Gender, Professions and Discourse: Early Twentieth-Century Women's Autobiography

Gender, Professions and Discourse This page intentionally left blank Gender, Professions and Discourse Early Twenti...

Author: Christine Etherington-Wright

5 downloads 509 Views 1MB Size Report

This content was uploaded by our users and we assume good faith they have the permission to share this book. If you own the copyright to this book and it is wrongfully on our website, we offer a simple DMCA procedure to remove your content from our site. Start by pressing the button below!
Report copyright / DMCA form

DOWNLOAD PDF

Gender, Professions and Discourse

This page intentionally left blank

Gender, Professions and Discourse Early Twentieth-Century Women’s Autobiography

Christine Etherington-Wright

© Christine Etherington-Wright 2009 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her rights to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin's Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–21992–2 hardback ISBN-10: 0–230–21992–6 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Etherington-Wright, Christine, 1950– Gender, professions and discourse : early twentieth century women’s autobiography / Christine Etherington-Wright. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0–230–21992–2 (alk. paper) 1. Autobiography – Women authors. 2. English prose literature – Women authors – History and criticism. 3. English prose literature – 20th century – History and criticism. 4. Women authors, English – Biography – History and criticism. 5. Women and literature – Great Britain – History – 20th century. 6. Women – Great Britain – Biography – History and criticism. I. Title. PR808.W65E84 2011 820.9⬘492072—dc22 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

2008027602

This book is dedicated to my husband Barrie and my two children, Amanda and Paul.


Contents List of Illustrations

viii

Acknowledgements

ix

Part One 1 Introduction

3

2 Headmistresses

17

3 Women Doctors

37

4

54

Nurses and VADs

5 Artists and Practitioners

70

6

86

Women Writers

Part Two 7 The Frontispiece Image in Autobiography

107

8 Prefaces, Prologues, Forewords and Introductions

130

9 Silences

143

10 Self and Identity

162

11

181

Memory and Accuracy

12 Conclusion

198

Notes

207

Index

235

vii

Illustrations 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 7.5 7.6

Katharine West Nancy Price Nancy Price – dust cover Frances R. Gray Lilian M. Faithfull Elinor Glyn – portrait by Philip de Laszlo

viii

112 115 118 119 120 125

Acknowledgements

This research has been an amazing roller-coaster. I have asked myself many times whether, had I known how high and steep the track would be, would I have started the journey. The answer has always been a resounding ‘Yes’. This is in no small part due to Professor Sue Harper, the supervisor of the original thesis on which this is based, whom I owe a great debt on so many levels. Her enthusiasm for the project kept me from faltering. She cajoled, listened and demanded intellectual rigour at each stage. For this my eternal thanks. I also owe a good deal to Dr Bran Nicol, whose comments and advice has been invaluable. Staff at the Frewen Library, especially David Francis has been incredibly helpful throughout. My family has been a constant support throughout with practical offers of IT help, and for making me ‘borrow’ Sam, the Labrador, to take me away from my work. Finally and above all, I should like to thank my husband Barrie. He has been forced to share this journey with me, coping with my absences both physical and mental. Selflessly he has dealt with my stress during difficult moments and has celebrated the triumphs along the way, whilst taking care of day to day living. My love as ever. The author and publishers wish to thank the following for permission to reproduce copyright material: Mrs Chowdharay-Best, granddaughter of Elinor Glyn for portrait of Elinor Glyn by artist Philip de Laszlo. Every effort has been made to trace rights holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publishers would be pleased to make the necessary arrangements at the first opportunity.

ix


Part One


1 Introduction

The ideas that generated this book have had a long gestation. My early interest was aroused by the literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As a teenager, the novels of Haggard, Conan Doyle, Stoker, Stevenson, Wells, Kipling and later Wilde, Conrad, Bennett and Forster filled my shelves. But where were the popular women novelists of this time? Female novelists such as Elinor Glyn, Bertha Ruck and many others are not part of the canon in the way that male novelists are. My interests then extended into the culture of the period and my quest for women’s writing expanded to include their autobiographies. This too seemed sparsely represented in the print canon when compared with autobiographies written by men. Of course there was Brittain, often discussed as the representative female from the Edwardian period and the First World War period. But where were other women’s lives? The history books acknowledged the pioneering women doctors, the thousands of Voluntary Aid Detachments (VADs), countless Suffragettes, an occasional actress, and so on. It seemed clear to me, that although men were the journalists and academic ‘gatekeepers’ of this thread of cultural history, there must be many female autobiographies waiting to be uncovered.1 I wanted to ‘hear’ the women themselves. So my project was initially motivated by the desire to explore issues of identity from what women themselves understood, and not from male opinion of the time. The drive to write this book has arisen from my interest in women’s autobiography, and in the cultural history of this period. In particular, I noticed a fundamental under-valuation of the rich pickings of cultural knowledge contained in these autobiographical writings. There seemed to be a lack of an ‘imaginative’ theorising about what these female autobiographers thought, and about how this 3

4 Gender, Professions and Discourse

should be placed in the historical knowledge of the period. There has been a concentration on some individuals, or a few well-known autobiographies, but no comprehensive survey of women autobiographers in the early twentieth century, and certainly not divided up by profession. Indeed, Trev Broughton expressed a frustration which I shared: ‘Until recently, critics toiled relentlessly over narrow issues of genre (which autobiographies count as such and why), representativeness (which auto/biographies matter and why) or value (which Life-writers succeed or fail to represent their subjects according to one or other timeless standard of adequacy)’.2 I would add to this the following observation; that there appears to be a tranche of critical texts on Victorian women’s writing, and less on Edwardian women’s writing. But these placed an emphasis on novelists. 3 Those that have considered autobiography, memoirs and diaries have concentrated on aspects of narration that gives a ‘storifying’ content to autobiographies. This leads to assertions about the unreliability and unsuitability of autobiography as historical evidence.4 This body of criticism has concentrated on what autobiography cannot provide, rather than allowing space for what autobiography can tell us. The extant research appears to ignore what I consider to be one of the fundamental assets of autobiographical writing: access to the mentality of the writer and by extension to the intimate life of the period under scrutiny. More recent research shows interest in an interdisciplinary approach, but is nevertheless heavily theoretical, with few examples from the autobiographies themselves. There are exceptions to this; for example, Regenia Gagnier’s seminal work based on the reading of hundreds of Victorian male and female autobiographies from different classes, or Claire M. Tylee’s work on the First World War.5 Other texts tend to concentrate on two, possibly three women to examine a specific issue.6 In this book I propose to offer a fresh analysis of the ways in which women writers, during the period 1900–1920, in different professions, present aspects of their lives. As an examination of women’s discourse as a central interpretative device, I intend to experiment with different reading practices using interdisciplinary methods, and to utilise a bricolage of theories to achieve my prime aim: that of analysing the female voice and the mentality of that period by those who lived and worked at that time. I shall argue that autobiography is useful in historical research by contributing to the histoire de mentalités.7 The first recorded use and criticism of the term ‘auto-biography’ occurs in 1797.8 Throughout the nineteenth century autobiography

Introduction

5

was a masculine mode dominated by professional males, such as generals, politicians and by middle and upper class men who were successful, and who related their ‘history’ in a linear manner, from young adult to eminence.9 The expectation was for a rigidly objective formula, a record of facts and information concerned with worldly affairs, and the protagonist’s part in these.10 Estelle Jelinek’s findings suggested that the conventional expectation of male autobiography was as a process of documenting an individual’s life. It would be in some sense partial, but generally claimed to be ‘objective’. Children tended to be excised from the role and anything concerning the emotional side to their life was pushed aside. Autobiography which did not conform to this system would not be classed as autobiography ‘proper’. The autobiographies marginal to this canon were those of workingclass men and those of women. But this was to change. During the early twentieth century Wilhelm Dilthey, a German historian and philosopher, became a key participant in early autobiographical criticism.11 Unlike others, his interest lay not only in historically significant individuals, but in autobiography as a medium shared by all. In this he laid the foundations for a broader interest in a ‘critique of historical reason’ grounded in Geist and Erlebnis.12 Dilthey’s inclusive concept of historical consciousness anticipated theories expounded by the Annales School in France. But this broader approach had made little impact in Britain, which remained largely antagonistic to extension of the autobiographical canon. This type of negative criticism was current in Britain at the turn of the century. In the years approaching the First World War, there was an era of unprecedented female public service, and a gradually emerging professional class of women, followed by their huge contribution to the war effort. From this participation in the public sphere, there ensued a peak period, for the first time, of women writing about their experiences. Just as ordinary men who fought in the First World War thought to record their involvement, the professional women who are the subject of this book were finding the impetus to write their accounts. Paul Fussell has noted that wars are often a vehicle for social change, and that the First World War appears to have been a catalyst for both ordinary men and women to record their memories.13 This impetus for lifewriting coincided with literary modernism with its experimental modes of writing engendering a shift away from social realism in fiction. New structures of feeling importantly evinced a renewed interest in subjectivity and diversity, and from women writers, a new voice.14 Interest in the documentary and the recording of people’s experiences which were


mundane and unexceptional grew in the 1920s and 1930s.15 After the founding of Mass-Observation in 1937, what Raphael Samuel described as ‘unofficial knowledge’ became part of mainstream culture.16 The stage was set for an emergence of a new kind of autobiographical writing. This apparent relaxing of the canonical parameters of autobiography which had hitherto defined autobiography, allowed women to feel that they could enter into this market. Jane Marcus notes that: ‘unlike epic poetry, the drama, or the novel, the memoir made no grand claims to artistic achievement. Consequently working-class men and all women could write in this genre without threatening male hegemony or offering claims to competition’.17 The increase in ‘ordinary’ writing, as Samuel argued, expanded the sources to include the literary productions and artefacts of the less wellknown person and made them available to the historian.18 But for reasons I make clear later, women’s autobiography was still marginalised in any critical research. During the 1960s and 1970s, autobiographical criticism continued to suffer from androcentric and narrowly prescribed boundaries. Indeed; ‘insignificant’ was the predominant description of female autobiography. Pascal’s text acknowledged only Martineau and Webb, in passing, and Olney had not a single reference to women autobiographers.19 This gender bias towards female autobiography continued well into the twentieth century. Jelinek recorded, that Shumaker, in 1954, had acknowledged only three nineteenth century female autobiographies and none from the early twentieth century.20 A.O.J. Cockshut, J. Goodwin and Clinton Machann all held very narrow and prescriptive definitions. 21 But attitudes were changing. Howarth in 1969 found that many definitions of autobiography were limiting, often only suitable for a social historian, and unsuitable as a basis for critical evaluation. Feminist ideas entered strongly into the debates about autobiography. A spate of writing in the 1970s formulated the notion of studying women’s writing as a separate enterprise and an index of new defined words appeared in this gynocentric criticism.22 This was essentially a radical feminist and separatist approach taken up notably by Mary Daly, Ellen Moers, Patricia Meyer Spacks and Elaine Showalter.23 Feminist critiques initially concentrated on gendered constraints which included problems of self-assertion, the female sentence, and the absence of women’s writing.24 It was in the 1980s, when Jelinek’s groundbreaking work pulled all these elements together. She identified that the most

Introduction

7

disputed areas between the critical canon and women’s autobiography were those of form and content. As I noted above, a failure to comply with these man-made rules would formerly have resulted in disqualification of texts as autobiographies.25 Jelinek wanted to encourage criticism of women’s autobiography. Although lacking in historical specificity, her edited collection made an important breakthrough because it promoted recognition of the critical value of women’s autobiography, and substantiated it as a literary discipline. There followed an immense amount of work which questioned the old definitions of genre and gender, theory and practice. Shari Benstock’s volume is representative of these 1980s advances in scholarship and illustrates the complexity of the relations between theory and practice where ‘theory takes precedence over practice.’26 It appears that in the 1990s, the sustained efforts from interdisciplinary scholarship had begun to move autobiographical criticism away from the trenchant and the largely unanswerable questions cited by Broughton above. Liz Stanley pioneered the term ‘auto/biography’ in her aim to argue that there are differences in forms of life-writing but: ‘these differences are not generic’.27 ‘Differences’ appeared to be key in the feminist arguments about the plurality of women’s lives.28 Historical studies of autobiography of the middle-class Victorian woman have been engaged in by Valerie Sanders, Sara Mills and Mary Jane Corbett.29 Alongside these, feminist approaches have helped to revolutionise the study of autobiography by expanding its definition, and the socialist feminist approaches have produced a discursive construction of the meaning of gender.30 In 1985, within literary studies, Paul John Eakin placed the blame for the problematic reception of autobiographical writing squarely with the autobiographers: ‘because they perform willy-nilly both as artists and historians’.31 He considered that they blurred the freedoms of imagination and creation with the constraints of biographical fact. Eakin believed that more scholarship and a shift in thinking were needed, and that autobiography should be understood as the: ‘art of memory and as the art of the imagination’.32 Again the questions of fictionality and non-fiction were being brought to the foreground. Literary studies and feminist critiques of autobiography focused their attention on the relative paucity of women’s writing and the absence of women’s voices from the canon.33 It is this type of reductive criticism that made Broughton believe that autobiographical studies had been in the domain of literary criticism, to its detriment, and that key questions had been prematurely foreclosed.


During the late 1980s and the 1990s there has been a growing interest in photography as a means of autobiography. According to Cosslett, this interest has contributed to the view: ‘that textuality should be at the heart of the study of autobiography’.34 But in order to examine this theory, Jo Spence, Liz Stanley, Annette Kuhn, sand J. Stacey all take examples from their own lives and family albums.35 They are used within the autobiographies as: ‘a piece of evidence, a clue – as material for interpretation’.36 Hitherto, I have found no exploration of the effect and use of presentation of the body and adornment in the examination of non-contemporary autobiography. This is an area I intend to address in Chapter 7. In the twenty-first century I find it dispiriting that literary critics such as Mary Evans are still batting against the wearying and largely unanswerable questions of classification, form and content.37 From the outset, Evans denigrates autobiography as the: ‘literary equivalent of gossip’ an implication that autobiography is based on fictions about the writer.38 According to Evans: the need for [the] uncovering of the working-class or female past leads to a focus on figures who, while interesting as all individuals are, may not in any sense represent anything more than individual interest ... Into the lives of diverse individuals we read cultural change and phenomena [ ... ] this task suggests that we should view auto/ biography as in urgent need of reclassification; that its place on the library shelves is not with non-fiction but very much closer to fiction.39 She fails to understand how in the study of autobiography we can recoup a missing part of history. Evans’ suggestion that female individuality, as exhibited in their autobiographies, prevents a coherent position is to overlook female group dynamics. The individuality of autobiographical selves does not apply to: ‘culturally imposed group or gender identities in the case of women and minorities.’40 Moreover, women are socially and psychologically more bonded to others: ‘[this] results in autobiographical forms that are not only individualistic, but also collective’.41 And similarly, Patricia Waugh suggested that because women often have more relational, or more fragmented selves, their stories will take a different shape.42 What Evans does not acknowledge is that if a large survey of individuals within a specific group is undertaken and coupled with a fitting methodology,

Introduction

9

the consciousness of the period in question will emerge and the need for reclassification becomes redundant. Whilst many of the articles and books on the Edwardian period are excellent, these authors often fall short of a full engagement with the text’s possibilities. By this I mean that the autobiographies are used to substantiate a theoretical position about form and content, rather than using the writing as a means of analysing and understanding the mentality of the writer and the era. As a result, the problems they may pose are often avoided altogether, or as Benstock accuses ‘theoretical’ critics of acting as interpreters rather than using the writing itself. She argues: ‘the writing is submitted to the violence of a theory that merely registers its effects through a sample set of quotations’.43 A false homogeneity is thus imposed. What close criticism can do is demonstrate the complexity of the texts and the difference between them. Benstock’s criticism could be levelled at Julie Bush. Concentrating on upper class women’s autobiographies of late Victorian and Edwardian Britain, Bush found a: pronounced levelling out which rendered the writing with a certain: ‘dullness’ of conventional upper class women’s autobiographies [ ... ] from a narrowly informational viewpoint makes them an unreliable, or even disappointing, historical source. [ ... ] However a close comparative reading of the autobiographies suggests otherwise ... with the assistance of literary theory (my italics) it is possible to work from within the published texts, and to travel beyond them in drawing conclusions about individual women’s outlook.44 Whilst Bush recognises further possibilities for analysing the texts, like others before her, she has not undertaken this mode of research methodology. I began this brief survey of the path that criticism of autobiography has taken with a quote that helped to clarify my unease with some aspects of existing criticism. So it appears apposite to end this section with a quotation from Tess Cosslett that suggests a useful way forward: it [autobiography] links together many different disciplines – literature, history, sociology, cultural studies ... the study of autobiography explodes disciplinary boundaries and requires an understanding of other approaches, methods and practices. Autobiography makes trouble: it is difficult to define as a distinct genre, on the borderline between fact and fiction, the personal and


the social, the popular and the academic, the everyday and the literary.45 There appears to be a burgeoning interest in expanding the potential knowledge ‘locked’ within autobiographical writings. Eight years on from when Cosslett wrote this, the work has not yet been undertaken. I propose to redress this situation. It now seems clear that existing methodological approaches have been insufficiently eclectic and flexible. Moreover, the underexamined era and arena of women’s cultural history, that of the professional woman, in the Edwardian, First World War, and post-war periods, needs to be addressed. Of course cultural history is not organised in neat decades, but the 1900s–1920s offer a particularly exciting and interesting period. It is a time rich in change with notions of national identity and femininity. From women in hitherto maledominated professions, and women called into professional and public service, a broad scrutiny of 90 autobiographies (plus 15 men’s autobiographies) was undertaken to guard against the possibility of selectivity or bias. From this, those representative of their profession and who occupy the centre of social, middle-class arenas and in short, they do not express radical positions, were selected. This will redress the balance of academic attention which has focused on the writings of women who took an extreme political position or who were in any way marginal, such as radical feminists, political activists or lesbians. From these, ‘common’ themes and identities surrounding professions, women’s role, marriage, families, social and cultural beliefs and so on will be examined. It will not be part of this study to enter either the disputed field of what does, or does not, constitute autobiographical writing, or to directly enter the debate as to whether autobiography should be classed as a fictional or a factual text. In reducing the parameters certain features of the autobiographies will need to be ignored as they do not fit into the schema. But this will provide clarity and allow space to incorporate omitted elements into a unified field of professional women’s writing. When I first began this book I entertained the possibility that somewhere there exists one theoretical model which would satisfactorily explain these texts. This turns out to have been a utopian fantasy. We can draw two conclusions from this; either the big models are inappropriate for non-fiction work or, which I think more likely, the hitherto unrecognised variety and complexity in this genre requires a little more fancy footwork on the methodology front. By virtue of rigorous

Introduction

11

and close textual analysis, visual methodology and memory work, a composite reading of the cultural competence and identity of these women will be produced. Although of late years textual reading has been deemed inadequate to the task of cultural analysis, it seems to me that a combination of textual and contextual analysis, which is historically specific, will be particularly fruitful in this case, and will avoid that doctrinaire narrowness which has afflicted much of the analyses of women’s writing. The structure of this book is divided into two parts. The first part is organised by profession, the second by theme. The reason for this is that I want to suggest that these testimonies of individual female lives will reveal shared patterns of female identity; the topics, attitudes and points of view expressed in a gender-specific manner. I want to ask whether there is a discursive consonance between these groups of professional women; and whether their perception of the significance of their cultural, professional events and activities will help us to reformulate our notion of what Raymond Williams called a: ‘structure of feeling [...] which is distinguishable from other social and semantic formations by its articulation of presence’.46 I then want to raise debate in the book to a higher level by constructing the second half along theoretical and thematic lines. In this section I want to ask the broader question; whether or not these different professional groups share a discourse and form of reference, and if they do what the consequences of that will be for the understanding of their experiences. Each of the first five chapters has a single profession as its starting point. I begin with the ‘closed’ lives of Headmistresses. I want to enquire whether their frame of reference was restricted by convention, by confinement, by gender hegemony and by institutionalisation. The doctors, although operating within the confines of hospitals and male protocol, had the advantage of more contact with the general public of both sexes, and colleagues who were both male and female. My interest here is to question whether this broader base of contact would be apparent in their autobiographies; in content or in form. The nurses and VADs discussed in Chapter 4, in the main, were from cosseted, middle-class backgrounds. Thrust into war zones and military hospitals, they cared solely for men, in extreme circumstances. In the ‘Field’ they relied on their own resourcefulness. However, would the demands of articulating their experiences involve them in unusual forms of selfcensorship and a struggle to find a vocabulary which evoked their involvement?


