties for the play to the National Union of
Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) and the WSPU, and the debates surrounding the produc-
tion and the issues it raised also empowered theatre professionals to think about their own visibil-
ity as suffragists. Four actresses from the original cast of Votes for Women! joined the AFL (John
2007: 206), and Robins became a Vice-President of the organization. She reshaped her play into a
novel, The Convert (1907), and remained an influential speaker and writer for campaigners in and
out of the theatre industry. Robins accepted Emmeline Pankhurst’s invitation to be on the Execu-
tive Committee of the WSPU in 1907, and although she regularly spoke and wrote on behalf of the
WSPU over the next six years and explained the ideas behind the principle of militancy in print,
she did not take part in any militant actions herself. The variety of pro-suffrage voices presented
in a heightened but recognizable representation of an open-air political meeting, paved the way for
the development of suffrage drama as a genre. Votes for Women! opened up possibilities for theatre

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created and produced by and with suffragists to be used to spread the message of the movement,
challenge negative stereotypes, and engage new audiences in the constitutional arguments for
women’s enfranchisement. In the same year the AFL and WWSL were founded, another suffragist
actress turned playwright had a breakthrough West End hit that would change the course of her
career. Her name was Cicely Hamilton, and she would go on to write some of the best-known and
most popular suffrage comedies of the Edwardian period.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake encourage people to have opinions!” (The Vote 14
January 1911: 141) – Cicely Hamilton and the sharing of greatness
Cicely Hamilton’s Diana of Dobson’s was first produced by actress-manager Lena Ashwell at her
Kingsway Theatre in Holborn in 1908. It was Hamilton’s third play, and her first success. The first
act was set in the dormitory of a large suburban draper’s shop and opened with what The Tatler
described as “a daring scene” throughout which the female shop assistants got undressed and
prepared to go to bed (19 February 1908: 131). Hamilton mixed comedy with social commen-
tary in Diana of Dobson’s, intriguing audiences and critics with her blend of “conventional and
unconventional” storytelling, exploring not only sweated labour but the wider theme of women’s
economic inequality in the workplace and showing a mastery of stagecraft informed by her many
years as an actress (Gillespie and Birrer 2003: 55). Hamilton began working as an actress in the
mid-1890s and for the first decade of her career toured the UK, appearing in a variety of plays.4
Like Robins, she became involved in the suffrage movement around 1906–1907 and was also
well-established in theatrical networks, but unlike Robins, she continued acting as well as writing
from 1906 onwards. Hamilton was a founder member of the WWSL and the AFL and was affili-
ated to many other suffrage societies including the WSPU and the Tax Resistance League. She was
also editor of The Vote, the newspaper of the WFL, and wrote the words for the WSPU anthem
March of the Women which was composed by Ethel Smyth. As the WSPU leadership became more
autocratic and tensions in the suffrage movement became heightened by the use of militancy and
violent direct action, Hamilton wanted suffragists frustrated by the differing views held across the
movement to see the tensions as part of the larger progress being made by women – and as evi-
dence that women were asserting themselves more confidently as individuals. In a speech entitled
The Spirit of the Movement, given to the Central London Branch of the WFL on 3 January 1911,
she encouraged fellow campaigners to reflect more generously:

I think we all of us ought to realise that one of the big causes that lie behind the Suffrage
movement is the new consciousness in woman that she is free to think for herself… Think
of the years, of the generations, that women have been told they must not think!… It is only
within the last generation that we have found we have a brain and a mind, and begun to
stumble slowly forward, and to bring a new view to bear upon things as they are, and not
only upon things as they ought to be… We see things with a view which is entirely different
from that which our brothers had; they saw them as their fathers saw them, but we see things
very differently from the way our mothers saw them.
(The Vote 14 January 1911: 140)

Hamilton described herself as “feminist rather than suffragist,” and wrote frequently in both her
journalistic and dramatic work about the systemic economic inequalities faced by women, espe-
cially keen to challenge the “identification of success with marriage, of failure with spinsterhood,
the artificial concentration of the hopes of girlhood on sexual attraction and maternity” (1935: 65).

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Her experiences as a touring actress reinforced her belief in the need for women to be paid and
treated fairly, to learn about and have access to birth control, and to be able to live independent
lives on their own terms.

It is ridiculous to suppose that nature, who never makes two blades of grass alike, desired
to turn out indefinite millions of women all cut to the regulation pattern of wifehood; that
is to say, all home-loving, charming, submissive, industrious, unintelligent, tidy, possessed
with the desire to please, well-dressed, jealous of their own sex, self-sacrificing, cowardly,
filled with a burning passion for maternity, endowed with a talent for cooking, narrowly
uninterested in the world outside their own gates, and capable of sinking their own identity
and interests in the identity and interests of a husband.
(Hamilton 1981: 45)

She explored these themes in her book Marriage as a Trade (1909) and in many of her plays for
the commercial stage, including Just to Get Married (1910), Jack and Jill and a Friend and The
Cutting of the Knot (both 1911), and Phyl (1913). She also satirized stereotypes of what Rob-
ins referred to as the “chocolate-box ‘type’” in her work for suffragist audiences – most notably
through the characters of the Early Victorian Lady and the Truly Womanly Woman in her Anti-
Suffrage Waxworks (1909).5 In one of Hamilton’s best-known suffrage plays A Pageant of Great
Women (1910), she showcases many different types of female leadership, entrepreneurship, and
independence. Hamilton was inspired to write the Pageant by actress, director, producer, and AFL
member Edith Craig, the daughter of Ellen Terry and partner of Christopher St John. The play
opens with Woman pleading her case for freedom and equality before Justice. She is pursued by
Prejudice, who claims that she is both incapable and unworthy of being man’s equal. In response,
Woman calls on the Great Women of the past, who appear in groups as The Learned Women, The
Artists, The Saintly Women, The Heroic Women, The Rulers, and The Warriors. They amass on
stage, over fifty women representing different women from history. Prejudice sees the array of
Great Women, hears what they have done, and leaves the stage, unable to argue further. Justice
then encourages Woman to speak to man as an equal, and her final speech, calling for the “clean,
clear right” to shape her own destiny without interference from or accountability to anyone else,
closes the play (Hamilton 1910: 47). Pageant was produced all over the United Kingdom, with
local suffragists and supporters taking the roles of the Great Women, and professional performers
playing Woman, Justice, and Prejudice. In the programme for one performance at the Albert Hall
in Sheffield in 1910, for which Edith Craig was stage manager and in which Hamilton played
Woman, Christopher St John wrote that the piece “has been described as a ‘Suffragist’ Pageant,
but it does not mention the vote, and is in no way controversial.”6 Pageant does not make explicit
reference to votes for women, focusing instead on a more universal disproving and dismantling of
Prejudice’s assertions that Woman is not fit for freedom. It is a participatory piece of theatre that is
not only educational and spectacular, but also optimistic and deeply moving. Through this visual
representation of a diverse international history and legacy of female achievement Hamilton gave
suffragist and feminist audiences and performers the opportunity to be part of a “collective acting
out of greatness,” creating a theatrical experience in which “greatness seemed to be within reach
of every woman” (Cockin 1998: 105). The play was published in 1910 by the Suffrage Shop, run
by AFL member Sime Seruya. Pageant may not have specifically mentioned votes for women, but
its development and performance context was steeped in the suffrage movement and in suffragist
networks. This is also true of Hamilton’s best-known suffrage plays, first performed in the same
year as Pageant, and written in collaboration with Christopher St John.

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“My vigorous individuality” (St John 1915: 267) – Christopher

St John and the balancing of priorities
Christopher St John – novelist, performer, biographer, playwright, translator, and journalist –
changed her name from Christabel Marshall when she converted to Catholicism as an adult. Of the
writers discussed in this chapter, St John was the only one with experience of higher education.
She studied Modern History at Somerville College, Oxford in the 1890s, published her first novel
in 1900, worked as a secretary for two vocal anti-suffragists, Mrs Humphrey Ward and Winston
Churchill, and had worked professionally as an actress before becoming interested in the suffrage
movement. Her initial impression of suffragists was not positive – she was puzzled at their “happy
indifference” to the mockery they received in the press and in public, and disliked “their pride in
the odious title ‘Suffragette’” (St John 1915: 262), but found herself drawn to the wider arguments
being made and able to look beyond the stereotypes:

When I went to suffrage meetings in the character of a sympathetic onlooker, I found that
the ‘suffragettes’ were not a race apart, but a collection of ordinary wives, mothers, sisters
and daughters, with all the virtues and faults of ordinary women; and I decided that the at-
tempt to represent them as an insignificant body of disappointed and soured spinsters who
had manufactured this agitation by way of venting their spite on a world where they were
not ‘desired’ would not do.
(St John 1915: 263)

Crediting the militants with making the cause visible and “contagious” (1915: 275), St John
first joined the WSPU and later became a committee member of both the Catholic Women’s
Suffrage Society and the WWSL. Unlike Robins and Hamilton, St John was arrested for suf-
frage activism whilst part of the WSPU, although she is not known to have been imprisoned.7 In
February 1909, she was charged with obstructing the police at a suffrage deputation in White-
hall, although the account of her arrest in the WSPU newspaper Votes for Women states that
she was simply walking nearby and watching the deputation to ascertain “if the average Press
reports of such deputations were fair and accurate” (2 July 1909: 879). At her trial, she avoided
a month-long sentence by pleading on oath that she was not part of the protest but instead
observing as “a journalist and a dramatist” (The Weekly Dispatch 28 February 1909: 5), an
interesting example of a problematic mix of visibility, activism, and spectatorship experienced
by many women in the suffrage movement.8 When taking part in a later WSPU deputation, St
John took the precautionary measure of wearing “Japanese lacquer armour” underneath her
coat to protect herself, and was arrested after seizing the bridle of a police horse (1915: 271).
In her autobiography, she expresses ambivalence about the approach of the militant campaign,
concern about the effectiveness of suffrage speakers and literature, and anxiety about the ten-
sion between engaging with performative propaganda and maintaining artistic integrity. She
said in February 1909 that she was “not a Suffragette in the accepted term of the word” (The
Weekly Dispatch 28 February 1909: 5) but defended it in a duologue entitled A Defence of the
Fighting Spirit a few months later:

DIANA: We didn’t invent the word, but ungrammatical, half-contemptuous as it is, there is
not one of us who would exchange it now for a more refined and literary title.
(Votes for Women 18 June 1909: 809)

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St John wrote explicitly about militant suffragettes in her one-act play Her Will, produced in April
1914 by Edith Craig at the Women’s Section of the Children’s Welfare Exhibition, organized by
the NUWSS at Olympia. Her Will is set after the funeral of a wealthy suffragette, Helen Wilton,
when her relations, unsympathetic to the cause and eager to discover their legacies, gather to
hear her will being read. Wilton is part of the fictional Forward Suffrage Union, and the colours
of this organization are described as red, purple, and gold – a combination of the colours of the
three most prominent suffrage societies with the red of the non-militant NUWSS, the purple of
the militant WSPU and the gold of the militant WFL.9 It is revealed in the play that Helen Wilton
has died from medical complications brought on by forcible feeding in Holloway Prison, and St
John takes the opportunity to allude directly to Parliamentary debates in 1913 surrounding the
use of forcible feeding, and the passing of The Prisoners (Temporary Discharge for Ill Health)
Act, better known as the Cat and Mouse Act, which meant hunger-striking suffragette prisoners
were released when they became dangerously ill, and were re-arrested once recovered to continue
their sentences. There are references in the play to the life of Helen Wilton that echo elements of
the stories of militant suffragettes Mary Jane Clarke, Lady Constance Lytton, and Emily Wilding
Davison, all of whom had suffered physical and psychological trauma at the hands of the prison
authorities whilst on hunger strike. Artist Mary Jane Clarke, the younger sister of WSPU leader
Emmeline Pankhurst, died in December 1910 two days after being released from Holloway Prison,
Lady Constance Lytton’s health had been permanently damaged by her treatment in Walton Gaol
in 1909, and Emily Wilding Davison had attempted to kill herself in protest at Holloway Prison
in 1912 after being repeatedly forcibly fed. The description of Helen Wilton’s funeral procession
is very similar to that organized by the WSPU for Davison when she died in 1913 after sustaining
serious injuries at the Epsom Derby.

Twelve young girls dressed in white and wearing the colours of the Forward Suffrage Union
were the pall-bearers, and white was almost universally worn by the hundreds of women
who followed the hearse to Kensal Green. All carried bunches of gay spring flowers, and
another brilliant note of colour was supplied by the band of the Union in their scarlet and
purple uniforms with gold sashes on which the word “Equalitas” was conspicuous.
(Paxton 2018: 173–174)

In Her Will, it is revealed that at the time of her death, Helen Wilton had been writing a book called
Prisoners and Prisons – a reversal of the title of Constance Lytton’s book Prison and Prisoners
which included graphic and disturbing descriptions of forcible feeding and had been published
just a few weeks before the first production of Her Will. The play emphasizes the camaraderie
between those who have experienced imprisonment – in Wilton’s will, she leaves money to her
housekeeper whom she originally met in Holloway, and the rest of her estate to the Forward Suf-
frage Union.

The ties which bind me to those comrades who have had to suffer insult and imprisonment,
torture even, in their efforts to procure such a simple instalment of justice to women as the
parliamentary vote, are stronger than any other ties.
(Paxton 2018: 180)

The play was not published in St John’s lifetime and seems not to have been performed elsewhere,
perhaps because its direct references to WSPU militancy were no longer considered relevant when

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all suffrage prisoners were released four months later after the outbreak of the First World War and
the cessation of militancy by the WSPU. It is, however, a fascinating piece of work that shows St
John continuing to engage audiences with the personal and political experience of militancy and
direct action. St John’s best-remembered and most popular suffrage plays were the one-act com-
edies she wrote with Cicely Hamilton, which celebrated female friendships and camaraderie and
mocked stereotypes of both suffragettes and anti-suffragists.

“Hurry up! Come on! Votes for Women!” (Paxton 2013: 27) – amplifying
activism through suffrage comedy
The most popular and widely performed pro-suffrage performance pieces were comedies. Marga-
ret D. Stetz’s view that suffragist writers “would find it easy to make audiences laugh with comic
plays… but difficult to move those audiences from laughter to action” (2001: 46) is a challenging
one. Suffrage plays were rarely produced as standalone events, but almost always as part of a pro-
gramme of entertainment that included speeches, or at exhibitions and festivals where other forms
of performative propaganda were happening simultaneously. One of the most widely performed
suffrage plays, How The Vote Was Won, is an ensemble comedy that champions women’s voices
and labour. First performed at the Royalty Theatre in April 1909, the play embraces the idea of
non-violent collective action by women and is based on Cicely Hamilton’s original short story of
the same name, a spoof history described as “Some short Extracts from Prof. Dryasdust’s ‘Political
History of the Twentieth Century,’ published in the year 2008 A.D.” (Hamilton 1908: 21) The story
and the play imagines a general women’s strike, called by suffrage campaigners to take the Govern-
ment’s argument that women are all supported by men to its logical conclusion. All working women
are instructed to leave their jobs on the same day at the same time to go to their nearest male relative
and demand to be supported, and those who have no male relatives are to go to the workhouse. Set
in the house of Horace Cole, a clerk in South London, the play introduces the audience to seven of
his female relatives who are all employed in different ways. Maudie is a music hall performer who
has worked since she was a young child, Winifred is a paid organizer for the WSPU, Agatha is a
live-in governess, Molly is a novelist and keen golfer, Madame Christine owns a dressmaking busi-
ness, and Aunt Lizzie runs a boarding house. Only Ethel, Horace’s wife, has no paid employment,
although it is revealed that she pays for the domestic help she has at home out of her own money. As
the play progresses, the women speak about their decision to take part in the strike and it becomes
clear that this action has exposed how vital and undervalued women’s labour is to business, politics,
and society. Horace wants to escape from the situation by going to the theatre, but as all profes-
sional actresses and female theatre workers have gone on strike too, the London theatres and music
halls have been closed. The language of the collective power of suffragist action and activism in
the play was familiar to suffragist audiences. In an article entitled The Sisterhood of Women in the
20th May 1910 edition of Votes for Women, Christabel Pankhurst urged readers to participate in an
upcoming procession for the sake of not only the suffrage cause, but also all womankind:

Any suffragist who, on that day, elects to stand out of the ranks will be diminishing the
strength and volume of the demand which will go out from this great concourse of women
to the Government. And how much poorer she herself will be because of the knowledge that
while she sits at home, the flag is flying, the drums are beating, and her sister women in their
thousands are marching through London to demand political freedom!
(Votes for Women 20 May 1910: 550)

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A similar emotive appeal by Christabel Pankhurst is quoted in How The Vote Was Won. Lily, the
maid of all work, explains to Ethel why she is going on strike:

LILY: Miss Christabel – she told us. She says to us: “Now look ’ere, all of yer – you who’ve got
no men to go to on Thursday – you’ve got to go to the Union,” she says; “and the one who
’angs back” – and she looked at me, she did – “may be the person ’oo the ’ole strain of
the movement is restin’ on, the traitor ’oo’s sailin’ under the ’ostile flag,” she says; and I
says, “That won’t be me – not much!”
(Paxton 2013: 9)

The play ends with the men of London, including Horace Cole, rushing to Westminster to demand
votes for women as a way of ending the strike. It is notable that they have not been won over by
the constitutional arguments presented by the women, but because direct action has forced their
hand. Christabel Pankhurst praised the play in 1911 when defending a militant attack on Govern-
ment property:

In that delightful and instructive play, “How the Vote was Won” […] the tactics resorted
to by women […] win the sympathy and enthusiasm of all […] and many have wished, no
doubt, that this same policy could be adopted in real life.
(Votes for Women 1 December 1911: 142)

An incident at an anti-suffrage meeting in March 1909 inspired another of Hamilton and St John’s
one-act comic plays Pot and Kettle, which was first performed in November of that year.10 The
piece is set in the family home of Marjorie, who is attending her first anti-suffrage meeting. She
returns home in distress after having been arrested for assaulting a suffragette who was part of a
group protest at the meeting:

MARJORIE: All the suffragettes got up and stood on their seats and shouted. And she - the one
next to me - was about the worst of all. She had got a flag hidden under her coat -
with “Votes for Women” on it - and she took it and waved it. And at last I got so
excited - with all the noise and the organist beginning “God Save the King” to
stop the questions - that I told her to sit down. But she didn’t take any notice and
went on waving her flag and making more noise. So then I got more excited still -
and I don’t know exactly what made it do it, but I knocked her hat over her eyes
and thumped her twice.
(Paxton 2013: 60)

This may have been directly drawn from an incident Hamilton recalls in her autobiography whilst
attending a pro-suffrage meeting at the Albert Hall at which WSPU activists protested and fought
with audience members, and in which the organist’s response was funnier than the one she chose
to include in the play:

Over the tumult and the shouting and the hatred there floated from the organ a melody fa-
miliar and amiable:
Oh, dear, what can the matter be?
Oh, dear, what can the matter be?

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I don’t know who was the Albert Hall organist on that occasion, but […] his musical
comment was so apt and so ridiculous that mirth swept the meeting like a gust.
(Hamilton 1935: 72–73)

In Pot and Kettle Marjorie’s cousin Nell, a suffragette, is able to resolve the situation by phoning
her injured fellow activist and asking her to drop the charges. Nell reveals that they know each
other through participation in a direct action at the Houses of Parliament:

NELL: She and I were chucked out of the Ladies’ Gallery the night the grille was shifted.
(Paxton 2013: 64)

This is a direct reference to a protest that took place in October 1908 for which Australian actress,
WFL and AFL member Muriel Matters was imprisoned for a month. Matters and another woman
chained themselves to the grille of the Ladies Gallery in the House of Commons before taking part
in an organized disruption of the Commons session by shouting, throwing leaflets, and displaying
suffrage banners. This action was covered in the national press, but it is a testament to Hamilton
and St John that they were able to make a topical reference to suffragette protest in Parliament that
would be recognizable to those within the movement, but that was subtle enough to be passed by
the censor. There are many other examples of suffrage comedies, and in each, the framing of suf-
frage arguments, activism, and activists through humour is a tactic that subverts expectations and
challenges negative stereotypes. Gale and Bush-Bailey have argued that the use of comedic forms
should not “undermine the importance” (2012: 23) of these texts, and they were highly successful
calls to action, frequently performed for and with different suffrage societies, and published and
distributed widely. Centring women’s voices and stories through a comedic suffragist lens allowed
for a sharing of experience through entertainment, inviting the audience to engage with suffragists
in person and presenting the constitutional arguments for the vote at a time when much of the
mainstream press was focusing on sensationalizing violent direct action and militancy. Christo-
pher St John considered her dramatization of How The Vote Was Won as the direct service of an
artist to the cause (Votes for Women 9 July 1909: 903), and suffrage comedies provided a space in
which heighted representations of suffragists and anti-suffragists could be explored playfully, and
in which writers and performers could demonstrate their support for the movement as activists.

“Proud and full of hope” – the Great Adventure of suffrage theatre

The Great Adventure is before her. Your Great Adventure is to report her faithfully. So that
her children’s children reading her story shall be lifted up - proud and full of hope. “Of such
stuff,” they shall say, “our mothers were! Sweethearts and wives - yes, and other things be-
sides: leaders, discoverers, militants, fighting every form of wrong.”
(Robins 1913: 236)

Robins’ challenge to her fellow suffragist writers in 1911 was an invitation to not only articulate
their unique perspectives, but also to find ways to make those perspectives available for audiences
to experience. The variety of styles and genres in suffrage theatre and the many ways it could be
accessed produced what Katharine Cockin has described as a “free-flowing, fertile and unfet-
tered” (2005: 530) environment for suffragist creatives to respond to the liveness of the campaign.
Making work without fixed limitations of style, genre, or space in what Rebecca Cameron has

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referred to as a “hybrid genre” (2016: 295) also meant suffragist playwrights could experiment
with reframing ideas and stories for audiences away from the pressures of the commercial theatre
industry, developing their professional practice across several different platforms, and experiment-
ing with form. Matinees produced by the AFL meant that new suffrage plays were guaranteed at
least one production, a crucial opportunity for emerging writers. They also created opportunities
for participation by local activists – for example, as part of the crowd scene in Robins’ Votes for
Women and as the heroines in Hamilton’s Pageant of Great Women. Robins, Hamilton, and St John
produced pro-suffragist work as part of their wider feminist outputs, informed by direct experi-
ence of taking part in performative suffrage activism and a practical understanding of the legacies
of systemic inequality in the creative and entertainment industries. The final tableau of St John’s
The First Actress (1911) represents actresses from four centuries of London theatre to prove, as in
Hamilton’s Pageant, that arguments used to keep women out of the professional theatre industry
and to dismiss their creative potential were nonsensical.
Embracing a multi-layered and multi-disciplinary approach to their campaigning meant artists
and practitioners within the WWSL and AFL were able to work collaboratively to test ideas in
networks of women linked by political ideology and professional practice. Suffragist playwrights
encouraged audiences to find points of connection with individual characters and situations, and
then see those individuals as part of a wider social, political, and historical movement for women’s
rights. Robins considered it “the business… as well as the high privilege of men and women writ-
ers to correct the false ideas about women which many writers of the past have fostered” (1913:
116), and scholars of twentieth century theatre, the suffrage movement, and feminist writing are
fortunate that the work of suffragist playwrights reveals underrepresented voices, stories, and ele-
ments of the campaign that may otherwise have been lost. By paying tribute to feminist voices
from the past and acknowledging the legacy of discrimination that prevented women from access-
ing education, training, and employment on the same terms as men, each of the writers explored in
this chapter refashioned and repurposed their experiences through and with their suffrage activism,
making space for their colleagues, collaborators, and audiences to think, speak, and be visible as
activists.

Notes
1 For more see Dyhouse (1981).
2 Board of Education, Suggestions for the Teaching of Needlework, Circular 750, p. 3.
3 Complimentary Banquet to the Suffragists seating plan, Museum of London Suffragette Collection.
4 For a detailed account of Hamilton’s work as an actress, see Moran (2017).
5 For more about the waxworks, see Paxton (2018) and Moran (2017).
6 St. John, ‘Description of The Pageant of Great Women’ in Pageant of Great Women programme, 1910.
Women’s Library at LSE.
7 St John does not appear on the Suffragette Fellowship’s Roll of Honour of Suffragette Prisoners 1905–
1914, compiled by former suffragettes in the 1950s, as either Christabel Marshall, Christopher St John or
the stage name Joanna Willett which she used in 1903. She may have been arrested, tried and imprisoned
under a pseudonym, but does not mention this in her writing about her suffrage activism.
8 See Green (1994–1995: 71).
9 Purple also featured in the colours of the Jewish Suffrage League, the East London Federation of Suf-
fragettes, and the militant Men’s Political Union for Women’s Enfranchisement; Gold in the colours of
the WWSL, the Church League for Women’s Suffrage, the Catholic Women’s Suffrage Society, and the
Conservative and Unionist Women’s Franchise Association. The Votes for Women Fellowship had the
colours purple, white, and red.
10 Programme for AFL and WWSL matinee, Scala Theatre, November 12th 1909, p. 3. Suffragette Collec-
tion, Museum of London.

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 Naomi Paxton

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Cameron, Rebecca (Winter 2016) “‘A Somber Passion Strengthens Her Voice’: The Stage as Public Platform
in British Women’s Suffrage Drama,” Comparative Drama, 50(4): 293–316.
Cockin, Katharine (1998) Edith Craig (1869–1947), London: Cassell.
Cockin, Katharine (2005) “Cicely Hamilton’s Warriors: Dramatic Reinventions of Militancy in the British
Women’s Suffrage Movement,” Women’s History Review, 14(3–4): 527–542.
Dyhouse, Carol (1981) Girls Growing Up in Late Victorian and Edwardian England, London: Routledge.
Finnegan, Margaret (1999) Selling Suffrage: Consumer Culture and Votes for Women, New York: Columbia
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­Broadview Press Ltd.
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Street and the Sites of Suffrage,” Discourse, 17(2): 67–97.
Hamilton, Cicely (1908) How the Vote Was Won. London: Women’s Writers’ Suffrage League.
Hamilton, Cicely (1910) A Pageant of Great Women. London: The Suffrage Shop.
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Hamilton, Cicely (1981) Marriage as a Trade, London: The Women’s Press.
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ter: Manchester University Press.
Mitchell, Geoffrey. (ed.) (1968) The Hard Way Up: The Autobiography of Hannah Mitchell, Suffragette and
Rebel, London: Faber and Faber.
Moran, Seán (2017) The Stage Career of Cicely Hamilton (1895–1914), Frankfurt: Peter Lang.
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Robins, Elizabeth (1913) Way Stations, London: Hodder and Stoughton.
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Press, pp. 166–184.

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 28
A LIFE CAN BE A MANIFESTO
Connecting Bernadine Evaristo to a history of
feminist manifestos

Fiona Tolan

Bernadine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other (2019a) commences with Amma, the dominant recur-
ring character in the miscellaneous cast of Evaristo’s choral novel, standing on the South Bank of
the Thames, drinking coffee, anticipating that evening’s opening performance of her play, The Last
Amazon of Dahomey, at the National Theatre. Once “a renegade lobbing hand grenades at the es-
tablishment” and a believer in “protest that was public, disruptive and downright annoying”, even-
tually, “the mainstream began to absorb what was once radical and she found herself hopeful of
joining it” (Evaristo 2019a: 2). A complex, polyphonic “fusion fiction” of twelve intertwined nar-
ratives from women and one non-binary character of different ages and backgrounds, Evaristo’s
novel strives, in her own words, to “put presence into absence” (Sethi 2019: n.pag.), addressing
what she diagnoses as the invisibility of black British women in literature with a profusion of over-
lapping narratives. As she explains to one interviewer, “I wanted to create as many black British
female protagonists as I could get away with” (Tepper 2019: n.pag.). This multi-perspectival novel
of divergent voices opens quite purposefully, however, with Amma’s story – that is to say, that of
a black woman writer from London, of about Evaristo’s age – reflecting on history and lineage, art
and community, marginalisation and protest. These themes persist through a narrative that draws
substantially at times on Evaristo’s own past, resulting in a text that merges in its depiction of the
radical 1980s London theatre scene with the personal history recounted in her 2021 autobiography,
Manifesto: On Never Giving Up. Taken together, these two recent works foreground Evaristo’s
concern – longstanding, but increasingly urgent – with a history of women’s lives, women’s writ-
ing, and women’s protest; together, they function to frame a literary manifesto for feminism today.
In Living a Feminist Life, Sara Ahmed writes: “In the labor of making manifest we make a
manifesto” (2017: 252). For Ahmed, the construction of a feminist manifesto commences and pro-
ceeds from the foundational act of recognising and describing the reality of women’s lives. This
same principle also underpins Evaristo’s work in which she strives to manifest the unwritten lives
of black women and does so with political and activist intent. As notably feminist-engaged literary
projects, both Girl, Woman, Other and Manifesto mediate the margins of the manifesto tradition –
“a complex, ideologically inflected genre” (Lyon 1999: 2) that “operates on unsteady ground”
(Fahs 2020: 4). They speak loudly to the feminist politics and demands of both the recent past and
the present moment. Although works of literary fiction and life-writing, these companion texts
overlap in their exploration of protest, of trouble making, of generations, history, and community,

419 DOI: 10.4324/9781003429951-34

 Fiona Tolan

and in their testing of the boundaries of genre and form – and they do so in a manner that recalls
a lineage of feminist manifestos, a form that is notably resurgent in recent years. In this chapter,
I contextualise Evaristo’s recent works within a historical legacy of feminist manifesto-writing;
by exploring the author’s connections to earlier women writers of these documents of protest, we
gain a new perspective on Evaristo’s writerly intentions. Taking from Ahmed the principle that
the purpose of a feminist manifesto is to “render a new order of ideas perceptible” and to “cause a
disturbance” (Ahmed 2017: 251), this chapter places Evaristo’s work at the heart of a discussion
that seeks to trouble the definition of a feminist manifesto in a manner that is, I suggest, entirely
congruent with the troublesome nature of both feminism and manifestos.

The Evaristo Manifesto

Amma’s experience of finally, unexpectedly, finding herself an insider at one of Britain’s great
cultural institutions, rather than a perennial outsider inhabiting the margins of experimental ac-
tivist theatre, echoes Evaristo’s own trajectory. Developing her craft in the same “1980s black
feminist countercultural community in London” – co-founding Theatre of Black Women “essen-
tially because there was no work available” for black women writers and actors (Tepper 2019:
n.pag.) – Evaristo’s reputation slowly developed over the course of six experimental-poetic nov-
els, eventually accruing a professorship and various literary-cultural indicators of prestige and in-
fluence, including appointment as President of The Royal Society of Literature, until she became,
as a recent profile in The New Yorker describes her, “a diplomatic, modernizing force at the top of
the British literary establishment from which she was long excluded” (Russell 2022: n.pag.). Just
as Amma achieves a notable marker of success when her play “opens at the National” (Evaristo
2019a: 1), so Evaristo experienced her own novelist’s version of highly visible attainment when
Girl, Woman, Other – her seventh novel – won the 2019 Booker Prize, making her the first black
woman and the first black British author to do so. How long did it take? she muses in an interview:
“It took Amma 40 years. It took me 40 years, quite frankly” (Tepper 2019: n.pag.).
The prize, when it eventually came, famously attracted controversy for being jointly awarded
to Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood, for The Testaments (her much anticipated sequel to the
1985 now-classic dystopian novel, The Handmaid’s Tale), contravening the Booker rules in what
the judges termed “a rebellious gesture but […] a generous one” (Flood 2019a, n.pag.). While
many condemned what Sunny Singh describes as the refusal “to reward a prodigious black woman
writer a win of her own” (Singh 2019: n.pag.; for discussion of the controversy, see Flood 2019b),
Evaristo, however, showed only good grace, acknowledging the Booker’s extraordinary capacity
to introduce to a wide readership “a ‘queer’ book, about black British women, quite radical in
terms of its stories and structure” (Tepper 2019; n.pag.) and to propel her own career “into another
stratosphere” (Liu 2020: n.pag.). Like Amma, Evaristo finds herself, late in mid-life, on the inside,
suddenly feted for work she has been doing for many years. As she says in Manifesto, after forty
years of writing, she became an “overnight success” (Evaristo 2021: 1). She may no longer be
the disgruntled outsider who “throws stones” at the “impenetrable fortress” of the establishment
(Evaristo 2021: 183), but crucially, her vision of the writer’s work remains unchanged: “I’m still
an uncompromising person and writer”, she declares, “I work within the systems to change them”
(Sethi 2019: n.pag.).
This instinct for change and activism is manifest in Evaristo’s championing of black British
writing. She was instrumental, for example, in the founding of the Black Writers’ Guild in 2020,
which began with a letter, signed by over 100 black British writers, calling on U.K. publishing
companies to tackle the “systemic inequalities” and chronic underrepresentation of black authors

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and publishers in the industry. The letter was written in the wake of the May 2020 killing of George
Floyd in Minneapolis, United States. Amidst the subsequent resurgent influence and increasing
internationalisation of the Black Lives Matter movement, institutions across the world sought to
ride a wave of repugnance at racial injustice and moved quickly to “release statements of support
for the black communities who have been campaigning for equality for decades”. Suspicious of
performative allyship and a readiness to condemn American racism without interrogating systemic
racial inequalities in British institutions and industries, writers like Benjamin Zephaniah, Candice
Carty-Williams, David Olusoga, Diana Evans and Malorie Blackman, alongside Evaristo, founded
the Black Writers’ Guild, with a declared intention to “to create a sustainable, profitable, fair and
equal eco-system for Black literary talent in British publishing” (theBlackwritersguild.com). Evar-
isto uses the fame the Booker Prize brings to power her activism, challenging the ­system – in this
instance, the publishing industry – to convert soul-searching into sustainable practice. This same
call to action runs through her writing. With Girl, Woman, Other, as with Manifesto, we see her
make manifest both the inequitable nature of ‘the systems’ in which she works and the changes she
deems them to urgently require.
As Evaristo was writing in the early 2020s, manifestos were clearly on her mind. When she
came to write her autobiography, prompted in large part by the phenomenal response to Girl,
Woman, Other and the consequent profusion of interview questions about her past, work and
politics, she chose to call it ‘Manifesto’. Struggling with the idea of writing “traditional ­memoir” –
more interested in “how [my life has] been shaped by my creativity and how creativity has been
shaped by my life” (Constant 2022: n.pag.) – she conceived of a book that builds up to a conclud-
ing document, “The Evaristo Manifesto” (Evaristo 2021: 187): “the result of the life I’ve led”
(Constant 2022: n.pag.). The genre subversion of the text – at once memoir, creative practice
manual, and manifesto – is typical of Evaristo’s style. Her previous works have included two verse
novels, Lara (1997) and The Emperor’s Babe (2001), and an experimental novel, Soul Tourists
(2010), which combines prose, poetry, and dramatic dialogue. She ties this experimental practice
to both her formative training in radical theatre and a broader politics: “[t]here’s a part of me that
is always oppositional to convention”, she explains, “not only counter-cultural and disruptive of
people’s expectations of me, but also of form” (Sethi 2019: n.pag.). For Evaristo, to resist formal
expectations in her writing is intimately bound up with the lived experience of resistance. Indeed,
this conjunction of art and politics is arguably what draws her to the manifesto as a form. As Ja-
net Lyon, discussing the expansive and often discordant history of the genre, observes: “To call
a text a manifesto […] does not distinguish among uses of the form that are utopian, political, or
artistic” (1999: 12). For Evaristo, indeed, who declares in one of the nine tenets that make up her
manifesto: “Creativity […] must not be bound by rules or censorship, yet we must not ignore its
socio-political contexts” (2021: 189), her document strives to combine the utopian, the political,
and the artistic into a unified vision of the artist’s function.
Evaristo is evidently concerned with the material politics of writing, especially as mediated in
terms of gender and race. Before writing Manifesto with its concluding “Evaristo Manifesto”, and
around the same time she was working on Girl, Woman, Other, she published an essay examin-
ing the recent resurgence in new feminist writing, particularly by young black women. As she
observes, a slew of “urgent, essential” (Evaristo 2019b: 92) feminist works have been published
to acclaim in recent years, including Otegha Uwagba’s The Little Black Book: A Toolkit for Work-
ing Women (2016), Yomi Adegoke and Elizabeth Uviebinené’s Slay in Your Lane: The Black Girl
­Bible (2018) and Chelsea Kwakye and Ore Ogunbiyi’s Taking Up Space: The Black Girl’s Mani-
festo for Change (2019). She commences her discussion, however, with Chidera Eggerue’s hugely
successful self-help motivational book, What a Time to Be Alone: The Slumflower’s Guide to Why

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You Are Already Enough (2018), which arose out of Eggerue’s work as a blogger and popular
Twitter campaigner (championing body positivity with the hashtag #saggyboobsmatter). Titling
her own essay “What a Time to be a (Black) (British) (Womxn) Writer”, Evaristo foregrounds the
same concern with intersectional identities she brings to her novels, but also, in adapting Eggerue’s
title, signals a call to connection and community that moves beyond Eggerue’s message of self-
reliance. For Evaristo, acknowledging the lineage of black women’s feminist writing and activism
is at the heart of her own evolving manifesto – as it can be traced in “What a Time to be a (Black)
(British) (Womxn) Writer”, in Girl, Woman, Other and in Manifesto. Recalling the pathbreaking
work of “brave, brilliant” women such as Beverly Bryan, Stella Dadzie, and Suzanne Scafe (au-
thors of The Heart of the Race: Black Women’s Lives in Britain, 1985), Heidi Safia Mirza (author
of Young, Female and Black, 1992), and Patricia Hilaire and Paulette Randall (Evaristo’s 1980s
co-founders of Theatre of Black Women), Evaristo writes:

It’s disheartening to see such trailblazers made invisible yet again, this time by the new gen-
eration of writers, their younger sisters, too many of whom are not prepared to dig beneath
the top layer of the Internet to discover their own history.

The solution for Evaristo lies, in part, in acknowledging the “living history” of older feminist writ-
ers and activists – a group within which she now places herself – who are prepared, when invited
in, to share their knowledge with a younger generation of activists who are called to recognise
that “they are part of a continuum: a tradition of black feminist literary history in this country”
(Evaristo 2019b: 90).
From this 2019 essay, we see themes begin to emerge that are crucial for understanding Evar-
isto’s work – specifically, her concerns with lineage, history, and community. These themes under-
pin Girl, Woman, Other, in which Amma’s opening narrative slides into that of Yazz, her daughter,
then Dominique, her best friend, and then on into the stories of other women: Carole, Bummi,
LaTisha, Shirley, Winsome, and more. Evaristo’s practice of eschewing quotation marks and
full stops aids the sense that each woman’s story bleeds inexorably into the next, overflowing its
boundaries until it is not always clear when one voice ends, and another begins. Running though
“What a Time to be a (Black) (British) (Womxn) Writer” is a sense of frustration at a younger
generation too ready to neglect the work already done. In Girl, Woman, Other, this disregard is
rendered humorously when Amma – a proudly radical polyamorous lesbian and “veteran battle-
axe” (2019a: 5) is dismissed by her daughter as old-fashioned and conservative:

I reckon we’re all going to be non-binary in the future, neither male nor female, which
are gendered performances anyway, which means your women’s politics, Mumsy, will be-
come redundant, and by the way, I’m humanitarian, which is on a much higher plane than
feminism
do you even know what that is?
(2019a: 39)

Amma’s lament – querulously meeting Yazz’s renunciation of a feminist politics she accuses her
daughter of not even understanding – becomes that of the Second-Wave feminist faced with a new
‘post-gender’ generation all too ready to interrogate and condemn the assumptions of her hard-
won feminism. Amma’s lived experience, however, as a black woman, of “what it meant to be a
feminist when white feminist organizations made them unwelcome” (2019a: 13) makes hers more
than an older woman’s despair at the complacency of a younger generation; she understands – as

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Evaristo understands – that the inclusion of black women within the broader feminist movement
has always been contingent, resisted, and precarious.
This legacy of marginalisation is explicated in “What a Time to be a (Black) (British) (Womxn)
Writer”, in which Evaristo describes how, commonly excluded from both white feminist endeav-
ours and black male arts production, creative black women, of necessity, formed their own groups
and arts projects, only to be condemned by the establishment as “divisive troublemakers, drawing
unnecessary attention to our ‘race’ or gender and thus problematizing ourselves” (2019b: 99).
Today, she cautions, when feminism is suddenly fashionable and publishers are keen to promote
books by fierce and fearless young black women, without a solid understanding of this history of
exclusion and the volatility of publishing and media trends, young writers are left isolated and
vulnerable, lacking the resilience afforded by feminist networks. Her anxiety is that, without solid
foundations, this new home for black feminist writing will prove only another temporary structure,
easily blown away by intemperate winds. Evaristo points, for example, to the mid-to-late 1990s
as a period in which “there were more young black men and women publishing fiction than ever
before”, but notes that, by the 2000s, most of these writers had disappeared, “and we were back to
square one” (Evaristo 2019b: 103). (This history – as it relates to both men and women writers –
also informs the perceived need for the Black Writers’ Guild.) With her careful understanding that
“[o]bscurity has been the fate of too many black women writers” (2019b: 104), Evaristo urges the
new generation of young writers to build a “spirit of entrepreneurship, community and arts activ-
ism” (2019b: 105) that might sustain them in years when they find themselves out of fashion and
unsupported by publishing and cultural institutions once again.
Community, for Evaristo, is both established in the present (in the networks that one builds
around one) and extended into the past (in drawing connections with those who went before)
and, hopefully, expands into the future (with those still to come). The importance of this idea is
manifest in Girl, Woman, Other in which any one character’s present-day story is likely to veer off
at any moment into a tale of mothers and grandmothers. The novel also hails – both directly and
obliquely – a history of black women writers and activists who can be glimpsed at times, haunt-
ing the edges of the text; we spot them when Yazz challenges her father, a “Professor of Modern
Life” at the University of London, on the absence of bell hooks in his cultural references, and
when a besotted Dominique likens her new girlfriend Nzinga to “Alice and Audre and Angela and
Aretha rolled into one” (2019a: 46, 80). The women who went before leave their traces in the lives
of Evaristo’s characters. It also surfaces in “The Evaristo Manifesto”, the final declaration of
which reads:

The ancestors are swaying silently behind us, the dead souls of the once dearly departed who
are the reason why we came into being – we must remember them.
(2021: 190)

Evaristo’s manifesto, like her essay and like her novel, champions individual female creativity, but
does so explicitly in the context of lifting up other creative women, acknowledging the trailblazers,
and finding strength in community.

A history of feminist manifestos

When Evaristo chose to call her autobiography Manifesto, and to conclude it with a formal nine-
point manifesto, she was aware, of course, that her work would consequently speak to and be read
against a history of such documents. Operating at the limits of the literary tradition, manifestos

423
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typically occupy a space that is marginal and insecure; a guerrilla mode of writing, the manifesto
is both easily identifiable as a published declaration of principles or demands, and at the same
time, it readily blurs into other forms (the essay, the argument, the polemic). Although its precise
qualities are perhaps surprisingly hard to pin down, it primarily declares itself as a revolutionary
document, hailing an imagined readership united by unhappiness with the status quo. As Breanne
Fahs observes, “in both style and content, manifestos embody resistance” (Fahs 2020: 9), and this
essentially resistive nature, combined with the malleability of the form, sits well with Evaristo’s
instinct for genre subversion and stylistic experimentation.
Commonly traced back to the seventeenth century pamphlet wars in England (see Lyon 1999),
manifestos were a particular feature of nineteenth- and twentieth-century political and artistic
movements. From Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ The Communist Manifesto (1848) to F. T.
Marinetti’s The Founding and Futurist Manifesto (1909/1912) to Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg
Manifesto (1985/1991), the form persistently demonstrates its capacity to speak loudly and force-
fully to myriad disparate causes and is taken up, again and again, by rebels, agitators and visionar-
ies, who each rewrite it afresh according to their own needs. As such, it holds a particular attraction
for feminists. For Lyon, the manifesto, at its core, arises out of the modern state, addressing and
calling into being “the People” in order to “negotiate a place” for “new” subjects around the fin de
siècle (1999: 40). Its attraction, therefore, for the New Woman of the period is unsurprising. Start-
ing with perhaps the earliest example – the 1848 Seneca Falls Woman’s Rights Convention and its
ensuing “Declaration of Sentiments” – women involved in the often-overlapping suffrage, family
planning, labour, and artistic movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries took
to the manifesto as an established means of making visible their struggle and broadcasting their
demands (see Moynagh and Forestell 2012).
With the Second Wave, the feminist manifesto became resurgent as feminists found use for
its ability to declare new formations of personhood once again. Early examples such as Kate
Millett’s 1968 “Sexual Politics: A Manifesto for the Revolution” and the 1969 “Redstockings
Manifesto” (both collected in Shulamith Firestone and Anne Koedt’s Notes from the Second Year
[1970]) started to test and articulate the demands of radical feminism, calling for “the end of sexual
repression” (Millett 1968/1970: 112) and declaring that “[a]ll other forms of exploitation and
oppression (racism, capitalism, imperialism, etc.) are extensions of male supremacy” (Redstock-
ings 1969/1970: 113). Such manifestos became a springboard for subsequent feminist theorising
and debate. bell hooks, for example, writing in 1984, returns to the anti-male sentiment of the
“Redstockings Manifesto” to address white feminism’s failure to comprehend political solidarity
between black women and black men. While fully cognisant of and resistant to sexism, she argues,
black women also recognise the “special tie binding people together who struggle collectively for
liberation” (hooks 1984/2015: 70), and consequently are alienated by the anti-male stance of the
kind of white feminist activism described by the Redstockings. In such critical returns to foun-
dational documents, we see how the manifesto is woven into Second-Wave feminism. Extending
across two centuries of agitating, feminists repeatedly return to the manifesto, both as a mode of
defiant public expression, and as a site of debate, where first principles are both declared and con-
tested. For Lyon, “to write a manifesto is to announce one’s participation, however discursive, in
a history of struggle against oppressive forces” (1999: 10), and with its foundational vocabulary
of oppression, liberation, and revolution, it is clear why feminism was naturally drawn to this
particular mode of writing.
While manifestos come in many guises, there are certain features that simultaneously work
to define them as such. Working contrapuntally with the wide variety of ideological positions
that manifestos have been deployed to declare is the persistence of certain conventions and

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characteristics which, although neither fixed nor assured, nevertheless make the rhetorical form
of the manifesto immediately familiar. Manifestos most typically occur as a list of statements
or demands; the tone is often declarative, exhortative, or one of righteous anger; the document
hails its reader, assuming a shared sense of injustice or purpose. For Fahs, whose 2020 anthol-
ogy Burn it Down! collects seventy-seven mostly twentieth-century feminist manifestos, includ-
ing iconic works such as Mina Loy’s 1914/1996 The Feminist Manifesto, Valerie Solanas’ 1967
SCUM Manifesto, and Bikini Kill’s 1991 RIOT GRRRL Manifesto, they “operate as an infectious,
contagious kind of document, one that purposefully ignites readers or listeners with its messages,
making little room for disagreement or rational back-and-forth discourse” (2020: 5). In another
recent anthology, which focuses instead on lesser-known, co-authored activist feminist manifestos
from women’s groups around the world, Penny Weiss rather emphasises the manifesto’s capacity
to sustain very different approaches. Manifestos, she suggests:

differ dramatically in form, one resembling an indictment, another an oath; one an essay,
another a letter; one a set of demands, another a set of principles. […] Flexibility in form
means that we hear from the unflinchingly angry, the necessarily dogged, and the unapolo-
getically passionate; from historical, political, and cultural viewpoints; and in analytical,
statistical, rhetorical, and narrative tones. Form can fit the needs of equality.
(2018: 2)

These seeming contradictions – between manifestations of a recognisable rhetorical form that

share a sense of injustice, but locate it in myriad and sometimes opposing forces, that likewise
share recognisable conventions but also operate in a wide variety of potentially irreconcilable
modes – point, again, to the ungovernable nature of the manifesto itself.
With “The Evaristo Manifesto”, Evaristo adopts some of the most recognisable elements of the
form. While it lacks the kind of typographic unruliness that sometimes accompanies manifestos
(different sized font, capitalised or underlined words and phrases, expressive ellipses, noisy ex-
clamatory punctuation), it is structured as a short, declarative list of principles, mostly pertaining
to the creative life, that clearly proclaims its function as a manifesto. Evaristo exhorts her reader,
for example, to:

Be wild, disobedient & daring with your creativity, take risks instead of following predict-
able routes; those who play it safe do not advance our culture or civilization.
(2019b: 189)

In its focus on the creative life – on its call to the fellow artist – her manifesto works most im-
mediately within the (traditionally male dominated) lineage of art manifestos, such as the Futurist
Manifesto or Wyndham Lewis’ BLAST, the manifesto-journal of the Vorticists (1914). This would
seem to draw her into what Kimber Charles Pearce, writing more than twenty years ago, identi-
fies as an ongoing “controversial” debate around the radical feminist use of the manifesto form
and the efficacy of appropriating a predominantly masculinist genre.1 Pearce cites critics such as
Gerda Lerner, who argue that “revolutionary ideas can be generated only when the oppressed have
an alternative to the symbol and meaning system of those who dominated them” and, contrarily,
those like Jo Freeman who argue that pre-existing rhetorical strategies are “co-optable to the ideas
of the new movement” (Pearce 1999: 308). For Evaristo, evidently (and in concordance with the
manifesto-writing feminists who have gone before her), the manifesto maintains its subversive,
resistive power, even as an historically masculine genre now taken up by a woman writer.

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This leaves the question of how to read Evaristo’s manifesto within a history of specifically
feminist manifestos. Indeed, it is not, on the surface, a particularly feminist intervention. Evaris-
to’s addressee is ungendered and the manifesto speaks in terms of an encompassing “we”/“our” –
“we must establish our own systems” (2019b: 189) – a seductively inclusive rhetorical device
typical of the form, which, although not directed in this instance to “we women”, nevertheless
also chimes with the collectivist spirit of Second-Wave feminism. Such inclusivity is key to un-
derstanding Evaristo’s project. Signalled in the title of her novel, in which the term “Other” po-
tentially invites in anyone for whom “Girl” or “Woman” fails as an appropriate mode of address,
Evaristo’s manifesto resists the exclusionary, separatist pressures of the manifesto tradition. Her
open, inclusive address baffles the hierarchical binarism of a genre that commonly “claim[s]
for ‘us’ the moral high ground of revolutionary idealism, and construct[s] ‘them’ as ideological
tyrants” (Lyon 1999: 2).
Working in the context of a legacy of feminist manifestos, “The Evaristo Manifesto” is quietly
in conversation with the documents that have gone before. In foregrounding inclusion, Evaristo
provides a riposte to previous manifestos that prioritise division. One might think, most strikingly,
of Solanas’ notorious SCUM Manifesto, which calls for the “elimination” of men but ultimately
turns its vituperative anger on “approval seeking Daddy’s Girls” (1967/2015: 68, 71), reducing the
“us” of the manifesto – those hailed to membership of the “Society for Cutting Up Men” – to the
slender few willing to reject organised protest and operate on the margins of violent extremism.
“If SCUM ever marches”, warns Solanas, “it will be over the President’s stupid, sickening face; if
SCUM ever strikes, it will be in the dark with a six-inch blade” (1967/2015: 76). Often dismissed
as a rogue outlier, Avital Ronell points out that Solanas’ methods have their roots in the “destruc-
tive demands” (2015: 5) of prior manifestos,2 but locates her startlingly savage document in her
particular frustrations as a marginalised and diminished experimental woman artist; as Ronell
concludes: “Sometimes you have to scream to be heard” (2015: 3). For Lyon, also invested in con-
necting Solanas to an artistic-literary tradition from which she is too often excluded as a deranged
outsider, SCUM is “a kind of hyper-manifesto”, spanning the divide “between ‘outrageous’ avant-
garde performance and the pedagogy of theory” (1999: 175). This bridge leads us to feminist
works that are unapologetically revolutionary and iconoclastic, but function in a very different
register from Solanas: from Firestone’s Marxist–Freudian call in The Dialectic of Sex to harness
technology to dismantle “a discriminatory sex class system” (Firestone 1970: 10) to Haraway’s
vision in A Cyborg Manifesto of a post-gender, post-human world that champions “transgressed
boundaries, potent fusions, and dangerous possibilities” (Haraway 1985/1991: 154). These three
texts operate very differently in terms of language, tone, and address, yet each adopts the mantle of
‘feminist manifesto’ – a restless, malleable genre that has always sustained difference and which,
I suggest, is capable of still further expansion.
While Evaristo adopts the familiar frame of the manifesto, she also works to undermine some
of the formal qualities to which she has otherwise seemingly carefully adhered. She prefaces “The
Evaristo Manifesto” by declaring: “There is a manifesto in each of us, emerging over the course
of our lives, changing & reconfiguring through our experiences. This is mine” (2019b: 189). Here,
the manifesto is not a fixed, eventually arrived at statement of truth values, but a document that
evolves, changes, and emerges in a notably organic manner. The statement “This is mine” is both
proprietorial and potentially works to invite the reader to reflect and respond with their own. Fur-
thermore, of course, it is not just the concluding document that is self-proclaimed a manifesto,
but the encompassing memoir itself. Evaristo’s Künstlerroman, it seems, is also a manifesto, and
having been so directed, the reader reads it as such. In Living a Feminist Life, Ahmed proposes that
“[a] life can be a manifesto” (2017: 256). In taking up this proposition and exploring its use as a

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frame for reading Evaristo’s work, we can start to see how both Manifesto and Girl, Woman, Other
can be conceived of as extending the purpose of fiction and life-writing to operate also within the
realm of the feminist manifesto.