For artists and practitioners, social and cultural boundaries were far more flexible, but would the divide between artists who operated in private and those that performed in public have a marked difference in their recording of their experiences? Finally, in Chapter 6, my inquiry into the women novelists, autobiographies needs a different emphasis. As wordsmiths, would they exhibit concern for the demands and presentation of ‘truth’ as given? I intend to investigate the patterning in their approach to subjects of a highly personal and emotional nature. As can be deduced from this brief summary, the five chapters develop from an analysis of lives that vary in significant ways. The different subjects that are pursued had primacy within each profession, and rose from the texts themselves and hopefully were not determined by any inductive design on my part. In the second part of the book, Chapter 7, ‘Frontispiece Images’, Chapter 8, ‘Prefaces, Forewords and Introductions’, and Chapter 9, ‘Silences’, address elements in autobiographical texts which are traditionally ignored. Chapter 7 asks, ‘Why autobiographers select a specific image to represent them?’ and how this idiosyncratic image, that is a rich source for cultural analysis, affects the reading of the text. I shall analyse these signs by using methods derived from Roland Barthes.47 Prefaces and Introductions, in tandem with photographs, are powerful in producing a first impression, and as such need close examination. The chapter questions whether there is any accord or contrast between the professions at the margins of their books. The chief aim in ‘Silences’ is to find a way in which silence, in its many forms, can be constructively analysed and shown to be as informative as the written word. Words are the signposts towards an understanding, but if words are supplemented with an analysis of silences, will a more profound and accurate account emerge? Chapter 10, ‘Self and Identity’ and Chapter 11, ‘Memory and Accuracy’ are very closely linked, and build upon the work undertaken in Chapters 8 and 9. In ‘Self and Identity’ I want to make a case for the usefulness of autobiography in historical research. The problematic concept of histoire de mentalités, initiated by the school of Annales in France, is germane to my work. Periods of history and culture have been deemed to have certain characteristic mental structures.48 I want to examine these autobiographies to ascertain whether there is accord or discord between different professional subcultures. Given that the findings from this chapter were assembled from the memories of these women, it is of prime importance to establish whether memory can be acknowledged as a reliable and accurate resource. In Chapter 11 I will

Introduction

13

be drawing selectively and cautiously on work from psychology practitioners to connect an analysis of discourse with studies on ‘memory work’, to make a case for the reliability and accuracy of memory recall. Of course we cannot undertake an analysis of women writers’ culture without a rudimentary understanding of social constraints which underpinned their creativity and productions. At the risk of seeming simplistic, it is worth including here a brief synopsis of the major social and legislative determinants which affected women’s professional lives. The periodisation of cultural history is of course quite different from the periodisation of social history. It makes perfect sense for the social historian to organise his or her analyses around major social events such as the First World War or the death of Queen Victoria. But for the cultural historian, the cycles of innovation and change are differently structured and sometimes take place significantly after the event. They have patterns of repetition or use retrospection to follow their own laws. The autobiographers who inform my research were born within the period from the 1870s to early 1890s, so it would be reasonable to assume that they would be aware of the influence of the fin de siècle, the Aesthetic Movement and the emergence of the phenomenon of the ‘New Woman’ in the 1880s and 1890s. In some respects the New Woman was a journalistic and literary creation rather than an actual social type. According to Sally Ledger, she: ‘had a multiple identity. She was, variously, a feminist activist, a social reformer, a popular novelist, a suffragette playwright, a woman poet; she was also often a fictional construct’.49 Needless to say, this was a stereotype to which few women conformed. However there was a kernel of truth in this for the new generation of women for whom marriage did not have to be the sole aim. Education and employment paved the way for the removal of some of the traditional ties of home and upbringing.50 During the last third of the nineteenth century women had entered the universities, had sat on school boards, continued to be guardians of the poor, had franchise in local elections and a large number of middle-class women had joined the work force. Change was being demanded for and by women.51 Essentially, sexual and economic emancipation gave a material reality to changing male/female relations.52 This was the arena of rapid change that some women could enter into and become part of the first generation of their chosen profession.53 According to Hobsbawm, some degree of women’s emancipation was probably necessary for middle-class fathers, as they could not all support


their daughters if they did not marry or work.54 In the late Victorian period almost one in three of all adult women were single and one in four would never marry.55 By 1911 this figure had reached a peak of some 1,330,000 single women.56 In the press they were described as ‘excess’ or ‘surplus’ women.57 The careers open to the middle-class, teaching, nursing, clerical work and work in the social service were not well paid, but by 1911 three-quarters of single women were in paid work. Although middle-class women’s aspirations and position had changed during the decades before 1914, by 1914 few women had advanced through the gap into the professions although, in principle, the way was now open.58 The higher professions were mainly barred to women. There were still only 553 women doctors in Britain in 1912 and women were excluded from the upper ranks of the civil service, the law, and accountancy. On two fronts, education had played a large part in women’s bid for independence. In Britain, there was no secondary school system before 1902. The number of girls’ schools in 1904/1905 was 89, and by 1913/1914 it had increased to 349.59 It therefore follows that there was an increased demand for women teachers. But only a minority would go on to graduate from women’s colleges at Oxford, Cambridge and London universities. This great growth in secondary and higher education paved the way for professional careers in teaching. Other, less easily quantifiable changes, lay in the greater freedom of movement young women had attained. They could go dancing, join touring and mountaineering clubs, there was mixed bathing, and entertainment had taken on a new medium with 3,500 ‘picture palaces’ in existence by 1914.60 This created a surge in consumerism, which both fuelled women’s importance as customers and generated a substantial number of jobs for them.61 These freedoms were replicated in the changing fashion. Women’s dress was looser and more flowing, hair was shorter. Once the First World War was in progress, social commentators were noting wartime changes, and the myth of women enjoying male ‘vices’ flourished in wartime popular culture.62 The freedom of the sexes to mix brought the difficult topics of sexuality, illegitimacy and contraception to the fore. Sexual liberation was a touchy subject, especially the issue of birth control and its implications for the future of the family and woman as mother. There was something like a ‘moral panic’ about birth control. This was exacerbated by the falling birth rate which, between mid 1870 and 1910, had fallen nearly 30 per cent.63 Between 1914–1917, in real terms, the birth rate had decreased by 200,000 and the illegitimate birth rate had increased

Introduction

15

by about 20,000.64 Fewer births were seen as a threat to the country in the lack of armed forces, lack of men, and decreased industrial labour force. Thus a woman who could choose not to have children would no longer be subordinate to a man. Contraception made her at once independent and mobile. Attitudes to sex are extremely difficult to uncover and sex without marriage was certainly still confined to an avant garde minority.65 Early writers on birth control, like Havelock Ellis, had their work seized, destroyed and they were prosecuted by the police.66 But this had begun to open up space for a ‘scientific’ discussion of sex.67 There followed Marie Stopes’s books; Wise Parenthood (1918) and Married Love (1920) which she wrote in an effort to make contraceptive devices respectable, and Mrs Sanger’s Family Limitation (1914) which championed sexual satisfaction.68 A large number, and probably the majority, of the emancipated middle-class women who opted for a career in a man’s world at this time were childless, or refused to marry and were celibate.69 The Suffrage movement was another contributing factor to the growing sense of moral crisis and monopolised the ‘centre stage’ of consciousness about changes in women’s lives. Indeed, suffrage support was seen as a measure of the public strength of organised feminism, but its limitations were that it appealed primarily to the middle class. The majority of women who joined did so, not to transform gender relations, or society as a whole, but to conserve the women’s sphere.70 There was also an Anti-Suffrage Campaign. But during the war all these groups suspended their campaigning, and in 1918 women over the age of 30 were enfranchised and women between the ages of 21 and 30 received the vote in 1928. The period 1900–1920 is marked by a coherent attempt by early psychologists to endeavour to get behind rational facades and to explore the unconscious self. Freud’s psychoanalytic investigations into the unconscious were gaining recognition. Writers and artists explored hidden depths of the psyche, Redon predicted the world of dreams, and primal inner states were portrayed by expressionists. This challenging and different world was the arena into which the autobiographers featured in this book were born. As first-generation professional, educated women, they would most likely be fully aware of these developments, which would not be without influence in their writing. In what follows I have opened up and extend the parameters of the existing critical methodology on women’s autobiography. My


detailed study will hopefully uncover important aspects of women’s consciousness in the period 1900–1920. My aim in this book has not been to champion these professional Edwardian women, but to listen to what they had to say, and to then maintain a critically observational distance in order to accurately present their history of consciousness. Yet I accept that no one volume can provide a definitive account.

2 Headmistresses

This study begins with headmistresses who were among some of the first women to gain professional teaching status. From the 12 headmistresses autobiographies examined I have selected four which exemplify the concerns of this group; some of which have been the focus of social historians.1 In these texts their common concerns range from those of vocation/service, religion, celibacy and spinsterhood, to teaching methods, curriculum and retirement issues. Hitherto, these issues have been an under-researched area. My intention is to examine the effect that institutionalisation has upon the content and style of their autobiographies, because at times the lives of these professional and articulate women can appear to be indistinguishable from the lives of their school. However, these headmistresses do not ‘disappear’ into the text; it becomes what Camilla Stivers calls the: ‘construction of the self through the narrative of others’.2 In these texts the ‘other’ is the school. This chapter will examine how the restrictions, social, cultural and professional – impinged on these pioneering women. The work of philosopher and theorist Michel Foucault will be of use although at times Foucault’s ideas can appear to provide more problems than they solve. For this exploration the notion that: ‘Foucault’s work does not form a system [ ... ] it is a patchwork of studies’3 is an advantage, because as I suggested in the introduction, this analysis requires a bricolage of theories. Moreover, Foucault suggests that his theories should be used as a ‘toolbox’ and that the reader: is of course, free to make what he will of the book. [The Order of Things] ‘What right have I to suggest that it should be used in one way rather than another?’4 Therefore, whilst Foucault’s writing on discipline is not my sole resource here, several parts of his study on this will be useful. He observed that, in a modern society individuals are increasingly bound 17


by ‘disciplinary power’.5 This has relevance here due to the confined nature of headmistresses’ careers. Decades spent within institutional confines must, of necessity, construct people in certain ways and be reflected in the register of their writing. In their autobiographies, they appear to need adherence to male conventions but not to be self-promoting in the public sphere. This has engendered the use of the passive voice, which according to Camilla Stivers, is the accepted convention for men’s professional writing.6 Equally it is important to note the precise stage at which these conventions/boundaries are broken through and the way this breakthrough is presented. For this textual analysis it is necessary to briefly chronicle women’s education just prior to, and during the period 1900–1920. The focus will be upon a few key themes and a concentration on high school developments that illustrate the journey from the role of unqualified governess to that of the acquisition of the status of professional teacher and headmistress. During the 1880–1910 period there were many different school establishments, loosely divided by class. In 1867–1868 the Schools’ Inquiry Commission had noted that it was common for girls from upper-middle-class families to be educated at home by governesses, and daughters of prosperous, middle-class parents received schooling at home, with their brothers, until ten years old. Class divisions were found in boarding schools as well. The cheaper ones were favoured by the richer farmers and mine managers, and for the upper-class there were costly, fashionable boarding schools, for example, in London, Bath, Clifton and Brighton.7 Less structured schools were attended by the majority of lower middle-class girls for a couple of years and were small and privately run, where the proprietor was the founder and Principal.8 These diverse aspects of discipline and curricula led to variety and uncertain standard of schooling for girls and made them ripe for reform.9 One of the great difficulties which the earlier schools had faced was the lack of qualified teachers as many had considered formal training unnecessary, as there was a belief in a woman’s innate ability to teach.10 Many headmistresses had had no formal training and remained in their schools for a great many years. The most notable was probably Alice Olivey, headmistress of Hemdean House School from 1926–1972 who first started at the school as a pupil in 1902.11 Some initial inroads into professional recognition and training had been made when the Governesses Benevolent Institution (formed 1841) opened Queen’s College for Women in 1848.12 The Association of Headmistresses first

Headmistresses 19

met in 1874, and by 1894 the Association of Women Teachers had been formed. Reformers recognised that teacher training would pave the way for better education, for better salaries, and raise the social and professional status of this new brand of career-minded teachers. Indeed, these associations were landmarks in establishing the professional repute and became instrumental when conditions and pay standardisation, on the same terms as men, would also become an issue.13 By 1895, there were 53,000 certified teachers, of whom only 29,000 had received two years’ training in training colleges, the remainder held an Acting Teachers’ Certificate Examination.14 Mixed abilities of staff continued, in part due to the rapid expansion, and in part due to the demands of the women teachers themselves. Headmistress Lilian Faithfull described the mixture of teaching abilities, at her first post, at the Royal Holloway College: two men, non-resident, Professors of Classics and Mathematics, and eight women, of whom one or two were of middle-age and had had experience in school teaching or as governesses, and in some cases had gone up late in life to Oxford or Cambridge. They were ripe scholars and trained teachers, but for the rest we were very young [ ... ] we were but a few years in advance of our students.15 The greatest numbers of unqualified teachers were to be found in the private schools and their experiences were often very unpleasant.16 Prior to the 1900s young women paid for some kind of teacher training by working in day-schools. Once trained the average pay was £100 a year, but could be considerably lower if board and room were available.17 In some schools, without a supplementary income, there would be little material comfort. Amy Barlow recorded that Bryn-y-mor, in the pre-war period, treated the mistresses so badly that: Breakfast was invariably watery porridge [ ... ] midday meal [eaten with the school] nothing more succulent than hard-boiled eggs, salad and a slice of round, red-skinned German sausage. I had no free periods during the week and my day began by reading prayers before breakfast. After prayers, breakfast and a rush to get one’s bed made, and one’s room tidied. We had lessons till 12 and then a break, unless one were [sic] taking games, until dinner. Then more lessons till tea-time and then prep.18


But few complained. Staff at all schools appeared to be in fear of dismissal and in desperate need of their jobs. Head teacher Elizabeth E. Lawrence and her friend M.F.S. planned to buy or set up their own school. She noted: ‘A Mr Donkin could not be induced to accept a post under £50 per annum’.19 Yet, another school caused her concern: ‘only £133 total salary for five mistresses’.20 In contrast, Sara Burstall, headmistress at Manchester High School recalled with pride: ‘It should be stated that we were well paid and were not discouraged by the deadening influences of a scale’.21 But after long years of penury and dedication there would be no pension.22 Pressure was placed upon teachers to retire in their mid-fifties. The Fisher Act of 1916 made some provision for pensions but it was the Burnham salary scale that made the greatest improvement to their lives.23 These new rates caused fees to go up, making it obvious that the middle-classes had had education cheaply from underpaid women, many of whom were from their own social class. In part, the enthusiasm for education was economically led. Few middle-class fathers and especially lower-middle-class families were sufficiently well-off to keep their daughters in comfort should they not marry.24 Lilian Faithfull, Principal of Cheltenham Ladies College suggested that: ‘In a large family money was the chief reason for a career, not the desire for a new experience, nor even freedom’.25 According to Burstall: ‘The preparation of young women for self-support and for useful work to the community became in this period more than ever an obvious duty. There was, therefore, much greater public interest in girls’ education, and funds were available as never before’.26 But the idea of unmarried, middle-class women pursuing meaningful paid work, outside the home, still lingered on as unfeminine.27 With this prejudice, for the new generations of university-educated women, teaching was the only outlet without odium. Changing the model of any institution in society is a precarious enterprise, and these pioneering headmistresses had to be careful that they did not commit any infringements in the curriculum, particularly on the rules of ladylike behaviour for their girls. Parental fear that intellectual education would make a woman into a ‘bluestocking’ impacted on the curriculum.28 Some High Schools felt the need to include the: ‘ “scientific principles” underlying domestic management’ rather than emphasise the practical skills of housekeeping.29 In fact all these schools had to ‘tread’ the careful line of what Sara Delamont calls ‘double conformity’.30 That is, they complied with the demands of providing both male academic standards and rigid codes of ladylike behaviour.31

Headmistresses 21

Formed in 1872, the Girls Public Day School Company set up undenominational high schools with the aim of providing a first-class education in day-schools for girls of all classes. 32 The Church founded Anglican high schools and endowed high schools were followed by grammar schools and the Municipal secondary girls’ schools. 33 The North London Collegiate School founded by Miss Buss, became the model for high schools. Cheltenham Ladies’ College opened in 1854 and was seen to have a similar impact on girls’ public boarding schools to that of the North London Collegiate on high schools. Cheltenham emphasised that in order to remain exclusive and elite institutions, the clientele were to be daughters of gentlemen. This set them apart from the more socially diverse High Schools. The curriculum included needlework, but overall was modelled on that of the boys’ public schools. For some parents this was too advanced. Although by 1863, pupils who were entered for Oxford or Cambridge Local Examinations also studied mathematics, science, Latin and Greek. 34 Interestingly, after 16 many more girls than boys stayed on in state secondary education and between 1870 and 1913 university places tripled. 35 These reforms were seen by some as a challenge to the new imperialism. One focus of attention was female physical deterioration and the falling birth rate, which were all too easily seen as the fault of higher education and the opportunities for women to have a professional career. B.L. Hutchins, a journalist writing in 1912, advanced theories disputing that: ‘professional advancement [ ... ] will draw women away from matrimony and motherhood, and lower the average fitness of the mothers of the race’.36 Hutchins collected statistics of married and unmarried women, self-supporting or not, by age and class to establish the facts. It emerged that: ‘the demand for Higher Education and wider opportunity has arisen as a consequence of the restricted prospects of marriage in the upper class [ ... ] The women’s education movement is being attacked on a priori grounds, and with very little knowledge of the real facts’.37 These objections would inevitably discourage the more timid female. Faithfull writes: I think there can be little doubt that indirectly the higher education of women discouraged marriage in as far as it gave to women an alternative which had none of the dullness or limitations of home life, and much of the variety and opportunity for initiative which would not normally be found in domesticity.38

22


Burstall in the Record Book of her school registers notes: ‘The Sixth Form had twenty-one girls; two-thirds of these went on to a university. More than half of these girls are now married; indeed, our old girls who go to college marry in greater proportion than those who do not’.39 In a similar vein, Arnold Bennett saw that only improvements for all concerned would accrue from the education of women. In accord with Burstall he writes that education would fit women as better companions to men and improve marriage for both sexes.40 He observed: ‘Girls marry later than they used to marry; therefore men also. I have heard expressions of wonder that economically independent girls should marry, not later, but at all’.41 Notwithstanding these advantages for pupils in late Victorian and Edwardian times, the headmistresses of the 1900s–1920s were confronted by many issues. The focus in this chapter is not on those issues which were featured in the common press, but those which appear to have an a priori position in headmistresses’ autobiographies. As girls and as pupils these highly respectable women would have been tutored in the importance of the feminine virtues of selflessness and service, and would have been given the expectation that they would marry. Therefore to pursue an academic role and to pursue a career where marriage was an impossibility would present a problematic image, because it was not one of traditional femininity. Early in her career Faithfull records that: ‘public opinion operated as a strong controlling force’.42 To mitigate this, ‘service’, ‘destiny’ and ‘calling’ became keywords as strategies which salved their consciences and steered public opinion away from unfavourable sentiment. Burstall identified her own and her peers’ teaching profession as: ‘our calling’.43 When appointed headmistress at Manchester she noted: ‘My service began [ ... ] and was destined to run to August 1924’.44 Similarly, reflecting on her appointment to Cheltenham, Faithfull writes: ‘There was great dignity and seriousness; and when I was summoned the second time, it was as if I had entered a church full of silent prayer [ ... ] it seemed to me that I was ordained to high and holy office, not merely elected to an important post’.45 Their ‘un-ladylike’ behaviour was ratified by holding ideas of their careers as a Divine calling; equating service in teaching as service to God.46 This concern for suitable conduct was always close to the surface when writing about their ambitions to teach and have professional success, and fomented this elevated, moral and religious lexis came into use only when writing about their ambitions to teach and have professional success.