A life can be a manifesto: Girl, Woman, Other

Evaristo’s writing is steeped in this legacy of feminist manifestos. When Amma and Dominique
in Girl, Woman, Other start Bush Women Theatre Company in the 1980s, they instinctively reach
for the declarative form of the manifesto, coining as their motto: “On Our Own Terms / or Not
At All” (2019a: 14). Theirs is a world of radical feminist spaces, and the language that circulates
– in the theatre, in underground samizdat publishing, in consciousness-raising groups, and in the
‘wimmin’s land’ alternative communities where Dominique and Nzinga settle – is the language of
radical feminist manifestos. Evaristo brings to this period a sense of deep nostalgia for its earnest-
ness and political commitment, but also an often-humorous sense of perspective. Amma recalls
the tense negotiations around communal living policy at her Kings Cross squat between the radi-
cal feminists, the lesbian radical feminists, and the black radical lesbian feminists, not to mention
(using Amma’s descriptors of the various factions) the anarchists, the Marxists, the hippies, the
environmentalists, the vegetarians, the Rastas, the Hari-Krishnas, the punks and the gays. As each
group looks to realise its own manifesto for living, Amma becomes the voice of scepticism, resist-
ing any too-prescriptive utopian impulses, preferring “mixing with others who didn’t try to impose
their will on anyone else” (2019a: 18). Indeed, in a novel in which many women find liberation
in feminist ideas – from the 1960s housewife Penelope who is slipped a clandestine copy of The
Feminine Mystique by a librarian, to 2010s Megan (later Morgan) who discovers transfeminism
and intersectional feminism via online chatrooms – Evaristo remains cautious of zealotry and
dogmatism. When Nzinga lectures Amma’s friends on how “to live a truly womanist life”, her
words echoing the tenets of many Second-Wave manifestos as she declares that “male energy is
disruptive […] the patriarchy is divisive, violent and authoritarian, misogyny is so unthinkingly
entrenched” (2019a: 102–103), Amma instinctively rejects the narrowness of her position, plead-
ing with Dominique: “we see men as individuals, don’t we? you were never separatist or misan-
drist, what’s happened to you?” (2019a: 103). The feminism that Nzinga espouses is adjacent to
the feminism of Amma, but in its absolutism, it fails to provide for her a persuasive manifesto for
living a feminist life.
For Fahs, the manifesto form, by its nature, encourages extremism; its urgent call to revolution
allows “no possibility for equivocation, refutation, or disagreement, shattering possibilities for
other ways of seeing” (2020: 9). This becomes, then, a potential site of tension for an author like
Evaristo, drawn to the vision and hope of a manifesto for change, but cognisant of the potentially
exclusionary danger of any radical document that proposes to speak to and for certain people and
not others. Her solution, I suggest, lies in drawing out connections and legacies, even where un-
comfortable or problematic. In “What a Time to be a (Black) (British) (Womxn) Writer”, she urges
young black women writers to recognise that “they are part of a continuum” (2019b: 90), and in
Girl, Woman, Other, the novel’s multiple disparate life-stories are ultimately unified by revelations
of connection, from the incidental crossing of paths to the most profound discovery of familial ties.
While charting an unexpected network of affiliations that eventually coalesce on a scene of
reconciliation, Evaristo remains always sharply cognisant of the troublesome history of feminism,
and the matrilineage of characters she devises are nuanced, sometimes failing and, often, con-
tradictory. From the early 1900s, she depicts the fearsome “enlightened” Edwardian ladies who
take in orphaned Grace and “believe in women’s suffrage” but reject the tactics “of those militant

427
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protesters […] because it only results in public opprobrium” (2019a: 381); these excellent women
(to borrow Barbara Pym’s phrase) can only conceive of a working-class mixed-race woman going
into service, but nevertheless provide her with education and opportunity. There is also a wry sym-
pathy in the novel for Penelope who is feminist but racially prejudiced and “couldn’t get enough
of Ms Friedan, whom she hid in the cupboard with the brooms, hoover and ironing board” (288),
but who, in the 1990s, “loathed that feminism was on the descent, and the vociferous multi-culti
brigade was on the ascent” (298). And one of the most sympathetically depicted characters of the
novel, Grace’s daughter Hattie, born in the 1920s, loves and marries a passionately anti-racist
African-American man, but in her later widowhood supports the right-wing UKIP party and, in
protest at “foreign labour” and “foreign produce coming into the country from the whole damn
world”, votes Leave in the 2016 Brexit referendum (2019a: 346). While Hattie struggles with her
grandchild Morgan’s coming out as non-binary – “you sound mental, dear” (2019a: 351) – she
recalls with affection the lesbian couple who were the only ones to welcome her mother to their
Northumbrian village, and gruffly tells Morgan: “just be who you want to be and let’s agree not to
talk about it” (2019a: 352). Evaristo acknowledges all these entangled feminist histories, with their
overlapping and competing priorities, their vision and their limitations.
As Girl, Woman, Other closes on “The After-party” (2019a: 405), a packed celebration of
Amma’s opening night triumph, the novel’s variously charted winding paths – of women’s lives
and of feminist histories – narrow to an intimate scene of Amma and Dominique (briefly returned
from America to catch the performance), talking late into the night in Amma’s shabby London ter-
race. In time, the conversation turns to feminism. The two friends, veterans of the radical 1980s,
wrestle with competing visions of feminism in the twenty-first century. For Dominique, the move-
ment’s sudden popularity (“feminism was massive right now” [2019a: 319]) precipitates its com-
modification, diminishing its transgressive power: “feminism needs tectonic plates to shift”, she
argues, “not a trendy make-over” (2019a: 437). Her suspicions echo Evaristo in “What a Time to
be a (Black) (British) (Womxn) Writer”, observing that feminism is now fashionable and warning
that a trend is “intrinsically ephemeral” (2019b: 102). Dominique’s complaints extend further,
however, taking on “trans troublemakers” who denounce her LA women’s festival as transphobic.
Anticipating her friend’s sympathy, Amma instead likens their own youthful acts of protest and
troublemaking to those currently targeting Dominique: “the trans community is entitled to fight for
their rights”, she tells Dominique; “you need to be more open-minded on that score or you’ll risk
becoming irrelevant” (2019a: 437).
When we read Evaristo’s recent work as a cumulative manifesto, we discern her central tenets
for living a feminist life. Firstly, at the heart of both Manifesto and Girl, Woman, Other is a call
for an inclusive, expansive feminism, open to “others” and open to challenge. Secondly, her work
solicits recognition of feminist legacy and continuity in the face of seeming divergence and rup-
ture. Just as Amma compares her and Dominique’s Second-Wave activism to today’s fights for
trans rights, so Morgan traces a question about the political adoption of a trans position back to
the kind of radical political lesbianism espoused by Adrienne Rich (“Morgan had come across this
in the online archive of long defunct, second-wave feminist magazine called Spare Rib” (2019a:
338)); similarly, Nzinga’s wimmin’s land Spirit Moon estate is reimagined in Morgan’s plans
for a safe-space retreat, “reinventing [Hattie’s] farm for people who had reinvented themselves”
(2019a: 332). These connections can be problematic and unwanted. Dominique’s experience of
abuse and coercive control in the “magical alternate society” (2019a: 87) of Spirit Moon troubles
our reading of Morgan’s possibly “naïve utopian dream” of “a completely gender-free world”
(2019a: 327). At the same time, they provide a sense of legacy and continuity that Evaristo deems
crucial to the sustenance and resilience of feminist practice. Thirdly, in writings filled with women

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 Connecting Evaristo to a history of feminist manifestos

and non-binary people engaged in the creative arts – from novelists to playwrights to bloggers to
newly confident readers – Evaristo calls on her artists to be fearless and disruptive, as she is in her
own resistive work. “Manifestos are mighty”, writes Fahs; they take “concrete social problems
and infuse[] them with the emotional and affective qualities of resistance and revolution” (2020:
11. Emphasis in original). This affective quality is best realised in, fourthly, Evaristo’s commit-
ment to making manifest the reality of women’s lives, whether through life-writing or through
literary fiction: a process which is, as Ahmed proposes, the starting point for making a feminist
manifesto.
Evaristo’s manifesto is not one of straightforward sisterly solidarity. Her miscellaneous cast
of characters challenge the cohesion and the limits of that Second-Wave term, “sisterhood”. We
see this, before the novel even commences, in the dedication to Girl, Woman, Other, which reads:

For the sisters & the sistas & the sistahs & the sistren
& the women & the womxn & the wimmin & the womyn
& our brethren & our bredrin & our brothers & our bruvs
& our men & our mandem & the LGBTQI+ members
of the human family

Prioritising sisterhood, but emphasising diverse relations, Evaristo takes a poet’s pleasure in
l­anguage, particularly as it manifests in marginal, defiantly non-standard community idiolects.
Her terminology is expansive, inviting the addressee to identify as they wish. This emphasis on
hospitable language is a discernible thread in Evaristo’s work; the same celebration of inclusive
vocabulary is touched on in “What a Time to be a (Black) (British) (Womxn) Writer”, in which
she cheers the easy expansiveness “of twenty-somethings who use the term ‘womxn’, with its in-
clusive emphasis on women of colour, queer and trans people” (2019b: 93). Read retrospectively,
the novel’s dedication becomes a riposte to both the kind of proprietorial feminism espoused in
Girl, Woman, Other by Nzinga and the neoliberal rejection of solidarity by Roland in favour of
­individual success (“his bredren and sistren could damn well speak up for themselves” [415]). The
call to “our brothers & our bruvs” recalls the shared histories and the extended solidarity of black
men and women that bell hooks acknowledged in her rejection of anti-male white feminist mani-
festos. The dedication calls to the reader, who is hailed – however they identify – as belonging: as
an insider rather than an outsider. In this paratextual address, Evaristo asserts a fundamental prin-
ciple also articulated in “The Evaristo Manifesto” – “We are all interconnected & must look after
each other” (2019b: 189) – and introduces a theme that both shapes her novel and expands beyond
the limits of the text. To conclude with a line from Ahmed, in Evaristo’s expansive, generous work,
we recognise that, finally, “[a] manifesto is an outstretched hand” (2017: 256), not excluding and
dividing, but rather inviting one in.

Notes
1 Marinetti’s Founding and Futurist Manifesto – still the preeminent example of the form – notoriously
states: “9. We wish to glorify war – the only health giver of the world – militarism, patriotism, the destruc-
tive arm of the Anarchist, beautiful Ideas that kill, the contempt for women” (1909: 4). As Lyon observes,
“Clearly ‘women’ […] are associated with the cultural stasis and decay decried at length throughout the
futurist program” (Lyon 1999: 99–100).
2 Marinetti’s Founding and Futurist Manifesto (published in English in 1912 as “initial Manifesto of ­Futurism”),
as Ronell observes, famously declares: “10. We will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind,
and fight moralism, feminism, every opportunistic or utilitarian cowardice” (Marinetti 1909: 4).

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 29
HOLDING WOMEN’S VOICES
Open Clasp as an example of feminist
theatre practice

Kate Chedgzoy, Rosalind Haslett, and Catrina McHugh

Introduction
What cultural and political work does feminist theatre do in the twenty-first century? What mate-
rial conditions, social relationships, and aesthetic processes make that work possible? How is fem-
inist theatre scholarship in dialogue with it? This chapter offers some answers to these questions
through a case study of Open Clasp (https://www.openclasp.org.uk/), a women’s theatre company
founded in 1998 and based ever since in Newcastle upon Tyne in the North-East of England. Cat-
rina McHugh, the company’s artistic director, observes that Open Clasp’s theatre ‘holds the voices
of the women who put their trust in us’ (‘Rattle Snake’ 2017).1 By thus ‘holding women’s voices’,
Open Clasp embeds a feminist ethics of care (Gilligan 2011) in its theatre-making. With the goal,
as their slogan puts it, of ‘changing the world one play at a time’, the company helps working-class
women – many of whom have been affected by domestic violence, the criminal justice system,
or experiences of forced migration – to become co-makers of original theatre work that explores,
documents, and shares their personal experiences. The history of feminist theatre practice and
criticism has been precisely about changing who makes theatre, whose stories it tells, which voices
are heard, and who it addresses, so a focus on Open Clasp provides an apt lens through which to
examine that history.
Contemporary feminist theatre is shaped by a dynamic interaction between practice and re-
search rooted in the profoundly collaborative, collective nature of theatre (Solga 2015: 15). Its
political and aesthetic goals and strategies are highly diverse, in keeping with the diversity of
political and identity positions, lived experiences, and theatrical practices of the women who have
shaped it (Sewell and Smout 2020). At its heart is the aspiration to ‘re-present women as subjects
in their own right: to move women’s issues, experiences and stories centre stage’ (Aston 1999:
6), and to do so in a way that directly addresses women as audiences and offers them theatrical
pleasure. Because the company both creates innovative professional performances and works ex-
tensively in community theatre, Open Clasp exemplifies a wide range of feminist theatre practices.
In both contexts, it strives to ‘create theatre from a female gaze, so the story telling is through the
eyes of the women we work with’ (‘Reflection’, July 2012). Placing the agency of the gaze not
with the audience, as in much feminist criticism, but with women who participate in community
theatre workshops, McHugh makes the key feminist move of shifting the power dynamics upheld

DOI: 10.4324/9781003429951-35 432

 Open Clasp as an example of feminist theatre practice

by the institutions of theatre. Open Clasp’s transformative aesthetic is grounded in a storytell-

ing creative methodology. As the material generated in workshops is transformed into plays, the
relationship between the telling of individual and collective, representative stories functions to
hold and voice the often-traumatic life narratives women participants share with the company; to
amplify them for a variety of audiences; and to stimulate a response, grounded in empathy, that
will drive social change.
Open Clasp is based in an ethnically diverse neighbourhood of Newcastle that is marked by
socio-economic disadvantage. A commitment to working with women and girls from that com-
munity is intrinsic to its feminism, and the company is deeply conscious of its responsibilities to
the people and the cultural life of its home region. But it also has wider geographical reach and
significance. Productions tour nationally, with London being an important destination because
of its influence in the U.K. theatre landscape. Landmark production Key Change (2015) won
the Carol Tambor Best of the Fringe award at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, leading to an off-
Broadway run the following year, while the stream of Rattle Snake (2017) has been viewed by
more than 27,000 people in thirty-five countries since it participated in the 2019 United Nations
Campaign to Eliminate Violence Against Women & Girls. In feminist theatre practice, there is
no contradiction between local specificity and broader reach, as the work of companies, such as
Cornwall-based Scary Little Girls, Clean Break in London, Edinburgh’s avowedly intersectional
Stellar Quines, and Liverpool’s Bite! Theatre, demonstrates. The interactions of feminist theatre
practice and scholarship are international in scope: English-language feminist theatre has been
shaped by transatlantic movements by academics and practitioners, such as Lois Weaver, doy-
enne of the New York lesbian feminist theatre scene and now professor at Queen Mary, Univer-
sity of London, and Black British playwright debbie tucker green, whose plays have resonated
in the United States.
Organisationally, Open Clasp is heir to a rich tradition of feminist, collaborative, and
­community-based theatre-making, examples of which are woven throughout this chapter. The
company’s structure as independent and women-only means that internally it is not hindered by
the male gatekeeping and artistic and financial control documented by Aston (2020, 15). But inde-
pendent theatre-making is frequently an economically precarious activity, and the company has to
navigate tensions between feminist practice – embodied in an all-women team of staff and board
members, and all-women casts – and the imperatives of operating in mixed-sex cultural and eco-
nomic environments. The company has had an association throughout its existence with Newcas-
tle’s Live Theatre, in which women played a significant founding role but which has always been
directed by men, and their first co-production – Rattle Snake in 2016 – was made in collaboration
with both Live and York’s Theatre Royal. Negotiations with male gatekeepers for access to the-
atrical spaces and funding are inescapable for any theatre company: the fact that as an avowedly
feminist, all-female company Open Clasp has been successful in securing funding from sources
including Arts Council England and the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, and has toured nationally for
more than two decades, is a salient aspect of its impact.
We begin by locating Open Clasp in histories of feminist theatre practice, showing how its key
strands interweave in the company’s work. We then consider the activist nature of Open Clasp’s
work, which continues a historic lineage of feminist and socialist theatre-making for political ends,
before examining how the company works to create and sustain community. Finally, we examine
how all of these factors inform its operational and artistic processes, shaping its distinctive aes-
thetic and informing the nature of the relationships it sustains with audiences. We argue that emo-
tion and pleasure are key feminist and political strategies in Open Clasp’s work. In all these ways,
Open Clasp’s work offers rich insights into the methods, ethics, and aesthetics of contemporary

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feminist theatre, and throughout the chapter, we map connections to practitioners and scholars,
showing how the company exemplifies and illuminates that broader field.

Positioning Open Clasp in the history of feminist theatre

Contemporary feminist theatre practice has been built on the scattered moments across the centu-
ries when women have overcome exclusion and disempowerment to seize the means of theatrical
production and exercise their dramatic creativity, and its makers are often aware of and engaged
with that history. British feminist theatre had its first flowering in the 1980s with the emergence of
companies including Theatre of Black Women, the Women’s Theatre Group, and lesbian company
Siren (Aston 1995: 58–59), and the development of a distinctive body of scholarship exemplified
by the work of Michelene Wandor (Wandor 1984).2 Enabled by comparable developments in the
United States, such as the emergence of WOW Cafe Theater, Sue-Ellen Case’s ground-breaking
Feminism and Theatre (1988) traced how much of theatre history has been controlled by male
playwrights, impresarios, and performers, and helped to signpost a different future by bringing
the political concerns of feminism into conversation with the process of making, and the scholarly
analysis of, theatre. In the same year, Jill Dolan outlined the structuring influence of the imagined
male spectator for whose entertainment most plays have historically been written and staged in
The Feminist Spectator as Critic. Elaine Aston’s An Introduction to Feminism and Theatre (1995)
added a U.K.-based perspective to Case and Dolan’s primarily U.S. focus. These generative works
not only challenged the male domination charted by Case and Dolan, but also called for feminist
theatre scholars and practitioners to work for change in all aspects of theatrical practice (Case
1988: 25). They stimulated a rich field of feminist theatre history and historiography, which first
found an outlet in the journal Women and Theatre: Occasional Papers in the 1990s, has been
sustained by the Women, Theatre and Performance book series edited by Maggie B. Gale and Viv
Gardner (Manchester University Press, 2001), and is now being extended by Elaine Aston and
Melissa Sihra’s Women Theatre Makers series for Cambridge Elements. This historiographical
work reveals that feminist theatre practice and political activism have long been entangled, and
that performance is a crucial modality in women’s political representation (Paxton 2018).
Cultural and political shifts towards conservatism in the late 1980s and 1990s meant that that
first wave of innovation in practice and research encountered a period of ‘feminism fatigue’ (Aston
2010: 583). A re-masculinised theatre culture valorised the contributions of individual male play-
wrights and directors, and re-energised existing structural inequalities. Theatre programming and
playwright commissioning cultures of the 1990s were often inhospitable for women playwrights.
Not until 2008 was an original play by a woman (Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s Her Naked Skin) staged
in the National Theatre’s main house. Consequently, even women writers whose work was attuned
to gendered political concerns such as Sarah Kane or Pam Gems chose at this time not to describe
their work as feminist, in order to avoid being marginalised (Stephenson and Langridge 1997). At
the same time, however, Caryl Churchill, the most eminent British woman playwright, sustained
her explicit commitment to feminism in her theatrical practice, and Sphinx Theatre Company –
formerly the Women’s Theatre Group – continued to grow its programme of productions, research,
and conferences designed to support women’s theatre-making.
It was within this complex context, marked by both postfeminist tensions and abiding commit-
ments to feminism, that Open Clasp emerged. The company’s issue-based collaborative practice,
enacted through an ensemble style and driven by a feminist ethos that shapes its ways of working
as well as the form and content of its plays, has roots in the 1980s. When contextualised within
an ambiguous, volatile cultural-political moment ‘when political identities forged by attachments

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to socialism and feminism came undone’ (Aston 2010: 578), and at the same time New Labour’s
cultural agenda offered opportunities to embrace corporatised and commercialised opportunities,
Open Clasp’s collaborative processes, non-hierarchical structures, and explicitly feminist agenda
can be seen as distinctively countercultural. To commit to such ways of working, and to centring
the company’s work explicitly on feminist content and practice, was a bold move in 1998.
In the twenty-first century, there has been a renewed interest in and appetite for feminist prac-
tice and scholarship. Social media has enabled the re-establishment of feminist networks and sup-
ported political activism that has highlighted naturalised gender oppression, as in the ‘Everyday
Sexism’ project (Bates 2016). It has also given voice to international movements of survivors
and allies seeking justice for historic abuse via the ‘Me Too’ hashtag and campaigns demanding
action (Burke 2021). Theatre and the performing arts have been a crucial site for this activism: a
rich example comes from the Irish theatre world, where Lisa Fitzpatrick situates both the problem
and the feminist response in the context of histories of gendered exclusions and abuse (Fitzpatrick
2020). Prompted by the absence of women artists and women’s narratives from the National Thea-
tre of Ireland’s programme commemorating the centenary of the 1916 Easter Rising, the arts-led
‘Waking the Feminists’ movement received international support and forced a review of equality
policies in Irish theatre (Donohue et al. 2017). Such activism demonstrates that, once again, the
‘personal is political’ and feminist theatre, as well as the scholarship that engages with it, continues
to animate the ‘exciting and frightening’ space that Sue-Ellen Case located between politics and
art (Case 1988).
Much current feminist theatre-making retains the socialist-feminist drive shared by Caryl
Churchill and the mixed-gender company Monstrous Regiment (1975–1993) in its wish to chal-
lenge the structural inequalities that oppress women. Increasingly, it also highlights the intersec-
tionality of inequalities that are not only gendered but also tied to other dimensions of oppression,
including race, trans and non-binary identities, sexuality, age, and disability. At the same time,
feminist theatre scholarship has benefited from a critical turn to affect, which has facilitated theo-
retical engagement with the emotional labour of feminist performance, provided a critical vo-
cabulary for the complicated matrix of rage, pain, joy, and pleasure that characterise the feminist
experience, and fed into theatre practice (Sedgwick 2003; Amich, Varney and Diamond 2017).
Vivid examples of work energised by both these trends include The Missy Elliott Project by Selina
Thompson, which combines participatory work with young women of colour and the creation of a
major new piece of musical theatre (The Missy Elliott Project | Selina Thompson); Tabby Lamb’s
work as a non-binary facilitator, performer, and writer (Tabby Lamb – Tabby Lamb’s Portfolio),
and Kaite O’Reilly’s work at the interface of feminist and disability theatre practice (About —
Kaite O’Reilly [kaiteoreilly.com]).
Open Clasp’s ethos, aesthetic, and working practices position the company to make a signifi-
cant contribution in this changing context. Fundamentally collaborative but always given key cre-
ative impetus by Catrina McHugh as writer and artistic director, its plays emerge from an applied
theatre practice in which women’s creative skills and energies are central. All of its scripts pass the
Sphinx test, a device created by Sphinx Theatre on the model of cinema’s Bechdel test to help thea-
tre makers ensure that compelling female characters interact with each other and drive dramatic
action (Sphinx Theatre | Resources). Its plays tackle themes that have been central to international
feminist theatre practice over the forty-plus years of its existence: familial relationships, especially
between mothers and daughters; women’s sexual and romantic relationships, with each other and
with men; violence (including sexual violence) against women; the impact on women’s lives of
societal forces such as racism and homophobia, and the specificities of female experience as it
intersects with race and sexuality; power dynamics and the structures and institutions that uphold

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them; women’s embodiment, as it is experienced and represented; the intersection of gender with
class, money, and the economics of everyday life. And it has material impact too, offering employ-
ment opportunities to women in an industry where those can be seriously constrained.

Activism
Theatrical activism has a long history, with key British examples including the involvement of
theatre professionals in the women’s suffrage campaign (Paxton 2018), and the pioneering by
Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop in the 1960s of techniques widely adopted in radical ­theatre –
­including that of Open Clasp (Littlewood 1994). Just as Sue-Ellen Case described the need, ar-
ticulated by the practitioners and academics she reached out to when writing her book, ‘to create
that connection between the social movement and the stage’ (1988: 2), so Open Clasp work to
embed feminist theatre-making in a broader feminist social praxis, working in ways that are con-
gruent with feminist values and politics. Asking herself ‘what makes Open Clasp work’, McHugh
concluded

for me it’s the politics. … if you don’t know about sexism, homophobia, racism, have no
awareness of discrimination and entitlement to power, then how do you facilitate work-
shops, discussion and debate? … your politics matter, your awareness of issues and the
wider context are key to the work.
(‘Eyes Wide Open’, September 2018)

This political commitment frequently arises from collaboration with community and activist
groups. For instance, Falling Knives and Runaround Wives (2001, revived 2006) came about when
a support group for survivors of domestic violence asked Open Clasp to create a performance piece
that would amplify their experiences and use their stories as a tool for change. This early work
already demonstrated some of the enduring characteristics of the company’s feminist aesthetic: it
was an ensemble piece in which the often-distressing intertwining stories of the four central female
characters were told in ways that offered theatrical pleasure (e.g. in the use of elements drawn from
popular culture); invited emotional identification and solidarity; and deployed laughter to prompt a
considered, critical reaction to the issues highlighted. More recently, Sugar (2017) emerged from
a series of workshops with women who were homeless, on probation or in prison, and had expe-
rienced troubled and traumatic lives. A blogpost reflecting on that development process vividly
evokes the vulnerability and trust demanded of participants, recalling encounters with women in a
homeless hostel in Manchester:

Every night we’ve finished the session all sitting round a big table and sharing a lovely
meal…. Last night they drew their character, and talked about the places she has walked
away from: my garden, little tree, roses, friends, peace, happiness and order. As well as
prison, kids homes, family, violent partners, my life! We finish tomorrow and it’s been an
honour to spend time with each and every one of these women, and we’ll return but know
due to the nature of homelessness it’s unlikely we’ll see them again.
(‘Some thoughts on Promise’, June 2016)

The juxtaposition in this passage of vital, sustaining relationships and the quotidian pleasures
of life with the profound losses, challenges, and traumas experienced by participants demon-
strates that the roots of the company’s distinctive aesthetic are in the earth of women’s lives.

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For obvious ethical reasons, the stories women share in the company’s carefully curated work-
shop environments are refashioned to ensure confidentiality when they undergo the process
of creative transformation that makes them into effective, moving political theatre. Aesthetic
transformation for theatrical impact is vital because it is a key value of the company’s work that
‘women’s stories, experiences and their voices are given value and recognition’ (‘Reflection’,
July 2012). This demand for recognition is at once a call for active responses from audiences
at the company’s performances and the wider world in which the plays are received and a way
of registering Open Clasp’s accountability to the women it works with. It articulates a descrip-
tion of ongoing practice, and an imperative for the ethical grounding and political efficacy of
future work.
Open Clasp’s activism has developed in step with the increasing importance of intersectionality
in feminist theory, practice, and culture-making (Sewell and Smout 2020). Intersectional feminism
entails a commitment to acting upon the awareness that gender intersects with other societal forces
to shape women’s lives at both personal and structural levels (Crenshaw 1989). Attention to the
intersection of gender and class is a constant in Open Clasp plays: over its twenty-plus years,
the company has created the most substantial and ambitious body of work putting the lives of
working-class women on stage in British theatre history. This matters because feminist theatre has
tended to focus on middle-class women’s lives, while working-class theatre has often privileged
men’s stories. The material conditions of theatre-making have made it difficult for working-class
women to find a place and a voice, notwithstanding brilliant exceptions such as Shelagh Delaney
(A Taste of Honey 1958) and Andrea Dunbar (The Arbour 1980; Rita, Sue and Bob Too 1982).
What Open Clasp plays share with these rare predecessors is that they avoid pathologising class
as the problem giving rise to a dramatic situation. Instead, in plays as different as After Her Death
(1999), which focused on mother–daughter relationships, and Rattle and Roll (2009), which dram-
atised women’s efforts to find security in unstable lives, the cultural and economic specificities of
working-class women’s lives contribute rich texture to the setting and action. Given the centrality
of middle-class women in mainstream theatre, this is itself a major contribution to intersectional
feminist practice in theatre.
Swags and Tails (2012) explored how class is further intertwined with age and gender. This
production emerged through an intergenerational process of work with women who lived or
worked in care homes, cared for loved ones, used day centres, or were housebound as a result
of the interaction of ageing, disability, and poor health, often exacerbated by living in poverty. It
provided these working-class women with creative opportunities that both sustained community
and enabled them to challenge the politics of economic austerity, with its intimate impacts on
women’s lives. Extending intersectional complexity and bringing theatrical learning into everyday
settings, Swags and Tails also generated a DVD and training tool designed to foster empathy and
understanding on the part of carers working with older members of the LGBT community. As this
example demonstrates, for Open Clasp, intersectionality is crucial to representation in theatre, and
to its community-oriented work for feminist change.
As a cultural institution, theatre is a site where both the politics of representation and the struc-
ture of the industry have compounded gendered exclusions with those associated with race, class,
age, and disability, among other factors. Recent research undertaken for Sphinx Theatre has re-
vealed that women are disadvantaged compared to men in almost all areas of the British theatre
industry and academic theatre studies, with the gender gap having widened in many areas com-
pared to the previous Sphinx report in 2012 (Sphinx 2020). This skewing of the profession both
damages women theatre workers’ careers and impairs the variety, inclusiveness, and quality of rep-
resentation on the British stage. As Lynette Goddard has demonstrated (2007), racism significantly

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exacerbates the exclusionary impact of the British theatre industry’s sexism on women of colour.
McHugh has reflected that Open Clasp is not immune to the racialised gaps and silences so com-
mon in British theatre:

Open Clasp’s rating with [Arts Council England’s] The Creative Case [for Diversity] is
‘good’, recognition of work that is inclusive of socio-economics, race, gender, disability and
sexuality, but two of our most current shows have white casts… and I have worried about
black women asking ‘where are our voices?’
(‘Our Artistic Director’, January 2018)

As a result of these reflections, Open Clasp has increasingly brought an anti-racist, intersection-
ally inclusive dimension to its feminist practice. Recent projects that signpost important future
directions for the company such as Sugar and Come to Where I Am (2020) centre the stories of
women of colour and employ them as writers and performers. Developed with and performed by
two Black women – mother and daughter Cheryl Byron (a key contributor to Key Change) and
Abigail Byron – don’t forget the birds (2019) represented a substantial commitment to redressing
the marginalisation of Black women’s voices. With this play, Open Clasp sought to avoid reify-
ing racial inequalities as a theme, choosing instead to amplify Black women’s voices by centring
their personal stories in the dramatic action and ceding the stage wholly to them. The production
demonstrates how a white-led feminist company can act to address the challenge issued by Ly-
nette Goddard to create theatrical representations of ‘complex and heterogeneous identities’ and
‘multiple black female experiences’ (2007: 7), and to ensure that their activist message is inter-
sectional in its feminism. Such efforts need to be juxtaposed with the work of companies led by
women of colour – such as Selina Thompson, or the collective of performers behind Mawa Theatre
Company, the United Kingdom’s first Shakespeare company made up entirely of Black and Black
mixed-race women – in order to signpost truly intersectional and inclusive directions of travel for
British feminist theatre.
A key aspect of the company’s activist agenda is to employ theatrical representation, campaign-
ing, and training with a variety of organisations to challenge and change men’s abusive treatment
of women. Though the dramatic action always foregrounds women’s stories and all performers are
women, the focus in recent dramas on domestic violence and coercive control means that men and
their significance in women’s lives are not absent. Plots and situations frequently show women
grappling with the consequences of men’s behaviour, and occasionally male characters are ven-
triloquised by female performers. Rattle Snake explores two women’s experiences of coercively
controlling domestic abuse inflicted by one man, James, to whom they have been married at dif-
ferent times. James is not a character and is never seen or heard, but both Eilidh Talman as Jen and
Christina Berriman Dawson as Suzy modified their voices and physical presence to conjure him up
as they recalled things he said and did to them. In one devastating scene, an appearance in family
court is portrayed by Jen shadow-boxing to the point of exhaustion with an invisible antagonist,
who represents not merely James himself, but the patriarchal institution. It is a powerful example
of a feminist theatre aesthetic in which ‘through repeating, re-performing, or parodying’ what is
enacted between men, the performance seeks ‘to rewrite the patriarchal… narrative through rep-
etition and re-contextualisation’ (Bissell 2018). Through its use to train police officers in dealing
with domestic abuse and coercive control, and its contribution to campaigns against gender-based
violence, Rattle Snake deploys a feminist aesthetic that puts women’s bodies and voices centre
stage in the service of feminist activism.

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Community
The sexual politics of theatre matters in relation to communities because it is a profoundly civic,
political, collective cultural form, and one which can either affirm the status quo or challenge it
and create possibilities for change. Open Clasp’s intersectional feminist activism grows directly
from the company’s roots in specific local communities. Of crucial importance to its practice
are the culturally diverse communities of Elswick, the socially and economically disadvantaged
neighbourhood of Newcastle where it is located, and the city’s lesbian community and cultural
scene, in which core people involved with the company are longstanding participants. Both of
these communities are brought together and sustained in the company’s life by its base in the West
End Women and Girls’ Centre (WEWAG West End Women and Girls Centre), a community venue
that welcomes everyone who identifies as a woman, and by the partnership in work and life of Cat-
rina McHugh and her wife Huffty McHugh, director of WEWAG (Chedgzoy et al. 2021). At the
heart of Open Clasp’s feminist theatre practice is an understanding that making theatre is a process
of making relationships, in which trust and responsibility are vital. It is a profoundly collaborative
organisation in both its internal structure and its relationships with partners, and that commitment
to collaboration shapes its interactions with its communities.
Community is also vital to the methodology of much feminist theatre practice, and Open Clasp’s
productions always start with a process of engagement and storytelling rooted in the methods of
community theatre. This term denotes practices of theatre-making with, by, and for communities
(Prentki and Preston 2009: 10), frequently taking place in spaces outside theatre buildings. A fun-
damentally relational activity, it has been defined as theatre that ‘asks for an audience that is open
to change’ (Kuppers and Robertson, 2007: 1), and itself typically works to bring about change.
Open Clasp’s work embraces all these aspects of community theatre and is also deeply invested
in the work of making community: this is a key aspect both of its affective process and activist
commitment. Always attentive to the ethical and emotional sensitivities of what they are doing,
the company works with women from a variety of vulnerable and marginalised communities in
participatory activities to support them in telling their particular stories. The material thus gener-
ated is then taken into a space where further collaborative labour transforms it into a theatrical
production, amplifying those delicate, vulnerable stories and bringing them to wider audiences.
A rich example is The Space Between Us (2013), a project involving 116 women, many of them
living locally to Open Clasp in Elswick, from a variety of marginalised and vulnerable communi-
ties including Czech/Roma and Slovak/Roma young women, British Travellers, and women from
African countries living in destitution and fear of deportation after being refused asylum. The play
that emerged from this process used the metaphor-rich scenario of four women (one of them les-
bian) sheltering from a storm in a church to weave together stories of Romany and Muslim experi-
ence. Another community-based project, the evocative, richly textured multi-media installation
Songlines (2013) broadened the company’s reach beyond live theatre performances. Photogra-
pher Phyllis Christopher, visual artist Taryn Edmonds and filmmaker Kate Sweeney worked with
women in whose lives the intersection of race, gender, experiences of forced migration, and sexu-
ality can entail extreme vulnerability to enable them to tell their stories and to amplify their voices
in a form that continues to travel to and temporarily inhabit a wide range of community venues.
Projects like these exemplify a political theatre-making process that involves ‘[w]orking in
partnership with [women] to play and replay options for action within that stultifying life cir-
cumstance’, a process which enables the challenging situations in which participants live to be
‘reformed and revisited, revealed and altered’ (Selman 2003). That last phrase highlights the

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transformative capacity of theatre: performance re-forms, reveals, and alters in a way that other
kinds of intervention might not. This creative capacity provides the spark for the possibility of
transformation through interaction between performance and audiences, which is key to femi-
nist theatre. Open Clasp facilitates this interaction in a way that aspires to bring together emo-
tional response with thoughtful engagement, thereby leading to political action. Reflecting on
Open Clasp’s work for change, McHugh affirmed her belief in the political efficacy of theatre and
identified ‘empathy [as] the key…. For me empathy makes you think and if you think you change’
(‘Big Questions’, May 2012). In foregrounding the significance of empathy as a political emotion,
McHugh contributes to an important trend in feminist scholarship (Pedwell and Whitehead 2012).
Empathy plays a multi-faceted role in Open Clasp’s work: it is the link between the company’s
activism and its embedding in specific communities, and it is also crucial to the company’s com-
mitment to reaching beyond the communities it works with to demand a political response from
a wider set of audiences. In the distinctive ways that its plays address audiences and demand en-
gaged responses from them, and in the multi-faceted and often recursive engagements with a wide
variety of participants in its other activities, the company sustains a practice of theatre-making as
dialogic empathy (Cummings 2016).
As noted above, the North-East lesbian community is particularly significant in the social
life and distinctive aesthetic signature of Open Clasp. The relationships between sexuality and
­gender – between specifically lesbian cultural imperatives and feminist perspectives – are a long-
standing site of debate within feminist theatre studies and practice (Rapi 1993). Historians of radi-
cal theatre have seen ‘queer performance’ as grounded in and building on ‘lesbian theatre’, but this
shift of terminology also indexes the volatility of LGBTQ+ cultural politics, frequently marked by
tensions between queer and specifically lesbian perspectives (Mullan 2015). While Open Clasp’s
feminist focus has been utterly steady, McHugh observes that over time lesbian sexuality has en-
joyed varying degrees of visibility in the company’s work (‘ Our Artistic Director’, January 2018).
It was prominent in the company’s first play, After Her Death, an ensemble piece in which one of
the four main characters was a lesbian mother. A Twist of Lemon (2008) used the comedic scenario
of four friends going on holiday to Lesvos to explore the continuing impact of homophobia and
share all the messiness and complexity of contemporary lesbian lives; tensions around lesbian
sexuality among women of different cultural and religious backgrounds are key to the plot of The
Space Between Us; and Love Should Never Be Abusive (2014) is a training film and resource that
uses Open Clasp’s established feminist ways of working to address the under-explored issue of
domestic abuse in same-sex relationships. Jumping Puddles (2015), a piece developed with and
for young women, had homophobic bullying as a key theme, and the company (in part through its
partnership with WEWAG, which hosts young women’s groups) is closely attuned to the needs of
young LGBT+ people, recognising the growing prominence of trans and non-binary perspectives.
Lesbian sexuality is often normalised in Open Clasp productions, which frequently feature sig-
nificant lesbian roles. And it is important not only to the content of the plays, but to the company’s
theatrical aesthetic. Throughout its lifespan, McHugh has been a key figure in the North-East’s
LGBT+ cultural scene as lead vocalist of lesbian drag band the Camp Vamps, whose gigs are
frequently fundraisers for women’s/lesbian voluntary organisations. She was also a moving spirit
in the lesbian pantomimes and ‘Rock ‘n’ Doris’ cabaret nights hosted at Live Theatre over many
years. The overlap between Open Clasp’s theatre and these types of cultural production illustrates
how ‘queer work’ in theatre frequently employs ‘forms of low-brow and popular performance,
often in cabarets or nightclubs’ (Campbell and Farrier 2016: 6), and underlines the porousness
of the boundaries between such forms and other kinds of theatre-making. The DIY aesthetic, use
of popular culture, and appropriation and reworking of materials for queer and political purposes

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that typically characterise these forms features in many of Open Clasp’s productions. A Twist of
Lemon (2008) combines music (including a cover of gay dancefloor favourite ‘I Am What I Am’)
and physical comedy (an uproarious boat ride) with nuanced explorations of mourning and abuse
in same-sex relationships. The company’s skilful use in sensitive contexts of theatrical devices that
are often upbeat and affirmative in their impact is a signature aspect of its aesthetic, and one that is
rooted in the history of queer performance cultures. The political resonance of their aesthetic and
methodology for queer culture has been articulated by Stephen Greer, who gives A Twist of Lemon
as an example of ‘activism through the medium of the arts’ grounded in ‘long-term commitments
to specific… communities’ (Greer 2012: 103). Such qualities are frequently evident in work by the
next generation of feminist and queer theatre makers, such as Sh!t Theatre’s ­DollyWould (2017)
which celebrates Dolly Parton while asking feminist questions about gender, sexuality, and em-
bodiment, or Figs in Wigs’ live art feminist appropriation of Little Wimmin (2021) to address
climate crisis. The next section of the chapter delves more deeply into these questions of how aes-
thetics and process shape feminist theatre-making, highlighting the key role of affect and ­emotion
in this work.

Process
Open Clasp’s process is shaped by the company’s feminist ethos, working methods, and aesthetic
and by its vision of how theatre makes change. In its creative and organisational practices, it is
committed to ‘a methodology that is feminist and democratic. We’re not about “othering”, we are
about standing in solidarity and making change happen’ (‘Eyes Wide Open’, 2018). McHugh’s
location of theatre’s transformative capacity in the affective, political, reflective, and dialogic en-
counter it creates between performers and audiences is echoed by Elaine Aston’s highlighting
of the importance of ‘the affective energies generated by the performances and their capacity to
stimulate identifications with feminist dynamics and strategies’ (2020: 13). Aston’s foregrounding
of ‘feminist-political anger’ (107) builds on Sue-Ellen Case’s foundational work, which noted that
‘many of us originally adopted feminism because of the pain and anger we felt when we encoun-
tered the prejudices and omissions of the traditional theater’ (1988: 1).
Anger with the existing order of things is crucial in energising change: but to imagine transfor-
mation and plan the strategies that can bring it about, anger needs to be met by a hopeful desire
for things to be different. Theatre is a potent resource for radical politics precisely because it can
embody alternative possibilities and present them to audiences: feminist theatre constitutes, as
Dolan says, ‘a liberating experiment with a form that had never addressed [its makers and au-
diences] before’ (2012: 7). The dramatic realisation of alternative social realities embodies the
possibility of change, gives pleasure to audiences, and thereby enlarges the political capacity of
desire. Elin Diamond calls theatre ‘a site where the performer’s and the spectator’s desire may
resignify elements of a constrictive social script’ (1997: iii). To use desire as well as anger to feed
work for change is an important aspect of Open Clasp’s practice, in multiple ways, including the
depiction of these political feelings as triggers for dramatic action; the emotions the plays seek
to arouse in the audience; and the way the company seeks to channel that emotional response
into commitment to social change. This is explicit in the social media campaign accompanying
the streaming of Sugar on BBC iPlayer in 2020, which invited viewers to ‘feel connected to the
women, see their strength & feel the urgency for social change’ (https://twitter.com/OpenClasp/
status/1334059828025712640?s=20 December 4, 2020). Part of what a company like Open Clasp
is doing – part of the whole project of feminist theatre – is to reimagine audiences in more expan-
sive, inclusive, less male-centred ways. Feminist theatre companies work to make theatre capable

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of speaking to diverse audiences, both those who already identify as feminist, and those who do
not but whom feminism may want to address and include.
This reorientation of both content and address has important implications for theatrical form.
Noting the close relationship between feminist and experimental theatre, Nicola Shaughnessy ar-
gues that the task of ‘developing new vocabularies to articulate hidden histories and gendered
experiences as the personal became political and public’ requires feminist experimentation which
has transformative potential for theatre practice (2012, 47). In Open Clasp’s embodied, popular,
collaborative, participatory theatre, this typically takes the form of non-realist theatrical strategies,
including comedy, music, or cabaret, fed by the company’s overlap with Rock ‘n’ Doris cabaret
nights and the Camp Vamps. Examples in their scripted plays include the ABBA tribute band that
provides a structural device in Falling Knives and Runaround Wives; the use of photography and
film in the multi-media installation Songlines; and the clapping song that opens Rattle Snake. Re-
sponding to audience feedback, changing technological opportunities, and shifting collaborative
relationships, the company has developed a distinctive aesthetic which shares a common herit-
age with the presentational, storytelling, theatrically self-conscious style characteristic of much
­Anglophone feminist theatre.
Increasingly, these theatrical elements are being enriched and extended by technical innovation
and formal experimentation. Initially developed as a stage production (2017), Sugar is now framed
as an intimate piece of theatre made for film, first screened in front of a live audience at Live Thea-
tre in Newcastle in 2019 and subsequently streamed on BBC iPlayer. Sugar is a powerful piece
of storytelling theatre in which three female characters representing diverse identities in terms of
age, race, and life experience speak directly to the audience/camera. Its aesthetic is purposefully
pared-back in order to foreground the voices of women who have shared their stories with as much
clarity and directness as possible, while creating a dramatic frame strong enough to hold this very
powerful and distressing material securely. Sugar blends live performance and film-making with
the use of digital media, and within these media also employs the direct address and use of song
that have been consistent presences in Open Clasp plays. It is a pioneering instance of a theatri-
cal modality of increasing significance at a moment when streamed, online performance has been
energised by the Covid-19 pandemic, potentially greatly extending the capacity of feminist theatre
to reach new audiences.
Reflecting on previews of Sugar’s theatrical incarnation, McHugh reveals the importance of
performance space and design elements in shaping aesthetic effect and audience response (‘The
Sound of an Audience’ 2017). A decision to light the audience was not ‘warm and inclusive’ as
anticipated, but had the effect of ‘exposing the audience, leaving no shadows or dark corners to
hide or step back into’. As a result, ‘the sound of the audience … was still’. This initially provoked
anxiety among the company, but in the post-show discussion ‘we heard the audience comments;
that the show was really powerful, stories that need to be told, but not with the big light on, give
me shadows, allow elbow room’. Embodiment, movement, sound, and listening are all in play in
the language of audience reaction and company response here. Learning quickly, the company
changed the lighting for the second preview to ‘invite shadows and corners’. When the perfor-
mance ended, says McHugh, ‘we let a breath out and listened to their thoughts’ which were more
positive, and the lessons learned are carried over into the screen version, where deep chiaroscuro
effects in the lighting set the tone of emotional intensity, while bringing the beauty of baroque art
to the difficult life stories recounted in Sugar. The development of Sugar’s lighting foregrounds
the complexity and importance of the relationship between form and content in feminist theatre.
Black feminist scholar and practitioner Lynette Goddard argues that aesthetic innovation in theatre
is crucial precisely because it can help to bring about intersectional social change: ‘Experiments

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 Open Clasp as an example of feminist theatre practice

with form aid in the deconstruction of prevailing ideas about gender, race and sexuality, offering
alternatives to the so-called “norms”’ (2007: 54). Sugar demonstrates that this has to be done in
dialogue with an audience’s openness to change in the context of a particular production. It reveals
that aesthetic innovation can be transformative but also for some viewers challenging and exclu-
sionary, especially if it exposes the vulnerabilities that audience members bring to a performance
that makes high emotional demands of them. This is not to say that the change of lighting was a
conservative move; rather, that a different kind of innovation was required for Sugar to connect
with its audiences.
This dynamic, engaged interaction with the preview audiences is characteristic of feminist and
radical theatre companies who often carry loyal audiences with them over multiple productions.
Women make up around two-thirds of theatregoers in the United Kingdom, and audiences attend-
ing commercial Open Clasp productions tend to be even more markedly female. Indeed, some
performances are women-only, but addressing and challenging men is also part of the company’s
purpose. Key Change initially toured to single-sex audiences in men’s prisons, before becom-
ing a commercial success with mixed audiences in commercial venues across England, at the
Edinburgh Fringe, and off-Broadway. Staged both in theatres and in other kinds of venues, Open
Clasp performances engage with a variety of audiences. Feminist companies rarely have a secure
physical home in a producing theatre, so this need to originate mobile, flexible productions is a
common one. It influences the aesthetic of feminist theatre-making, both because of the need to
make theatre that can be flexibly staged in a variety of spaces, and for budgetary reasons. This can
afford strengths as well as constraints: tours to diverse venues, including non-theatrical spaces, can
open up broader possibilities than those available to building-based companies, serving to build
feminist community and politicise everyday life. This is supported by pre- or post-show discus-
sions, often co-hosted with community organisations. They can be crucial to the impact of feminist
theatre in exposing the inherently political nature of women’s everyday existence and enabling
audiences to make active connections between their own lived experience and the dramatic action.
The co-authors participated in one such discussion after a screening of Rattle Snake at Newcastle
University as part of the 2019 United Nations Campaign to Eliminate Violence Against Women
and Girls. Participants including university staff and students, women from Open Clasp, and a
group of women experienced with the criminal justice system joined in a powerful, unexpected
sharing of experiences and insights. Tracing ‘the role that interventionist theatre can play in de-
bates about social justice’, Goddard highlights the value of ‘plays as important tools for starting
conversations’ (2015: ix): post-show discussions are a key site where such conversations can oc-
cur, drawing out the empathy, amusement, and anger in audience responses in supportive and pur-
poseful ways. Extensive, evidence-based analysis of audiences’ engagements with feminist theatre
is important research that remains to be done; a rich source for it is provided by documentation
of audience feedback in Open Clasp’s archive, which offers insights into audience expectations,
behaviours, and reactions across a range of theatrical and non-theatrical venues since 1998. These
responses demonstrate that the company typifies Kim Solga’s description of feminist theatre as
‘a place to experience and explore political feelings’ (2015: 15). At the heart of feminist theatre-
making is the recognition that ‘performance can be a powerful political weapon in exposing the
sexism, misogyny, and inequality at the heart of our structures both political and social’ (Bissell
2018: 536). And just as anger must be met by hope to effect social and political change, so feminist
theatre knows that the pleasures it offers to audiences are vital to energising that action for change.
In its productions and across the full range of its activities and relationships, Open Clasp is repre-
sentative of much feminist theatre practice in its commitment to an aesthetic which understands
theatrical pleasure as both emotional and political, making purposeful use of pleasure and feeling

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 Kate Chedgzoy et al.

to elicit both empathy and critical, engaged response from the audience with the goal of changing
the world one play at a time.

Notes
1 All quotations attributed to McHugh come from the blog reflecting on the company’s work she has
­maintained since 2021, and are identified in text with the date and short title of the specific blogpost; full
details are provided in the bibliography.
2 Richly detailed information about and documentation of these and other feminist companies can be found
at Unfinished Histories – Recording the history of Alternative Theatre.

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 30
PROTECTING THE LAND,
SAFEGUARDING THE FUTURE
Ecofeminism, activist women’s writing, and
contemporary publishing in Wales

Michelle Deininger

In the face of global climate change, which results in rising sea levels, increased temperatures,
and ecosystems on the brink of collapse, literary analysis can feel insignificant – even, at times,
pointless. The environmental crisis is a human-made catastrophe, caused by an overreliance
on fossil fuels, underpinned by capitalism. At the same time, capitalism demands increasing
growth which in turn damages the environment, ranging from higher demand for crops (and
the chemicals used to sustain their growth) to the building of yet more infrastructure to support
human expansion. Marginalised communities, especially women of colour, are disproportion-
ately affected by climate change, especially in the Global South. There are, however, ways to
combat the despair caused by the overwhelming nature of the environmental crisis and its roots
in capitalism; these include, this chapter argues, ecofeminism and the literature of women’s
activism and protest, in which environmental issues are reimagined and different types of solu-
tions posed.
Ecofeminism, a term coined originally in the 1970s by French feminist and activist Françoise
d’Eaubonne, did not begin within literary studies and many of its most important proponents,
such as Vandana Shiva, Ariel Salleh, and Maria Mies, are located in other disciplines, such as
nuclear physics or sociology. However, as with many approaches that seep into and shift the
focus of literary studies – such as decolonisation or cultural geography – ecofeminism has been
changing the way we read and interpret texts for some time, especially through the work of
critics such as Greta Gaard (1997, 2010, 2017). While it is sometimes viewed as a subcategory
of ecocriticism or a branch of feminist thought, ecofeminism is far more than the sum of its
interrelated parts. Modern literary ecofeminism is a dynamic way of reading texts that opens
up questions about the way power works, offers a critical perspective on the silences around
domination and subjugation, and draws attention to the trampling of both the environment and
marginalised communities by patriarchal actions and policies, which are themselves rooted in
capitalism. As Carolyn Merchant argues in her Foreword to a new edition of d’Eaubonne’s Le
Féminisme ou la Mort (Feminism or Death),

Ecofeminism, with its emphasis on relations, has the potential to see connections among
various forms of oppression, such as those affecting women, marginalized and colonized

DOI: 10.4324/9781003429951-36 446

 Ecofeminism, activist women’s writing & contemporary publishing

peoples, animals, and nature. Recognition of the weblike character of various forms of
­domination suggests a cooperative strategy of web repair.
(2022: xiii)

Indeed, the metaphor of the web, of connective regeneration, often features in women’s activist
and protest writing, rather than the direct, straight (in all its senses) line of economic growth.
What we deem as ecofeminist within literary studies remains open to debate. As Myriam
­Bahaffou and Julie Gorecki note in their introduction to Le Féminisme ou la Mort, while tracing
the emergence of ecofeminist as a label for texts, “the criteria for inclusion into the ‘ecofeminist
family’ seems rather simple: the integration of nature, the environment, or the earth within femi-
nist activism and/or analysis” (2022: xxvi). They also emphasise that the term has been “primarily
used by academics – a majority of them white – hoping to theorize a global wave of the mobiliza-
tion of women for the planet, to describe very different experiences or movements” (2022: xxv).
This criticism shapes the trajectory of this chapter, which focuses on the way women’s writing and
publishing in Wales is part of a wider ecofeminist narrative. I would argue that to be truly ecofemi-
nist, a literary text must have some sort of transformative potential to enable the reader to see the
interplay between oppression (of women, as well as non-binary and trans peoples) and the destruc-
tion of the environment as elements that are bound to each other as a consequence of the effects of
capitalism, consumerism, and a turn away from an ethics of care and compassion. The examples
drawn from Wales by women writers provide new platforms for ecofeminist voices as well as un-
derlining the contribution Welsh women in publishing are making to ecofeminism as a discipline.
As a critical approach, ecofeminism has often been aligned with essentialism, intertwining en-
vironmental concerns with the supposedly fixed nature of femininity. Some early (and indeed more
recent) approaches have conflated ecofeminism with essentialist discourse, especially concerning
nature as an inherently maternal or feminine construct, excluding queer bodies and identities.
However, as Asmae Ourkiya argues, “essentialism in all its forms fosters dangerous ideas such as
the feminization of womanhood, masculinization of manhood, the superiority of heteronormativ-
ity leading to homophobia, the superiority of cisgender people leading to transphobia, and racial
prejudice leading to neo-nationalism” (2022: 314). The kind of ecofeminism enacted by Ourkiya,
which is inclusive in its reach and explores not just patriarchal oppression but also oppression
related to transphobia and homophobia, offers much hope for the future of the discipline. Indeed,
ecofeminism today is often a complex intersection of theory, practice, and activism, motivated by
an overarching drive to change the way we think about the interplay between gender, sexuality,
and the environment. As Sunaina Jain argues, it “is not a unified and coherent term” but “rather
different strands of discourses and practices [that] have branched out from it” (2022: 272). Jain’s
use of the metaphor of branching connects ecofeminism to imagery of natural networks and in-
terconnection. This same emphasis on connection and the opportunity for repair is at the heart of
this chapter.
Taking these broader political and theoretical ideas as a starting point, this chapter uses the
contemporary literary and publishing contexts of Welsh women’s writing and publishing (in its
broadest and most inclusive sense) as a case study for hope, exploring how these texts and contexts
provide examples of ecofeminist practice through their recurrent activism and protest. Texts which
scrutinise the interplay between the mistreatment of the environment and the resultant impact on
the most vulnerable can be traced from the 1970s onwards in Wales, and this continues in mul-
tiple forms today. I begin by looking at women’s short forms (from the short story to ecopoetry)
and their contribution to a growing body of work, either written in Wales or published by Welsh
presses, which can be read with an ecofeminist lens. At the same time, I explore the emerging

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spaces for women writers and publishers of colour, arguing that Welsh publishers are at the fore-
front of some of the most urgent and compelling ecofeminist writing, emphasising the work of
emerging Cardiff-based publisher, Lucent Dreaming. I contend that focusing on elements of envi-
ronmentally engaged writing and publishing, which are either undervalued or simply not examined
beyond the Welsh university sector, is a strategy which embodies an ecofeminist politics. Next,
I explore the role of the contemporary novel in capturing important historical and contemporary
moments involving women’s environmental activism and protest, focusing on the protection of
the land. This includes Kathryn Simmonds’ Love and Fallout (2014), which discusses both Green-
ham Common and contemporary environmental issues, and Philippa Holloway’s The Half-Life of
Snails (2022), focused on nuclear power in both Wales and Chernobyl. Both novels are published
by Welsh presses, Seren and Parthian respectively. Finally, I turn to the future and the opportuni-
ties literature provides for hope in the midst of the environmental crisis. By focusing on public-
facing opportunities, such as the role of women as writers in residence (a role often associated with
white, middle-class, male voices), open access publishing, and public engagement projects aimed
at the most marginalised groups in society, this chapter illuminates the powerful opportunities for
disruption provided by women writers and activists.