Headmistresses 23

Self-advancement had been considered a wholly masculine trait. In order to camouflage the ambitions they had for professional success, these autobiographers utilised a passive narrative form which would deflect any appearance of active negotiation. For example, Faithfull recognised that she should move schools to further her career and wrote: ‘it was borne in on me’.47 For Burstall, when she applied for advancement: ‘I found myself in Manchester, not by my own will but by that overpowering circumstance which some call Fate others Divine Providence’.48 The use of ‘borne’ and ‘found’ made them appear the passive recipients of an action rather than the initiators. Furthermore it promoted their selfless image and militated against charges of being unfeminine. Burstall’s appointment was of immense importance to her, but she was not prepared to face public ire and say ‘I want to be ... ’. She preferred to avow fate as the instrument of her success, and to define her experience as a ‘Christian calling’. Again the conflation of the Christian process with that of the educational process raised the status and helped with the projection of a professional career. What is of interest here is not only the use of religious phraseology. When they list these incidents of personal achievement, there is a marked élan in their writing which is not witnessed at any other period in their narratives. When Burstall’s appointment was announced: I felt like a tree in a flooded river, borne on by some power not my own to an unknown end. I might have been fearful had I known all the difficulties there were to encounter and all the stormy seas I was to traverse. It was a great adventure: and like one in a dream obeying some master suggestion.49 Such striking narrative occurrences rupture the earlier and subsequent balanced style. The measured and didactic tones give way to betray her true disposition at this juncture. The reader is assailed by a wild metaphoric onslaught. Selected as headmistress, a course she set in motion, she impresses upon the reader that as the ‘tree’ she had been overawed. The intermingling of mythical adventure and biblical vision make it unclear as to which force is the ‘master’. The mythical ‘stormy seas’ and ‘master suggestion’ give way to the established precepts of religion and teaching as coterminous: ‘real work ... a preparation’. There is a clash between the narrative of her private desires and the narrative of her public image. Burstall’s attempt to subvert attention from her forthright


act of ambition, but at the same time present her joy in her success, did not allow for the climactic impact of the dramatic change in the pulse of her writing. The overwhelming excitement in achieving her ambition had interfered with her presentation of correct behaviour. But of equal importance is that this invasion of vitality is only recorded at the outset of their careers. If, as Foucault suggested in Discipline and Punish, the emergence of new organisations leads to an increase in hidden bureaucratic surveillance, then these headmistresses had shrugged this away when recording their remembrances of the outset of their careers. They were able to situate themselves to a time when they had not succumbed to this monitoring affect. But in order to write the main body of their autobiographies and refract charges of self-assuredness in their actions, they adopt and maintain a ‘masculine’ style which uses the passive voice. As professional writing aims at an invisibility and anonymity of gender, it would be a portal through which headmistresses could enter a discourse and be accepted. The formal, distilled, authoritative tone, syntax and lexis would mark the writer as professional and objective. In effect they could assert their competence, and because this style of writing was so widely used, they (and it) became in a sense less visible and genderless. An exception to Burstall, Faithfull and many other headmistresses is Frances Gray, First Mistress of St Paul’s Girls School. While reading The Spectator in January 1903 she saw an advertisement for a Headmistress of a new school for girls: I took it for granted that I was to apply for the post that was advertised [ ... ] I received letters from friends at Westfield College urging me to try [ ... ] I needed no urging. [ ... ] I had no premonition of success or failure; but I had a very strong feeling that I must [ ... ] make some effort to enter this new field of work. It has always interested me to observe how many experiences and how many kinds of experiences may be crowded into one life if we are prepared to accept and to use every scrap that comes to us.50 Yet it is this forthright confidence which the majority of others lack that consolidates my assertions above. Gray had experienced life outside the school confines. She had travelled. Importantly, she had worked alongside men and within the community at large. Unlike so many other women teachers, she had not dwelt solely with women within the confines of scholastic institutions. Gray did not suffer the impact of

Headmistresses 25

isolation because she made herself part of a larger community. She had escaped being stifled and subsumed. This is one of many occasions that show Gray as representative of a minority that had not yielded to the hierarchical observational systems posited by Foucault.51 Dominant systems cannot exercise total control; neither can they tailor their systems of control to meet the exact situation of each person within a group. Foucault noted that hierarchical mechanisms operate: ‘not by differentiating individuals, but by specifying acts according to a number of general categories’.52 Gray was both ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ of her school institution. Thereby, the hierarchical observation and normalising judgements noted by Foucault impinged less on Gray. Her assurance and boldness are a direct result of her energy and selfpossession. In her chapter, ‘The Vocation of the Teacher’ she raised what she considered to be an inherent fallacy, that ‘two’ lives were necessary. The one: ‘the outer kapelistic [sic] life of drudgery, the other the inner and cherished life of the spirit’.53 For Gray there was no divided mind. She energetically denied the suggestion often put to teachers that: ‘we are supposed to act vigorously during term-time in our vocation among our pupils and to be “ourselves” when we go on holidays’.54 In fact Gray is one of the few headmistresses that acknowledged that they had holidays. She wrote about the fullness of a teacher’s life which she found: ‘as satisfyingly, in the schoolroom as in any other region to which his destiny may send him [ ... ] it is a mark from those who are truly called [ ... ] be wise and seek until you find the work that brings lasting happiness’.55 At this juncture it is worth noting the different attitude of teachers who worked in small, privately owned establishments. For Amy Barton, after being awarded her B.A., there was resignation to the fact that she must teach: ‘Well, there was no choice. One taught or did nothing’. 56 As for it being a calling, neither Barton nor her three friends wanted this profession. ‘Teach?’ her friend Bennie wrote in a letter, ‘I’d rather sweep a crossing’. ‘Nobody wanted to teach.’ Another friend disliked the school so much that she habitually headed her letters ‘Hell’. 57 Similarly, Faithfull found the new enthusiasm for teaching careers, as vocational, had been short-lived: ‘our own enthusiasm, made us eager to get posts and content to keep them for years. All this has changed now’. 58 Management of these schools required rules and regulations and as such, these mechanisms appear to have had a deleterious effect on the headmistresses. Responsible for everything under their control, they


were in a particularly invidious position, placed as they were with governors and parents on the one hand, and staff and pupils on the other hand. For example, observations by staff of Edith Creak, first head of King Edward VI School in Birmingham, comment on this heavy toll. At the beginning of her career Creak was noted for her joie de vivre and sense of humour but by the end she had become domineering and irritable; a trait that appeared especially in the higher-ranking Public Day Schools.59 It is in Marion Cleeve’s writing that the most coherent example of the school’s encompassing grip is illustrated: ‘The school dominated me; indeed it dominated us all. More or less slowly, but very surely, it – or they – got us. We came to think as they – or it – thought and did as we were told’.60 To write of the school as a separate, personified unit bears witness to how deeply embedded in their psyche the school was. The pupils would be subjected to the rules and regulations for maybe three to five years. But for the staff it could be a life-time of restrictions. Cleeve’s comments are very telling of the insidious force of a relatively closed community. Indeed, the prolonged exposure to restrictions evidently had a duel function. By this I mean that the techniques and procedures to coerce pupils to behave in a certain manner were devised by the headmistresses in order to free themselves from disorderly conduct and disorderly daily lives. But these parameters would need to be adhered to by staff as example. Foucault’s theories on discipline are particularly useful here. He stresses that the same disciplinary mechanisms employed by prisons govern the daily functioning of factories, hospitals, armies and schools. All these institutions rely on strict hierarchies, normalising judgements and repetitive tasks to control timetables and space.61 It follows that year upon year under the aegis of set regimes; the rules would have a repressive influence and be internalised on the psyche and discourses of their inmates. E.M. Butler, teacher, Voluntary Aid Detachments (VAD) and schoolgirl at Cheltenham recalls how, after some misdemeanour, any ‘crimes’ would be dealt with during assembly. For one particular infringement, no one came forward, the Principal condemned the whole school as: ‘besmirched, and every individual member of it was under a fearful cloud, fallen from favour with the principal and by implication from divine grace. Silly though it sounds, the emotional pressure behind the words was great’.62 She noted that this occurred every morning for weeks an appeal: ‘to the spirit that glorifies the institution at the expense of the individual. They appealed to the herd-instinct as well’. 63 What

Headmistresses 27

was in operation here is what Foucault called the ‘normalising judgement’: ‘The workshop, the school, the army were subject to a whole micro-penalty of time (lateness, absences, interruptions of tasks), of activity [ ... ], of behaviour (impoliteness, disobedience)’.64 The enabling of a commonality in group power in effect punishes nonconformity and is restrictive to both recipient and controller: ‘the penalty of the norm’.65 In effect, non-conformity is being punished. To lead by example, the headmistresses must submit to this power of normalisation. For these women this normalisation would be particularly arduous, given that they had removed themselves from society’s notion of ‘normal’ women by pursuing a career. These self-administered controls could rebound on them. My point here is to show the pervasiveness of the school-body as an isolated, authoritarian society. This is pivotal to the main thrust of this chapter; the power of these institutions over headmistresses and the way in which this is prefigured in the writing of their autobiographies. The great majority of headmistresses lived on the school premises and had little external social life. When Faithful succeeded Miss Beale she was dejected to discover that the Principal’s rooms were surrounded by classrooms in the centre of the building: ‘which added to my melancholy’.66 She found that the drawing-room had no outlook and from the dining-room the view was on to a corridor. But to: ‘Miss Beale it had meant everything to live in the midst of her work [ ... ] it did not affect her at all’.67 There are two issues here. The implied layout of the Principal’s accommodation with those of the class room appears to be similar to that of the Benthamite Panopticon prison system discussed by Foucault. The use of ‘hierarchical observation’ or ‘the power that acts by means of general visibility’ relies on architecture designed: ‘to permit an internal, articulated and detailed control’.68 In other words, Miss Beale had centred herself within a circle of classrooms. From there, her possible observation effects power, as the subject is potentially visible. The guard is also the prisoner. Foucault maintained that in making people visible to scrutiny, it in turn made it possible to alter them.69 But it also appeared to alter the headmistresses as well. It left Faithfull: ‘full of depression.’70 Miss Beale and Miss Faithfull clearly had different needs of social and emotional space. For Faithfull, Cheltenham Ladies College as: ‘a little world of itself’ was a suffocating influence on her, and in time she did move out to a cottage a few miles from the college.71 This manner of enforced control was observed by ‘outsiders’. Dame Katherine Furze, writes of her sister, comparing their lives: ‘mine was so free, while she, was very much

28


tied to the grindstone [ ... ] I see her as a lark in a cage, her wings quivering to carry her up into the sky and sunlight’.72 Isolation through office led, for many, to loneliness. One incident recorded by Cleeve whereby a young girl physically shakes her shoulder to gain her attention when allocating parts in a play initiates unexpected feelings: ‘If I were to describe how delighted I was about this, I should expose myself to the charge of sentimental exaggeration’.73 She appears disproportionately concerned with this incident; even to the point of singing the Hallelujah Chorus or: ‘if a street urchin, I might have turned a surprising number of somersaults [ ... ] as I was Marion Cleeve, I betook my prim person to the comparative seclusion of my room, sat down, laughed a good deal and cried a little’.74 This is a clear example of how reined-in her feelings were. The void in Cleeve’s life is so raw and emotionally stretched that the slightest show of affection renders her unstable, and in fact for some, their stoic forbearance brought illness. Octavia Wilberforce, a doctor writing of her experiences at Graylingwell psychiatric hospital Chichester, is surprised by the number of women that had formerly taught: ‘Why should teaching send you dotty? Continual hard work, no future, no ambitions, bad pay, eh? It’s the inelastic who go off [ ... ] One [ ... ] forty odd, and the most lamentable creature I’ve ever seen, mentally, morally, physically. Harmless but a wreck. [sic]’75 As Wilberforce noted, those who are fragile go to the wall. Foucault believed that continued observance permitted: ‘an internal, articulated and detailed control – to render visible those who are inside it’.76 That is to say, the external constraints leave their impressions in the soft tissue of the psyche. At this stage Foucault saw only benefits and that everyone were similarly treated. But as Anthony Elliott noted: ‘In time Foucault came to admit that surveillance is not something that settles upon all persons equally’.77 At one end of the scale you have the ‘dotty’ teacher, at the other end you find the more robust like Francis Gray. Gray approved of unified control: The form of government that I believe to be the best for schools is beneficent despotism. Where the interests of forty or fifty mistresses, four hundred and fifty girls, several hundreds of parents and a considerable number of servants are at stake it is convenient to have unified control, but I regard autocracy as not only convenient but in the highest degree useful in education of girls.78

Headmistresses 29

Gray’s openness in embracing hierarchal observation and normalising controls in fact confirms Foucault’s theories. Unlike many other headmistresses, Gray did not confine herself to the school. Her text is flavoured with lively reminiscences and mini-biographies of, to her, key figures in her life both male and female. She is far more involved in the community than has been revealed in other autobiographies; frequently writing of ‘friends of mine’ who vary from the Reverend Playfair, a working carpenter, Lady Airlie to that of a kitchen maid. Atypically, Gray alone mentions motherly care of young pupils. For example, a young child she had told off earlier in the day, she finds: ‘lying awake and perfectly wretched. I took her down to my fire and warmed her, for she was cold with misery [ ... ] as she sat in my lap while I rubbed her little feet with my warm hands’.79 These incidents show how Gray had remained mentally separate from her institution and maintained a healthy balance between her two ‘worlds’. Rather than consider the school environment as a reason for emotional problems, popular belief at this time attributed hysterical breakdowns to women who did not marry. As Chris Shilling notes: ‘The restraint of desire has traditionally been concerned with the regulation of female sexuality by systems of patriarchal power [ ... ] In the Victorian period in particular; women were seen as governed by their sexuality and reproductive functions, and properly confined to marriage and domestic sphere’.80 Women generally were not allowed both, and in fact worldly success was seen as unfeminine. Here the teaching profession was caught in a double-bind. As untrained governesses and teachers, they met with patriarchal and societal approval. For women to have undertaken vocational training and to have established a professional body implied an active desire to work rather than ‘work’ being an unpleasant necessity thrust upon them.81 Moreover, in this choice of spinsterhood and celibacy highly emotive responses were generated because, unlike their male counterparts: ‘celibacy, actual or potential, was the price paid for entry into male fields of secondary and higher education’.82 They appeared to be actively rejecting marriage in favour of a career. Burstall does not see spinsterhood as a conflicting criterion to becoming a teacher but something to be contended with. She writes: ‘A girl’s teacher is, in general, a student and a spinster – not a woman leading the normal ordinary woman’s life’.83 The idea that it is not a ‘normal’ woman’s life is telling. It appears that the efforts to gain qualified, professional status, with a move from the insecure realm of the unqualified governess, caused a greater separation from society’s expectation of


womanhood and the feminine than perhaps some women were able to accept. This doctrine would cause teachers and headmistresses, in particular, feelings of guilt, because their personal ambition necessitated the rejection of family life. Stewardship of a high profile girls’ school exacted a high price. It can be seen from the above the intricate pattern of conflicting standards that these headmistresses had to negotiate. Burstall wrote in 1907: On the qualifications of teachers [ ... ] which cannot be tested but which are personal to the woman, are far more vital. A love of children, strength and sincerity of character, inexhaustible patience, simplicity [sic] of thought [ ... ] Fortunately many women possess it by nature; and thus, it is that teaching is the woman’s profession.84 This recognition of a woman’s natural capabilities is not balanced by any empirical experiences. It recognised and utilised the loving and nurturing aspect of women’s psyche. But, these new large establishments denied professional headmistresses an important part of caring; the intimacy of tactile expression, which was part of the smaller, ‘family’ run establishments. Furthermore, unlike their male counterparts, they were forbidden marriage as well as a career. On the one hand their profession encouraged the inherent maternal instincts but on the other hand, the profession necessitated curtailment and distance from physical display of care. Thus it appears that, provided women’s teaching ambitions remained within the confines of unqualified governess and that of unqualified schoolteacher, society found this an acceptable career. But as soon as they achieved professional status, their ‘normal’ feminine instincts were called into question. Because these headmistresses concentrated on the desire and need to appear as public, professional, celibate women, it left them open to prejudice and charges of strangeness.85 For example, the writer Bertha Ruck commented on schoolgirls she knew: ‘Which of them I wonder, have become school-marms or taken the veil? (Often Synonymous) [sic]’.86 Their celibate life fostered the illusion of there being a necessary and crippling choice between career and marriage. Vicinus wrote: ‘The sexual revolution placed new strains upon marriage and pushed the unmarried to question their state as sexually abnormal. Single women had no weapons with which to fight the labelling of their friendships as deviant because they understood sexual activity as heterosexual’.87

Headmistresses 31

Faithfull looked back over 40 years and wrote at some length on schoolgirl friendships and those of staff. She believed that friendships formed at school and college, whether by men or women, would rank highest of the friendships: ‘They are like no others.’88 But she also recognised that many school girl friendships: ‘degenerate into a sentimental devotion, good neither for the worshipper nor for the one worshipped’.89 Her commanding narrative clearly indicates her intention of laying-to-rest suggestions of deviant behaviour. She urged against these ‘follies’ and warned against ‘absurd relationships’ which could cause a ‘loss of dignity’.90 What is of interest here is that when she strongly constructs a brief outline of her own ‘close’ friendship her lexis echoes descriptions of an androgynous hero: ‘built on generous lines, and body and spirit were finely matched. She looked as if she could lead armies. [ ... ] Tall and handsome [ ... ] radiantly alive and enjoying [sic] She was the best tennis-player; no mean violinist’.91 This unnamed friend continued in Faithfull’s life for over 40 years built on: ‘deep admiration and understanding’.92 It appears that Faithfull knew of the charges against these all-women institutions and was at pains to present a clear rebuttal. From the1900s the ideas of Freud and sexologists such as Edward Carpenter had gained more currency amongst lay people. Suspicious of the spinster, these new ideas challenged and placed a different interpretation on all-women institutions. As Vicinus noted, ‘for many single women, friendship was seen as [ ... ] validating the decision not to marry, to have a career. [ ... ] Quite unselfconsciously women referred to their relationships as marriages. [ ... ] Sexual passion, if not physical sexuality, characterised a special friendship’.93 According to Sheila Jeffreys, a woman who was heterosexual, unmarried and remained a virgin was repressing her sexuality. This would make her neurotic and unfit to live happily. Conversely, if she was homosexual, she was an invert and as such a dangerous woman.94 Either way, headmistresses of high-ranking schools faced censor in their unnatural, cloistered, single-sex environs. For others in the teaching profession, the ability to earn a living and to be free from marriage was a positive advantage. Barlow had a string of what she referred to as ‘amatory episodes’ which stand out in her narrative because of the highly emotive language used to express her dreadful fear of being drawn into marriage: ‘Whenever a “suitor” appeared on the scene, I felt like a wild cat, spitting, scratching and biting, being dragged on a chair into a cage. I fled ... such was my horror of being trapped’.95 So powerful are her emotions that her tone, style and


language change. Earlier, Barton’s remembrances were modulated by humour and a joie de vivre that did not change with time. She: ‘had no time for “philandering” ’.96 Various encounters were described in combative terms: ‘cut, thrust, parry ... fencing bouts ... .’ others follow in the form of clichés, ‘ships that pass in the night’.97 The language of romance appeared ‘foreign’ to her. To articulate her feelings Barlow had to resort to the combative and ‘Boys Own’ language of men. As a child she read The White Chief, a story about Red Indians, Sir Walter Scott and R.L. Stevenson, which appear to have accumulated as part of her cultural competence. In the last male/female encounter she believed that they were getting on so well she suggested that maybe they had ‘met in a previous existence, perhaps as slaves chained together on the same bench in a Roman galley’.98 These unusual and awkward formulations within a sado-masochistic analogy constitute a different texture in the narrative. Barlow, in what she had imagined as the ‘battle field’ of masculine/ feminine relationships, had appropriated the male, dominant position. She had assumed an active role as she: ‘disposed of these suitors’. and had taken mastery over the situation.99 She recorded: ‘I fled, such was my horror of being trapped’ and ‘I felt I must do something drastic’.100 She was actively taking the initiative to remove herself from the experience. Self-reflexively she noted: I had behaved very badly. I had, but I am sure it was the best thing to do, I was then about thirty. After that-nothing. [sic] Romance seemed to pass me by in disgust. Then, at last, at long last, I met W.J., but then it was too late, much too late.101 Tantalisingly her unvarnished immensely articulate narration ends in silence. The pace and intensity of her writing is slower, repetitive and passive and poetic: ‘pass me by [ ... ] at last, long last [ ... ] too late, much too late’.102 These last sentences seem to be tinged with regret and wistfulness. Barlow’s candour in writing of her emotional gamut with men is unusual. However, similar to Gray, she has had contact with males all her life and is especially unusual in that she worked with men in a boys’ school. For her, the experiences were just another aspect of her character and her life. Social architecture, institution and societies’ expectations can affect the writing of headmistresses; all of which are betrayed in their narratives. But they are not the only controls which influenced these professional women. A striking feature of these new schools was the