Welsh publishing, short forms, and ecofeminism

Outside the mainstream, and not funded by large corporations or the colonial legacies of rich
universities, Welsh publishing has often been a place for new voices and experimentation. In the
twentieth century, journals, periodicals, and magazines such as The Welsh Outlook (1915–1933)
and Dock Leaves (1949–1957), which later became The Anglo-Welsh Review (1949–1998), would
often publish work that was alive to the damage done to the environment by industrialisation.
Women writers were featured in these publications, but not as often as they could have been.
Planet: The Welsh Internationalist (1970–present), a highly political and forward-thinking maga-
zine, has often been at the vanguard of criticising the consequences of imperialist-style policies
emanating from England and impacting on Welsh life and landscapes, including via fiction written
by women. One short story published in Planet that encapsulates a sense of rage at the damage
done to both the land and women’s bodies is Elizabeth Baines’ “Boiling the Potatoes” (1978). The
story explores the consequences of Dutch Elm disease and the devastation it causes to the ancient
hedgerows, while also enmeshing this imagery in concerns about higher rates of breast cancer
(caused by pollution and the legacy of the industrial and nuclear age). Voices such as Baines’
should be considered Wales’ clarion call of 1970s ecofeminism (see Deininger 2018). Baines
makes use of the metaphor of the thread or the spider’s web, “noting the connections” (1978:
31) between layers of the past and the present, and a present shaped by dementia and cancers,
all rooted in environmental factors that harm the female body. If we consider Baines’ story more
closely for a moment, it encapsulates some of the most important ideas in ecofeminist writing from
Wales. In the space of a mere two pages, Baines depicts multiple time frames from the perspective
of an unnamed female narrator who watches family members die from a range of diseases, as well
as capturing the onset of her own dementia. (This disease is metaphorically linked to Dutch Elm
disease, which the English government allows to spread unchecked through Wales.) Each disease
is connected to the pollutants released into the environment from the establishment of Aberthaw
power plant, in the Vale of Glamorgan, as well as the dust emanating from the nearby cement
works. What was once a village idyll has become an over-developed hell, polluted by the increased
use of fossil fuels and continued industrial expansion. While Aberthaw was coal-powered, rather
than nuclear, the story is shot through with images of dust, caused by the cement but clearly linked

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to the imagery of nuclear fallout: “The chimneys puff dust. Hedges drifting, white and grainy, even
the blackberries pale with dry snow” (1978: 31). Reminiscent of the poisonous DDT powder that
“had fallen like snow upon the roofs and the lawns, the fields and streams” (Carson 2000: 22) in
the opening of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), this residue is a metaphor for the spread of
pollutants that harm the bodies of the most vulnerable (such as women, children, and the elderly).
New voices and experimentation continue to be features of Welsh publishing, but in more
recent years, women of colour have been at the forefront of both the writing itself and bring-
ing new voices into print. Cardiff-based magazine Lucent Dreaming (2018–present) is a case in
point. Founded by editor-in-chief Jannat Ahmed, alongside a small team of editors, the magazine
aims to publish “beautiful, strange and surreal short stories, poetry and artwork from contributors
worldwide” (Lucent Dreaming, 2022). The magazine became a book publisher in 2022, funded by
the Books Council of Wales and Creative Wales, and swiftly published the anthology Maps and
Rooms: Writing from Wales (2022), containing works exclusively by writers of colour, including
Umulkhayr Mohamed and Nia Morais who both use she/they pronouns. This funding was a first
in Wales, with The Bookseller leading with the headline: “Books Council Wales funds first two
full-time magazine and book editors of colour” (Comerford 2022). Editor Ahmed spoke of the op-
portunities this funding has opened up as well as the systematic barriers that have curtailed efforts
in the past:

I hope […] we can create a publishing landscape with a working culture better suited to a
more diverse literary community, and redress the long-standing barriers that people of col-
our and other marginalised people disproportionately face in the arts. Lucent Dreaming as
it currently exists is reflective of the minimum energy I’ve been able to give the magazine
for almost three years due to a lack of finances. To be given the chance to work in a new
way, full-time four days a week, will be transformative, for me, and for publishing in Wales.
(Comerford 2022)

While not explicitly ecofeminist, the magazine has provided a wealth of environmentally informed
women’s writing since it began. The first edition of the magazine showcases (on its first page of
content) a pointillist illustration, titled “Growth”, by Cardiff-based artist Cerys Knighton, whose
work often combines elements of the natural world, such as roots, leaves, and plants, with the hu-
man body. Much of Knighton’s early work is activist in its intentions, drawing attention to bipolar
disorder, and “creat[ing] a space to provoke thoughts about how medical categories have evolved,
and to challenge our perceptions of mental illness” (2019). “Growth” is juxtaposed with Taylor
Edmonds’ poem “In Bloom”, which has many parallels to Knighton’s work, again enmeshing
nature with the human body. Edmonds was a recipient of the Rising Stars Wales Award (2020),
an award held in partnership between Literature Wales (the national organisation for the develop-
ment of literature) and Firefly Press, which aims to recognise talented children’s poets from Black,
Asian, and Minority Ethnic backgrounds in Wales. In Edmonds’ poem, the narrator lays out a
scene which has magical-realist elements, as she and her sister eat sunflower seeds and then wait
for them to “plant / themselves into our intestines, / root, feed, grow” (Edmonds 2018: 2). While
the sister intends to sell hers at the flower market, as “bouquets for men to take home / for their
wives”, as if imagining a part of herself is “blooming” in a stranger’s house (Edmonds 2018: 2),
the poem ends with the narrator picking out petals from her teeth, suggesting that she has eaten
the fruits of her own labour instead of selling them to someone else to display. There is something
very playful about this poem but it also has a sharp edge; it declares that women’s bodies are not
a commodity to be sold on the market. Indeed, there is an echo of Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin

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 Michelle Deininger

Market” (1862) and its refusal of the masculine world of consumerism and capitalism, reimagined
here for the twenty-first century.
That these works are in the public domain at all speaks volumes for the hard work and dedica-
tion of inspirational Welsh women of colour like Ahmed and testifies to the space that still needs to
be carved out for more voices. As Umulkhayr Mohamed and Taz Rahman outline in the introduc-
tion to Maps and Rooms, there is still much work to be done in terms of publishing and readership:

The #BlackLivesMatter movement has evidently made a little more space for all of us at
the margins, in redressing more of the historical imbalance in publishing. However, in pub-
lication terms, we are still somewhat restricted to our expected intersections. In readership
terms, there is still a long way to go.
(2022: 7)

Mohamed’s own piece, “How can someone draw a map without lines and why they should want
to”, is part memoir, part essay, part poem. In this piece, she highlights the exclusionary practices
found in studies undertaken on how women and men provide street directions:

They, the scientists who did these studies, do not speak of how other genders / non-genders
approach this task so I cannot relay this to you, this is the kind of leaving space I do not ap-
preciate, and absence despite the pretence of completion.
(2022: 83)

It is worth pausing for a moment here to draw attention to the lines and boundaries that Mohamed
is deconstructing. “Other genders” and “non-genders” opens up multiplicity as well as empha-
sising the negativity that comes from this reluctance to encompass more than just the binary.
Mohamed calls into question the process of maps and mapping, and more broadly, the failure of
language to adequately represent identity while also calling for connection and community – an
idea that recurs again and again in this chapter:

Lines feel so underwhelming here, in their inability to reveal what lies under them. Why
not draw zones instead shaped like wells? Each holding their value under the surface, but
allowing for the possibility of overflowing into one another, when nature calls them to. And
what if this was the case, would we have the capacity to read this not as an overburdening,
but a sharing instead?
(2022: 82)

Here Mohamed asks for a new way of writing the world, of a mode not restrained by linearity yet
designed to allow for the overflow, for ideas to flow together and make new shapes. The focus on
“sharing” rather than “overburdening” calls for connection, once again, and forming new commu-
nities. It is this kind of rethinking of the world around us that is exactly what is needed to combat
issues like climate change.
The Lucent Dreaming imprint is defining new territory in Welsh publishing, while also opening
up a platform for new voices to speak, including women’s voices concerned with the environ-
ment. If there is a space to speak, there is a place to protest. Issue 10 of the magazine, for instance,
features Cathy Raven’s flash fiction (a term for very short stories, usually around 500 words),
“Contemplations of a Six-Thousand-Year-Old Bristlecone Pine Tree in the White Mountains of
California”, which is told from the perspective of the tree and charts its history that pre-dates

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human intervention. The story captures an earlier time when indigenous peoples “scurried and
hunted and raged, but stilled to hear the earth and read the water and taste the sky – listen to the
warning. Short lives – fragile and bright” (Raven 2022). It depicts a reverence for the natural world
that is lost when European colonisers take over the land, bringing a new kind of violence with
them: “Taking, taking, and not giving back. Hacking and sawing and burning. Rush for gold. Rush
for knowledge. No time for understanding” (2022). This flash fiction is ultimately about survival
and the idea that the tree will continue beyond the era of humankind, while also underlining the
violence and pointless destruction that underpins both capitalism and colonialism.
Shorter forms, such as the short story and flash fiction, as well as modern ecopoetry (itself a de-
scendant of lyric and elegiac poetry) can encapsulate environmental issues in a way that is sharply
focused and difficult to ignore. Often these genres are less financially viable within the publishing
sector, given the dominance of the novel, so it is frequently the role of small, independent presses
to bring this kind of work to the fore. There can be a performance element to these works when
presented in the form of live readings, which can bring these issues to a wider audience (something
that can also be part of the writer in residence’s remit, discussed below). In this context, the line
between literature, protest, and activism can become blurred – live readings bring the work of the
writer into a public arena and create a direct relationship with readers-as-audience. Lucent Dream-
ing, for example, showcased work by several women of colour, including Taylor Edmonds and
Hanan Issa, National Poet of Wales (2022–2025), at a free event at Cardiff’s branch of Waterstones
in the autumn of 2022. These types of small-scale events can bring about the incremental change,
whether in terms of resituating women’s voices or shifts in attitude to environmental issues that
many ecofeminist literary texts strive to foreground.
To publish work that is exclusively focused on the environmental crisis could be seen as an
ecofeminist act, as illustrated by Welsh publisher Seren’s 100 Poems to Save the Earth (2021),
a collection that incorporates poems from writers from a huge variety of nationalities and back-
grounds and directly tackles many ecofeminist issues. As with Raven’s flash fiction, themes of loss
and lament for a world that is being built upon runs through the entire collection, not least the role
of women in bearing the burden of that loss. Several poems narrated either explicitly or implicitly
by women explore the weight of issues such as climate change, including Australian poet Cath
Drake’s “How I Hold the World in this Climate Emergency” or Scottish poet Kathleen Jamie’s
“The Creel”. Drake’s poem personifies the world, referring to it simply as “world” with no use of
a definite article. There is a very telling line in which Drake’s narrator says: “I am privileged and
should be able to do something” (2021: 80) and, in many ways, the entire collection is attempting
to address that privilege by consciousness-raising, much like the women’s movement of the 1960s
and 1970s, by speaking the truth, telling the stories. Jamie’s poem is the first in the collection and
imagines a world which “began with a woman” (2021: 11); the essence of the poem is the female
figure, godlike, who holds up the world and if she were ever to put it down, then “the world would
go out like a light” (2021: 11).
While Jamie’s poem points to a mythic female figure holding up the world, drawing on folklore
and traditional tales, the collection also tackles practical issues that are caught up with land use
and social justice. In the United Kingdom and Ireland, building houses on greenfield sites to meet
demand is a critical issue, not least because the social housing available is insufficient, putting
pressure on the green belt. In Irish writer Paula Meehan’s poem, “Death of a Field”, there is a sense
of urgency and lament in the loss of natural spaces for housing. In this poem, that space is a simple
field that is transformed by the local council turning it into a “site” for construction (Meehan 2021:
86). Meehan captures the sense of this landscape as a repository of natural knowledge, highlighted
by the constant references to different types of flower, herb, grasses, and birds, often listing them

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in an elegiac fashion: “woodpigeons in the willow”, “finches in what’s left of the hawthorn hedge”,
and “wagtail in the elder” (2021:86). The field’s herbs and plants become erased by the chemicals
in the kitchens that will be built on this land. Instead of natural things like dandelion, thistle, or
sloe, the reader is faced with a slew of branded chemicals:

The end of dandelion is the start of Flash

The end of dock is the start of Pledge
The end of teazel is the start of Ariel
The end of primrose is the start of Brillo
(2021: 86)

As Giovanna Di Chiro argues,

The embodied environmental justice praxis of activists […] has long called attention to the
importance of place, of knowing the history of the land you are standing on, and learning
from the peoples, communities, and non-human relatives who have inhabited these places
for generations.
(2021: 823, emphasis in original)

Meehan is capturing that moment as the land changes and its distinctive sense of place shifts, even-
tually to be forgotten. Meehan’s poem is one of the standout poems in the collection, emmeshing
the domestic with the natural, juxtaposing Oxyaction, Brasso, and Flash with the dandelions and
thistles these chemical cleaning products overwrite and erase. Ultimately, the poem is a protest
about land being destroyed for the sake of human expansion. The importance of that place, with its
herbs, wildflowers, and weeds, is about to be lost – a microcosm for the broader issue of growing
populations that unbalance the biodiversity of wild areas.

Protecting the land: activism and the novel

While the short stories, flash fiction, and poems discussed so far can be read as the literature of
ecofeminist protest, and their very publication as instances of environmental activism by authors,
editors, and publishers, what about literature that explores the motifs of activism and protest
itself? Again, Welsh publishers have been at the forefront of supporting women’s writing that
engages with activism, protest, and the recurrent trope of protecting the land. Kathryn Simmonds’
Love and Fallout (2014), published by Seren (an imprint of Poetry Wales) is a case in point.
While having many connections with Meehan’s poem, and a desire to protect the land in small,
localised ways, it also explores the lasting implications of international environmental protest via
Greenham Common. Begun by Welsh protest group, Women for Life on Earth, the protests were
an attempt to stop nuclear weapons being stored at RAF Greenham Common in Berkshire, Eng-
land. Starting in 1981 and lasting until 2000, Greenham Common was a series of protest camps
and the site of well-publicised interventions, many of which have been documented, including
in Ann Pettitt’s autobiography, Walking to Greenham (2006), published by Welsh feminist press,
Honno.
Despite this overtly ecofeminist underpinning, Love and Fallout is marketed to a broader audi-
ence as ‘chick-lit,’ with the cover depicting a woman in a bath reading a book, and a curly ‘femi-
nine’ font used for part of the title and the author’s name. On closer inspection, however, there are
clear signs that all is not as it first appears. The woman in the bath is fully dressed, with her boots

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resting on a tap, and the bath itself is situated in the midst of trees. This is taken directly from a
scene in the novel, where characters take refuge in the bath while protesting at Greenham Com-
mon. Set across two time periods, Greenham Common of the 1980s and the present, Simmonds
maintains a delicate balance between semi-comic episodes objectifying women’s appearances (the
central character, Tess, has a TV makeover, gifted by her friend Maggie to offset her supposedly
middle-aged dowdiness, in which she is shamed for being “sartorially stranded at Greenham Com-
mon” [67]) and depicting momentous periods in history. At the same time, Tess’ makeover is also a
metaphor for the times: an indictment of superficiality and the pursuit of consumerist desires rather
than meaning and connection.
In many ways, the quieter parts of Tess’ activism form the most interesting aspects of the novel.
Tess works for a social justice enterprise called Easy Green, which “advise[s] people on low in-
comes about sustainable living – heat insulation, mostly – which helps reduce their utility bills”
(Simmonds 2014: 25). She is also part of the Heston Fields campaign, which has been set up to
prevent building on public land, a campaign that has caused much friction between Tess and her
husband, Pete:

We’ve had the Heston Fields discussion. Or row, as it turned out, and as far as Pete’s con-
cerned, if the council wants to sell a chunk of neglected land so a developer can build luxury
flats there’s no point in losing any sleep. He calls it scrubland, or backlands, but the truth is,
it’s public land. All right, it’s a bit tussocky, but kids play football there and people cross it
to reach the parade that qualifies as Heston’s high street. We used to play cricket there with
the kids.
(2014: 4)

At the point of telling the TV makeover show presenter, Jude, about Heston Fields, the latter cuts
across her and says “Fabulous. Now, this is the key question. Ready?… What do you want from
your wardrobe?” (Simmonds 2014: 25). The chapter this episode is taken from is titled “Eco
Chic”, underlining the superficial interest in the serious environmental issues that Tess is trying
to articulate.
Similarly, when Tess is invited to “Feel Good”, “one of the new and fashionable summer festi-
vals” (301), she is situated in the “Feeling Caring Zone” (308) to promote the work of Easy Green
at this “boutique cultural event” (308). Tess feels a growing sense of uneasiness:

Looking around on the first day, I couldn’t help suspecting the charities had been hand-
picked to promote the right image: there’s plenty about human rights, environmentalism and
overseas development, but not much in support of battered women or nasty degenerative
diseases.
(308–309)

As is the case at Feel Good, surface is everything. The novel suggests that for many of the fes-
tival’s attendees, real activism is too difficult, a choice that conflicts with their lifestyles. As her
fellow Greenham protester, Angela, who now runs Feel Good, remarks:

“People come here for the entertainment, but they’re really paying for something else,” she
says motioning to the glut of recycling bins, and the fresh fruit stand and the Feeling Car-
ing Zone, “All this helps to create a mood. People like being in a community, and that’s the
experience they get here, even if it’s only for a long weekend. […] And research shows that

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being green, or rather perceiving oneself to be green, makes us feel good about ourselves.
So we push that”.
(313)

The novel shines a light on ‘environmentalism-lite’ and the ways in which it pays lip service to
change. It also acknowledges, in the words of Angela (before she moves into a career in advertis-
ing), that “protest is hard. It demands sacrifice” (254).
Love and Fallout fictionalises the lived experience of environmental protest as an important
moment in both women’s and Welsh history. In “A Review of the Contribution of Women to
Welsh Life and Prospects for the Future” from 2002, Jane Aaron notes that “‘Greenness’, in
a broad sense, has constituted a significant aspect of Welsh women’s contribution not only to
Welsh but to global life” (2002: 201). The camp drew international attention to the issue of nu-
clear weapons as well as the power of women’s voices in protesting against the location of these
weapons in Britain. A snapshot provided by a women’s aid worker, captured over a decade later
in 1993 in an article in an Irish newspaper, the Sunday Tribune, underlines some of the trans-
formative opportunities Greenham provided for women to meet other women from very different
backgrounds:

Middle class women met working class women in prison. Lesbian women and straight
women talked. The whole debate about the links between violence against women and mili-
tarism was opened up […] It is easy to ridicule Greenham, but it opened a door, and it was
a passionate political experience. I saw women transformed by it.
(McKay 1993)

In Love and Fallout, that transformation is a slow process for Tess and it is not until she faces her
own past, and begins to understand the reasons that motived her fellow activists, that she gains
real self-knowledge. She is often a quiet, almost inadvertent activist – she admits she “stumbled
to Greenham partly by accident” (2014: 309) due to a relationship breakup. Yet the work she does
later for Easy Green (which, according to marketing expert Angela, “sounds like an airline for
hippies” [312]) is perhaps more accidentally radical than it might initially seem. A lot of Easy
Green’s core work is very much aligned with the work of what we would now recognise in the
United Kingdom as Insulate Britain, a direct-action group campaigning for social justice measures
to improve people’s lives via adequate insulation and the reduction of carbon emissions. The group
have called on the U.K. Government to commit to both insulating Britain’s social housing – some
of the least energy-efficient in Europe – by 2025 and to retrofitting low-energy, low-carbon solu-
tions in all homes by 2030 (Insulate Britain website 2022). What Simmonds’ novel is arguing,
through Tess’ quiet activism, is the power of scalable change. While she may not be taking dra-
matic action in the style of Insulate Britain protesters (which has included blocking motorways
to draw attention to their cause), she is still demanding change for the most vulnerable in society:
the social housing tenants, often on low incomes, who are living in homes that are in urgent need
of additional insulation and alternative solutions to fossil fuels. At the same time, the novel also
points to the problems of small-scale charities like Easy Green which promote sustainable living
but are not part of a collective commitment to sustainability as an urgent necessity. As Greta Thun-
berg argues in The Climate Book:

We think our societies can be a little bit more or a little bit less sustainable. But in the long
run you cannot be a little bit sustainable. It is like walking on thin ice – either it carries your

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weight, or it does not. Either you make it to the shore, or you fall into the deep, dark cold
waters.
(2022: 2)

In Love and Fallout, published nearly a decade ago, public awareness of environmental issues,
especially regarding the climate crisis and urgency of reducing reliance on fossil fuels, had not
reached its full extent. In many ways, it highlights the issues readers will face in the decades to
come and the need for quiet activism to become far more vocal and joined up.
The political activism of Love and Fallout is taken much further on almost every page of
Philippa Holloway’s The Half-Life of Snails (2022), another work that embraces an ecofeminist
position through its depiction of activism. Once again published by a Welsh press, Parthian, the
novel splits its action between two locations, Wylfa nuclear power station in Anglesey, in north
Wales, and Chernobyl. This text has metaphorical and thematic links, like the webs of connection
mentioned earlier, with a much broader body of work that explores the impact of pollution on the
land. As in Baines’ “Boiling the Potatoes”, where a direct link between cancers and environmental
pollutants is repeatedly suggested, The Half-Life of Snails shares similar concerns. Like Love and
Fallout, it too is about protecting the land and safeguarding the future. Set in 2014, during the
Ukrainian Maidan Revolution, central character Helen travels to Chernobyl as the region destabi-
lises (shortly after the novel’s publication, the region was destabilised by Russian invasion). This
is a pilgrimage of sorts, a journey that she feels she has to take before dealing with the realities
of her declining health and a diagnosis that is likely to be breast cancer, a disease that is also kill-
ing her mother. Her obsession with Chernobyl stems partly from the direct impact the disaster’s
nuclear fallout had on her own family’s farm as a child (witnessing culled animals and vegetable
gardens left to wither) and neighbours nearby. It is well documented that areas of north-west Wales
were significantly affected by the Chernobyl disaster, with “radioactive dust from the accident
penetrat[ing] the uplands of north-west Wales, creating disruption for the food chain and farm-
ers’ incomes” (Martin and Wiliam 2019: 276). As Seán Aeron Martin and Mari Elin Wiliam have
demonstrated through interviews with plant workers, the first sign of danger was discovered when
workers came on shift at Wales’ two nuclear power stations, Trawsfynydd and Wylfa, where high
radiation readings on their clothes set off alarms (2019: 276). As Martin and Wiliam emphasise,
and indeed as Holloway’s novel underlines, “nuclear power, in any guise, does not respect or rec-
ognise traditional borders of nations” (2019: 275). In the novel, Chernobyl is a shadowy twin of
Wylfa, which is located right next to Helen’s family’s land. Helen “can’t remember exactly when
its presence switched from being nothing more than a hunkering block of sky-coloured concrete
in the background into a latent bomb” (Holloway 2022: 34) and the prospect of it being extended
(with the building of Wylfa B), rather than decommissioned as originally planned, is terrifying.
The plant is almost a character in its own right, a shadow looming over the wider narrative as much
of Helen’s energy is devoted to protesting against the extension of Wylfa, and the proposed build-
ing of Wylfa B on her family’s land.
The impact of nuclear disaster has long been a subject for ecofeminist attention. As Shiva notes
in Ecofeminism, “Hiroshima, Three Mile Island, the Pacific Islands, Chernobyl – each of these
nuclear disasters reminds us that the nuclear threat is greater for future generations than for us”
(Mies and Shiva 2014: 83). And as Mies underlines in the same volume, “Hiroshima, Nagasaki,
Chernobyl and Fukushima are just names for a system which promises a better life for all but ends
in killing life itself” (2014: xxiv). And in a line that could come straight out of Ecofeminism, Hol-
loway writes: “But there is no such thing as a safe nuclear power station” (2022: 32). The novel is,
in many ways, an articulation of the trauma related to the potential after effects of nuclear disaster.

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There is an especially discomfiting scene in which Helen remembers elements from her childhood
in fractured moments:

Images of Chernobyl’s shattered reactor flickered onto the tiny black and white portable
TV in the living room. Doors and windows shut tight against the hot spring sunshine until
the rooms were stuffy and her nose itched for fresh air. She remembers pressing her fingers
against the cool glass of the hall window and watching her dad disappear inside the rubbery
skin of a monster suit to go check the sheep. The gritty texture of powdered milk on her
tongue. The hushed conversations […] Enough to know that everything had changed, that
they weren’t safe anymore […] Spraying the fields years later […] Prussian blue compound
to prevent the uptake of residual caesium as the flock grazed.
(2022: 11)

For Helen, the disaster at Chernobyl is just as real for her in her own home in Wales as it is for
those in Ukraine, despite the geographical distance. The impact of the fallout nearly bankrupts the
family, leaving them close to “losing everything” (2022: 11) as she discovers years later. Several
details stand out, from the family home imagined almost as a fallout shelter (with the windows
closed, rather than sealed) to the vision of Helen’s father in a type of hazmat suit, checking the
livestock. The milk is powdered because fresh milk from the cows may not be safe, but the gritty
texture evokes the grit of the dust from nuclear fallout. Finally, the Prussian blue protects the sheep
because it works as an agent to bind caesium and was developed as part of “countermeasures to re-
duce or prevent the radiocaesium contamination of animal-derived foods” (United Nations 1997:
69). Restrictions on sheep farming were not lifted completely until 2012, which was, as Martin
and Wiliam note, “a staggering twenty-six years after the disaster” (2019: 291). It is little wonder
that Helen is traumatised by these experiences and subsequently prepares her son, Jack, for any
possible catastrophic eventuality (which forms a large part of the novel’s final narrative).
Parallel to the work of Meehan and Simmonds, Holloway depicts the destruction that the ever-
growing demand for domestic power brings to the land that will be the site of Wylfa B. It is a world
in which nature is evicted and its new home is inscribed with the markers of capitalism:

The landscape back home is already emptying; houses ripped down now the owners have
left, hedgerows next on the list. Bats are being relocated, a new, purpose-built ‘barn’ under
construction. Their old home will be made uninhabitable, slowly: noise, tiles removed one
by one to let the rain and wind in, until eventually they can’t bear it and settle in their new
loft, nestling in timber beams that still bear the stamp of the construction company.
(2022: 115)

As with the focus in the 2022 anthology Maps and Rooms, much of Helen’s narrative is determined
by maps – of the trip she takes to Chernobyl (during which she gets hopelessly lost after fighting
breaks out) and of the farmland she is so desperate to protect, both as an inheritance for Jack, and
in defiance against the energy companies destroying the land she has worked so hard to tend:

Helen has to protect the farm, ensure they don’t do the same to her family. Already the plans
show trees removed and earth banked, a contouring to prove neighbourly consideration by
softening the noise, blocking the view to the new waste storage unit, the new reactors. The
view right now is fields and sea, a forest where the new turbine will sprawl and vibrate.
(2022: 116)

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A view that has been beautiful will be transformed into a kind of hell on earth. In the energy com-
pany’s own promotional materials, Wylfa B is romanticised in a grotesque, semi-poetic language
of “grey-green reactors caught between an azure sky and cobalt sea” (2022: 149). Both Love and
Fallout and The Half-Life of Snails link to wider discourses about protection from nuclear power,
whether intended as a source of energy or as a potential weapon. Equally, both texts are concerned
with the damage that is done to families, livelihoods, and future generations by a reliance on non-
renewable energy. Jack, for example, is so prepared for any impending apocalypse that he cannot
relate to other children his age and finds play difficult – he is far too aware of the danger he may
have to face. The novel ends on a note of hope, but also cautions that the battle to protect the land
is far from over.