Headmistresses 33

extent to which they were sponsored, organised, patronised, governed and controlled by men. This ruling extended even to the Governesses Benevolent Institution.103 However enlightened these men may have been, they would still assert a repressive control. Cleeve reflected that during 25 years: ‘When I first took office the hand of tradition lay heavy upon me. It was a long time before I dared to be myself’.104 Her concern about her femininity is foregrounded here by her exhibiting her fear of patriarchal approbation. Far into her career, headmistress Marion Cleeve recalled a meeting with the governors of her school at which she had spoken out. It was made plain to her, in a mildly sarcastic tone, that: ‘We all have learnt to regard self-assertion with an indulgent eye.’105 Although powerful among her female staff and female pupils, within the boundaries of a male dominated Board of Governors, headmistresses were expected to be subdued and submissive. In later years, Cleeve had learnt that by outwardly accepting the restrictive practices of patriarchy she: ‘gained a reputation for getting [her] own way’.106 Apparently muted by strictures of patriarchal expectation, Cleeve was not erased entirely from governing. ‘I forbore to interrupt [ ... ] and lived on the best of terms with my governing body, being given all I asked for – I was careful to keep within the bounds.’107 Unlike an unnamed fellow headmistress who told her that: ‘the chief quality needed for success in municipal life was a low cunning [sic]. I should have said it was servility of soul or, as Snellham phrased it, willingness to kow-tow [sic].’108 But headmistresses did break out from time to time. Burstall remembers at one Governors’ meeting, when asked about scholarships and educational principles: ‘For once I lost patience and broke out: “Don’t ask me about educational principles: I have long abandoned them. I seek only to administer regulations to do the least possible harm to my children.” ’109 Sadly, after this discharge Burstall noted that: ‘an inward distress ensued, and all joy in work vanished.’110 Burstall’s temerity in challenging existing gender arrangements caused her unease. Interestingly, Cleeve ended her autobiography with an account of hostilities from her final Chairman of Governors. They disagreed over a schoolmistress. All the reader is given is: ‘Hostilities began.’ The Chairman appeared to use: ‘a sledgehammer made of Pigiron’s heaviest and I staggered out of the arena murmuring in Mr Henley’s most inelegant, horribly hackneyed, but perfectly irresistible phrasing, “My head is bloody but unbowed.” ’111 In the one fight that she recorded, she was rendered mute and the reader is left to conjecture the meaning of the

34


silence. What is evident from these incidents is that although the male governors dominate, they cannot exert total control. Foucault wrote that power is always interactive. He offers the notion that although the effects of power are described in: negative terms: it “excludes”, it “represses”, it “censors”, it “abstracts”, it “masks”, it “conceals”. In fact, power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth.112 Foucault is asserting that there are different subject positions in the power nexus. These headmistresses were brought up in an era when women were expected to be attentive and listen. But they also appear to understand that there is a power in listening, as well as speaking. Burstall’s and Cleeve’s behaviour, when meeting with the Governors, could be read as a renunciation of their opinions. Rather, I believe that they are withholding agreement through their silence. The spaces of silence and talk are dependent on one another, and silent observation and listening are often ‘rituals of truth’ for women. If we move away from the ‘prison-house’ view of women’s language and women as observers, we can assert that the silent observer or listener has an equal and sometimes a superior position, in relation to the talker. This I would suggest is the position of these headmistresses. After 30 plus years of service, retirement loomed for many. Some 50 per cent of headmistresses included this experience in their writing. For the rest, we can only conjecture the reason why retirement was omitted. For some, their experience as a teacher and headmistress only had relevance, and others wrote before retirement. Patriarchy deemed women’s retirement at 50 as appropriate. Burstall notes that Professor Sadler in his 1905 address to the Head Mistresses Conference at Winchester recommends: ‘That in all but very exceptional cases, a woman ought to give up her work as a teacher in a school when she reaches the age of fifty-five.’113 Gray compounds this notion: ‘as my elderly brother said when I consulted him, it is a great mistake to stay too long. In teaching especially, age is a handicap: grey hair makes a barrier between the pupil and oneself.’114 The reality of retirement took two distinct courses. Headmistresses such as Cleeve and Burstall viewed retirement as a new start. Cleeve’s autobiography ends abruptly, but the reader is left with the unwritten prospect of a soaring anticipation: ‘And so to Innisfree.’115 Its name symbolically represents Cleeve’s expectation for her future, but more tellingly the notion that her career was a time of

Headmistresses 35

constraint and restriction. In that one quoted place name, the reader experiences the idea of deliverance and independence. Burstall is more expansive, she dedicates a chapter to her retirement thus far. She reflected on the positive nature of the older, educated woman: when I came to retire from active service did I realise how happy old age might be. I have never been so happy since childhood. (my italics) as I have been in these years of freedom, and that is why the brief record of it may justly be called ‘Autumn Sunshine’.116 She justifies her comment in practical terms; the Superannuation Act of 1919 which provided comfort, time to do unpaid public service, time to travel and see friends and: ‘enough time to enjoy some measure of family life.’117 Again, freedom is the prize. For Faithfull, who retired in 1921 after 35 years’ service, the future held less assurance. She wrote this autobiography nine months after retiring and admits to being uncertain of her emotions. The chapter is simply called ‘Retirement’ and begins with an objective analysis of the pros and cons of this decision. Later, she trusts that the ‘melancholy’ will not last but that there was an ‘intolerable emptiness in life – the moorings gone, the landmarks removed, one’s occupations changed in a moment’.118 She can intellectualise the benefits of the freedom to read at will, no timetabling and a freedom that is unending. This is the problem. Years of teaching and familiar routine had created a dependency on a structure that was no longer accessible. The anticipation of the freedom to read, talk and travel whenever she wanted was made sweeter because it had to be earned and taken in snatches: ‘But it is in the very consciousness of untold wealth lies the sting. The freedom that was bound to end was far more precious than this new liberty. When working life ceases, the holidays cease too’.119 She found it hard not to be needed. ‘And so, as one shuts the door on the old life, a complete and absolute silence descends upon one, and it must be so. [ ... ] The silence is something like the silence of death.’120 In her final paragraph but one, Faithfull acknowledged that: ‘something must be found to be done, some new activity. One cannot sit down meekly with folded hands for the rest of one’s life’.121 I wrote above that Foucault came to recognise that surveillance power is not something that affects people equally. Thirty years of work within an institution had left markedly different perspectives for headmistresses. Some were able to flee their ‘chains’ and embrace a new life, whilst the regimented life had initially cowed others. The repetitive process had


created a dependence which was not wholly conscious. The hierarchal observation, the normalising judgements had a powerful effect on their internal experience and sense of self. It required energy to effect a transformation and renewed energy to sustain it. This was something that Faithfull began to appreciate after nine months ‘treading water’. The headmistresses’ narratives are characterised by their need to expose the concrete nature of their personal achievement, but women culturally were not expected to promote themselves. They were trying to change important boundaries for themselves and for forthcoming generations. But to initiate such changes could be risky and deemed a threat; not least because they tampered with the boundaries of ladylike behaviour. Their texts do not display tormenting self-doubts as educationalists. But as women within a patriarchal system, misgivings appeared as they struggled to be defined in their own terms and rebut male domination when the need arose. Nevertheless, they were strongly aware of the pivotal position they held; both for their chosen profession and for the teaching of following generations of career-minded young women. The strain of both the new role within society and the new role of headmistress in these newly formed secondary schools exacted a penalty. Put simply, in every society an individual is bound by power. The objective of this power in these schools was the smooth running and maintenance of the patriarchal status quo. Both these would exert pressure on headmistresses. As Faithfull writes: ‘The discipline has at times been condemned as too severe, and the repression greater than is at all necessary in these days.’122 Across the years the insidious repression was amplified in the subtle changes in their writing styles. Years of service gradually impinged on their richer and enthusiastic language to produce a drier, genderless, passive voice.

3 Women Doctors

The previous chapter on headmistresses showed women engaged in a career which had long been deemed acceptable by the public. Their struggle for this generation of headmistresses had been to gain professional status similar to that of their male counterparts. But a woman whose ambition was to be a doctor faced immense opposition. Teaching was acceptable but doctoring was unfeminine. Until Elizabeth Blackwell became the first woman doctor in 1849, women had been excluded from this profession.1 According to Eric Hobsbawm: ‘The hardest task was undoubtedly that of women who braved the entrenched resistance, institutional and informal, of men in organised professions, in spite of a small but rapidly expanding bridgehead they had established in medicine’.2 Hobsbawm recorded that there were around 20 women registered in 1891, 212 by 1901 and 447 by 1911.3 According to Carol Dyhouse, just before the First World War around 1,000 women were on the Medical Register and the 1914–1918 war ‘encouraged many more to qualify and the numbers doubled to 2,100 by 1921’.4 Women’s efforts to gain entrance to the medical profession were initially rebuffed on two main counts. The first had its origin in the male doctors’ fears of female incursion; they feared economic competition in an already overcrowded and depressed profession.5 The second was based on cultural definitions of the feminine and the implication was that medical training would harden and unsex women.6 ‘Victorians believed that a woman became unwomanly with knowledge of the world [whereas] a man could not truly be a man unless he had seen stripped bare the tree of forbidden fruit of knowledge of good and evil.’7 This notion of unsexing was broad-ranging in its scope. It questioned women’s physical capabilities, and expressed concerns that the effect of 37

38


studying anatomy and dissection of the human body would destroy women’s sensibilities. Also the prospects of candid discussion in mixed classes were raised. Over the years Dr Elizabeth Bryson noted the many times she had heard: ‘ “No, not a doctor!” from older, friendly, thoughtful men [ ... ] They feared the loss of something – delicacy? – modesty? – women should be protected from harsh things, the sordid facts of life’.8 But these shocked reactions could and did give way to open hostility particularly by medical men against ‘women who wanted to enter the field, not as midwives but as doctors. It was even whispered they were afraid! [of women]’.9 But from male students hostile reactions ran high, when in 1870 outside the Surgeons’ Hall of the Royal Infirmary the male students jostled and ‘[threw] mud and rotten vegetables at the women, slammed the huge gates of the courtyard in their faces [ ... ] and used the foulest language’.10 Even the professors who taught them required fees as much as four times the fees of the male students.11 Dr Isabel Hutton recorded that women medical students were: ‘considered the traditional enemies by the men and were the constant targets of their criticism and even hostility [ ... ] women had to put up with very cavalier treatment by their men colleagues, who criticised, patronised or were even blatantly rude’.12 But this flagrant opposition failed. In the years before the First World War, the opposition to medical coeducation gradually eased. The war itself helped to end segregation in medical teaching, although Oxford and Cambridge remained closed to women.13 When war began, there were less than 500 women enrolled in medicine throughout Britain. From Blackwell’s registration in 1868 to this period of discussion there is a bare 50 years of very limited numbers of women doctors, which makes these women autobiographers innovators in their field. It makes them exceptional in their era; a point that needs to be borne in mind when examining these autobiographies. There is an abundance of primary evidence for this investigation. These articulate women encompassed many facets and themes in their autobiographies. For example, Isabel Hutton, Caroline Matthews, and Flora Murray recorded wartime experiences; Mary Scharlieb her experiences in India, Ida Mann became a professor at Oxford. Many like Isabel Hutton and Octavia Wilberforce encountered problems with education, Elizabeth Bryson shied away from general practice and spent time in New Zealand; and Gladys Wauchope, like Octavia Wilberforce, went into country practice.14 In 1998 Carol Dyhouse reflected ‘upon the extent to which these accounts share features of the literary genre, the

Women Doctors

39

quest or the folk-fairytale. [ ... ] if they are read with careful attention to form and metaphor’.15 She noted a sense of mission, rite de passage, trials and tribulations, and associated these with the notion of fairy/ folktale.16 My research suggests that the genres employed are wider than those of the fairy/folktale. It is the fairytale, girl’s heroic stories and boy’s adventure narratives that are appropriated, and are the most important and overriding point of interest, because this phenomenon occurs solely in the autobiographies written by women doctors. However, as is often the case in brief articles, scant attention is given to what these young women doctors wrote themselves. Instead situations such as: ‘institutional obstacles, [ ... ] idea of separate spheres [ ... ] possessed by a mission’ are acknowledged without undertaking a close textual reading to ‘hear’ the autobiographers themselves.17 Therefore in this chapter I examine why these narratives were imbued with such genre-specific conventions and vocabulary, and consider why, and to what effect, these autobiographers found it necessary to construct themselves as archetypal, mythical heroines in their narratives. Finally, consideration is given to the emotional context, when these forms of discourse are foregrounded. Of the professions examined in this book, the doctors give the greatest narrative space to childhood memories, educational struggles, family and patriarchal approbation, and male prejudice. It follows that these themes need to be analysed in some detail, as they tend to be part of the most important experiences. The autobiographies of Elizabeth Bryson, Gladys Wauchope and Octavia Wilberforce are the main focus for this chapter, as they are representative of this cohort of women doctors. As a starting point, it is useful to outline some tenets of the fairytale and girl’s and boy’s fictional narratives. The fairytale as a bed-time story has images of the miraculous and the beautiful, operating in a world of wish-fulfilment and magic events, and usually involves the gift or removal of some magic spell. There is a sense that anything can happen and that the ending will be happy. The happy ending underpins the sense that tribulations will result in safety and reconciliation. According to David Luke, ‘Tales are not only variants of each other, but consist for the most part of combinations and permutations of certain typical constituent elements’.18 Jack Zipes noted that literary fairytale was: ‘designed both to divert as amusement and instruct ideologically as a means to mold [sic] the inner nature of young people’.19 He added that Perrault’s prose fairytales: ‘can be divided into two


distinct groups based on gender’. In Perrault for example, Red Riding Hood and Sleeping Beauty wove ideas of the female child as good, beautiful and patient and the female role models have beauty, grace, musicality, humility and self-discipline. 20 Fairytales that were aimed at boys for example, Tom Thumb and Puss in Boots suggested that ambition, brains and courage were of importance. Perrault endows the male hero with: ‘remarkable minds, courage [ ... ] manners, success and achievement’. 21 So from the outset, the symbolic, cultural, civilising process operates and as A.S. Byatt noted: ‘fairy tales clearly stamp the rules of gender differences on their readers’. 22 These gender rules condition females to regard marriage as the goal and for males the prime aim is active pursuit of goals and social success. For Jack Zipes the divide is that ‘men became more closely associated with reason, temperance, activism, and sovereign order; females became more identified with irrationality, whimsy, passivity, and subversive deviance’.23 The role models supporting gender differences which obtained in fairytales continued in girls’ and boys’ fiction. This can be seen in books like The Railway Children (1906) which shores up gender ideology and social relations.24 By the early twentieth century, school stories were the most popular light reading for girls from late childhood and through the middle teens. Many employed a melodramatic style and conveyed conflicts and their resolution between family and ambition. Named as the favourite author by readers of Girl’s Realm in 1898, L.T. Meade wrote girls’ fiction that imbued notions of traditional Victorian femininity, womanhood as fragile, dependent and protected.25 However it became a commonplace idea that, by the turn of the century, many girls found that the girls’ canon was fairly tedious and took to reading their brothers’ adventure stories. 26 E.J. Salmon suggested that girls would often read beyond what was taken to be suitable literature because it was often too passive and ‘goody-goody’ and inferior to that of boys’ fiction. 27 This led them to read popular authors such as G.A. Henty. 28 These boys’ novels described a set of institutions which upheld the social order for the male and allowed the authors to provide an ideological view of the world. A prime interest was how ‘maleness’ was to be presented to the young reader.29 Knowles and Malmkjaer found that: ‘physical rather than intellectual is desirable. Complex mental activity was not the order of the day [and] central to this genre is a hero who overcomes many trials often in strange surroundings [ ... ] we noted the decidedly Christian ethos which pervades all the

Women Doctors

41

institutions’.30 Henty wanted his young heroes to be bold, straightforward and not milksops.31 Due to the supposedly susceptible nature of girls, their reading material was vetted by their parents to prevent them reading unsuitable stories. But their brothers’ books in many cases slipped through unnoticed, although they would be deemed unsuitable with their masculine role models. The boys’ books that girls liked best were historical novels and empire adventure tales, the reading of which perhaps instilled Edwardian jingoism.32 In reading these fictions the cultural message that these young girls then received was a valuation of the male as better with more privileges.33 Clearly it is impossible within the boundaries of this chapter to investigate the minutiae of all the genres and sub-genres involved here, and the changes that evolved in young people’s literature. However it is worth noting that circa 1900s, Meade’s response to the idea that girls preferred boys’ books was to write stories with a keener sense of danger and plot, school adventure stories, and ‘light-weight’ fictions that presented heroines as genteel role models for the new century’s young girls.34 She gave girls what others had done earlier for boys: a separate culture with its own values, customs, and social standards. However, according to Mitchell, Meade’s feminist intention was compromised by the idea of traditional conventions and adherence to stereotypical gender, class and imperial characters.35 Part of this investigation, was to ascertain whether these women doctors used the fairytale motifs and adolescent fiction ‘against the grain’, in a potentially radical way. Many of them do record what they read as children. For example Dr Elizabeth Bryson delighted in The Golden Thread, Tess of the D’Urbervilles and The Scarlet Letter, Dr Isabel Hutton pursued the Classics and Shakespeare, Dr Ida Mann read Longfellow and Tennyson and Dr Octavia Wilberforce favoured The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers.36 Of course, unless stated in their writing, we cannot know which fairytales they read. But it will become apparent from what follows that, for these women, their children’s books made an impression and had a profound influence on how they remembered and chose to present their childhood, and indicate key moments in pursuit of their careers and when faced with opposition. In Bryson’s writing we can see from the outset how the fairytale is intercalated into her life. Her father: ‘told us endless stories, fairy stories and Bible stories and stories of his own [ ... ] All early memories of him have an air of enchantment [ ... ] like pictures in Fairyland, all sunny


and golden’.37 She begins her autobiography: ‘My tunnel of memory is a long one and it brings me out into a strange world’.38 As with all good children’s tales, the reader’s curiosity is aroused to find out what is ‘strange’. At an early age, as the fourth of nine children, and with 28 full cousins, she found it difficult to ‘untangle’ herself from the scrimmage of siblings and form her ‘little self’.39 Bryson feared, ‘I am in danger of being lost in a forest of children as I try to follow and disentangle a fine thread of self that was seeking to find its way to consciousness in the midst of the crowd’.40 This recognition that she was different and craved individuality would mark her as unconventional and out of the ordinary in a close-knit family. To make sense of this need, Bryson has appropriated the tale of The Golden Thread which she read as a child.41 This tells of a girl lost in a forest who is guided by a gold thread away from snares and pitfalls. This couches her early assertions to be different in a non-confrontational form, and is a technique that averts criticism. To tell of the first of many bursaries she won, Bryson recounted a specific episode. Aged ten, this bursary was formally given to her by the Town Clerk, who asked her what she intended to be when she finished school. To encourage her and in stereotypical fashion suggested: ‘a teacher perhaps?’ [She replied] I found my small voice and heard myself saying – as in a dream – ‘No, sir, I’m going to be a doctor.’ ‘A doctor! Nonsense! Not a nice little girl like you! Surely not a doctor. [ ... ] A doctor! Surely not! Would you like to cut off my little finger?’42 This extract is important because it brings into direct attention two of the fundamental themes of this discussion. Foremost, the Town Clerk portrays a prejudice typical at the time (1890s) against females aspiring to become doctors. His horror culminated in a reductive argument, and what he deemed would intimidate a child; the idea of blood and assault on his body, a form of castration. As mentioned, the orthodoxy that ‘nice’ women would not actively seek work, least of all in the unsexing role of a doctor, was common currency. It was taken as improper and unfeminine for women to directly intervene in the body.43 This pervading culture made it difficult for these women to find a tone suitable to articulate their driving ambitions. But also typical of this group of women was Bryson’s response that she ‘found’ herself speaking ‘as in a dream’. She became ‘confused and shy’ believing that she ‘can’t explain

Women Doctors

43

it. I blushed and was silent.’44 Bryson sought refuge in the idea of being possessed by something outside of her control: in a dream. Why had I said I was going to be a doctor? Why was I so sure? I do not know. But I know that at that moment a little unconscious, yet already determined, desire had found expression in words from that moment there was no wavering nor [sic] any hesitation, I knew where I was going although I didn’t know the road.45 But the utilisation of an enchanted dream-like state, as a means of explanation, deflects censure. Bryson framed herself as a heroine drawn to follow a quest into unknown territory to secure her pot-of-gold. On another occasion of emotional stress, Bryson appropriated the fairytale discourse, but her usage has a more disquieting affect. Hitherto her life appeared idyllic with memories that had ‘an air of enchantment’.46 This is rudely shattered: But my tunnel is dark – I am moving uncertainly on a dark road with unknown dangers threatening. Suddenly out of the gloom a strange, sharp picture appears. The house, still, unfamiliar, is bare and cold: two strange men are in the room, one sitting idly on a chair, the other looking at the books in the bookcase – he starts to take out some of the books – my mother comes into the room; she doesn’t notice me; she is looking at the man and the books. ‘You can’t take these. They are mine. They were mine before I married. My name is on them.’ The man lays down the books. We were being sold up. The household furniture was taken – even the bed.47 This event occurred after the family business had failed and bailiffs had arrived; a traumatic and pivotal event in any family’s life. There is no preamble to this incident nor is there any aftermath. So the reader is unaware and unprepared for this. Family life resumes in a small house in a poorer area and: ‘the memory tunnel becomes sharp, clear and continuous’.48 It is evident that the emotional economy that underpins Bryson’s autobiography is disrupted at points of upheaval and uncertainty in two ways. First, the pace and tone of her narrative has changed from one of evenness and authority to one of brevity and short sentences. Secondly, she has recourse to ‘tunnel’ imagery which foments a sense of menace, subversion and foreboding. The bailiffs emerge as faceless ogres who force the family to undertake a hazardous journey or


quest which is full of uncertainties. This ‘tunnel’ emblem morphs from a ‘dark road with unknown dangers’ and ‘gloom’ when the bailiffs are present to ‘sharp, clear, and continuous’ when safety and light are reached. There are a number of potential interpretations as to the substance of the ‘tunnel’. It is possible to argue that this imagery has sexual connotations and that, at a symbolic level, it refers to anxieties about the vagina and about the likelihood of the female body as figurative of space and absence. Here, I believe these ‘tunnels’ to be suggestive of subversion; the notion of travelling an illegitimate route. The ‘strange’ world, her childhood, the bailiffs and the enforced house-moving, the fevered imaginings during scarlet fever that made her ‘memory tunnel dim’49 all combine, at some level, to distort and darken her main life. But in these circumstances, I believe it implies narrow vision; containment and a means of restriction to prevent the painful or uncomfortable experience coalescing with the rest of her ‘enchanted’ tale that she saw as her life. It appears that this is a coping mechanism for experiences that life had not prepared her to understand. Due to attend St Andrews’ Medical School Bryson remembered back to when she was ten years old. In the chapter ‘My Appointed Road’ she exhibits a wavering between direct assertion and the claims of forces outside her control: I knew where I was going, but I didn’t know the way. Now the way was clear; straight on even to a medical school [ ... my] determined desire: it was still there, deep down beyond my volition. I had not chosen the road ... it had chosen me! It was part of the magic.50 Three years on there is further evidence of inconsistency in recording her driving ambition. I knew now that I had found my road; perhaps my road had found me. It was indeed my good fortune to be enlightened and brought to the threshold of wider horizons-to glimpse down a long vista of knowledge to which there is no end [ ... ] Life had not lost its magic. I was a child playing with pebbles in a world of wonder.51 As a woman in her early twenties she still believed she was ‘brought’ to her path; not withstanding the 12 to 15 years of trials, in the form of exams; the need for bursaries and struggles to fight against the establishment. It is an irresolution that betrays the uncertain position in

Women Doctors

45

which these women doctors found themselves. Yet these fairytale analogies mitigate their strength and present them as more feminine, uncertain and less in control. But, in a highly charged and revelatory emotional statement, she finally shows that she had begun to reconcile her drive with her destiny. She questioned: What was it that drew me up suddenly and said, ‘No, no, no!’ to every prospect except Medicine? I began to know a little [ ... ] I wanted a road that would be hard and use the whole of me – all my faculties. ‘All of me’ – and I was a woman!52 This explosive experience is further underlined by her random highlighting of individual words in bold print: ‘But – if I had money [ ... ] Then why had I said Gynaecology, non-surgical: but I did want my hospital position.’53 This unusual form affirms the emotional content. Her epiphanic moment came from within, not as a quasi-religious alibi. At this point the fairytale imagery is shed, as she has reached a stage when she can claim her vocation and no longer be concerned with the social myths of femininity. The fairytale mode had not only been assimilated and used as a means of articulation. In my introduction I noted the value of the fairytale as ideological instruction. This is apparent in these autobiographies when, for example, Bryson was faced with sexual discrimination. Unable to enter medicine until she was 19, she claimed a bursary to take a university degree in the arts and on completion was the only name on the List to achieve a First Class Honours degree. Overjoyed, she knew she had won a scholarship and accepted the invitation to a meeting of the University Senate. The Principal congratulated her on her success but added in: a somewhat subdued tone – to say how sorry they all were that they could not award me the Scholarship that I had undoubtedly earned. Why? Because I was a Woman! It would require an Act of Parliament to alter the terms before the award could be made to a woman.54 The scholarship was awarded to a man with a second class degree. Bryson received 30 pounds and it was again suggested that she should teach. Her response was: ‘Degrees, Medals! They were easy to pick up! The world was still wide and I was young’.55 This could be read as a

46


somewhat disingenuous statement. But I would suggest that the narrative implies a sense of boundlessness and a sense that anything is possible. As Marina Warner in From the Beast to the Blonde noted about fairytales: ‘This very boundlessness serves the moral purpose of the tales [ ... ] fairytales are not passive or active; their mood is optative – announcing what might be’.56 To have travelled so far against all manner of oppositions, these women had to believe in the boundlessness of their lives and this ‘optative’ element enabled them to see the way ahead and deal with adversity. Some autobiographers in this profession enlisted the aid of other sub-genres read by children. Born in 1889 Gladys Mary Wauchope was the eldest of four children. Wauchope’s narrative presents her as both typical of her era and yet as challenging the orthodox. She lived what she considered ‘The life of an Edwardian girl [which] is now almost legendary’.57 Typical of her class and era, her future had been mapped out by her parents: ‘It was the usual outlook for a girl in a comfortable middle-class family’. 58 Wauchope wanted to go to Oxford to read the Classics, but she was sent to ‘ “finishing school” and was to live with my parents, taking part in the affairs of the neighbourhood, and the entertaining of our guests and my sister and brothers’. 59 Her only passion, since she was a very young girl, was horse-riding. She was proud of her accomplishments as a confident and courageous rider when hunting, not wishing to be known as a ‘sissy’.60 With the shocking news of war her life of fun and idleness ceased. She had announced: ‘There were two things I said I would never do: nursing or medicine. Both careers I associated with smells. But the 1914–1918 war [ ... ] sharply diverted my life’.61 But Wauchope, along with countless others of her class, trained as a Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD). In 1915 she heard there was a shortage of doctors and: ‘the thought flashed upon me: “I could do this medical work.” It was as though a call came, and I answered: “Here am I, send me.” ’62 This revelatory experience is presented in language redolent of a religious calling or of a mystical conversion. She faced various pre-medical tuitions and: ‘Two years arid academic work’.63 It is then that her ‘conversion’ analogy gave way to that of equine imagery: I have been like a horse ridden in blinkers and seeing only straight in front. Although there have been many faults, failures, and mistakes, I have never been tempted to jib or shy off. [ ... ] I have been like a

Women Doctors

47

rider to the hounds, with my eye always on the line of the hunt, choosing my fences, and scanning each field as I jumped into it for the best way to get out and onwards.64 It is widely recognised that courage and skill are prerequisites of exemplary horsemanship. Therefore to couch her single-mindedness and assertiveness within these boundaries would camouflage her ‘unfeminine’ drive and present it in an admissible form. Similar imagery is used again after she qualified. Wauchope had detected that the small minority of women students in 1918–1919 were unwelcome to the teaching and nursing staffs. She recorded that some of the women were ‘depressed’ and ‘irked’ by the feeling of ‘being on sufferance’.65 Some lecturers ‘deplored’ the admission of women and ‘ostentatiously’ ignored and missed them out of questions, and others used ‘bullying methods’.66 But Wauchope presents herself as being undaunted by this negativity: ‘I was too busy and too happy to think about it.’67 But contradictory comments follow when Wauchope conceded that she had experienced prejudice from fellow doctors and female nursing staff. She was appointed to the ‘lowest’ post in the medical hierarchy known as a ‘clinical ass’.68 Then as a pathology assistant she worked ‘long and obscurely’ until she was appointed as a house physician which had long been her ambition.69 This caused a crisis. The other doctors found: ‘a woman in the house insupportable, and the residents resigned in a body.’ They hoped that Wauchope would ‘shy-off [ ... ] take fright and withdraw’.70 Wauchope stood her ground, backed by the Chairman Lord Knutsford. But hostile reactions were not the sole province of male staff. Sisters presented ‘hurdles’ reacting as ‘cold and stately monoliths’ who added to this ‘anxious’ period.71 At this time she appears less self-confident and her narrative has become uncertain and anticipatory. Facing the exciting challenge to become a doctor, Wauchope utilised the courageous aspects of horsemanship. Now, although the narrative aims to relate successful outcomes to prejudice on all sides, her choice of equine metaphors associate her with a nervous horse, uneasy with hurdles. The equine imagery is not used in these later instances to soften her appearance but the tenor is expressive of Wauchope’s position. She had faced all her medical training trials to arrive at her goal, only to encounter further opposition. This appears to have unnerved her. Similar to Bryson, Wauchope could only articulate and interpret her ambitions within discourses already familiar to her. These discourses

48


from fairytale and from girls’ fiction were reassuring, because they allowed them to present themselves as heroines rather than face stricture for unfeminine aspirations. Also, when stressful or unpleasant emotional memories came to the fore for these women, some form of metaphor or imagery was employed to explicate these. My final area of investigation into the popular fiction utilised by these would-be doctors is that of how boys’ tales are commandeered by some autobiographers. According to Sally Mitchell: ‘The boys’ books that girls liked best were historical novels, empire adventure tales, and (to a lesser extent) sea stories’.72 Octavia Wilberforce had recorded in her autobiography that she enjoyed reading these and it is these boys’ tales that appear to have influenced her. Wilberforce, like Bryson and Wauchope, was brought up to live a genteel life, to serve the family and to be useful. Unlike them, formal education was not seen as important. She lacked support from her mother, who exerted restrictive control and her father cut her out of his will when she persisted in training for medicine.73 Wilberforce’s mother involved her in the National Rose Society and to also be ‘useful over the house keeping’.74 She continued to care for the roses and play golf, and for both pursuits she won trophies, prizes and money. This triggered her mother’s resentment and: ‘When I returned from there [golf fixtures and the Rose Society] I came to realise I would meet with black disapproval. It worried me’.75 This repressive regime acted as a catalyst to go against these superficial pursuits: ‘Though golf helped my self-confidence it was, after all, only a game and at intervals I felt depressed. [ ... ] I had no desire to tread in my sisters’ footsteps [in marriage]. I wanted something else [ ... ] I would like to mean something in the world. But how’?76 Wilberforce’s constant battle for a worthwhile existence continued to be detrimental to her health: ‘The constant harrowing at home was having the effect of turning me in upon myself. [ ... ] I lost weight. [ ... ] In Victorian times I should probably have been ripe for a “decline”. Instead I had to battle on’.77 Writer and social reformer Harriet Martineau had noted that this type of depression, brought on by frustration and lack of usefulness was not uncommon.78 Wilberforce had two turning-points in her journey towards a medical career. It is in the first of these, meeting actress and writer Elizabeth Robins, that the reader encounters Wilberforce’s change of style. She became infatuated with Robins who became an ally and, in contrast to her authoritarian home-life, was supportive emotionally and later financially. Aged 21 Wilberforce secretly paid for an education at Roedean, or she would ‘be mocked and life insupportable’.79 This

Women Doctors

49

heightened emotional period is expressed in a melodramatic language. She found that Robins ‘ardently supported’ Women’s Suffrage, of which she (Octavia) had ‘abysmal ignorance’; she listened to the ‘impassioned eloquence’ of her tutor and suffered from the ‘discreditable secrets’ she kept from the family.80 The second key moment of her quest for a useful life was initiated by a misdiagnosis of the family housemaid’s illness. Wilberforce had recognised the symptoms early on. By the time the doctor finally admitted the housemaid to hospital it was too late. Wilberforce recounted this to Robins ‘I boiled over with fury [ ... ] I could be a better doctor myself. [ ... ] Why couldn’t I [sic] become qualified and be a doctor?’81 Robins agreed with her.82 From this gung-ho outburst Wilberforce is overawed by her own thoughts: ‘I was flabbergasted! What had I started?’83 A few days later she is sent to care for her sister who had bronchitis. During this stay she took a walk in a beech wood: The utter silence filled my spirit with an inner peace [ ... ] Now had come the time when I felt compelled to decide my future; was I born to be a bond slave to family forever? I was plainly made in a different mould from the rest of my family. That I knew [ ... ] I left the beech wood with an iron determination not to be lazy or cowardly but to carve out my own career.84 At this profound moment, Wilberforce wrote plainly and calmly of her experience and decision. She had experienced a sudden shift in her life but, unlike Bryson and Wauchope, Wilberforce openly acknowledged ‘an iron determination’ to pursue her goal. As the great-granddaughter of William Wilberforce it is significant, and has greater resonance, that at the moment her future became clear and the magnitude of the task before her became apparent, she used the analogy of a ‘bond slave’ to characterise her role in her family; a role she intended to abolish. Throughout her autobiography, Wilberforce conflated and co-mingled novelistic vocabulary from boys’ fictions. The text is splattered with alliteration: ‘flabbergasted with flashing eyes [ ... ] doggedly determined [ ... ] grovellingly grateful’.85 She is by turn: ‘revolted [ ... ] horribly realistic [ ... ] absolutely dazed [ ... ] craving for possession [ ... ] valiant bolstering [ ... ] valiant exhortation [ ... ] trammelled and galvanised, [and] dreadfully burdened’.86 These robust descriptions and melodramatic discourse summon up a suffering, yet passionate, steadfast and triumphant hero. It was at moments of extreme adversity, when courage and perseverance were required of her, that an amalgam of religious,


fairytale and boy’s fiction modes was used. She presented herself as the heroine overcoming a series of trials and battles over boundaries, domination and of crushing defeats. Wilberforce’s narrative style in the first chapter, ‘A Haphazard Upbringing’ is unremarkable but engaging in its credible, matter-of-fact representation of what were many young, middle-class women’s lives. But this tone changed. Another form of opposition for these would-be doctors focused on the notion that medical training was unsexing and unfeminine, and these women jeopardised their marriage prospects. Wilberforce presented a melodramatic narrative when she described the towering pressure upon her to marry the son of a family friend. In a light-hearted vein she: ‘laughed till she ached’ and apologised to her mother for: ‘not being like the rest of your daughters who have a readiness to fall in love with rapidity’.87 Pressure built and a nursing friend urged her to get away from the ‘nagging coercion which surrounded me [and] from the mesmeric tyranny of home.’88 What is interesting is that, the further into retelling of this episode of the mounting pressure she experienced, her vocabulary and phrasing increased in its melodramatic content. The affair culminated in a meeting with the young man: I was perfectly miserable [ ... ] I almost felt I was a criminal, I knew it was utterly impossible. When he came and I walked along the lane with him I felt I was a beast and quite dreadfully sorry. But when he spoke of it,[marriage] though he said [sic] quite nice things, I suddenly felt so revolted at what it all meant from my point of view. I was so staggered at the horror of such thoughts that to prevent his sleeve touching mine I walked in the ditch! [ ... ] But I was really absolutely dazed and felt I had come up against something too horrible for words and which I could not understand. And that awful look. Ugh! The sort of greedy way [ ... ] a craving for possession [ ... ] but I am not cut out for it [marriage] the very thought of it makes me shudder and it revolts me.89 This striking passage raises two areas of interest. To express her extreme reaction she utilised a melodramatic narrative in the form of a letter to Elizabeth Robins. Similar to Bryson, italics and exclamation marks draw attention to her emotions. The robust ‘Boys’ Own’ vocabulary of ‘revolted, staggered, horror, dazed, greedy, craving and shudder’ run the range of blood-thirsting narratives, the young man’s ‘craving for possession’ chimed with the ‘bond-slave’ element of earlier family life. By any standards this reaction was extreme and such sentiments could fuel the

Women Doctors

51

anti-women doctor lobbyists, in confirming their fears that women doctors would not marry. Although her close ‘special friendship’ with Elizabeth Robins implied homosexual tendencies, her revulsion rests on what seems to be heterosexual physicality, which she equated with animal passion: ‘I wanted more and more to keep free from being governed by my body’.90 Unlike Wilberforce Bryson does marry, but the recording of it is brief and shrouded in magical mystery with the expectation of a ‘happy ever after’. The reader has had no indication of any romance. Her future husband suddenly featured in the narrative when she recorded that she had packed to take her post in New Zealand. He asked her to stay and marry him: ‘I cannot tell what I said or did not say; [but] in the words of Browning [ ... ] the time will come. His name was Robert Bryson.’91 Neither marriage nor sex feature strongly in these doctors’ autobiographies, although the issues of dress and femininity were often mooted. Bryson recorded attitudes to what women medical students were to wear: ‘In order not to appear frivolous [ ... ] we should wear three- quarterlength Holland jackets of a severe style.’92 Hutton noted contradictory messages. At work: If we were feminine in attire or demeanour or had the effrontery to wear high-heels, a dizzy hat then in vogue, it was deemed that we could not be serious; worse still, it might be argued that we were too nice to be studying medicine and this was considered more devastating. [ ... ] It was clear that mannish suits and hobnailed boots were less frowned upon than lace on a petticoat.93 But she recorded that the ‘lady-meds’ underwent a metamorphosis at dances: ‘Cinders’ magically transformed into ‘Cinderellas’ dressed for the ball. No longer were they grave and aloof in their severely tailored costumes but en grand décolletage, [ ... ] wearing long white kid gloves, a loop over the left arm holding high their sweeping skirts to show a bright silk petticoat. Till midnight they were just pretty young girls in fluffy gowns, blissfully and dreamily swaying [ ... ] in love with Prince Charming and life itself.94 On the whole the topic of femininity appeared to be a vexed one. There were few precedents on dress codes for them to follow. There was a fine line between dowdy/dressy, feminine/sexless, serious/frivolous; a line

52


that most were not sufficiently interested in to write about at length. But the pervading sense is one of ill-ease.95 The appropriations of these modes of popular fiction are what I see as important elements of these women doctors’ mentalités. Utilised in a number of ways the fairytale analogy and adolescent fictions acted as cloaking mechanisms, minimised responsibility and reduced the need to conform to conventional family life, and instead to be a successful doctor. As Warner suggested, the canopy of wonder in fairytales creates a ‘huge theatre of possibilities in the stories’.96 This aspect of ‘possibility’ would have had a strong resonance for women doctors as they advanced into what was hitherto unknown male territory. Within fairytales boundless expectancy is used subtly with a moral purpose, to restate where boundaries do lie. Zipes noted that the prime objective was not one of manipulation, but as an aid to instruct ideologically, assist in the socialising process and defining of sexual roles, and to inculcate norms and values.97 These facets of children’s genres enabled them to make sense of their ambitions. As M. Halliday points out: ‘language is a powerful socialising agent, because it is through language that the child learns about the social world’.98 It is this that I believe doctors used ‘against the grain’. From reading fairytales written for boys, they saw the visible advantages and privileges in life that this male gender should aspire to. As Andrea Dworkin wrote about fairytales: ‘We ingested it as children whole, had its values and consciousness imprinted on our minds as cultural absolutes long before we were in fact men and women. We have taken the tales of childhood with us into maturity, chewed but still lying in the stomach, as real identity’.99 Many of these women as young girls read their brothers’ books, thought to be totally unsuitable for them, and drew on the factors that epitomised noble ideals for a young male.100 They eschewed feminine notions and favoured ambition, brains and courage which they identified with, and found representative of the attributes necessary for a professional medical career. But equally of interest, when they needed to write about situations of a highly emotional nature, the fairytale or adolescent fiction is drawn from the female trope of these genres. This switching between girls’ and boys’ fiction produced a conspicuous wavering in the narratives, where the protagonists shift between taking control and being driven by external forces. This substantiates my earlier comment that a bare 50 years’ incursion into medicine has had an effect on the manner in which they present themselves. The concern with their interaction with society was part of

Women Doctors

53

their socialisation (the beautiful princess) as a sexual object of male gaze and as an ‘unusual’ object of public gaze. This made them aware of themselves, a point I intend to pursue in the chapter on artists. There are also issues of power here. These women were strong, highly intelligent and contributed significantly to the economy. The use of the children’s genres freed their imaginations and enabled them to camouflage this power, but also emphasised their credentials as social heroines. Their intellect enabled them to articulate and weave what appeared to be less controlling discourses. These ‘soften’ their crusading motivation, and make them appear more vulnerable, more feminine and conventional. They needed recourse to this eclectic mix of cultural resources because they were more subject to terrible oppression than any other profession. Their insurgence placed them at the sharpest end of any profession and necessitated a coping strategy. The overall effect of borrowing these discourses is to sabotage what would be deemed by society as a cultural emergency in their unfeminine and unswerving conviction to become doctors.