Public voices, public platforms: safeguarding the future

While fiction can shape our relationship with the environment, how far can it reach, and to what
extent can it change the way we treat the world we live in? These are not easy questions to answer.
However, there is perhaps a wider audience to be reached through public-facing roles, accessible
texts, and local opportunities; these include writers in residence schemes, as well as open access
publishing, which has been seen as more democratic and offering greater access, and community-
based engagement projects. The role of writer in residence offers a connection between a particular
place and the audience they can speak to; it is a public role that demands interaction alongside
modelling new ways of thinking and writing. These are roles which are increasingly being held
by women of colour in the United Kingdom, including Zakiya Mckenzie as writer in residence for
Forestry England (2019–2020) and Alinah Azadeh for Seven Sisters Country Park on the Sussex
Heritage Coast (2021–2022). In Wales, Taylor Edmonds held a broader geographical remit but
one focused on raising awareness of climate change as the nation’s poet in residence for 2021.
Established in collaboration with the Future Generations Commissioner, these roles are bound up
with the foundation of the Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015. This Act, which is
“unique to Wales” and “offers a huge opportunity to make a long-lasting, positive change to cur-
rent and future generations” has a clear focus. It:

requires public bodies in Wales to think about the long-term impact of their decisions, to
work better with people, communities and each other, and to prevent persistent problems
such as poverty, health inequalities and climate change.
(Future Generations Commissioner for Wales 2022)

With climate change foregrounded in this legislation, it is unsurprising that Edmonds chose to
write about the consequences of rising sea levels and the devastation this causes to the land in
her poem, “My Magnolia Tree”, which was performed as part of the Everything Change events
in 2021, “a series of discussions and events exploring the roles creativity, adaptive thinking
and storytelling can play in overcoming the challenges of climate and ecological crises” (Eve-
rything Change, 2021). The poem describes Cardiff as an “underwater city” (2022a: 26) in the
future, drowned by rising water levels, and cautions against careless consumerism and unneces-
sary waste. The “bloat” in the river, for example, is a “warning” articulated through washed up
plastic (2022a: 25; see also Deininger 2022). The poem is also an elegy for the narrator’s great-
grandmother and the world she inhabited (our current time) as those warnings went unheeded,
while also charting some of the violence and fear that she experienced as a young woman. Im-
mediately after her residency, Edmonds published Back Teeth, a poetry pamphlet which includes

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“My Magnolia Tree” and explores themes of womanhood, identity, and the environment, while
drawing on folklore, fairy tale, and surrealism. The great-grandmother figure returns in “Our
Town Was Built Around The Oak Tree”, where her initials are “engraved into the trunk / with a
penknife” (2022b: 20). Later, the narrator adds her own initials, and the oak becomes a textual
record of their family history. The oak is a symbol of memory and loss, but also healing – the tree
provides bark for use in healing “broken skin” and leaves for treating frostbite (2022b: 20). As
with the magnolia tree, which is a symbol of both home and the hope of future generations, the
oak is the centre of community – the very fabric of interconnection and social cohesion. These
poems demonstrate that Edmonds is an emerging voice with much to say about contemporary
Wales and its role in combatting the environmental crisis. They also underline the importance of
women of colour undertaking these kinds of public-facing roles – as role models, leaders, and
voices of protest.
One of the poems included in the inaugural edition of Modron, a new open access environmen-
tal magazine, is Edmonds’ “My Magnolia Tree”, further cementing the poem’s place in contempo-
rary accounts of Welsh ecofeminist literature. First published in late 2022 and founded by Kristian
Evans and Zoë Brigley (editors of 100 Poems to Save the Earth), the magazine’s name draws on
Welsh mythology. As Sioned Davies notes in her translation of The Mabinogion, Modron is the
mother-goddess figure and Mabon the son-god (2007: 270).1 In this use of maternal metaphor,
Brigley and Evans’ magazine entwines ideas of rebirth with environmental concerns, revitalising
and rewriting old traditions rather than reaffirming essentialist ideas. Clearly, the magazine’s pur-
pose is not limited to motherhood, but is focused instead on “an ethic of dwelling with care […]
rejecting narratives of conquest and domination” (Modron 2022). The magazine has already fea-
tured several women of colour, including Karishma Sangtani, Rachael Li Ming Chong, and Durre
Shahwar, and demonstrates the potential to be an important new activist platform for women’s
writing about the environment.
Wales’ cultural institutions are also encouraging wider discussion and participation in environ-
mental issues, providing meaningful opportunities for women in Wales to become involved. For
example, Literature Wales is taking important steps to encourage action within local communi-
ties, having already identified the climate emergency as one of their three main priorities in their
strategic plan for 2022–2025 (alongside representation and equality, and health and well-being).
In partnership with Wales’ branch of the World Wide Fund for Nature, WWF Cymru, Litera-
ture Wales has recently funded three pilot creative writing projects, under the umbrella of Llên
mewn Lle | Lit in Place, which is aimed at “exploring the climate and nature emergency with a
community”, enabling local communities to explore and understand local ecosystems while also
“contribut[ing] to wider discussions on finding practical solutions to the effects of the climate and
nature emergency” (2022a). Projects range from incorporating illustrated diaries documenting re-
lationships with nature within a woodland-focused mental health group (“The Fruits of our Fire”)
to supporting participants of colour and those from low-income groups to publish responses to the
links between the climate crisis and colonialism (“The LUMIN Syllabus”, which has developed
from various other LUMIN initiatives, including LUMIN Journal which focuses on anti-colonial
and experimental work). While small in scale, these kinds of projects represent a response to the
climate emergency that is underpinned by hope and drawing communities together, providing op-
portunities for both women and marginalised groups. As is the case with The LUMIN Syllabus,
the point of these kinds of projects is encouraging community members to “take the lead in form-
ing solutions at a localised level” (2022b). One of the project’s founders, Sadia Pineda Hameed, a
Filipino/Pakistani Cardiff-based artist and writer states:

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The goal of this project is to enable greater access and entitlement to literature, to public
space, and to the discussion around climate justice. Empowerment is not about privileged
access to a cultural centre, institution or course but instead understanding literature’s demo-
cratic potential within a local environment.
(2022)

In many ways, Hameed’s point – greater access and entitlement – is the solution to the ques-
tion posed by Bahaffou and Gorecki in their introduction to Feminism or Death: “why does the
ecofeminist canon remain majority white, while literature shows us that racialized women are
disproportionately affected by the destruction of the environment and climate change throughout
the world?” (2022: xxvi). In its small way, this chapter attempts to help change that narrative and
broaden the scope of contemporary ecofeminist writing.

Conclusions: hope for the future

Finally, I want to return to Mohamed and Rahman’s Introduction to Maps and Rooms in which
they argue:

Here in Wales, there seems to be a long overdue attempt to redress the balance of who gets to
experience the opportunity of development. This is a long-term programme, and one bursary
or two cannot redress the imbalance of who writes, who is being published and even more
importantly, who gets to develop a taste for reading literature. Creating writers and readers
has to be a sustained campaign over a generation. A diverse readership comprises readers
from marginalised backgrounds, economically deprived households who bear the brunt of
being priced out of literature because of cuts to library funding, and prohibitively expensive
and remote literary festivals. All this could not be reversed in a year or two.
(2022: 7–8)

Those marginalised readers are the same people who will bear the brunt of climate change
via structural inequalities. Ecofeminism that encompasses the experiences of people of colour
is a form of activism that can change things from the ground up, helping to improve the life
chances – not just the survival chances – of those who need to be heard most. And while it is, as
Bahaffou and Gorecki suggest, “a difficult movement to capture, always crumbling within the
definition we try to affix to it”, ecofeminism “remains profoundly, absolutely, and definitively
anti-­capitalist” (2022: xxxvi). In Wales, women writers, especially women of colour, are finding
new spaces to write about environmental issues, as well as providing opportunities for others
through their platforms, and so are changing the world around them. This kind of work can be
viewed as anti-capitalist (as much as it can be from within a capitalist system), focused on an
ethics of care that looks beyond the individual to the future of the planet. As Evans notes in the
rationale for Modron:

Climate change and the ecological crisis are compelling transformation across all aspects
of human experience, and poets and writers are searching for the words to describe these
changes. A new way of being in the world has not only become possible, it has become
necessary.
(2022)

459
 Michelle Deininger

This “new way of being” has the potential to disrupt and challenge capitalist ideologies. It can also
foreground different voices – not just of women writers or writers of colour – but non-binary and
trans writers as well, creating inclusive, supportive communities and growing webs of interconnec-
tions. By doing so, Wales’ writers and publishers are working fiercely to safeguard the future for us
all.

Note
1 The name Modron also features in The Half-Life of Snails. Jack has a pair of snails named Modron and
Mabon, miniature representations of the mother–son relationship between Helen and Jack.

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461
 INDEX

Note: Page numbers followed by “n” denote endnotes.

Aalders, Cindy 289 African Americans 132, 135, 266, 268–269;
Abortion 13, 23, 236, 238, 249, 251, 252, dehumanisation of 135; enslaved 127, 132;
254, 372 violence 132
Abrams, Lynn 346 African Writers Congress 309, 318
Abse, Leo 98 After Her Death 440
Achebe, Chinua 313 Agnes Grey (Brontë) 6, 55; bird murderers 64–66;
Ackland, Valentine 165, 167, 298–299 ‘helpless’ women in 64–66
activism 17–21; women’s antislavery activism Ahmed, Sara 307, 316; Living a Feminist Life 419,
125–137; Open Clasp 436–438; women’s 426
suffrage 138–149, 406–418; theatrical 20, Aidoo, Ama Ata 318
436–437 Aizura, Aren 97
actress 18–19, 141, 193, 245, 246, 253, 257–258, Aldred, Chris 348
380–392, 406–412, 414, 416–417: as Alexander, Cecil Frances 277
independent woman 383–388; as rescue Alexander, Sally 167, 342
worker 388–390 Alexander, William: A History of Women 31
Actresses’ Franchise League (AFL) 19, 140, 407, Allegorizings (Morris) 99–101
409–410 Allen, Judith A. 203
Adah’s Story (Emecheta) 306 Allison, Clive 314
Adam, Corinna 306, 308–313, 314, 319 Allison and Busby (publisher) 15, 306, 314–315
Adams, Carol J. 55, 59 American Civil Rights movement 168
Adams, Jab 138 Amymone: A Romance in the Days of Pericles
Adegoke, Yomi: Slay in Your Lane: The Black Girl (Lynn) 380
Bible 421 Anand, Mulk Raj 167
Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi 306; We Should All Be André, Naomi 192–193; Blackness in Opera 192
Feminists 23 androgyny 12, 84, 216–217, 225; disembodied 222;
adoption 13, 244; forced 254; trans-racial 244, 246, modernist 220–222
248 Angelou, Maya 319, 340
“The Adoption Papers” (Kay) 12, 244–246, 249, Anglophone Global North 2, 96, 103, 105, 106
255–256, 259 Anglophone Spanish Civil War literature 166–168,
adult education 16, 336–339 172–174
aesthetics, trans-racial 255–256 The Anglo-Welsh Review 448
The Aëthnic Union 216–218 Anim-Addo, Joan 4, 183–197, 197n1; Imoinda 11, 17
African: diasporic cultures 259; enslavement 183; animal advocacy 55–67; women’s role in 56–58
Europeanised 189; imperial conquest 187; animal rights 6, 18, 56–68, 132, 447
music 183 Annual Necrology (Hays) 377

462
 Index

anti-colonialism 169, 177 Mr Gilbert Wakefield’s Enquiry into the

anti-eugenic visions 202–206 Expediency and Propriety of Public or
anti-fascism 2, 169, 177 Social Worship 370
anti-feminism 18, 70, 76–77, 126, 144, 201, 219, Barker, A.L. 294–298, 301, 303; Apologies for a
236, 382–383 Hero 297; The Goose Boy 297
antislavery movement 3, 8, 9, 125–137 Barnes, Djuna 220, 224–225; Ladies Almanack 220,
Anti-Suffrage Waxworks (Hamilton) 411 224–225
Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko in a new adaptation Barrett, Jerry 395
(Bandele) 191 Barrie & Jenkins (publisher) 15, 306, 311, 314
Apologies for a Hero (Barker) 297 Bartkowski, Frances 85
An Apology for the Life of Mrs Shamela Andrews Bates, Laura: Everyday Sexism 23
(Fielding) 32 Beagan, Glenda 359
Appeal of One Half of the Human Race, Women Beatrice the Sixteenth: Being the Personal
(Thompson and Wheeler) 57 Narrative of Mary Hatherley, M.B.,
Aragon, Louis 168 Explorer and Geographer (Clyde) 215,
archive: creolised 11, 183–185, 191, 195–196; 218, 225
double 186–189, 195–197; personal 157 Beckett, Samuel 168
Archive Fever (Derrida) 187 Beddoes, Thomas 399
Aristotle 69; Politics 67n3 Behn, Aphra 183, 186–187, 191; Oroonoko 11
Armstrong, Isobel 286; Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Bell, Eleanor 338
Poetics and Politics 286 Bellamy, Edward 207; Looking Backwards 207
Armstrong, Nancy: Desire and Domestic Fiction 34 Belonging (Muir) 151, 154, 155–156
Ashwell, Lena 410 Bentham, Jeremy 34
Associated Negro Press 169 The Beth Book (Grand) 58
Astell, Mary 31 Between Women: Friendship, Desire and Marriage
Aston, Elaine 433–434, 441; An Introduction to in Victorian England (Marcus) 115
Feminism and Theatre 434 Billington-Greig, Teresa 409
Athill, Diana 294, 303–304 Biography 1, 368, 377–378: C. Brontë by Gaskell
Atlantic Slave trade 11, 184, 187, 195 9, 114, 122; Clyde 215; Cruickshank 153;
Atlas Shrugged (Rand) 101 Hays 358, 377–378; Plath 251
atrophy 202–204, 206 biological sex 215–216, 220, 222–224
Atwood, Margaret 13, 271, 420; The Handmaid’s biotechnology 269, 271
Tale 89–90; Maddaddam trilogy 271; Oryx Birds of America (McCarthy) 59
and Crake 271; The Testaments 420 The Birds of Australia (Gould) 57
Auden, W.H. 167, 168 Black Beauty (Sewell) 58
Authors Take Sides (Cunard) 167, 169, 173, 177 black British 4, 12–13, 16–17, 20, 193, 201–214,
Autobiography 1, 31, 231, 284: Douglass 133; 244–262, 306, 322, 330–334, 352–363,
Emecheta 15, 306–319; Evaristo 20, 419, 419–431
421, 423; Hamilton 233, 415–416; Pettitt Blackburn, Helen: Women’s Suffrage: a Record
452; Seacole 19, 393, 397–403; St John of the Women’s Suffrage Movement in the
412, Syrett 9–10, 138, 141–142 British Isles 147
Azeth the Egyptian (Lynn) 382 #BlackLivesMatter movement 22, 421, 450
The Black Man’s Lament: Or How to Make Sugar
Ba, Mariama 315; Une si longue Lettre 315 (Opie) 130
Bahaffou, Myriam 447 Blackness in Opera (André) 192
Bainbridge, Beryl 4, 16; The Dressmaker 322, Blackstone, William: Commentaries on the Laws of
327–330, 334 England 30
Baines, Elizabeth 448; “Boiling the Potatoes” 448 Blackwood, Caroline 317
Bakare-Yusuf, Bibi 318 Black Writers’ Guild 420–421, 423
Baldock, Minne 409 The Blazing World (Cavendish) 7, 84
Baldwin, James 313 Bloch, Iwan 220
Bandarage, Asoka 165 Boden, Helen 43
Bandele, Biyi 187, 191–192; Aphra Behn’s bodies 10–13, 58–60, 85,91, 96, 115, 201–204,
Oroonoko in a new adaptation 191 215, 217, 272, 318, 394, 422, 448, 449;
Barad, Karen 232, 235, 272 bodily autonomy 23, 37, 230, 233–236,
Barbauld, Anna Letitia 18, 367; Eighteen Hundred 238; clothed 231, 233–236, 239–240,
and Eleven, A Poem 369; Remarks on 324–326; racialised 183–192, 194, 248,

463
 Index

257, 360–361; reproductive, maternal 248, Busby, Margaret 306, 308, 313–316, 319;
252–253, 255, 266, 360–361; sexed 96, Daughters of Africa 315
215, 217, 220, 222–226; violence against Butler, Judith 219
61, 186, 192, 235, 248, 333; Butler, Octavia 13, 270
Bogarde, Dirk 296 Byron, Abigail 438
“Boiling the Potatoes” (Baines) 448 Byron, Cheryl 438
Bonnelame, Natasha 185
The Bookseller 449 Caballero, Chamion 256
Borrowed Body (Mason-John) 256 Cain, Ruth 343
Bostrom, Nick 271 Caird, Mona 3–4, 11, 139, 202, 205–206, 209–212,
Boulter, Amanda 88 265; The Daughters of Danaus 206, 209
Bradley, Sue 293 The California Nationalist 208
Bradshaw, David 267 Callaghan, Dympna 193
Bradshaw, Sir William 267 Campbell, Terry 244, 248
Braidotti, Rosi 271–272 Canopus in Argos (Lessing) 268
Braithwaite, E.R. 256 Capital (Marx) 328
The Bride Price (Emecheta) 309 Carby, Hazel V. 307, 317
Brigley, Zoë 458 The Carhullan Army (Hall) 7, 82, 89–93
Brinkhurst-Cuff, Charlie 360–361 Caribbean 13, 19, 245–246, 254, 306, 314, 396,
British Black Panther Party 21 397, 401: African Caribbean 11, 183–200;
British Empire 2–4, 12–13, 19, 22, 57, 97, 104, 187, British Caribbean 19, 322, 330–334;
245–246, 332, 353, 360–361, 393–397, imperial conquest 187; music 183; slavery
399–403 189
British Ornithologists’ Union 57 Carpenter, Edward 220
British Women’s Petition 9 Carson, Rachel: Silent Spring 449
Brito, Leonora 4, 352–362; background 352; Dat’s Carswell, Catherine 153, 154, 157
Love 16–17, 352–362 Carswell, Donald 153
Brittain, Vera 115, 165, 168; Testament of Case, Sue-Ellen 436; Feminism and Theatre 434
Friendship 115 Cassandra: An Essay (Nightingale) 204
Broch, Hermann 154, 160 Cassava Republic Press 318
Brontë, Anne 3, 6; abuses of society 55–67; Agnes Castle, Barbara 311
Grey 6, 55, 64–66; The Tenant of Wildfell Castlemilk Women Writers and Readers 16, 337,
Hall 6, 55, 60–64 338–340, 346, 348–349
Brontë, Charlotte 3, 8–9, 113–123; death of 122; Cavendish, Margaret: The Blazing World 7, 84
Gaskell friendship with 120–122; gender Chalk Farm Library 313
and writing 114; Jane Eyre 113, 116; Chapman 336, 338
on Mary Taylor 118; Shirley 113, 120; Chapman, John 380
Villette 113 Charnas, Suzy McKee: Walk to the End of the
Brougham, Henry 396; An Inquiry into the Colonial World 82
Policy of the European Powers 396 childbirth 13, 246, 248–249, 251–254, 259, 267,
Brown, Curtis 311 343, 360
Brown, Pastor 331 Childbirth Without Fear 252
Browne, Sarah 338 childcare 22, 166, 308
Browne, Victoria 343 The Child Manuela (Winsloe) 157
Bruno, Sarah 190, 193 Child Poverty Action Group 312
Bryan, Beverley 307, 361, 422; The Heart of Children’s Book Circle 300
the Race - Black Women’s Lives in Britain Children’s Employment Commission 323
307 Childs, Donald J. 266
Bunting, John 314 The Chimney Corner (Stowe) 129
Buñuel, Luis 173 The Chinese as They Are (Lay) 203
Bunyan, John 283 chorality: transcultural 184–186
Burdekin, Katherine 266; Swastika Night 266 “The Christmas Party” (Shepherd) 343
Burdett, Carolyn 202; Olive Schreiner and the “Christmas Tree” (Swindon) 341
Progress of Feminism 202 Churchill, Caryl 434, 435
Burstein, Jessica: Cold Modernism 231 Churchill, Winston 412

464
 Index

Civale, Susan 368 Contemporary African Literature and the Politics of

Clairmont, Claire 43 Gender (Stratton) 315
class: 1,3, 8, 14, 18, 38, 47, 56, 69, 98, 101, 126, contraception 13, 166, 220, 224, 254, 265–266, 411
127, 130, 133, 136, 147, 166, 218, 230, Conundrum (Morris) 7, 96, 99, 107–108
245, 254, 259, 265, 269, 306–307, 311–312, The Convert (Robins) 409
314, 322–325, 328, 330, 388, 408; middle- Coolidge, Susan 72–73; What Katy Did 72–73
class women 6, 12, 14–16, 18, 19, 29–30, Cooper, Ben 284
32, 34, 37, 39, 63, 77, 84, 96, 116–118, 138, Corday, Charlotte 384
141, 218, 233, 245, 252–253, 264–266, Cornish, Dorothy H. 216
311, 316, 323, 368, 381–383, 385, 395–396, Cosas de Espana: 1936–46 (Cunard) 175
408, 436–437, 448, 454; working-class Cosmopolitan 202–203
women 4, 15–17, 19, 30, 120–121, 144, coverture 30, 33, 35
166, 238, 245, 263, 278, 306–307, 310–311, Cowman, Krista 293
322–323, 327, 329–330, 336–351, 362, Coxe, William: Sketches of the Natural, Civil, and
385, 395, 408–409, 428, 432, 436–437, 454 Political State of Switzerland 45
The Clever Woman of the Family (Yonge) 7, 70, Craik, Dinah: A Noble Life 69; Olive 72
76–79 creative labour 322–334
The Climate Book (Thunberg) 454 Crick, Francis 268
Clyde, Irene 4, 12, 215, 216; Beatrice the Sixteenth: Crimean War 19, 393–405
Being the Personal Narrative of Mary Crossman, Richard 310
Hatherley, M.B., Explorer and Geographer Crowder, Henry 168
215, 218, 225; Eve’s Sour Apples 215, 218, Cruickshank, Helen B. 4, 10, 151, 154; Collected
220, 222, 224; Urania 12 Poems 153; More Collected Poems 153; Sea
Coate, Kelly 337 Buckthorn 153; Up the Noran Water 153
Cobbe, Frances Power 58, 70 “Culture Conflict” (Emecheta) 317–318
Cockin, Katharine 416 Cumberland News 222
Cold Modernism (Burstein) 231 cumulative manifesto 20, 428
Colegate, Isabel: The Shooting Party 59 Cunard, Nancy 4, 10, 167, 177; Authors Take
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 9–10 Sides 167, 169, 173, 177; and feminist
Collected Poems (Cruickshank) 153 internationalism 165–177; and Spanish
A Collection of Hymns Adapted to Public Worship Civil War 165–177; Spanish Civil War
279 poetry 166; Spanish Civil War writing 172
Colley, Linda 97 Cunningham, Anne 237
colonialism 2, 4, 8, 10, 330–331, 354, 451, 458 Cunningham, Valentine 173
“Comilla Declaration” 269 Cursory Remarks on an Enquiry into the
Commentaries on the Laws of England Expediency and Propriety of Public or
(Blackstone) 30 Social Worship (Hays) 370
Comments on Birth Control (Mitchison) 224 Cushman, Charlotte 384
The Communist Manifesto (Marx and Engels) 424 The Cutting of the Knot (Hamilton) 411
Comprehensive Index of Names of Original Authors A Cyborg Manifesto (Haraway) 424, 426
and Translators of Psalms and Hymns, with
the Dates of their Various Works, Chiefly Dadzie, Stella 307, 361, 422; The Heart of the Race
Collected from the Original (Sedgwick) 277 - Black Women’s Lives in Britain 307
Confessions (Rousseau) 29, 30–31, 39 Daedalus, or Science and the Future (Haldane) 266
confinement 371–376 Daily Herald 173
consciousness-raising 16, 22–23, 337–338, 346, The Daily Mirror 297
348 Dalí, Salvador 173
Conservative Women’s Reform Association 265 Darwin, Charles 206, 212, 263, 264; The Descent of
contemporary: black British authors 4; British Man 206–207, 264
imperial ideology 395; creolised archive Darwinism 265
11, 183; culture 281; ecofeminist writing Dat’s Love (Brito) 16–17, 352–362
21; feminism 177; feminist theatre 432, Daughters of Africa (Busby) 315
434; publishing 21; publishing in Wales The Daughters of Danaus (Caird) 206, 209
446–460; Welsh language trans writing 7, The Daughters of England: Their Social Duties and
96–109; women’s writing 15 Domestic Habits (Ellis) 115, 147

465
 Index

Davies, Sioned 458 DuPlessis, Rachel Blau 255

Davis, Caroline 316 Dworkin, Andrea 219
Davis, Margaret Thomson 314
Dawson-Scott, Catharine Amy 150, 163 ecofeminism 3, 5–6, 21, 42–54, 58–59, 62,
Deacon, David 167 446–452, 455, 459
d’Eaubonne, Françoise 446; Le Féminisme ou la Edmonds, Taylor 451, 457
Mort 446–447 education: adult 16, 336–339, 348; feminist
Deininger, Michelle 352, 358–359, 362 histories of women’s 16; formal 1, 3, 278,
Delage, Yves 224 290; informal 7; political 17–18, 313; sex
Delaney, Shelagh 437 220–221
Delap, Lucy 165, 172 Edwardian 410, 427: audience 143; avant-garde
Demand the Impossible (Moylan) 83 10, 166, 172; femininity 230; periods
Derrida, Jacques 187; Archive Fever 187 138; suffrage campaign 407; women’s
Descartes, René 59 experiences of sexual objectification 12;
The Descent of Man (Darwin) 206–207, 264 women writers 144
Desire and Domestic Fiction (Armstrong) 34 Edwards, Rosalind 256
Desmond (Smith) 367 Egerton, George 3–4, 13
Desmoulins, Camille 47 Eggerue, Chidera: What a Time to Be Alone: The
Development (Bryher) 222 Slumflower’s Guide to Why You Are Already
devotional poetry 279–287 Enough 421–422
The Dialectic of Sex (Firestone) 426 Egginton, Heidi 294
Diana of Dobson’s (Hamilton) 19, 410 Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, A Poem (Barbauld)
diaspora 97, 99, 184, 187, 193, 306, 308, 353 369
Di Chiro, Giovanna 452 Elbe, Lili 96, 106
Dickens, Charles 395; Dombey and Son 395 Eliot, George 209–210
Dickens, Monica 312; One Pair of Feet 312; One Eliot, T.S. 168
Pair of Hands 312 Eliza Cook’s Journal 382
Disability 3, 6, 7, 18, 21, 22, 266, 269, 271, 272, Elliott, Charlotte 277
307, 333 435, 437, 438: and femininity Ellis, Havelock 167, 220, 222
69; and gender 69; invalidism 69–81; The Ellis, Sarah Stickney: The Daughters of England:
Moorland Cottage 7, 70, 73–76; symbolic Their Social Duties and Domestic Habits
function in domestic fiction 72 115, 147
Discords (Egerton) 264 Elphinstone, Margaret 338
Dock Leaves 448 Emecheta, Buchi 4, 15, 306–319; Adah’s Story
Dolan, Jill 434; The Feminist Spectator as Critic 306; The Bride Price 309; contribution to
434 literature and feminism 307; In the Ditch
DollyWould 441 306, 308–313, 314, 317; Head Above
Dombey, Florence 395 Water 306–312, 314–317; relationship with
Dombey and Son (Dickens) 395 feminism 307; Second-Class Citizen 306,
domesticity 17, 39, 71, 342, 352, 358, 380, 383–384, 308–309, 313–316, 317–318; The Slave
396, 408 Girl 314; theorisation of writing 309
domestic violence 22, 432, 436, 438 Emerson, Caryl 188
Dominique, Lyndon 191 Emile, Or Treatise on Education (Rousseau) 29, 40
Donlon, Anne 175 Emmeline, Or The Orphan of the Castle (Smith) 5,
Douglas Jerrold’s Shilling Magazine 382, 389 30, 33, 36–40
Douglass, Frederick 9, 128–129, 131–132; Life The Emperor’s Babe (Evaristo) 421
and Times of Frederick Douglass 134–135; Empire 2–3, 4, 12–13, 22, 57, 97, 104, 187, 353–354,
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass 360–361, 394–397, 399–403
132; slavery 132–133 Enacting Englishness (Poon) 395
Dowson, Jane 166 Engels, Friedrich 424; The Communist Manifesto 424
Drabble, Margaret 312 English Republic (Linton) 382
Drake, Cath 451 English Woman’s Journal 384, 388
The Dressmaker (Bainbridge) 322, 327–330, 334 Enlightenment 3; scientific tradition 269;
dressmaking 16, 322–335 speciesism 58–60
Dunbar, Andrea 437 An Enquiry into the Expediency and Propriety of
Dunn, Nell 311–312; Poor Cow 311–312 Public or Social Worship (Wakefield) 370