4 Nurses and VADs

Nursing, like teaching, had long been accepted by the public as a suitable role for women. But unlike headmistresses and teachers, in the early to mid-nineteenth century, nursing was undertaken largely by poor, uneducated women who could find no better employment. This was to change radically as nursing reforms demanded higher standards and better educated women. Reforms began when Florence Nightingale, (credited as the founder of the modern nursing profession), took a post as superintendent of the Care of Sick Gentlewomen in London. In 1854, with the outbreak of the Crimean War, Nightingale was appointed to lead a relief mission to Scutari. Within weeks she had overturned the systems, putting army doctors to shame and reducing the death rate among the wounded from over 40 per cent to just over 2 per cent. She returned a national heroine. Money raised for the Nightingale Fund established the world’s first modern training school for nurses at London’s St. Thomas’s Hospital in 1860. By 1907 Nightingale nurses had revolutionised hospital care throughout the English-speaking world.1 During the two decades at the end of the century there were many rival nursing associations and much in-fighting. Summers noted that: ‘the gallant record of all these bodies during the First World War has tended to obscure the complex, and not always heroic story of their origins’.2 In 1878 the St John’s Ambulance Association was launched which became the basis for training thousands of Voluntary Aid Detachments (VADs) in the First World War, and in 1896 the War Office finally took action and devised the formation of the Army Nursing Reserve in March 1897.3 In the last years of the nineteenth century, ‘war-fever’ extended to many women who were not working nurses and

54

Nurses and VADs 55

this caused another element of discord between professional nurses and rank amateurs.4 At the outbreak of the First World War there were 463 trained nurses of Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Military Nursing Service (QAIMNS), and 2,783 Territorial Force Nursing Service (TFNS).5 The QAIMNS replaced the Army Nursing Service in March 1902. It wanted candidates from ‘a better class and more cultivated and educated than is generally the case’.6 Femininity remained an issue and above all the battlefield was a forbidden area. Women were to keep a philanthropic persona and carry out medical work at a discreet distance.7 Yet as will be seen from the autobiographies in this chapter, these boundaries were breached in the years from 1909. Between the Boer War and 1914, the War Office sponsored three Army Nursing Reserve Corps; the QAIMNS TFNS and the VADs. These institutions trained more than 50,000 females for a role as military nurses. It meant that the involvement of women in war could no longer be seen as a ‘philanthropic craze’ as these organisations opened a path of usefulness for women during 1910–1914.8 Approximately twothirds of VADs were women.9 VAD hospital training was a couple of hours a week on the wards, followed by training to look after the wounded in hospital tents, spending weeks under canvas. (The Red Cross trained 1,110 out of 1,318 in February 1912.)10 But distinctions between qualified and unqualified nurses broke down under the volume of work. In spite of the majority of VADs being female, the organisations were run by men. The exception to this was the adult corps of the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry Corps (FANY)’.11 This was a select club of strong and efficient riders. By 1909 they were reported as a ‘band of aristocratic amazons [ ... ] trained for the mounted rescue of wounded soldiers’.12 As with other organisations at this time, a split occurred in 1909 and Mrs St Clair Stobart formed the Women’s Sick and Wounded Convoy Corps. Stobart found the FANY: ‘absurdly unpractical [ ... ] We were to be nurses mounted on horseback [ ... ] galloping bravely on to the battlefields and snatching the wounded from under the canons’ mouths and rendering first aid. We rode horses, wore scarlet tunics, helmets, and divided skirts, and brandished whips, and were doubtless picturesque.’13 These two corps remained apart from the VADs and concentrated in other military fronts, mainly the Balkans and Eastern Europe.14 Anne Summers recorded that without the resources of some 23,000 VADs who served as military hospital auxiliaries, the existing civilian nurses could not have provided this number.15 In the United Kingdom


between 1914–1919, over ‘two and a half million sick and wounded soldiers were treated in hospitals’ cared for by 32,000 women military nurses.16 According to a 1909 circular, the VADs were: ‘not only intended to plug the gaps between the field ambulance and the base hospitals, but also to provide “supplementary personnel” for the latter.’17 Their training was wide ranging with an emphasis on spontaneity and inventiveness. These VADs were drawn from a well-educated class; many were daughters of professional men, merchants, farmers and tradesmen. Educated at home or in single-sex High Schools run by unmarried female teachers they were propelled from a life of closeted comfort and ignorance into a world of men and of violence. But the other side of the coin is aptly put by VAD Diane Cooper who wrote: ‘I began scheming to get to the war to nurse [ ... ] Hospital rules and discipline spelt liberty. I had never been allowed to go out alone on foot. My every movement at all times of the day must be known at home’.18 Yet it is no surprise that women’s involvement in the war was resisted. Elaine Showalter identified the war as a ‘crisis of masculinity’ and a trial of the Victorian and Edwardian internalised masculine ideal.19 However such a crisis in 1914–1918 implies stability beforehand, which was obviously not the case in pre-war Britain. Bourgeois or middle-class patriarchal society was already being challenged by suffragists and women workers. When the call for mobilisation came, women felt they had the right to serve. Pankhurst had led 30,000 women under the banner; ‘We demand the right to Serve’. May Wedderburn Cannan, poet and war-worker, was galvanised into action as soon as war was declared and mobilisation needed: ‘Well it was our war too [ ... ] I can still remember [ ... ] sorting out call-up telegrams to go to each of our members [VADs] I rang up my drivers and borrowed cars, called out my volunteer collectors’.20 The objections to women were not only on ideological grounds; questions of patriotism were raised over the issue of women wearing military-style uniforms. In point of fact, the concerns raised and fuelled in the Press, appear to have more to do with male insecurities surrounding women’s part in the war rather than any female breach of gender ideologies; especially those where differentiation in dress needed to be maintained in order to prevent the undermining of the gender social order.21 Objections were that women who wore uniforms were exaggerating their own importance to the war effort, and consequently the role of women in the national crisis, and that they were attempting to become like men. According to Susan R. Grayzel, women in uniform

Nurses and VADs 57

were ‘potentially even shameful, by apeing men and the “real” work of the war that men performed’.22 Every autobiographer in this category mentions in some form the provoking subject of uniforms and dress. From the middle-class VAD to the professional nurse arose a widely differing perspective; but from neither was there the traditional extreme and controversial comments of the press, which in the main represented the male position.23 Socialite recruits insisted on ornamentation and adaptation because they were used to ‘made-to-measure’.24 Stobart and Dame Katharine Furze, Commandant in Chief of the VADs found their uniforms gave a dignified appearance essential to participation in professional life: ‘eminently practical [ ... ] selected for serviceability in the field [but] possibly not becoming to good looks’.25 To this end nurses were ‘clad in skirts to their toes [ ... ] a Red Cross over their foreheads, on the front of their white linen veils’.26 The many variations of nurses’ uniforms at this time all presented an image of non-sexual, unassailable dignity and, with some uniforms, a nun-like quality. 27 Russ suggests that the wearing of garments that elicit compliments furthers men’s dominance. But clearly uniform, whether for men or women, is an important emblem of status and identity. These were soon to be very minor issues when set against the conditions that these autobiographers entered. Due to the wealth of information available, it makes sense to investigate areas that have not been addressed. This chapter concentrates on aspects particular to the wartime and particular to their articulation of nursing experiences in their autobiographies; those of death and survival and of treating the wounded. Here I want to consider the acute coping mechanisms deployed by these women in order to find a means to articulate the horror, disorder and confusion which enveloped them; and furthermore examine what stimulates their stylistic, narrative procedures. I intend to discuss how the form of writing and stylistic features replicates a mentality endeavouring to make sense of extreme and alienated conditions. In the quotations used, I have taken pains to reproduce the layout, which is I believe important, as part of the stylistic convention and, as such, is intrinsic to the meaning. Similarly, the use of punctuation, especially ellipses and ‘ ... .’, in the examples used, are faithfully reproduced. In spite of the training outlined above, the young women and widows that flocked to offer their services as VADs and newly qualified nurses could not have had any thorough preparation for the conditions they were to face behind the lines. Hitherto, any firsthand experiences of


death would have been articulated in a language of consolation, grounded specifically in Christian hope. Chris Shilling wrote that: ‘religion served the purpose of survival strategies [ ... ] religion has sought to deny the finality of death in various ways’.28 People’s experiences would have been homogenised and euphemism would be the shared language. In the literary conventions of Victorian realist novels the nineteenth century idea of a quiet death in one’s own bed were portrayed.29 Michael Wheeler pointed out that, for example, the analogies that the beloved was not dead but sleeping and the grave as a bed were common.30 Nurse Florence Farmborough recalled that she had never seen a sick adult in bed. Appropriating a novelistic tone and style, she began with a personification of death when she told her first experience of a corpse: I wanted to see him; I wanted to see Death. [ ... ] This was my first meeting with death. It was not so frightening as I had thought it would be; only the silence awed me. [ ... ] he looked more like a child than a grown man. [ ... ] immobility of the statue-like figure began to disturb me. Death is so terribly still, so silent, so remote.31 Although Shilling suggests that: ‘the dying make death real, immediately present’.32 In a similar experience, Mabel Lethbridge aged 16, whilst still a probationer nurse, recalled her first exposure to death; that of a child: ‘I removed the sheet and gazed upon the small dead face with infinite tenderness. Poor pathetic, lonely little thing, and I had been afraid. [ ... ] locking the door securely behind me. How silly it seemed, as if the poor dead could escape!’33 Lethbridge used calm simple prose and a lightly playful observation to capture this unknown entity. Both Lethbridge and Farmborough display a disarming naïveté and a high degree of cultural shaping. However these bodies were in morgues and were within Lethbridge and Farmborough’s boundaries of understanding and knowledge, not corpses from violent deaths. But young women were to be catapulted into an unconnected world of mayhem, death and suffering which they needed to make sense of in order to narrate scenes and emotions beyond their previous experience and familiar words. For example, when Lethbridge is faced with her first ward duty for men back from the war: ‘I was distracted by terror and anguish by all I saw [ ... ] unspeakable facial disfigurement or terrible head wounds [ ... ] I found myself brought face to face with war [ ... ] the ugly side of war’.34 There was no place for

Nurses and VADs 59

beatific visions and describing the dying as ‘angelic’. Faced with horrific wounds, mangled bodies and painful death they needed language not only to record, but most importantly to speak to the dying. Death was no longer hidden and anaesthetised: it became ‘unspeakable’. Stobart for the greater part of her autobiography wrote in a pragmatic manner. There is a detached, resigned tone to her writing when she told of her husband’s death: ‘He was on his way home to England when he died, and was buried at sea. There was no wireless in those days, and I knew nothing of what had happened until the vessel arrived in England without him. Thus ended the African chapter of my life.’35 When she hears of the death of her son a similar tone is adopted: ‘In 1918, during the influenza epidemic [ ... ] my younger son succumbed to the plague in British Columbia’. 36 But for neither of these family deaths was she present. The reader is given the bare details, in the manner they may have been given to her. However, in the war zone, her record of the death of an orderly, the wife of a doctor, is very different: In the early morning, as a gust of wind swept through the tent-her tent – the soul with its life-force passed [ ... ] But I knew that the lifeforce had carried with it all that was real; it had taken to the BeyondLand the idea, the logos, the norm, the soul, of which the body that was left, was only a graven image.37 Her tone becomes one of preternatural, theological terminology to describe a sacred moment, which is all the more intense, given the daily onslaught. Furthermore, throughout her writing whenever there were tender and individual occurrences to be described, her faith lifted her expression above the mundane towards the figurative, mystical or romantic. Yet, when Stobart wrote of her duties as a nurse she had the objective, factual manner of explaining a procedure. She recorded with methodical precision the processing of newly arrived wounded: The blood-sodden clothes can of course only be removed by the aid of knives and scissors. Immediate attention is then given by the doctors [ ... ] In theory, the dirty blood-strained clothes are not taken into the wards. The wounded man is undressed in a room set apart; he is bathed and given clean garments.38

60


It is immediately noticeable that there is a disjunction between the unpalatable subject and style. Her professional clinical detachment was the only way she could write in detail about such ugliness. This schism between form and content is not unusual as a mechanism with these writers. Furthermore, such detached prose to describe these circumstances does act as a contrast to the vulnerability of bodies, and makes the rupture all the more poignant. I would suggest that for some, this professional training became a ‘rope’ that they would clasp on to in an effort to establish some form of sense of the mayhem. Yet, despite Stobart’s effort to imply clockwork efficiency, the use of ‘in theory’ belies this. In contrast to this, professional nurse Violetta Thurstan drew upon what she had recorded in: ‘odd times, on all sorts of stray pieces of paper [ ... ] close to the turmoil of the battlefield.’39 Her record of the admission of the newly wounded encapsulated the disorder and mayhem: It is an awful nightmare to look back at. Blood-stained uniforms hastily cut off the soldiers were lying on the floor-half-open packets of dressings were on every locker; basins of dirty water and disinfectant had not been emptied; men were moaning with pain, calling for water, begging that their dressings might be done again.40 Here the style reflects the content. She has achieved this by writing in long sentences, heaping phrase after phrase, in the past continuous, which builds a vital and pressing quasi-cinematic depiction of a casualty station. Thurstan appears unable to detach herself from the horror. Unlike Stobart, at times of an emotional hiatus, her professional demeanour has been overridden. From these treatments of a similar scene, the difficulties encountered by the autobiographers to find a means of surviving such emotional catastrophes are evident. For me, these are key elements and are illustrative of part of the overall question of the different mechanisms, boundaries and stylistics that are deployed to transcribe these horrific events. Nurse Mary Borden, in contrast to the nurses and VADs whose style change according to the emotional input, conveyed her memories in a flat monotone of relentless images. She evoked the senses of sight and smell in a potent manner: The moonlight is a pool of silver on the linoleum floor. It glints on the enamel washbasin and slop pail. I can almost see the moon reflected in the slop pail. Everything in my cubicle is luminous. My

Nurses and VADs

61

clothes hanging on pegs, my white aprons and rubber boots, my typewriter and tin box of biscuits, the big sharp scissors on the table – all these familiar things are touched by magic and make me uneasy. Through the open door of the hut comes the sweet sickish scent of new-mown hay, mingling with the smell of disinfectants, of Eau de Javel and iodoform, and wet mud and blood. There is wet mud on my boots and blood on my apron. I don’t mind. It is the scent of new-mown hay that makes me uneasy.41 The fragment begins with conventional romantic imagery of the moon bathing objects in silver light; a silver filter which covers mundane objects to produce an ‘otherworldly’ glow. But as the description of this collection of disparate objects continues, the visual montage forms a nightmarish stark quality in opposition to conventional expectations. This chaotic world is further actuated by her inversion of the acceptance of blood and mud and the rejection of new-mown hay. The ‘normal’ caused anxiety, ‘makes me uneasy’, but the anomalous was wellbeing and a comfort. These contradictory responses to sight and smell are compounded by a similar contradictory reception to sounds: The cannonade is my lullaby. It soothes me. I am used to it. Every night it lulls me to sleep. If it stopped I could not sleep. I would wake with a start. The thin wooden walls of my cubicle tremble and the windows rattle a little. That, too, is natural.42 All these sense images and flat style of narration suggest that despite Borden’s attempted control and intention to produce a distanced style, her discourse ‘escaped’ unconsciously to reveal a desperate coping mechanism in a hostile environment. In her reflective mode, a surreal imagery was kindled. The patterning of juxtaposing conventional imagery with the unpredictable continued throughout her narrative. Her ‘topsy-turvy’ reasoning clearly established the mayhem and shock of losing prescribed boundaries of behaviour where nothing made sense. Borden’s unemotional and unsentimental depictions of her daily routine accrue more of this strange coinage: At midnight we have cocoa in there [sterilising room] next to the operating room, because there is a big table. Sometimes there isn’t much room [sic] Sometimes legs and arms wrapped in cloths have to


be pushed out of the way. We throw them on the floor – they belong to no one and are of no interest to anyone-and drink our cocoa. The cocoa tastes very good. It is part of the routine.43 This macabre scene, repeated night after night, is presented with a forensic attitude in matter-of-fact language and conventional style. Her mode and vocabulary here present a bid for a callous and blasé delivery, but this is betrayed when, style, tone, and pace accelerate with the grim detail that follows: There are no men here, so why should I be a woman? There are heads and knees and mangled testicles. There are chests with holes as big as your fist, and pulpy thighs, shapeless; and stumps where legs once were fastened. There are eyes – eyes of sick dogs, sick cats, blind eyes, eyes of delirium; and mouths that cannot articulate; and parts of faces – the nose gone, or the jaw. There are these things, but no men; so how could I be a woman here and not die of it? Sometimes suddenly a smile flickers on a pillow, white, blinding, burning, and I die of it. I feel myself dying again. It is impossible to be a woman here. One must be dead. Certainly they were men once. But now they are no longer men ... I am a ghost woman.44 This accumulative momentum, discontinuous fragments of memory, and deliberative mix of unpalatable images are reiterated. The text is uneasy, it moves back and forth between two distinct styles without a change in emotional temperature. On the one hand there is narrative description, factual without romance or metaphor, and on the other hand there is a distance, succinct but dreamlike. This unpredictability of the content and style replicates the unexpectedness and uncertainty of her existence. The broken bodies are echoed in her short discordant sentences. Her survival mechanism is to disassociate her mind from her body, ‘One must be dead’.45 As Borden must have longed for a cessation from the relentless onslaught of war, the reader endures the steady salvo of her accumulative prose and longs for the end. There is a replication and accord with her form and content in these montages of horror. Prior to the investigation of repetition in these autobiographies it is useful to take stock of what has surfaced and use it as a springboard for what follows in the next section, and to then draw together an explanatory model. Farmborough, Stobart, Lethbridge, Thurstan and Borden all

Nurses and VADs 63

display a need to do more than just describe events. But the problem for them arises in their uncertainty of presentation in style, vocabulary and sense of boundary. Yet all engender vicarious emotions in the reader. This provokes a number of questions about the conflict between form and content, and more specifically, about seeking a language to articulate the ‘unmentionable’, control of the subject, presentation, and emotional economy. For the moment, however, it is important to consider aspects of repetition and the different ways that it occurs in these autobiographies. Free from the existing norms of life in Britain, and by incremental stages, the new rhythmic tempo of their ‘world’ became internalised. The increasing familiarity with the sounds of war and death was central to the transformation of these young women. They all mention repetitive sounds of one kind or another. Thurstan recalled the bombardments: ‘the cannon never ceased booming [ ... ] In time, one gets so accustomed to cannon that one hardly hears it, but I had not arrived at that stage then: this was my baptism’.46 Later she referred to it as the, ‘continual music of the cannon and the steady tramp of feet marching past’.47 Human sounds also became habitual. Farmborough noted: ‘It is, however, astonishing how quickly even a raw recruit can grow accustomed, though never hardened, to the sight and sound of constant suffering’.48 This rhythmic patterning was internalised; it was produced in their manner of speech. One of Farmborough’s duties which caused intense anxiety was to decide which of the wounded cases were hopeless. As readers we can only begin to imagine: ‘What it cost to turn away without aiding him, I cannot describe, but we could not waste time and material on hopeless cases, and there were so many others ... waiting ... waiting ... waiting’.49 Here not only is the sense of hopelessness magnified in the repetition but the sense is given of the experience churning round and round in her mind. After a particularly gruesome onslaught Stobart wrote: ‘dead men at every turn – men dead from hunger, cold, fatigue, and sorrow. With the dead men the pathos lay, not in their deadness – we shall all be dead some day.’50 She introduced a mesmeric quality with this repetition of ‘dead, dead – men’ and its inversion ‘men – dead’. The deliberate piling-up of the same detail mimics the repeated horror of men dying and continuing to die. Then as if replicating a lull, the emotional impact of this juggernaut of death ceased with the pragmatic: ‘we shall all be dead some day’. It is as if to state the obvious provided her with a firm hold in reality. Through the recycling of words an alliance between

64


form and content emerges. The reiterative words signify what is of central significance; ‘waiting ... waiting ... dead ... dead – men ... men dead’. Again the reader is drawn in to the experience, of the interminable desperateness of the situation. This hypnotic quality of repetition of words or phrases was not just internalised, it also occurred at a time of intense distress. Farmborough endured a particularly heavy bombardment and noticed a ‘curious change’ in both hers and another nurse’s demeanour: Anna’s face was stony, quite expressionless, and while she worked, the same words came from her lips every few moments. It’s nothing! It’s nothing! My dear. My dear. Quickly, quickly! Suddenly, with a shock I realise that I, too, have been repeating similar words, repeating them at intervals when the groans and cries of my patient have been too heart-rending.51 Here repetition mimics the comfort of meditation; similar to the effects of reciting a mantra. This delivery of familiar words of support created a synergy in both the personal survival of Farmborough and that of the patient; inducing a solipsistic state in the nurses in their attempt to absorb the suffering into themselves. For the nurses and patients alike, a denial-trance could be induced. Several esoteric religions document that there is a magical property inherent in sound and, as such, words would not have to convey actual meaning. Instinctively, these nurses adopted the field of repetitious language as a balm and solace and a method of numbing. It is as if all these different forms of repetition joined together to make a cocoon-like construct to offer protection and a means to stabilise the disorder. But this palliative usage of reiteration did not obtain for all autobiographers. In Borden’s autobiography it also occurs at quiet moments of interiority and elicits montages of horror and images of disjuncture: In a dream I see her, in a crazy hurting dream. Lovely night, lovely lunatic moon, lovely love – sick earth – you are not true; you are not part of the routine. You are a dream, an intolerable nightmare, and you recall a world that I once knew in a dream.52 In the quiet of night Borden found the enforced memory of the beauty of nature too painful and a contrast to her daily existence. The iterative force of ‘lovely’ with its progressive and accumulative imagery heightens and intensifies the dream-like quality. Beauty had