466
 Index

entomology 11, 202, 209 423–427; materialism 319; memory

environment 449–451, 457–459: justice 21; 15, 307; modernist writing 240–241;
activism 452–454; crisis 22, 446–448, 451, orientalism 203; political anger 441;
458; natural 43, 45–47, 52; degradation 56, politics 166, 202; publishing 307; utopia
448, 455; see also ecofeminism 85; utopianism 91; vegetarian 58–60
Equal Franchise Act 139 The Feminist Spectator as Critic (Dolan) 434
Espérance Girls Club 408 feminist theatre: Anglophone 442; audiences 441;
Ethelinde, or The Recluse of the Lake (Smith) 5, 30, British 438; contemporary 432; Covid-19
33–34, 36–37, 38 pandemic 442; described 443; English-
ethnos 216 language 433; history of 432, 434–436;
eugenics 201–214, 263–274: feminism 264–265; impact of 443; see also Open Clasp
and modernity 265–267; visions 202–206 Ferguson, Moira 189
Eugenics Society 265, 267 Feuchtwanger, Lion 154, 159
European internationalism 10 Fielding, Henry 5; An Apology for the Life of Mrs
Evans, Kristian 458 Shamela Andrews 32
Evaristo, Bernadine 4, 20, 23, 306, 419–429; The Finkelstein, David 293
Emperor’s Babe 421; Girl, Woman, Other Firestone, Shulamith 424; The Dialectic of Sex 426;
20, 419, 421–423, 427–429; Lara 421; Notes from the Second Year 424
Manifesto: On Never Giving Up 20, 419, The First Actress (St John) 417
420–423 First-Wave feminism 138, 148, 264
Everyday Sexism (Bates) 23 First World War 10, 140, 151, 153, 173, 414
Eve’s Sour Apples (Clyde) 215, 218, 220, 222, 224 Fischer, Susan Alice 307
evolution: Darwin’s theory of 11, 201; human 201, Fitzpatrick, Lisa 435
207, 213; of nation-states 2 Fleetwood (Godwin) 48
Extinction Rebellion movement 22 Fletcher, Loraine 33
Flood, Alison 339, 340, 341, 344
Fabian Society 265 Floyd, George 22, 421
Fahs, Breanne 424 forced migration 432, 439
Fairbrother, Sydney 140 Forché, Carolyn 171
Falconer, Louise 361 Foster, Shirley 42
Falling Knives and Runaround Wives 436, 442 Founding and Futurist Manifesto (Marinetti) 424,
Fascism 10, 165–167, 169, 176–177, 266 429n1, 429n2
fashion 6, 11, 12, 147, 230–241, 325, 328, 334; Fox, William Johnson 381
modernism and 231–232 France (Morgan) 44
Fawcett, Millicent: Women’s Suffrage: A Short Frankenstein (Shelley) 47, 56
History of a Great Movement 147 Frawley, Maria 70
The Female Advocate (Scott) 280 Frederick Douglass’ Paper 9, 131
Female Biography (Hays) 368, 377 The Freewoman 217, 219, 220, 236
female economic dependence 11, 201–213 Freire, Paulo 337, 339
The Female Man (Russ) 7, 82, 87–89 French Revolution 2, 3, 5, 51, 56
The Female Worthies 31 Frend, William 374
femininity 42–44, 69–80, 230–236, 383–384; Fresh Oceans: An Anthology of Poetry by Scottish
bourgeois 70; conventional markers of 166; Women (Thomson) 338, 345
and disability 69; domestic 3, 7, 19, 122; Freud, Sigmund 69, 221, 222
polite 30; submissive 143; trans 215, 225 Frey, Johann-Rudolf 45
feminism 4–5, 10, 55–67, 83–86, 134, 165–166, friendship 3, 8; Charlotte Brontë networks 113–123;
316–319; eugenic 264–265; fatigue 434; between equals 29, 36; female 115–117,
First-Wave 138, 148, 264; interwar 218–220; 157, 162, 414; intellectual 8; networks
multivocal 87–89; Second Wave 15, 93, 8–10, 113–123; testament of 120–122
202, 424, 426; today 21–24; white 247, 424;
writing, for future 147–148 Gaard, Greta 446
Feminism and Theatre (Case) 434 Game Act 56
feminist 230–241; avant-garde 165; consciousness- Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie 69
raising groups 337; Edwardian 166, Gaskell, Elizabeth 3, 7, 8, 114; friendship with
172; fiction 138–148; internationalism Brontë 120–122; The Life of Charlotte
165–177; manifesto 20, 419–420, Brontë 114, 122; Mary Barton 114, 120;

467
 Index

The Moorland Cottage 7, 70, 73–76; North Griffiths, Julia 3, 9, 126, 130–134, 135
and South 114; Ruth 114, 121 Griffiths, Marion 294
Gay Liberation Front 21 Grimstone, Mary Leman 381
Gell, Alfred 231 Grit and Diamonds (Henderson and MacKay) 336
gender-based violence 1, 10, 12, 23, 89, 157, 230, Grossman, Neil 247
240, 248, 433, 438, 443, 454, 457 Grosz, Elizabeth 231, 234
The Gender of Modernism: A Critical Anthology The Guardian 295, 303
(Scott) 167 Gubar, Sandra 286; The Madwoman in the Attic 286
Genetics 13, 263–274 Guy, Rosa 314
George Braziller (publisher) 306, 316
Gerald, Mary 234 Hacking, Ian 70
Gibbon, Grassic 153, 154 Haldane, Charlotte 4, 266
Gikandi, Simon 394 Haldane, J. B. S. 266, 268; Daedalus, or Science
Gilbert, Ann Taylor 278 and the Future 266
Gilbert, Susan 286; The Madwoman in the Attic 286 The Half-Life of Snails (Holloway) 21, 448, 455,
Gill, Josie 270 457
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins 3–4, 11, 202–203, 212, Half-Sister (Jewsbury) 384, 386
224, 266; Herland 7, 82, 84, 86–87, Hall, Catherine: White, Male and Middle-Class 396
224–225; With Her in Ourland 266; The Hall, Lesley 215
Home: its Work and Influence 208; Women Hall, Radclyffe 12, 151, 163, 220, 223
and Economics 203, 205, 208 Hall, Sarah: The Carhullan Army 7, 82, 89–93
Gilroy, Beryl 186, 306 Hamilton, Carolyn 187
Gilroy, Paul 188 Hamilton, Cicely 19, 139, 407, 410–411; Anti-
Giorgio, Adalgisa 343 Suffrage Waxworks 411; The Cutting of
Girl, Woman, Other (Evaristo) 20, 419, 421–423, the Knot 411; Diana of Dobson 19, 410;
427–429 How the Vote Was Won 19; Jack and Jill
Gleadle, Kathryn 380, 381 and a Friend 411; Just to Get Married 411;
Glissant, Édouard 195 Marriage as a Trade 411; Pageant of Great
Glodsmith, Marie 224 Women 20, 417; Phyl 411
Goddard, Lynette 437, 442 Hamilton, Elizabeth 369; Memoirs of Modern
Godwin, William 367, 377, 381; Fleetwood 48; Philosophers 373
Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of The Handmaid’s Tale (Atwood) 89–90
Caleb Williams 375 Hanson, Clare 359
The Golden Treasury of Songs and Lyrics HapMap Project 270
(Palgrave) 277 happiness: private discussions about 287–289; in
Goldsmith, Netta Murray 138 Steele’s published writings 281–287
Golpe de mano 176 Haraway, Donna 424; A Cyborg Manifesto 424, 426
The Goose Boy (Barker) 297 Harraden, Beatrice 140, 409
Gore-Booth, Eva 215–216 Harris, Laurel 237
Gorecki, Julie 447 Harrison, Susanna 278; Songs in the Night 278
Gould, John: The Birds of Australia 57 Hatherley, Mary 218
The Gowk Storm (Morrison) 159 Havergal, Frances Ridley 277
Graham, K. J. E. 282 Hav of the Myrmidons (Morris) 97
Gramich, Katie 362 Hawkesworth, John 187
Grand, Sarah 4, 13, 140, 264, 266; The Beth Book Hays, Mary 3, 18, 367–378; Annual Necrology
58; The Heavenly Twins 264 377; Cursory Remarks on an Enquiry into
Great Adventure 416–417 the Expediency and Propriety of Public or
Green, Barbara 233 Social Worship 370; Female Biography
Green, Nan 165, 175 368, 377; Historical Dialogues for Young
Greenham Common 21, 317, 448, 452–453 Persons 378; Letters and Essays, Moral
Greenlee, Sam 314; The Spook Who Sat By The and Miscellaneous 370; Memoirs of Emma
Door 314 Courtney 18, 368, 371–377; Memoirs of
Greg, W. R. 389 Queens, Illustrious and Celebrated 378;
Gregg, Melissa 234 The Victim of Prejudice 18, 368, 372,
Gregory, Davinia 331 374–376
Griffin, Julia 279 Hays, Matilda Mary 369, 381

468
 Index

Head, Bessie 315, 316 Hughes, Langston 168

Head Above Water (Emecheta) 306–312, 314–317 Hughes, Mary 348
Heafford, Michael 43 Human Genome Project (HGP) 269–270
Heaney, Emma 215 Hume, David 34
The Heart of the Race - Black Women’s Lives in 100 Poems to Save the Earth 451
Britain (Bryan, Dadzie, and Scafe) 307, 361 Hungerheart (St John) 225
The Heavenly Twins (Grand) 264 Hunt, Leigh 381
Hebrew Bible 278 Hunt, Violet 140, 151
Hedda Gabler (Ibsen) 409 Hutcheon, Linda 195
Heinemann’s African Writers Series 306 Hutcheon, Michael 195
Hemmings, Clare 240 Hutchinson, Thomas 358
Henderson, Lynda: “Mother Love” 343 Hutton, Clark 300
Henderson, Shirley: Grit and Diamonds 336 Huxley, Elspeth 301
Hens in the Hay 338, 345 hymns 277–283, 285, 356–357; accessibility and
Herland (Gilman) 7, 82, 84, 86–87, 224–225 acceptability of 278; English 277–279,
Herndl, Diane Price 70 283, 290; mode of self-expression 277;
Her Will (St John) 20 women’s religious expression 278; writing
Heston Fields campaign 453 14, 16, 277
Heyrick, Elizabeth 3, 9, 126, 130, 135 Hymns and Spiritual Songs (Watts) 286
Hilaire, Patricia 422
Historical Dialogues for Young Persons (Hays) 378 I Am (Scally-Clarke) 256
History of a Six Weeks’ Tour (Shelley) 43, 47–50 Illegitimacy 13, 36, 254, 265, 373, 386
The History of England, from the Earliest Records Imagined Corners (Muir) 154, 157, 159
to the Peace of Amiens; in a Series of Imoinda: alter(native) 191–193; generational
Letters to a Young Lady at School (Smith) conversation 189–191; staging 193–197;
377 towards a live performance 193–197
History of the French Revolution (Mignet) 384 Imoinda (Anim-Addo) 11, 17
History of the Swiss Confederation (Müller) 49 Imoinda: Or She Who Will Lose Her Name 183
A History of Women (Alexander) 31 Imoinda’s Shade: Marriage and the African Woman
Hogarth, Grace 300 in Eighteenth-Century British Literature,
Holland, Patrick 42 1759–1808 (Dominique) 191
Holloway, Philippa 4, 448; The Half Life of Snails imperialism 8, 104, 166, 190, 237, 360, 424
21, 448, 455, 457 Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Jacobs) 126
Holmes, Rachel 169 independence: material aspect 36–37; women 30,
Homage to Catalonia (Orwell) 167 31, 34
home dressmaking 322–335 Indian Love Lyrics 330
Home in British Working-Class Fiction (Wilson) individuality 5, 30–34, 38–39, 102
323 industrialism 84, 352–353, 358, 360, 362
The Home: its Work and Influence (Gilman) 208 Ingram, Angela 215
home sewing machine 328, 332, 333 In My Mind’s Eye (Morris) 99, 102–105
homosocial relationships 120 Innocents (Barker) 296, 298
Hood, Thomas 323 An Inquiry into the Colonial Policy of the European
hooks, bell 188–189, 423, 424, 429 Powers (Brougham) 396
housing 333, 345, 347; developments 331; In Search of Mr. McKenzie: Two Sisters’ Quest for
environments 331; post-war urban 337; role an Unknown Father (McKenzie-Mavinga
of 332; social 451, 454 and Perkins) 256
Housman, Lawrence 139 insects 206–213
Howell, Jennifer 397; “Mrs Seacole Prescribes internationalism 2, 10, 104, 165–179; European 10;
Hybridity” 397 feminist 10; intimate 175, 177
Howell, Jessica 394 intersectional 166, 177, 433, 437–439; activism 9;
Howells, William Dean 204 feminism 427, 437; feminist perspective
Howitt, Mary 381, 382, 384 352, 437; identities 422; of inequalities
Howitt, William 382 435; social change 442
Howitt’s Journal 382, 384, 389 intersex 107, 217, 223
How the Vote Was Won (Hamilton) 19 interwar feminism 218–220; and science 218–220;
Huggan, Graham 42 and sex 218–220

469
 Index

In the Ditch (Emecheta) 306, 308–313, 314, 317 Kennedy, Mary 348
An Introduction to Feminism and Theatre (Aston) Kennedy-Epstein, Rowena 167
434 Kensington Society 146
invalidism 69–81 Kesson, Jessie 340
Invitation to the Waltz (Lehmann) 322, 323, Key, Ellen 219, 220
324–327, 328, 330, 334 Key Change 433
‘Is it incurable?’ (Swindon) 344 Keynotes (Egerton) 264
Issa, Hanan 451 Kingston, Gertrude 409
Kitch, Sally 85; Third Wave Feminism 85
Jack and Jill and a Friend (Hamilton) 411 Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press 315
Jackson, Laura 293 Knighton, Cerys 449
Jacobs, Harriet: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl Koedt, Anne 424; Notes from the Second Year 424
126 Kortsch, Christina Bayles 329
James, Adeola 316 Kowalzig, Barbara 184
James, C. L. R. 314 Kraft, Elizabeth 290
James, Felicity 368 Kristeva, Julia 248, 252
Jamie, Kathleen 21 Kuczynski, Sarah A. 252
Jane Eyre (Brontë) 113, 116, 119–120 Kwakye, Chelsea 421; Taking Up Space: The Black
Japan Times 224 Girl’s Manifesto for Change 421
Jennings, Vandyck 208
Jeremiah, Emily 343 Lacan, Jacques 101
Jerrold, Douglas 382 Laconics Jingles and Other Verses (Muir) 154
Jewsbury, Geraldine: Half-Sister 384, 386 Ladies Almanack (Barnes) 220, 224–225
Jew Süss (Feuchtwanger) 159 Ladies Free Produce Association 134
Jock Campbell Award 314 Lady Hymn Writers (Pitman) 279
John, Angela V. 409 L’Age d’Or 173
Johnson, Barbara 231 Lamarck, Jean Baptiste de 265
Johnson, Charles 184 Landor, Walter 381
Johnson, Samuel 32 Lane, Mary E. Bradley: Mizora 82, 84
Johnston, Mary 343 La Nouvelle Héloise (Rousseau) 40, 46
Jones, Chris 45 La Parthogénèse (Delage and Glodsmith) 224
Jones, Claudia 306 Lara (Evaristo) 421
Jorgensen, Christine 96, 106 Latimer, Bonnie 31, 34
journal 1, 3, 43–44, 156, 382, 384, 448, 458; agenda Latour, Bruno 231
217; feminist 12, 58, 215–216; international Lay, George Tradescan 203
217; multidisciplinary 67n5; role of Welsh Ledger, Sally 139
21; unpublished 51 Lees, Bernadette 341; “Sandie” 341
journalism 1, 9, 10, 19, 125–126, 131, 134–135, Leeworthy, Daryl 98
166, 170, 175 Le Féminisme ou la Mort (d’Eaubonne) 446–447
Journal of a Tour of the Continent (Wordsworth) The Left Hand of Darkness (Le Guin) 219
44, 50–52 Le Guin, Ursula 84, 218; The Left Hand of
Julie, or the New Heloise (Rousseau) 48 Darkness 219
Jumping Puddles 440 Lehmann, Rosamond 4, 16; Invitation to the Waltz
Just to Get Married (Hamilton) 411 322, 323, 324–327, 328, 330, 334
Lemon, Margaretta Louisa 58
Kant, Emanual 59 Lerner, Marc 43
Karavanta, Mina 185, 188, 194, 195 Lesbian 11–12, 157, 163, 215–229, 235, 307, 422,
Kay, Jackie 4, 13, 244–259; “The Adoption Papers” 427, 428, 433, 434, 439–440, 454
12, 244–246, 249, 255–256, 259 Lessing, Doris 13, 268; Canopus in Argos 268
Kean, Hilda 56 letters 1, 3, 6, 8–9, 18, 43–45, 77, 125–128, 131–135,
Keizer, Arlene 184 151–163, 205, 222, 234, 297–302, 377;
Keller, Evelyn Fox 272 animated 205; open 8, 9, 167; private 373
Kelley, Theresa 47 Letters and Essays, Moral and Miscellaneous
Kemble, Lucretia 384 (Hays) 370
Kenealy, Arabella 264 Letters written during a short residence in Sweden,
Kennedy, Deborah 45 Norway and Denmark (Wollstonecraft) 371

470
 Index

Letters Written in France (Williams) 47 Manion, Jen 223

letter writing 3–4, 6, 8–10, 14–15, 17–18, 113–124, Man’s World (Haldane) 266
125–137, 150–164, 167, 175, 221–222, Maps and Rooms: Writing from Wales 449
232, 279–280, 285, 287, 294, 296, 298–302, Marcus, Sharon: Between Women: Friendship,
368–374, 377–378, 420–421, 425 Desire and Marriage in Victorian
Lewes, G. H. 386 England 115
Lewontin, Richard 270 Maria, or The Wrongs of Woman (Wollstonecraft)
Library of Wales series 352 367
libretto 184–185, 187–189, 194–196, 197n10; Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: Founding and Futurist
African-Caribbean 191; intercultural 194; Manifesto 424, 429n1, 429n2
neo-slavery 11, 183 marriage 3, 5, 30, 33–39, 143, 205, 326–328;
Life and Letters Today 172 advantageous 71; conventional denouement
Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (Douglass) of 119; happy 71; heteronormative 12;
134–135 heterosexual 215, 217, 225; inequities of
The Life of Charlotte Brontë (Gaskell) 114, 122 18; interminable 388; interrogation of 141;
Lindsay, John 358 issues of 6
Linklater, Eric 154 Marriage as a Trade (Hamilton) 411
Linton, Eliza Lynn 3, 18; Realities: A Tale 18 Married Love (Stopes) 265
Linton, William James 382; English Republic 382 Marsden, Dora 220, 236
Literary Gazette 382 Marshik, Celia 231
A Literature of Their Own (Showalter) 72 Marson, Una 306
The Little Black Book: A Toolkit for Working Martin, Richard 56
Women (Uwagba) 421 Martin, Seán Aeron 455
Little Wimmin 441 Martineau, Harriet 3, 9, 126, 130–134, 135
Living a Feminist Life (Ahmed) 419, 426 Martin’s Act 56
Living with Ballads (Muir) 154 Marx, Karl 328, 424; Capital 328
Lochhead, Liz 340 Mary, A Fiction (Wollstonecraft) 5, 30, 32, 34–35
Lochhead, Marion C. 153, 157, 158 Mary Barton (Gaskell) 114, 120
Locke, John 31, 281 Mason-John, Valerie 256
London Labour and the London Poor 212 Massana, Elisabeth 247
Looking Backwards (Bellamy) 207 Massingberd, Emily 58
“Loombi Experiment” 268 Matarasso, Francois 347
Love and Fallout (Simmonds) 21, 448, 452–455 “Maternity” (Ryan) 343
Love Should Never Be Abusive 440 Matters, Muriel 416
Lucent Dreaming 449, 450 Mayhew, Henry 212
LUMIN Syllabus 458 Mayo, Marjorie 347
Lynn, Eliza 380–390; Amymone: A Romance in the Mayreder, Rosa 219, 220
Days of Pericles 380; Azeth the Egyptian Mazelis, Jo 359
382; Realities: A Tale 380–390 McCarthy, Mary: Birds of America 59
Lyons, Rebecca 293 McCleery, Alistair 293
Lytton, Doris 140 McClure, Glenn 195
McCowan, Eugene 172
MacDiarmid, Hugh 152, 153, 160 McCulloch, Palmer 156
A Machynlleth Triad (Morris) 100, 101 McHugh, Catrina 432, 436, 438, 439
MacInnes, Colin 310, 314 McHugh, Huffty 439, 440
MacKay, Alison: Grit and Diamonds 336 Mckenzie, Zakiya 457
Maclehose, Christopher 314 McKenzie-Mavinga, Isha 256; In Search of Mr.
Maddaddam trilogy (Atwood) 271 McKenzie: Two Sisters’ Quest for an
The Madwoman in the Attic (Gilbert and Gubar) 286 Unknown Father 256
Make Do and Mend campaign 328 McKinnon, Catherine 219
Manchester Guardian 169, 170, 173 McLaren, Anne 268
manifesto 1, 4, 17, 419–429; collective 167; McLeod, John 313
cumulative 20, 428; feminist 20, 419–420, McMahon, Darrin 281, 284
423–427 McNeill, F. Marian 153, 154, 157
Manifesto: On Never Giving Up (Evaristo) 20, 419, Meehan, Paula 21
420–423 Mellor, Anne: Women’s Studies 84

471
 Index

memoir 1, 6, 17, 42, 157–158, 161, 348, 373–374, Moore, Olive 266
426: Athill 294; Emecheta 15, 306, 308, The Moorland Cottage (Gaskell) 7, 70, 73–76
310, 316; Evaristo 421, 426; Godwin 377; More, Thomas 218; Utopia 83
Mohamed 450; Morris 7, 96, 98, 106; Muir More Collected Poems (Cruickshank) 153
151, 154–158, 161 Morgan, Lady Sydney: France 44
Memoirs of a Spacewoman (Mitchison) 224, 268 Morgan, Victoria 282
Memoirs of Emma Courtney (Hays) 18, 368, Morning Chronicle 380
371–377 Morning Post 394, 398
Memoirs of Modern Philosophers (Hamilton) 373 Morris, Jan 4, 96; Allegorizings 99–101;
Memoirs of Queens, Illustrious and Celebrated Conundrum 7, 96, 99, 107–108; Hav of the
(Hays) 378 Myrmidons 97; A Machynlleth Triad 100,
Mendelssohn, Anna 166, 176 101; In My Mind’s Eye 99, 102–105; nation
Mengrave, Jeff 208 state 98; Pleasures of a Tangled Life 102;
Mental Deficiency Act 265 Thinking Again 99, 102–105; Trieste and
Merli, Paola 347 the Meaning of Nowhere 97; ‘Venice’ 96;
Merriman, Catherine 359 Welsh culture 100
Meteyard, Eliza 389 Morrison, Cecil Wilmot 154
#MeToo movement 22 Morrison, Nancy Brysson 159
Michie, Margaret Fairweather 160 motherhood 9, 12, 17, 78, 84, 86, 121, 248, 251,
microscopy 206–213 255, 259, 264–267, 342–343, 352, 360,
Middlebrook, Diane 248 361, 408, 458; combative 167; ideologies
Middleton, Rebecca 152 of 323; transatlantic 126–129; unmarried
Mies, Maria 446 144
Might is Right (Syrett) 9, 139–144 “Mother Love” (Henderson) 343
Might Is Right or The Survival of the Fittest Mott, Lucrecia 125, 129
(Redbeard) 142 Mowatt, Anna Cora 384
Mignet, François 384; History of the French Moylan, Tom: Demand the Impossible 83
Revolution 384 Mrs Dalloway (Woolf) 267
migration 2, 4, 104, 245, 256–257; and displacement Mrs Grundy in Scotland (Muir) 154
22; external coercion 186; forced 432, 439; “Mrs Muttoe and the Top Storey” 154
human 270; transnational 40 Mrs Ritchie (Muir) 152, 154
Millenium Hall (Scott) 84 “Mrs Seacole Prescribes Hybridity” (Howell) 397
Miller, Jane Eldridge 230 Muir, Edwin 153–162
Mills, Sara 42 Muir, Willa 4, 10, 151, 153
Mintz, Sidney 186 Müller, Johannes von: History of the Swiss
Mirza, Heidi Safia 422 Confederation 49
miscarriage 244, 246, 252 multiculturalism 4, 17, 313, 352–354, 357–358,
Miscellaneous Pieces in Verse and Prose (Steele) 361
281 Murdoch, Iris 296; The Philosopher’s Pupil 301
Miss Miles, or, A Tale of Yorkshire Life 60 Years Murray, William 358
Ago (Taylor) 114, 117, 119–120 My Mind’s Eye (Morris) 102–105
Mitchell, David 69 My Wife and I (Stowe) 129
Mitchell, Hannah 409
Mitchell, John 384 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Mitchison, Naomi 13, 224, 268, 338; Comments (Douglass) 132
on Birth Control 224; Memoirs of a National Anti-Slavery Standard 131
Spacewoman 224, 268 National Conference of Labour Women 265
Mizora (Lane) 82, 84 National Review 383
Modernism 11, 12, 166, 215–229, 231–232, 241: National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies
artistic innovations of 166; and fashion (NUWSS) 409
231–232; feminist 226; literary 4, 218, 225; Nazism 13, 150, 157, 176, 266, 267, 269
scientific 218, 225 Nead, Linda 70
Modernism à la Mode (Sheehan) 231 Neal, Mary 408
Modernism and Nationalism 156 Negro anthology 168–169
The Modern Scot 154 neo-Darwinism 265
Monthly Magazine 377 Nesbitt, Jennifer 174