Nurses and VADs 65

become intolerable and unreal. Therefore in order to cope with the pain of remembering and writing about her ‘ordinary’ world, she had to transfer the memory to that of a dream which, in a stream of consciousness, transformed into a nightmare. Although this is not recorded in a realist mode, its lyrical subjectivity makes it more real and more horrifying. In connection with the above discussion, VAD Enid Bagnold’s autobiography is interesting as she combined more than one level of repetition. Repetition of words coalesce with a repetitious task; that of the laying-up of meal trays. She tells the reader: ‘I was laying my trays in the corridor, the dim corridor that I am likely often to mention.’53 The trays provided Bagnold with an anchor which had a cathartic effect: ‘I lay my spoons and forks. Sixty-five trays. It takes an hour to do. Thirteen pieces on each tray. Thirteen times sixty-five ... eight hundred and forty-five things to collect’.54 Their importance to her need for control and harmony lead her to resent teaching a new VAD: ‘the subtle art of laying trays. I didn’t want to share my trays with her. I love them; they are my recreation. I hung over them idly.’55 The task which is repeated again and again in her narrative accentuates the disjunction and fragmentation of her world by its non-sequitur intrusion. The circularity of the repetitive laying of trays helped to mollify the turmoil and became a meditative action, analogous to that of using a rosary. It allowed her to escape into her mind and a kind of nirvana. In addition, the return to these trays usually arose after a particularly unnerving or confusing event. For the majority of these autobiographers, this displacement into other zones of experiences set them apart as survivors. They had stepped beyond the world of security and tradition into one of the thrill of being useful, shared physical danger, and excitement. The writing that followed their return is symptomatic of just how much was suppressed. In one way or another they all mention the initial elation and how, as Lethbridge noted, that each: ‘thrilled and rejoiced that I was permitted to take so active a part’.56 Baronees T’Serclaes remembered that, ‘It was a heady atmosphere to move in, and it infected me with a strong desire to do something more’.57 In similar fashion, Furze rushed around and found herself, ‘throwing up the life I liked best, and committing myself to a sort of servitude’.58 But these women had become exhausted and drained after years of ordeal. The remorseless routine that had held them physically and mentally had created dependence. This was now to be broken, and the trauma of this withdrawal engendered a spectrum of sentiments. In London, VAD Diana Cooper recalled bouts of drinking: ‘My nerve had gone. Dread

66


had taken possession’.59 Just prior to her return to England Farmborough began to experience ‘battle’ fatigue: I knew what was wrong with me. It was my love for my Red Cross work was slowly fading; I was becoming sick of wounds, illness, dirt and filth. That was the dreadful truth, and I had to face it [ ... ] All had combined to unnerve me. I felt deeply ashamed to think that I was growing tired of my work; where had my passionate enthusiasm gone? And my vows? Sick at heart, I sat many long minutes a prey to dejection and grievous reflection.60 She recognised the need for time to recover as the horror set in. As the inexhaustible round of caring ceased, many nurses were left with a void. As carers, these women understood the necessity of giving themselves space to recover. Cannan understood her own and her colleagues stress: ‘What one needs most in shock and grief is time. Losing one’s world one still wanders in it, a ghost’.61 There is a sense of bereavement in the use of ‘shock’ and ‘grief’, not only for the dead, but for their own losses as individuals, both spiritually and emotionally: Now, for me, the war is over and my Red Cross work is finished. I cannot express the dreadful emptiness which has come into my life [Anna] found me weeping one day; I could not tell her why, because I did not know. She said it was ‘reaction’ but I knew it was something deeper than that.62 In recalling her mixed emotions, Stobart’s narrative switches sentence by sentence from the past to the present tense and back, and memories tumble one upon another: ‘I recalled desolate battlefields and see soldiers lying amid the twisted wires and shell cavities’.63 Her tone is clear and unvarnished, the syntax is not fragmented or repetitive. In its stead, the use of the present continuous exudes a pace that is languid. But what needs to be noted is the prevalence of elliptical markers, italics, unfinished questions and atmospheric metaphor. For example, Farmborough expected to look and be physically different after the suffering she had witnessed. Again there is a search for words: How can I describe ... I feel as though I have been caught in a mighty whirlpool, battered, buffeted, and yet ... I am still myself, still able to

Nurses and VADs 67

walk, talk, eat and sleep. It is astounding how much a human being can endure without any outward sign of having been broken up into pieces.64 Here it seems to me that, the elliptical marks or breaks in language suggest breaks in her knowledge or understanding of her experiences and her emotions. Later Farmborough wrote: ‘Was it I-really I – who saw that? Was it I – really I who did that?’65 [sic] With the use of rhetorical questions and italics for emphasis Farmborough presents a sense of incredulity at what she had undergone. When they returned to England and to their families they could not return to their former selves. Even those like Cannan who only spent a few weeks at a time on the continent found: ‘The world was different since I had been in France. I was different, though I did not know how exactly or why. It was queer being home again’.66 It is highly probable that many of these women would not immediately articulate their experiences to others. Unlike the majority of women, they had firsthand knowledge of maiming and terrible deaths, and by this they were separated and silenced. It could be due to what Paul Fussell noted about the art of letter writing from the front: ‘the trick was to fill the page by saying nothing and to offer the maximum number of clichés’.67 But I believe Foucault’s theoretical stance is useful here in that: ‘There is not one but many silences, and they are an integral part of the strategies that underlie and permeate discourses.’68 This aspect of silence is relevant not just for nurses and VADs, but as an underlying determinant for all the professions examined in this book, and as such warrants a full chapter which follows later. For all nurses and VADs, there appears to be an uncertainty where the boundaries lay for them to find a voice to express themselves and to decide how they should ‘appear’. Hitherto, the male experience of war would be one of patriotic service, being under fire, and heroism to the point of dying for one’s country. The admittance of women into these male arenas, where they would experience similar challenges and therefore challenge the male/female spheres, was unsettling. Traditionally women’s patriotism would have been expressed by passivity; waiting at home and maintaining order. These women saw war as a chance to take part in the global stage; to show that they could be as good as men. From the start, within the nurse/patient paradigm, the male/female roles had been reversed; nurses/women were mother-figures, active and in control, and men were supine, passive and vulnerable. Stobart appositely and sardonically wrote: ‘We had done nothing wonderful – women

68


are not allowed to do wonderful things – but we were content to feel that we had contributed our tiny share to the relief of suffering, and we had perhaps, made it easier for other women to do more in future times’.69 In this new situation, the definition of femininity needed to be broader, more inclusive and more permissive. This was the first boundary they crossed; the physicality of being in the theatre of war. War offered excitement in contrast to their restricted upbringings and this would have heightened the experience. Yet they faced the problem of how to express these new experiences. This introduced another set of boundaries to be negotiated. Many like Furze, Stobart, Farmborough, and Thurstan attempted to write in a manner that would befit the male versions of autobiography of this period. But, as can be seen from the above, schisms occur at exceptional and emotional episodes. In fact this question of narratorial boundaries had possibly more resonance for these professional women than any other group. In this war arena, they had to negotiate difficult and different discourses to find their voices. They would have been helped by the huge increase in writing, by women, after the war. This would have provided a domain in which they felt able to record their own experiences in their own manner. These experiences gave them the right to an opinion on the war which was no longer sentimental expression.70 It appears that the acute coping mechanisms utilised, to enable these women to write of their wartime experiences, shows the immense emotional pressure they suffered from. The various strategies (as I have shown) all aim to affect a style that presented a distance between narrator and subject. This would be in part to avoid possible charges of hysteria, in part to emulate the male voice and, most importantly, to find their own register. As autobiographers they tried to maintain their professional posture, especially that of a clinical detachment by their use of familiar prose. But despite this manoeuvring, the horror infiltrates the reader and vicarious emotions ensue unbidden. The tone these nurses and VADs adopted was calm and simple. This absence of sensationalism makes the narrative more compelling and creates a contrast between them, as observers and participants, and the mayhem of war. What I find of especial interest is that when these facades were breached, their writing became edgy, unsettling and stylistically innovative. This is evident particularly in the autobiographies by Bagnold and Borden. Their style typifies that of Modernism in their use of fragmentation, randomness and mess.71 Each of the professions

Nurses and VADs 69

appears to have a register specific to itself. The writing by this group of nurses and VADs is richer. Horror stimulated the stylistics, and if there is a gap created between the ugliness of the subject and style, the awfulness still comes through. Margaret R. Higonnet suggested that all women ‘struggle to express the inexpressible’ and identifies this in misogynist barriers to women.72 I would suggest that these nurses and VADs do in fact ‘express the inexpressible’ but the manner was different from that of the male testimonies. Foucault’s writing in The History of Sexuality has relevance here. Both sexual and war narratives record the unspeakable. Foucault posits: ‘It is no longer a question of simply saying what was done – the sexual act [war experience] – and how it was done; but of reconstructing, in and around the act, the thoughts that recapitulated it, the obsessions that accompanied it, the images, desires, modulations ... that modulated it’.73 Farmborough and others would write that situations were ‘indescribable’, meaning nasty. But rather than being censored in the manner Higonnet raised – that of describing without ‘violating an old taboo’74 – these autobiographers combined the effect of unspoken meaning. They used the stylistics discussed to: ‘pronounce a discourse of truth concerning themselves [ ... ] and took for its object what was unmentionable but admitted to nonetheless [ ... ] the validity of introspection, lived experience as evidence’.75 For the reader to expect expression that was hampered by delicacy, sensitivity and silence would be defensible. But these autobiographers are disarmingly frank. The writings of these nurses and VADs manages to cut through the boundaries of what permits some things to be said and not others. Their experiences have taken them from the articulation of death in the terms of consolation and euphemism, to forms of articulation that range from the halting narrative of innocence, through various distinctive and stimulating styles, to those of a distanced, professional, scientific discourse. The structures of feeling they display cover a gamut of understanding. These were not written to be self-serving or aggrandising accounts.

5 Artists and Practitioners

As I suggested in my general introduction, social and cultural boundaries were far more flexible for artists and practitioners than those of headmistresses and women doctors. Hitherto, the autobiographical writings of women artists (whether they were painters, dancers, actresses, musicians, composers or sculptors), have primarily been researched and read for their recording of their public accomplishments and for information on the participants within these artistic circles. For example, Sophie Fuller submits a survey of Edwardian women composers and defines what and how their scores are remembered.1 Suzanne Raitt wrote on female singers in the context of the paintings that John Singer Sargent undertook.2 Women painters are either part of an overall survey of painters and sculptors across time, or they are the subject of conventional biography combined with a catalogue of their work.3 Much the same cursory treatment attends the biographical content of actresses. For example, Roger Manvell wrote of Ellen Terry concentrating upon her career rather than any private or personal aspects; and Sara Maitland tackled Vesta Tilley’s life in the context of issues of gender and cross-dressing.4 In this chapter my intention is to analyse the mostly unexamined area of their private experience; from those artists that attract acclaim through public performance, followed by those artists that attained acclaim from work carried out in the private sphere. The texts these artists produce have perceptible boundaries which distinguish their private life from the period when their life becomes public and, for some, completely dominates to the extent that the narrative excludes all that is private. It could be argued that the concentration on career aspects is a given, in that this is what the general reading public is primarily interested in; it provided an insight into what is perceived as 70

Artists and Practitioners

71

a glamorous and exciting life. But it is explicitly this division between private and public that is of importance for actresses, dancers and musicians, and the less defined boundaries for private ‘performers’ such as painters, and sculptors. I intend to examine the distinction in the content, style and tone of writing that occurs when their public life becomes of prime importance to them, and when their private life became of secondary importance. The issues of public and private roles lead us to interrogate ideas of femininity absent from other female autobiographies, because the other professions do not engender a public persona. This chapter is divided into topics which are pre-eminent and common to all these texts, and are clearly divisible between pre and post-career periods and career. Then, to take the analysis to a further stage, autobiographies where artists do not exhibit marked delineations in topics, style, and tone are examined, in order to establish a reason for this. The competence of women musicians, painters and writers was often questioned. For those on the stage, it was a matter of questioning their respectability. Acceptability of actresses had had a chequered past in the English theatre, from one of admissibility and part of the community, to one of an essentially immoral and low character. Actress, Lena Ashwell’s father believed: ‘The stage was the Mouth of Hell.’ And dancer Isadora Duncan commented, ‘What is it that made men at that time exclaim, “I would rather see my daughter dead than on the stage?” ’5 When Henry Irving, the actor-manager of the Lyceum was knighted in 1895, it helped transform players from a public image of rogues to one of respected professionals.6 The average middle-class father may have accepted, by the end of the century, the theatre as suitable entertainment for his daughter, but it was a far cry from allowing her to become an actress.7 If young women did defy their families, they found themselves outside this familiar protection. In 1896 the first acting academy was established by Ben Greet, and Sir Henry Beerbohm Tree established a school in 1904.8 Young actresses had to face the isolation in the hierarchical theatre system along with advances from stage-door Johnnies who, along with most of the public, believed that these girls were sexually sophisticated. Many used the appellation ‘Mrs’ because a married title implied a greater air of respectability. Successful marriages tended to be with actors who did not require a conventional wife and mother, as traditionally an actress was not expected to give up her career to look after her children, as few were successful enough to be financially secure.9 As with any group or profession for women at this time, if they were unmarried, they risked and faced accusations of homosexuality.


According to Deborah Cherry: ‘Hundreds of women worked for their living as painters and hundreds more painted or drew as a recreational activity.’10 They worked in most areas of art production and due to feminist interventions into the history of art, women have been inscribed into accounts of art.11 Of course women musicians, painters and sculptors did not suffer from the opprobrium that actresses and dancers did, but they were nevertheless negatively recorded in art books. Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock wrote: ‘women are presented negatively, as lacking in creativity, with nothing significant to contribute, as having no influence on the course of art [ ... ] Women’s practice in art has never been absolutely forbidden, discouraged or refused, but rather contained [ ... ].’12 There are few full length studies of individual artists published before 1914. According to Cherry: ‘Time and again, the writers of magazine articles and short biographical entries on women artists claimed that there was little or nothing to tell.’13 The ideas of the time appear to want to preserve notions of ‘lady’ artists living tranquil and uneventful lives and in no manner opposing patriarchal boundaries. It is of interest to uncover whether this is borne out in their writings. With the exception of Ethel Smyth, all these autobiographies by artists and practitioners, listed in my bibliography, begin with childhood memories establishing their position in the immediate family. What is most notable is the pervading influence of the father and, in contrast to this, the shadowy depiction or absence of the mother. From the outset of actress Lillah McCarthy’s autobiography, it is clear that her father monopolised her world as a larger-than-life figure: Like a rushing mighty wind my father comes into my life; bursting in [ ... ] and capturing once and for all the heart of his little girl, the seventh of his children and the child of his choice. A handsome, tall, masterful, wild and eccentric Irishman [ ... ] my father was a tornado of a man. He caught me up and carried me far on the wings of his wild enthusiasms. During all the years of my childhood and until he died he dominated my life. His love for me and mine for him made me oblivious of all else [ ... ] In my childhood, Cheltenham days, however, I knew only one parent, my father.14 McCarthy cast her father as ‘life’ itself. In the half-dozen pages devoted almost unreservedly to their relationship she attached epithets to him, consistent with sentiments of adoration: ‘he was Athenian like the men


73

of Athens in his tastes.’15 He was a figure with whom she was entirely simpatico. This idolised association placed and associated her father in the context of a classical and pastoral landscape: ‘How peaceful it is: an oasis of leisured and ordered life, of planted trees, gardens and pleasant walks. Cheltenham, the heart of England! pulsing [sic] so gently that life there seems like a tableau rather than a pageant, not moving but enduring’.16 McCarthy was aware that this relationship was unusual: ‘The rest of the family thought us queer, and queer we undoubtedly were; though at the time everything my father did seemed natural to me.’17 Her unquestioning allegiance infiltrated all aspects of her life. After an incident at school, in which she was caned, he takes her side and decided: ‘No more school for you, my girl. I will teach you myself.’18 Despite huge omissions in her studies she had no regrets and was grateful ‘to my father [ ... ] to have been both ruled and loved.’19 It is not hard to imagine that this ‘ruled and loved’, from such a charismatic parent, would have had far-reaching affects over a young child and a young adult, especially one who appeared his soul mate. This all- embracing relationship: ‘fills the canvas of my memory of the next three years’20 and continued until, with his backing, she began her training as an actress. In like manner, cross-dresser Vesta Tilley had a close bond with her father, Harry Ball. There is strong evidence in her autobiography of the direct leverage he had over her life for many years. From the age of three she used to accompany him to the Variety Hall where he performed, and where he soon became a manager. Modern music hall was arriving and encouraged by her father, who had composed a medley of songs for her first performance, she began her stage career. She remembered: ‘my father carrying me to the side of the stage, [sic] straightened my little skirts.’21 This memory shows that her father appeared to be fulfilling both the father’s and mother’s role. Some years later she recorded, how one night in her bedroom she dons her father’s hat and overcoat and attempted to sing a song. Unbeknown to her, her father observed this and suggested: ‘That was quite good. Would you like to have a suit of boy’s clothes for one of your songs?’22 From her tone, it appears that her father, an impresario and theatre manager, saw nothing odd in this. As a family steeped in theatre, this was simply a cross-dressing variety act. Tilley recorded that she was delighted: ‘I felt I could express myself better if I was dressed as a boy.’23 It was masked as a boy that she continued to perform, and found fame.


Similar to McCarthy, Tilley acknowledged: ‘Between my father and myself there was a great bond.’24 This bond is made plain throughout her narrative in remembrances of his support of her career and encouragement in her cross-dressing act. Further, his ubiquitous presence is apparent from the great number of paragraphs and sentences beginning, ‘My father’. Again, in like manner to that of McCarthy, there is a total obliteration of her mother in her autobiography, and similar to McCarthy, Tilley wrote of her father until she married. For these women the closeness to the father draws them to emulate them physically and emotionally. These actresses are removed from the family environment into one of unusual intimacy with their fathers. They appear to have exclusive rights to their fathers’ attention and, for Tilley the wearing of male clothes could be a protection against her feelings for him and his for her. Marina Warner raises an interesting idea that: ‘Identification with the father and the prohibition against incest [ ... ] can impel her to refuse womanhood, to refuse to become an adult object of his lust and retreat instead into a symbolic neutral state.’25 But in general, the relationship that each of these young women held with their father placed them in his company, allowed them to escape from matriarchal influence and to have a prestigious professional life. Clearly there is an Oedipal thread running through many of the narratives. The analysis of this powerful father/daughter relationship is shown at some length for two reasons. The first is that this devotional closeness is only in professional women that perform in public. Second, it is necessary to make clear that this father/daughter relationship does not rest on their being an only child. Lillah McCarthy was the seventh child of eight and Vesta Tilley was the second of thirteen children. Correspondingly, pianist Mathilde Verne, fourth of ten children, all of whom were musical, is the one chosen to perform piano duets with her father from the age of eight. Once again, Verne privileged her father in the narrative. He spoke six languages fluently, played the piano, violin and organ, and composed several works.26 Gladys Storey, a painter, openly admits that her father’s influence was so prevailing that: ‘it is only through the memory of my father that I have knowledge of the facts.’27 Indeed, a third of her autobiography becomes a biography of her father. The magnetic relationship with the father gave them confidence. It would not be unreasonable to assume that, if the patriarch of the family found no fault with their career aspirations, why should they fear society’s disapproval? Unlike the headmistresses and doctors who found it


75

necessary to set out their aspirations under the cloak of euphemism, epiphany, and fairy tale, these artists make plain their paths. McCarthy believed she was born to be an actress: ‘I determined to give rein to my ambition.’28 This confidence is further displayed by her observation: ‘I feel deeply. My job in life is acting’29 Actress Lena Ashwell found: ‘my determination to follow my dream to become an opera singer, [ knew ] I ought to go on the stage.’30 Painter Laura Knight knew: ‘I could draw better than any of them and I was going to be an artist.’31 And dancer Isadora Duncan succinctly summed it up: ‘My art was already in me when I was a little girl.’32 I would suggest that the candid tone exhibited shows an unswerving confidence in the rightness of their actions. Supported by their fathers, these actresses, painters, dancers, musicians, and composers utilised the ‘gift’ from childhood and took this talent as normal, and as a need to be perfected and performed. This intrinsic talent from an early age was ‘natural’ to them and therefore did not appear to challenge boundaries of femininity. This enabled these talented girls to aspire to the confidence usually implicit in the male. Furthermore, artistic achievements such as watercolours, playing the piano, singing and dancing were encouraged and taken as necessary accomplishments before marriage. The artistry of acting, as I have already noted, would be the only one to attract public ire. In opposition to her father, McCarthy’s mother was at first portrayed in pallid terms, and contrasts strongly with the picturesque images given of her father. Her mother, she briefly records: ‘with her lovely face as of a cameo in ivory, seems to have all but vanished from my memories of these strange and strenuous years. [ ... ] my memory of her in those days is blurred.’33 Indeed, this is the only description of her mother during her childhood which is not marked by a comparison or contrast to that of her father. Only brief allusions of any kind are made: ‘my father abounded in hospitality, but left his wife to contrive it. [ ... ] My father was poetry; she seemed only prose.’34 An interesting feature of the vocabulary is that it is, ‘my father’ and, ‘his wife’, and ‘she’ not ‘my’ mother. The lack of possessive pronouns when writing about her mother reinforces the distance of feeling between them, and accentuates the depth of feeling for her father. This is a prosaic and descriptive delivery, whereas her writing about her father is full of energy, vitality and romanticism. Her writing unconsciously mirrors her comments and the contrasts are stark; poetry/prose, colour/ivory, hospitality/chores, flamboyance/making ends meet. Moreover from this moment her mother is then erased from the narrative.