472
 Index

Nestor, Pauline 120 One Pair of Feet (Dickens) 312

networks 2–5, 8–11, 14–16, 18–19, 22–23, 35, 105, One Pair of Hands (Dickens) 312
167, 196, 202, 269, 279–280, 285, 362, On the Origin of Species (Darwin) 206
369, 370–371, 378, 423, 427, 435, 447; Open Clasp 20, 432–444; activism 436–438;
antislavery activism 125–126, 131, 133, community 439–441; in history of
135–136; friendship 113–116; Scottish PEN feminist theatre 434–436; overview
150–153, 155, 157, 161–163; women’s 432–434; process 441–444; see also
suffrage 138–139; 142, 146, 407, 410–411, feminist theatre
417; writers’ groups 338, 346, 349 open letters 8, 9, 167
News Chronicle 173 opera 11, 184, 186, 188, 192–196, 234
New Society 317 Opera, Sex and Other Vital Matters (Robinson) 194
New Statesman 306, 310–311, 312, 314 Opie, Amelia 3, 9, 126, 130, 135, 369; The Black
New Testament 278 Man’s Lament: Or How to Make Sugar 130
New Times 166, 169–170 oral history 16, 293, 337, 346
New Times and Ethiopia News 169 Oram, Alison 216
New Woman 3, 9–13, 18, 58, 138–149, 201–214, Organisation of Women of African and Asian
230, 264–265, 424; discourse 166; Descent (OWAAD) 307
emancipated 58; eugenicists 202; fiction Orlando 220, 221
and drama 139, 144, 230, 409; novelists Oroonoko (Behn) 11, 183, 186–187
139, 265; peers 9; protagonists 145; and Orwell, George 167
suffrage movements 10; thinkers 80; Oryx and Crake (Atwood) 271
writing 9, 11–13, 202, 206 Othello (Shakespeare) 193
The New York Times 223 Ould, Hermon 150
Ngcobo, Lauretta 318 Ourkiya, Asmae 447
Nigerian Writer Living in London (Emecheta) 307 Out in the Wash: Poems and Stories from the
Nightingale, Florence: Cassandra: An Essay 204 Castlemilk Women Writers and Readers
‘Nightmare Canoe’ 184–186 Group 340–341
A Noble Life (Craik) 69 Outwrite feminist newspaper 165–166
Nobody’s Fault (Syrett) 144 Ozturk, Anthony 47
Non-binary 13, 21, 419, 422, 428–429, 435, 440,
447, 460 Pageant of Great Women (Hamilton) 20, 417
Nonconformist Women Writers, 1720–1840 279 Paid Servant 256
North American Review 264 Palgrave, F. T.: The Golden Treasury of Songs and
North and South (Gaskell) 114 Lyrics 277
Norton, Brian Michael 281 Palmer, Ada 140
Notes from the Second Year (Firestone and Koedt) Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (Richardson) 32
424 Pankhurst, Christabel 232, 415
NourbeSe Philip, M. 189 Pankhurst, Emmeline 232, 233
Nova (magazine) 311 Pankhurst, Sylvia 166, 167, 169, 177
Nussey, Ellen 114, 118 Parallax 168, 172
Nwapa, Flora 313 parasitism 203, 207, 210
Parker, Rozsika 334
O’Brien, Karen 339–342 Parkins, Ilya 231–232
O’Brien, Maeve 246 Parmar, Sandeep 166, 167, 169
O’Connor, Frank 359 Parr, Michelann 244, 248
Octobiography (Cruickshank) 153 Patai, Daphne 215
Oddy, Nicholas 328 patriarchy 10, 12, 37–39, 56, 63, 70–71, 82–83,
Oeser, Mary Drury 161–162 85–86, 88, 90, 93, 99, 133–134, 143, 145,
Ogunbiyi, Ore 421; Taking Up Space: The Black 147, 153, 157, 203, 211, 237, 239, 244–245,
Girl’s Manifesto for Change 421 248, 251, 255, 267, 278, 309, 317, 348, 356,
Ogwugwu Afor (publisher) 306 358, 360–361, 407, 427, 438, 446–447
Okoye, Ifeoma 316 PEN: International Congresses 151; PEN India
Olive Schreiner and the Progress of Feminism 162; refiguring a double archive 186–189;
(Burdett) 202 reputation of 186–189
Olufemi, Lola 177 Penguin Modern Classics 306
OncoMouse 269 People’s Journal 384

473
 Index

Perkins, Thelma 256; In Search of Mr. McKenzie: prostitution 10, 18, 33, 236, 238, 380, 383, 385,
Two Sisters’ Quest for an Unknown Father 388–389
256 publishing: Black Writers’ Guild 420–421, 423; in
Pethick-Lawrence, Emmeline 407–408 Wales 446–460; women as editors 1, 4, 9,
petition 8–9, 126–127, 146 10, 12, 14–15, 21, 131, 141, 215, 293–305,
Pettitt, Ann 452; Walking to Greenham 452 310, 314–315, 319, 381; 382, 390, 410,
Philips, Eliza 58 449, 452; women in publishing 1, 4, 14–15,
The Philosopher’s Pupil (Murdoch) 301 17, 21, 168, 293–305, 307, 308, 314–315
Phyl (Hamilton) 411 Pulteney, William 56
The Pilgrim’s Progress (Bunyan) 283
Pitman, Emma 279; Lady Hymn Writers 279 Quakers 9, 104–5, 134, 136, 368, 369
Planet: The Welsh Internationalist 448 queer 4, 11, 12, 20, 21, 96–99, 106–107, 157,
Plath, Sylvia 13, 244, 251–255; “Three Women: A 163, 216–217, 219–223, 225, 420, 429,
Poem for Three Voices” 12, 244 440–441, 447; constructions of androgyny
Plato 263 12; constructions of lesbian 12; feminist
play 1, 20, 34, 328; parodic 94n4; polyphonic 171; 217, 220–221, 223; identities 97, 107;
suffrage 139, 141–144 implications 99; performance 440, 441; in
Pleasures of a Tangled Life (Morris) 102 theatre 440; women’s relationships 157
Plock, Vike Martina 231
Poems on Subjects Chiefly Devotional (Steele) race 1, 3–4, 8, 12–16, 18–19, 22, 32, 69, 125–137,
278–285, 288 166, 193, 201, 216, 230, 238, 245, 254–5,
poetry 1, 344; devotional 282; meditative form of 257–259, 263, 266, 268–271, 306–321,
172; performance 245; political 169, 172; 330, 352, 357, 359, 361–362, 394, 400–401,
sound 245; war 10; of women’s liberation 421, 423, 428; cross lines of 126, 130; and
movement 14 gender 129, 135, 269–271; and genetics
The Poets of the World Defend the Spanish People! 269–271; politics 259; propagation of 266;
168 white 266, gender and class 306–321
political novel 17–18, 368
Politics (Aristotle) 67n3 racism 4, 21, 103, 246, 256–257, 266–267, 314–317,
Pomegranate: Poems by Pomegranate Women’s 331, 333, 360, 401, 403, 421, 424, 435–437
Writing Group 338 Radical Scotland 338
The Ponnage Pool (Cruickshank) 153 Rainwater, Crescent 138
Poon, Angelia 395; Enacting Englishness 395 Rand, Ayn: Atlas Shrugged 101
Poor Cow (Dunn) 311–312 Randall, Paulette 422
Pope, Alexander 281 Rape 185–186, 192, 195, 236, 239, 254, 375
Portrait of a Rebel (Syrett) 9, 139–140, 144–147 Rattle Snake 433, 438, 442, 443
postcolonial 2–3, 5, 309, 317; economics 13; Raymond, Harold 295
feminism 361; nation 353, 362; Wales Raymond, Mary 372–373
353–354, 358, 360–362 Realities: A Tale (Lynn) 18, 380–390
post-war 13, 331–332, 337; Britain 15; British Redbeard, Ragnar: Might Is Right or The Survival
multiculturalism 17; Caribbean migratory of the Fittest 142
heritage 247; Europe 267; genetic Reding, Aloys 51
science 267; London 17; social services Red Rag 176
files 256; United Kingdom 16; urban Refiguring the Archive 187
housing 337 refugee 10, 22, 166, 169–171
Pound, Ezra 168 Regiment, Monstrous 435
poverty 21, 33, 37, 119, 265, 269, 285, 307, religion 86; based professional and political
309–313, 317, 333, 340, 343, 348–349, networks 8; of Church of England 368;
382, 397; poverty industry 347–349 religious dissent 2, 3, 8, 17, 18, 116, 117,
Preciado, Paul 98–99 278, 279–280, 283, 286–287, 290–291,
pregnancy 122, 236, 246, 248–254, 266, 324 368–371, 377; in literary production 14; in
A Previous Engagement (Howells) 204 Romantic literature 368
Priestley, Joseph 310, 369 Remarks on Mr Gilbert Wakefield’s Enquiry into
Prisoners and Prisons (Wilton) 413 the Expediency and Propriety of Public or
Pritchett, V. S. 310 Social Worship (Barbauld) 370
Probyn, Elspeth 240; Sexing the Self 240 Renaissance 156, 159, 160

474
 Index

Representation of the People Act 21 Sand, George 381

Representing Female Artistic Labour (Zakreski) 323 “Sandie” (Lees) 341
Republic (Plato) 263 Sanger, Margaret 266
retro-feminism 90–91 SANGHARSH 165
Reuter, Martina 29 Saturday Review 389
Rhys, Jean 4, 12, 230–241 Savage, Sir George 267
Rich, Adrienne 344 Savage Coast (Rukeyser) 167
Richardson, Angelique 202, 206, 248, 264 Scafe, Suzanne 307, 361, 422; The Heart of the
Richardson, Anna 9, 126, 134–136 Race - Black Women’s Lives in Britain 307
Richardson, Carole 244 Scaif, Gillian 140
Richardson, Ellen 9, 126, 134–136 Scally-Clarke, Michelle 256
Richardson, Samuel 5; Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded Schalk, Sami 69
32 Schiller, Friedrich von: Wilhelm Tell 49
Richter, Virginia 327 Schneider, Jane 331
Riedelsheimer, Martin 245 Schreiner, Olive 11, 201, 202, 203, 212, 219, 220
Rigby, Elizabeth 395–396, 399 science: and interwar feminism 218–220; and sex
Riley, Joan 4, 16, 306, 322; The Unbelonging 306; 218–220
Waiting in the Twilight 322, 330–334 science fiction 84, 88, 219, 224, 268, 269
Rippon, John 279 Scotland: Calvinist region in 153; consciousness-
Rising Stars Wales Award 449 raising groups in 338; Free Church of
Robins, Elizabeth 19, 406–410, 416; The Convert Scotland 132; interwar 156; PEN Congress
409; Votes for Women! 19, 409–410 in 160; restrictive gender norms and sexual
Robinson, Paul 194; Opera, Sex and Other Vital shame in 152; social networks and work
Matters 194 161–163; women’s writing groups in 336;
Robinson, Robert 370 see also: Scottish
Robyn 106–108 The Scotsman 232
Roe v Wade 23 Scott, Bonnie Kime 167; The Gender of
Roland, Madame 384 Modernism: A Critical Anthology 167
Rolley, Katrina 233 Scott, Mary 280; The Female Advocate 280
romantic 5–6, 31, 35, 38, 46, 48, 78, 86, 257, 355, Scott, Sarah: Millenium Hall 84
367–369, 372, 374, 386 Scottish 150–164, 336–351: nationalism 156;
Romantic 5, 6, 9, 31, 42–54, 367–379 parents 44; in support of antislavery 132;
A Room of One’s Own 221 voices and languages 10; women’s writing
Roper, Esther 215, 216 338; see also: Scotland
Rose, Gregory 204 Scottish Journey (Edwin) 156
Rose, Hilary 269 Scottish Nationalist Party 155
Rose Cottingham Married (Syrett) 145 Scottish PEN: co-founders of 154–157; living
Rosenberg, Leah 237 through letters 157–161; social networks
Rossetti, Christina 449–450 and work 161–163
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 5, 29; Confessions 29, Scottish Renaissance 4, 10, 152, 154, 158, 160
30–31; Emile, Or Treatise on Education Scottish Women’s Letter 9
29, 40; Julie, or the New Heloise 48; La Sea Buckthorn (Cruickshank) 153
Nouvelle Héloise 40, 46 Seacole, Mary 3, 393–403; Wonderful Adventures
Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) 191 19, 393, 397–403
Rudig, Stefanie 118 Second-Class Citizen (Emecheta) 306, 308–309,
Rukeyser, Muriel 166, 167; Savage Coast 167 313–316, 317–318
Rushdy, Ashraf 183–184 Second-Wave feminism 4, 15, 17, 21, 84, 89–90,
Russ, Joanna: The Female Man 7, 82, 87–89 93, 202, 307, 316, 344, 422, 424, 426, 428,
Russell, W. H. 402 429
Ruth (Gaskell) 114, 121 Second World War 150, 176, 215, 269, 293; and its
Ryan, Mary: “Maternity” 343 aftermath 267–269
Rye, Gill 343 Sedgwick, Daniel 277; Comprehensive Index of
Names of Original Authors and Translators
Said, Edward 203 of Psalms and Hymns, with the Dates of
Saint-Amour, Paul 177 their Various Works, Chiefly Collected from
Salleh, Ariel 446 the Original 277

475
 Index

Segal, Lynne 348 slavery 2–4, 19, 33, 49, 125–137, 183–200;
Seigworth, Greg 234 African 191; American 9, 126–130;
A Selection of Hymns from the Best Authors realities of 128–129; transatlantic 331;
Intended to be an Appendix to Dr Watts’s traumatic histories of 4; World Anti-Slavery
Psalms and Hymns (Rippon) 279 Convention (London) 129
sensibility 31–35, 40–41; feminine 5; in fictional Slay in Your Lane: The Black Girl Bible (Adegoke
texts 32; novels of 39; radical 45; and and Uviebinené) 421
suffering 38; weaponising 36 Smallwood, Norah 4, 14–15, 294; arrival at Chatto
The Sentinel (West) 12, 230–231, 232–236 and Windus 294–296; end of reign and her
Several Ladies of Great Britain 31 legacy 302–304; and her friendships with
Sewell, Anna: Black Beauty 58 authors 298–299; industry relationships
sex: biological 222–224; education 220–221; and 300–301; negotiating skills 301–302;
interwar feminism 218–220; and science support for her authors 296–298
218–220 Smeddum Press 345
Sexing the Self (Probyn) 240 Smith, Charlotte 3, 5, 18, 367, 377; Desmond 367;
sexology 11–12, 215–229 Emmeline, Or The Orphan of the Castle
sexuality 11, 18, 22, 115, 215–216, 220, 230, 5, 30, 33; Ethelinde, or The Recluse of
232; brutal 192; female 121; feminist the Lake 5, 30, 33–34, 38; The History of
236; lesbian 220, 440; primitive 238; England, from the Earliest Records to the
reproduction 224–226, 330; science Peace of Amiens; in a Series of Letters to a
215–226; selection 201, 223, 264; violence Young Lady at School 377
12, 22–23, 62, 230, 238–239, 435 Smith, Judith Ann 217
sexual violence 12, 22, 23, 62, 185–186, 192, Smith, Zadie 4, 13, 269; White Teeth 11, 13
195, 230, 236, 238–239, 254, 332–333, Snyder, Sharon 69
375, 435 social housing 451, 454
sex work 10, 18, 238 Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals 56
Sharp, Evelyn 408, 409 Solution Three 268
Shaw, George Bernard 139, 265 Songs in the Night (Harrison) 278
Sheehan, Elizabeth 231 Southerne, Thomas 187, 191–193
Shelley, Mary 3, 6, 42; Frankenstein 56; History of Southey, Robert 114
a Six Weeks’ Tour 43, 47–50 The Space Between Us 439–440
Shelley, Percy Bysshe 43 Spain (Auden) 167
The Sheltering Tree (Syrett) 9, 138, 141 Spanish Civil War 10, 165–179
Shepherd, Janette 342; “The Christmas Party” 343 Spanish Civil War Verse 173, 174
Shepherd, Nan 153 Spanish Maquis 176
Shirley (Brontë) 113, 120 Spanish Popular Front 167
Shiva, Vandana 446 Spare Rib 348, 428
The Shooting Party (Colegate) 59 Spender, Stephen 167
short story 16–17, 264–265, 296–297, 352–362 Sphinx Theatre Company 434
Showalter, Elaine: A Literature of Their Own 72 The Spirit of the Movement 410
Sihra, Melissa 434 Spleen (Moore) 266
Silent Spring (Carson) 449 The Spook Who Sat By The Door (Greenlee) 314
Silkü, Rezzan Kocaöner 394 Squier, Susan 224
Silviania 278, 280, 289 “Stand Still” (Swindon) 348
Simmonds, Kathryn 4, 452; Love and Fallout 21, Stanton, Elizabeth Cady 125, 129, 133
448, 452–455 Steedman, Carolyn 342
Sinclair, May 140, 151 Steele, Anne 3, 14, 289; happiness in published
Sinclair, Upton 167 writings of 281–287; Miscellaneous Pieces
sisterhood 90, 92, 389, 429; cross-racial and in Verse and Prose 281; Poems on Subjects
transatlantic 126; literal 86 Chiefly Devotional 278–285, 288; private
Sister Resisters 345 discussions about happiness 287–289; public
Six, Abigail Lee 343 and private literary personae 278–280;
Skeehan, Danielle 331 published writings 281–287; Silviania 278,
Sketches of the Natural, Civil, and Political State of 280, 289; “Theodosia” 278–279
Switzerland (Coxe) 45 Steinach, Eugen 223
The Slave Girl (Emecheta) 314 Stetz, Margaret D. 414

476
 Index

Stevens, Elizabeth 314 Test and Corporation Act 368

St John, Christopher 19, 407, 412–414; The First textual triads 12, 244–259
Actress 417; Her Will 20; Hungerheart 225 theatre novel 18, 380, 384, 385, 386
Stöckl, Korbinian 245 theatrical activism 20, 436
Stone, John Hurford 42, 45 Thelwall, John 367
Stopes, Marie 265–266 Theodosia 278–279
The Story of an African Farm (Schreiner) 203, 211 Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb
Stowe, Harriet Beecher 9, 125, 127–129; The Williams (Godwin) 375
Chimney Corner 129; My Wife and I 129; Thinking Again (Morris) 99, 102–105
Uncle Tom’s Cabin 126, 128 Third Wave Feminism (Kitch) 85
Stowell, Sheila 408 Third Worldist internationalism 166
Strachey, Jane Maria 140 Thomas, Amy Brandon 140
Stratton, Florence 315; Contemporary African Thomas, Zoe 294
Literature and the Politics of Gender 315 Thompson, William: Appeal of One Half of the
Subject to Others: British Women Writers and Human Race, Women 57
Colonial Slavery 1670–1834 (Ferguson) Thomson, Karen: ‘To the Sisters I Always Wanted’
189 341
suffrage 2–5, 8–9, 17–20, 138–149, 406–418; Thornton, Valerie 336
activism 140, 147, 407, 412, 416–417; Three Guineas (Woolf) 174, 266
feminism 219; literature 9, 145; oratory and Three Women 252
propaganda 139, 145; societies 406–408, “Three Women: A Poem for Three Voices” (Plath)
410, 416 12, 244
suffrage play 139, 141–144 Thunberg, Greta 454; The Climate Book 454
Summers, Anne 395 Tiernan, Sonja 216
The Sunday Telegraph 296 Tiger Bay 352, 354, 358
Sunday Tribune 454 Time and Tide 165
supplementary schooling (Andrews) 331 Tiptree, James, Jr 82
Suvin, Darko 83 Tirre, Alan 195
Swags and Tails 437 “To Douglas Cooper” (Cunard) 168
Swastika Night (Burdekin) 266 Tomorrow Club 150, 151
Swindon, Margaret Mary: “Christmas Tree” 341; To the Lighthouse (Woolf) 267
‘Is it incurable?’ 344; “Stand Still” 348 ‘To the Sisters I Always Wanted’ (Thomson) 341
Swiney, Frances 264 A Tour of Switzerland (Williams) 43
Switzerland 43–44; Journal of a Tour of the Townsend, Peter 312
Continent 50–52; mountains 47–50; travels’ Townsend Warner, Sylvia 298–299
text 44–45; Williams’ account of landscape Toynbee, Polly 310
44–47 trade (tucker green) 12, 244–248, 250, 256, 257, 259
Syrett, Netta 138–148; Might is Right 9, 139–144; trans 7–8, 11–12, 96–110, 215–229
Nobody’s Fault 144; Portrait of a Rebel transatlantic: abolitionist journalism 131;
9, 139–140, 144–147; Rose Cottingham antislavery movement 125–137;
Married 145; The Sheltering Tree 9, 138, motherhood 126–129; women’s networks
141; suffrage play 141–144 125–137
transcultural chorality 184–186
Taking Up Space: The Black Girl’s Manifesto for transhumanism 271–272
Change (Kwakye and Ogunbiyi) 421 transnational 5, 7, 22–23, 40, 99, 165, 169, 176–177,
Talleyrand-Périgord, Charles Maurice de 31, 40–41 316
Taylor, A. J. P. 310 trans-racial aesthetics 255–256
Taylor, Jane 278 travel writing 1, 3, 5–7, 19, 42–54, 96–97, 371
Taylor, Mary 3, 8, 114; background/education Treagus, Mandy 212
117–120; Miss Miles, or, A Tale of Yorkshire Trezise, Rachel 359
Life 60 Years Ago 114, 117, 119–120 trialogues 244–259
The Telegraph 303 Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere (Morris) 97
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (Brontë) 6, 55; abused “Triple Sec” 236–240
wives in 60–64; hunted animals 60–64 Trollope, Anthony 57
Testament of Friendship (Brittain) 115 Trooboff, Rhoda 186
The Testaments (Atwood) 420 Trotter, Thomas 399

477
 Index

Trump, Donald 23 Wadia, Sophia 162

tucker green, debbie 4, 12–13, 244–259; trade 12, Waiting in the Twilight (Riley) 322, 330–334
244–248, 250, 256, 257, 259 Wakefield, Gilbert 370; An Enquiry into the
Turda, Marius 265 Expediency and Propriety of Public or
Twist of Lemon 440–441 Social Worship 370
Two Selves (Bryher) 222 Wakeford, Mary 289
Tzara, Tristan 168 Wales 105–108; LGBTQ+ community 105–108;
see also: Welsh
Umeh, Marie 315 Walford, Howard Neville 294
The Unbelonging (Riley) 306 Walker, Alice 317, 319
Un Chien Andalou (Buñuel and Dalí) 173 Walker, Gina Luria 368
Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe) 126, 128–129 Walking to Greenham (Pettitt) 452
Under the Net (Murdoch) 296 Walk to the End of the World (Charnas) 82
UNESCO 268 Wallace, Jo-Ann 225
Une si longue Lettre (Ba) 315 Wallace, Michelle 127
Unitarianism 17, 18, 45, 121, 368–370, 381–383, Walton, Dawn 256
385–386, 388–389 Wandor, Michelene 434
United Nations Campaign to Eliminate Violence Ward, Humphrey 409, 412
Against Women & Girls 433 Ward, Ian 368
Up the Junction (Dunn) 312 Warner, Sylvia Townsend 165, 174, 177
Up the Noran Water (Cruickshank) 153 Watson, James 268
Urania (Clyde) 12, 215, 216–218, 219–220; The Watts, Isaac 278
Aëthnic Union and 216–218 Watts, Isobel: Hymns and Spiritual Songs 286
Urban Aid funding 338–339 Weaver, Lois 433
“The Urgent Present: the 1930s” 154 Webb, Beatrice 265
Utility Clothing Scheme 328 Webb, Mary 151
utopia 4, 5, 7, 12, 30, 36, 40, 48, 82–95, 215, 218, Webb, Sidney 265
224, 225, 271, 421, 427, 428 Weininger, Otto 220
Utopia (More) 83, 218 Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act 457
Uviebinené, Elizabeth: Slay in Your Lane: The The Well of Loneliness (Hall) 163, 220–221, 223
Black Girl Bible 421 Welsh 96–110, 352–364, 446–462: culture
Uwagba, Otegha: The Little Black Book: A Toolkit 100; language trans writing 7, 96–109;
for Working Women 421 publishing 448–452; see also: Wales
The Welsh Outlook 448
vegetarianism 56, 57–61 We Should All Be Feminists (Adichie) 23
Vegetarian Society 57 West, Rebecca 4, 151, 167, 230–241;
Veigelé, Alexandrine 58 The Sentinel 12
The Victim of Prejudice (Hays) 18, 368, 372, West Coast Magazine 345
374–375 West End Women and Girls’ Centre, Newcastle,
Victorian: discourses of gender and race 3; female UK 439
friendship communities 8; feminism 115, What a Time to Be Alone: The Slumflower’s Guide
390n1; fiction 80; gender ideology 207; to Why You Are Already Enough (Eggerue)
ideology 114; literary culture 123; literary 421–422
feminism 18, 382; narratives of domestic What Katy Did (Coolidge) 72–73
sentiment 7; print culture 18, 382; sexual Wheatley, Phillis 125, 130
morality 145–146; theatre novels 384, 386 Wheeler, Anna: Appeal of One Half of the Human
Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics Race, Women 57
(Armstrong) 286 Whelan, Timothy 279, 368
Villette (Brontë) 113 White, Male and Middle-Class (Hall) 396
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman whiteness 9, 12, 13, 15, 19, 21, 23, 32, 84, 125,
(Wollstonecraft) 2, 29–33, 59, 129 126–128, 130, 132–135, 166, 187, 189,
Votes for Women! (Robins) 19, 409–410, 412, 414 191–193, 195–196, 218, 233, 236–238,
Votes for Women movement 19 245–247, 253–254, 256–259; of the British
female ideal 396; of British womanhood
Waddington, C. H. 268 19; Imoinda’s 191
Wade, Jessey 216 White Teeth (Smith) 11, 13, 269

478
 Index

Whyte, James 154 Women’s Suffrage: a Record of the Women’s

Wilberforce, William 56 Suffrage Movement in the British Isles
Wild, Susie 359 (Blackburn) 147
Wilhelm Tell (Schiller) 49 Women’s Suffrage: A Short History of a Great
Wiliam, Mari Elin 455 Movement (Fawcett) 147
Williams, Daniel 363n2 Women’s Theatre Group 434
Williams, Helen Maria 3, 5–6, 18, 42, 367; accounts women’s voices 1, 8, 12, 19, 106, 114, 144,
of Switzerland landscape 44–47; feminine 244–259, 348, 356
revolutionary politics 44–47; Letters Women Writers’ League 19
Written in France 47; power of nature Women Writers’ Suffrage League (WWSL) 140,
44–47; A Tour of Switzerland 43 406–410, 412
Williamson, Emily 58 Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many
Wilson, Nicola: Home in British Working-Class Lands (Seacole) 19, 393, 397–403
Fiction 323 Woolf, Virginia 4, 174, 223, 266–267, 277; To the
Wilton, Helen 413; Prisoners and Prisons 413 Lighthouse 267
Windham, C. A. 394, 398 Wordsworth, Dorothy 3, 6, 42; Journal of a Tour of
Winsloe, Christa 157; The Child Manuela 157 the Continent 44, 50–52
Winterer, Catherine 281 Wordsworth, William 51
Winterhalter, Franz Xaver 395 Workers Educational Association (WEA) 337–339,
Winter Trees 244 348–349
With Her in Ourland (Gilman) 266 World Health Organization 22
Wollstonecraft, Mary 2–3, 5, 18, 381, 382; Douglas World War One 150, 154
Jerrold’s Shilling Magazine 382; equality Worthen, W.B. 259
29; Letters written during a short residence Wright, Valerie 348
in Sweden, Norway and Denmark 371; writers’ groups: and adult education 337;
Maria, or The Wrongs of Woman 367; adult education-affiliated women 338;
Mary, A Fiction 5, 30, 32, 34–35; A community 340–345; limitations of 346–
Vindication of the Rights of Woman 2, 348; literature and gender in Castlemilk
29–33, 59, 129; wrongness of women’s 338–340; membership of 338; movement
circumstances 32; The Wrongs of Woman 336; personal transformation 345–346;
35, 36–37, 40 political consciousness 345–346; and print
Woman and Labour (Schreiner) 201, 203, 207 culture 336–349; reading 340–345; Scottish
womanism 317 women’s writing 338; shared experience
‘Woman Question’ 21, 61, 69, 76, 80n1, 121, 129, 340–345; solidarity 340–345; writing
144–145, 202 340–345
Women and Economics (Gilman) 203, 205, 208 The Wrongs of Woman (Wollstonecraft) 35, 36–37,
Women and Theatre: Occasional Papers 434 40
Women: An Inquiry (Muir) 154, 159 WSPU 232; Votes for Women 232
Women for Life on Earth 21, 452
Women in Scotland (Muir) 154 Xenogenesis (Butler) 270
‘Women’s Campaign Against Fascist Spain’ 176
Women’s Freedom League (WFL) 408 Yee, Jennifer 256
Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM) 2, 5, The Yellow Book 138–141, 144
10, 165, 306, 308, 310–311, 317–318, Yonge, Charlotte 3, 7; The Clever Woman of the
336–337, 348 Family 7, 70, 76–79
Women’s Manifesto (PEN) 150–151 Young, Douglas 153
women’s rights 5–8; activism 17–21; in British Y Pump 106–107
contexts 2
Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) Zakreski, Patricia 384; Representing Female
406–407 Artistic Labour 323
women’s studies 317, 337, 348 Zonana, Joyce 203–205
Women’s Studies (Mellor) 84 Zubaida, Sami 312
women’s suffrage 138–148 Zwierlein, Anne-Julia 210

479