McCarthy appeared to be aware of the need to redress the balance of the brio accorded to her father in the early part of her autobiography. She can only achieve this by prolepsis at this juncture, and by an indication of what her mother came to personify. She recorded that: ‘in her later years [she] stands out serene and beautiful [ ... ] In her ripe old age my mother became yet more beautiful [ ... ] She made matter–of– factness [sic] a fine art’. 35 There are further domestic details of black dress and white shawls, ability to grow small cuttings and reminders to drink her cocoa; all rather minor memories when set against the fulsome account of her father. Interestingly, it is worth noting that the more detailed but lack-lustre writing about her mother occurred later in her narrative, only after her father was dead and when she was between marriages. Such brief depictions of the mother are common in this professional group. Liza Lehmann, composer and Mathilde Verne, pianist, write with affection of their mothers’ feminine attributes. The most common remarks can be summed up in Verne’s autobiography: ‘My mother was one of the unknown heroines created to beautify life. Her existence was one long sacrifice to further her children’s interests.’36 The ‘angel in the house’ conceit underlines the shadowy mother figure, not unsurprisingly, given the number of siblings in these families. Ashwell was one of seven children, Duncan and Knight were one of three, McCarthy was one of eight, Tilley was one of 13, Maude White was one of six and Verne was one of ten children. Violet Vanbrugh does not mention her mother but her sister Irene briefly alludes to their mother when, at the age of 29 she decides to marry Dion Boucicault, an actor. Her mother was biased against her marrying Boucicault, which Irene finds hard to deal with: ‘that unreasoning attitude she took had an effect on me difficult to explain. It was all bewildering.’37 Irene Vanbrugh’s beloved father had died some years earlier, although there is no mention of this. Irene takes a walk to try and intuit what attitude her father would have taken: ‘and eventually it came to me quite clearly that he would have said, “If you are sure you love Dot [Dion] sufficiently to take this step against your mother then you must take full responsibility.” ’38 For her, even from the grave, her father’s ‘opinion’ held more sway than her living mother’s. In the second part of the three clear divisions in these autobiographies, the period covering their careers, the single-mindedness of these women is clearly visible. Their narratives are reduced to the parameters that bound their career life. I have already shown that they do not suffer anxieties over the propriety of claiming a career, and by the same


77

token they do not present as stereotypical, marriage-seeking, young women. This focused, insular disposition is manifest when Vanbrugh baldly writes: From the time I was fifteen when I started I had no interest outside the theatre. It completely filled my life. I don’t remember many young men admirers; I didn’t seem to have time for them. I would break any appointment I had, without hesitation if it clashed with my job [ ... ] I loved it more than anything else. I can’t conceive of life without acting [ ... ] you give up everything for it.39 This succinct extract, which offers extraordinary candour, speaks for this professional group. That is not to say that other groups of professional women were not so determined (see Chapter 3) but this level of steadfastness towards a career would more readily be associated with masculine objectives. Such unswerving dedication could be disarming, and indeed did elicit a price. Irene Vanbrugh recorded when Boucicault proposed: ‘I don’t know why I did not accept him then and there except that my mind was so concentrated on acting that all else seemed to take second place.’40 It was a further 11 years before they finally married which she justified by: ‘I am sure we were happier working out our own lives separately.’41 However these few lines of personal detail are minimal, when set within the many pages of career detail and they possibly operate as a form of closure rather than as an opening. McCarthy’s autobiography is typical of this transformation. In her adamant avoidance of any reference to personal relationships during her re-telling of her very public career, she gave only perfunctory trivia. She used letters from friends and colleagues to provide evidence of her acting status. In fact the autobiography becomes half biography of playwrights, directors and other actors, and McCarthy herself is subsumed. Following on from several paragraphs concerning Man and Superman, she announces: ‘In April 1906 I was married.’42 There is no preamble, no name and no intimation of who this man was. A few chapters further she writes: ‘Desmond McCarthy, in telling the story of the Court Theatre . . .’.43 From the earlier silence and surname the reader can only conjecture that this is her husband. Moreover, during the pages committed to the period covering their careers, this style of silence and evasion persists. For McCarthy, there is no subsequent mention of her husband or her marriage. The reader again is left to infer: ‘In the spring of 1910 I was very ill and, a weak and suffering creature, was taken off to stay with Mr and Mrs H.G. Wells.’44 Similarly, when several years later

78


she received a death threat and was pursued by a stalker, she was again assisted by friends. At such times the reader would expect to find her husband of major importance. It is not until much later in her text, when she is no longer writing about her career, that it became obvious that there must have been a divorce. A similar gloss over personal trouble was used by Maude White, the composer, pianist and teacher. Whilst touring abroad she mentioned: ‘[I] had rather a nasty little break-down’.45 To deflect attention from this there follows a two page description of a gentleman traveller and his suggestions of places to visit and stay at. McCarthy noted: ‘Sorrows too fall heavily upon me. A dearly-loved brother dies. Turmoil of war.[sic] Asquith falls.’46 These compressed deliveries acted as emotional shutters when sensitive upheaval occurred during their careers. Short and incomplete sentences spurn personal and world events in short shrift. When these performers wrote about their lives prior to their careers, it can be seen that they used a fulsome, energetic and flowing style. In the career period of their lives, it is no longer a linear recording with a spectrum of emotion and experiences. It becomes a prosaic record which moves from play to play or composition to composition. Family, close friends, personal experiences, emotions or tragedies are omitted or glossed over. It is worth mentioning at this juncture that this does not obtain for women painters, and this contrast will be the subject of a discussion below. There are two points at issue here. One is the nature of self-disclosure, and the other the strict boundary between the notion of womanly and unwomanly. This part of their autobiography that deals with their careers is ordered differently. They are a record of their public achievements which are established in the public domain, in which they want to appear competent, in control and professional. More than in any other area of their lives, what they wrote can be proved or disproved, and this censure could have had an inhibiting affect. Their restraint makes the language dry, and furthermore, the themes are curtailed to those connected with their profession. All their emotional energy flowed into their chosen profession, leaving a vacuum that they were apparently unaware of at the time. Thus the autobiography atrophies in emotion and becomes a biography of the theatre, concert hall and the participants. This reigned-in, emotional economy is symptomatic of self-set boundaries and the imagined boundaries of public life along with its association with masculinity. With these autobiographies in question, the accepted barriers between male/female, public/private becomes ill-defined. This usually


79

signals a change in the balance between their career and private life. When Irene Vanbrugh returns to the tale of her proposal she noted that; it was above a year before she allowed an announcement to be made: ‘[not] till the end of the run of the play’.47 Having reached 30 years of age, many women would fear remaining a spinster. But flying in the face of convention, it transpired that due to further commitments on Irene’s part, the marriage was delayed for several years. Such confident and challenging behaviour disavowed the social assumption that all women aspire to marriage. There is no evidence of remorse. Vanbrugh’s highly focused behaviour placed personal needs a very poor second to achieving public accolade and the enhancement of her career. In the first two parts of these tripartite-structured autobiographies, the first section showed the father as the prime influence and object of devotion, and the second, which concentrated on the career, ignored contemporary feminine aspirations and showed unashamed commitment to their careers. In the final section of this autobiographical structure they return to concentrate on their private life as their careers were either over or relegated to secondary importance. The most striking of these changes was the return to a need for patriarchal control. The influence moved indicating transference of devotion from father to husband which was not uncommon within the artistic profession. Also in the re-telling the style and tone is reminiscent of that displayed in the first section of the autobiography. In 1918 McCarthy met Dr Keeble, an Oxford don. They talked and found they had a lot in common: ‘I brightened up. He brightened up [ ... ] He knew the poets and loved poetry. So did I. We talked the whole evening.’48 She returned to London with little thought of marriage when all of a sudden, ‘I began to wish he would [ask her to marry]. Within a week he did. And I promised to marry him’.49 There are exuberant minutiae on house building, the planning and: ‘five years digging ourselves in in [sic] a garden’.50 Her second marriage heralded the return of the happiness and safety she enjoyed as a child: ‘a moment that will remain with me all my life; it showed me beauty such as I had never seen before’.51 What becomes apparent and needs to be noted here is that her career had ceased to be predominant, and the narrative style of her writing replicates the pre-career period of her life. The pastoral bliss of her childhood was replicated. Her new husband created the safety and a role similar to that of her father. Tellingly, McCarthy called her husband ‘my Controller’. The father/child axis was in place: ‘ “Now, my dear,” says my Controller, “you’ve talked

80


quite enough: drink your cocoa; it’s time for you to be in bed!” ’52 There directly follows a flashback to her father, who has not been mentioned in some 30 years of her life. A lengthy poetic description of the countryside leads unswervingly to memories of his restlessness when he would say: ‘ “Come on Lillah, let’s be off”, and we would go [ ... ] I used to hope that we would go on for ever.’53 It appears that in one sense they have. Finding herself totally in love, to the exclusion of all others (similar to that with her father’s) ‘love for me and mine for him made me oblivious of all else.’54 Her earlier energy and vitality once again become transparent in her writing. His leverage was still present. McCarthy’s descriptions of her father and later, her second husband, had drawn parallels in their interests. Both were enriched by poetry and nature, and both were romantics. At both periods of her life she is at home, in her private womanly sphere. However this is not particular to McCarthy. Liza Lehmann, composer and singer experienced, a not dissimilar, liberating rupture, but her voicing of it is more effusive. The narrative of her early singing career is blithe and genial; anecdotes abound about other performers, and there are a few personal details of her young life. She lived in a: ‘charming house with a fine studio, where I lived until I abandoned my career as a singer.’55 At this point of change in her life she reminded herself that: ‘this is a human document’ and by implication truthful.56 After a spell of illness – exhaustion followed by flu and the idea that, her nervous nature made her unsuitable for this profession – she was: ‘half inclined to give it up [ ... ] and whilst I hesitated on the brink, Fate took the matter out of my hands, for I met my future husband – and when we married I retired into private life and abandoned my career without a sigh of regret’.57 No longer in the public domain, Lehmann retracts into the female private sphere where her creative energies flow: ‘after my marriage a curious thing happened. All the intense longing to compose music, which I had for so long felt and which had been practically repressed for years, now found vent.’58 It appears that, because she was no longer engaged in public performance with all her energy going outwards, she had mental and physical space to compose music, which is intrinsically a private activity. But even this ceases with the birth of her sons: ‘I was far more wrapped up in “living poems” than in my art [ ... ] and the love of my children became the very mainspring of my existence.’59 Womanly tasks of home-making, love and childcare provide a different form of creative outlet within the private sphere. Her


81

enthusiastic narrative exhibits a similar freedom which only flowed in the recounting of her pre-career life. Similar to McCarthy, Lehmann needed the release from the restraints of a professional career to produce a multifaceted persona. Communication in society is controlled and organised in order that the dominant power maintains mastery. Thus the process of exclusion and prohibition appear to operate in these performic professions. The force of these limiting mechanisms is plainly seen in this comment from Lehmann: ‘I abandoned my career as a singer, became human and married’ (my italics).60 It is significant that she associated marriage and being human in the private world, and that of her career, in the public world, by default, as inhuman. Although she had public success, unconscious and inherent structures placed legitimacy in her woman’s role in the private domain, and she was unable to de-compartmentalise these. Further, the emotional temperature of these separate worlds problematises the narrative tone, style and vocabulary. Part of the difficulty lies in the framed societal boundaries and the way which, as autobiographers, they merged their two worlds textually. By this I mean that when they wrote of the private, familial and domestic, the writing flowed, emotions were aired and vocabulary that was familiar to them produced an overall style and tone that was confident and effusive. On the other hand, the public domain appears as a forbidden and dangerous arena; the private had to be hidden. The writing describing the later is therefore devoid of expansiveness. This all serves to show how the tripartite structure (private/public/ private) operated for artists who conducted their careers in the public domain and how the role of the father and the public, masculine world is foregrounded in these texts. We need now to consider how women painters differ from this pattern. This can be summed up in two ways. The painters’ autobiographies do not have a stark tripartite structure and the nature of their narrative has a uniform and unwavering tenor throughout. By this I mean that periods of sadness or excitement, whether in childhood, pre-career, career or post-career receive an appropriate emotional and lexical temperature and are recorded in full. There does not appear to be the necessity felt by the public performers to evade or foreshorten personal experiences. It would be difficult to accept that these actresses, musicians and dancers lacked the necessary emotional vocabulary to enable them to articulate their feelings in desperate circumstances. But it is probable that whilst writing about their public and professional life, they wanted to underplay the personal


elements of intimate life. It is this which is the nub of the different range of parameters witnessed in the autobiographies of public performance artists, and artists who worked in private. Estella Canziani, Knight and other painters often had an itinerant upbringing and tended to maintain this bohemian lifestyle throughout their careers. Knight married Harold who she had met as a very young student. Knight wrote that: ‘To be free to go where we wished was our desire.’61 These painters rented, stayed awhile then moved on. It was this liberty and flexibility that is exhibited in their writing; in topics covered, style and tone. With so few possessions and indeed no desire for such burdens, their lives had a laxity and latitude not experienced by many other artists. There were no walls; physically or mentally. Knight’s tone and style appear as a natural extension of her painting, which exposes a stimulating joie de vivre. Her descriptions have an energy that stimulates the senses: ‘I drew in the fire of ambition [ ... ] an old brown nut-cracker face ... the smell of new wood [ ... ] to paint a lot of landscape and climb trees [ ... ] everything held absorbing interest [ ... ] The moor was in its most theatrical mood’.62 Many, many more fill the text invoking a painterly canvas. This style is not reserved only for periods of happiness. When she wrote of her mother’s death, Knight drew upon metaphorical images of colour and nature. She described a huge ash tree while painting in Winchester cathedral grounds: So many berries – a mass of scarlet – the next morning reduced to a just rotten stump [ ... ] there had been no wind. It [the tree] had destroyed itself with its own exuberance [ ... ] I could never dissociate the breaking of that tree from that of my mother’s life. All thought her such a splendid creature she was so handsome she looked so radiantly strong and full of life. When we went back home a doctor told her she had at most two years to live.63 It could be taken as a common-place that visual memory and colour would be prevalent with painters. But what is of greater interest is the willingness and openness of their discussion, when actively involved in their careers. It is this which marks them as different from performance artists. Within this sector of artists and in contrast to other artist’s careers, Knight does not shirk from her darker moments. After the death of her sister she became depressed: ‘Ugly threads were being woven into the material of my character. I shook hands with hate.’64 Shortly after her


83

depression she noted: ‘Spring-time came and life seemed worth living after all.’65 The language here has a figurative romanticism in its use of metaphor, and nature is frequently used to echo her moods. Its poetic simplicity captures the emotion and the easy renewal of the young. Canziani does not shy away from telling of her mother’s illness and death, but intersperses newspaper cuttings with her own involvement. This is the first real reference to her mother. An artist of renown, her mother: ‘struggled to finish her last picture [ I ] supported her with cushions in a chair to enable her to work’.66 With touching delicacy, Canziani tells how she used a wheel-chair to take her mother to the gallery for the last time. She continued: My mother died after a long illness at 3am a lovely summer morning, birds singing, the may in full bloom, and a gorgeous sunrise flooding the room with light [ ... ] that is what one thinks of when we die, all that glory and beauty. There is nothing to fear in death [ ... ] when my mother died it was sunrise not sunset –.67 The main point of contrast with performance artists is that painters, composers and sculptors tended not to avoid recounting personal issues at any time in their lives. I believe that this has to do with boundaries; boundaries of the public/private and boundaries of the notion of womanly/unwomanly. Foucault’s studies on the Panopticon are useful here because of his observations on the ‘gaze’, especially when it is instantiated in the notions of this as a controlling force. Foucault wrote: ‘each gaze would form a part of the overall functioning of power.’68 It must be emphasised here, that I am using the term ‘gaze’ to connote the idea of collective observation which demarcates and enforces society’s boundaries of propriety. In his chapter, ‘The Means of Correct Training’, Foucault suggests the arrangement of space is crucial if we wish to know and alter people.69 He is, of course, referring to buildings where construction enables ‘the eye of authority’ to observe and control. This explanatory model can be valuably expanded to autobiographical writing of a certain type, namely, for the autobiographies of headmistresses and for doctors, because they were so imbricated into institutional frameworks. It is appropriate to extend Foucault’s metaphor here, and float the idea that ‘the eye of authority’ can also be shorthand for the presumed ‘eye’ or gaze of the public. Actresses, musicians and dancers had crossed a threshold where they are seen, and they too became subjects of a disciplinary power in that they were observed and could be classified. Foucault noted that: ‘visibility assures the hold of the power


that is exercised over them [subjects]’70 It is what Foucault described as: ‘a mechanism that coerces by means of observation.’71 Obviously this could be applied to any of the women autobiographers in my research, but it has more explanatory power when applied to these artistic women who function in a very public domain. The tripartite structure of ‘public’ artists’ autobiographical writing lays bare two distinct levels of coercion. In the first and third periods, when they are within domestic confines, they were contained by boundaries that were marked as ‘womanly’ and ‘feminine’. As children, their prime influence of the father provided them with the necessary confidence to conquer the public domain. When finally, they return to private life, most usually because of marriage, the record once again broadened to encompass private matters. The childhood boundaries of masculine influence return in the form of a husband. In the ‘middle’ career period of their lives the ‘coerc[ing] observation’ is all the more intense. The boundaries and demands of this public life made them protective of their private activities and their perceived need to appear focused, strong and professional. They did not want the ‘fluffy’ or ‘ragged’ parts of their lives to intrude on this professionalism. This caused their writing to become highly compartmentalised, restrained and decidedly selective in its image making. Social pressures which would define them as unwomanly would constrict their writing style, tone and breadth of coverage. They and their work were public, but the product of this work is transient. The accolades only hold ‘good’ until the next performance. This initiates a strong division in their lives which is not so tightly drawn for that of the private performers. Put another way, the emotional temperature of these separate worlds problematises the recall. Part of the difficulty for the actresses lies in how they were to merge their two selves, the one conventional, and the one unorthodox. The record of the private, domestic world has an overall confidence and effusive tone, whereas, the discourse about their public experiences evokes as a forbidden and dangerous area. Indeed, at times the actresses lack confidence and present an insecure and diffident text. For non-performance artists, these boundaries between career and private life are almost non-existent. This is markedly displayed in the content, style and structure of their autobiographies. Many of these women had an itinerant, bohemian life style. Their private arena was frequently at the fringe of the dominant social expectations of home and family life. In contrast to performance artists, it was unlikely that they would have had overt public recognition. It was their work that


85

was recognised and lauded. Whilst their art was produced from the world at large, this art entered the public arena, but the artists themselves could remain anonymous and private. Moreover, their art on canvas, musical score or sculpture, is a concrete and lasting testimony to their talent. This was not so for the public performers whose art had the impermanence of each performance and only retained in public memory. It is this difference between artists who perform in public, and artists whose work ends up in the public domain, that affirms how boundaries, whether they are physical or psychological, affect the style, tone and content of these women autobiographers. Public performance artists were bound by the ‘eye’ of society, in the early twentieth century. This initiated a power nexus which could undermine their nerve and self-assurance. But for artists working in private, their anonymous, bohemian or itinerate arena allowed them physical and mental freedom.

6 Women Writers

In this chapter the autobiographies of women who wrote for a living are examined. These autobiographies of professional wordsmiths will inevitably be qualitively different from autobiographies of amateurs in the field, and they raise interesting issues about the interrelation of ‘truth’, fact and fiction. These women novelists who were published in the period 1900 onwards participated at a time of great literary change. In a brief overview of the writing scene during the fin de siècle and Edwardian periods it is clear that, between the decline of the threevolume novel in 1895 and the outbreak of the First World War, fiction was the most important section of the leisure industry.1 The development of a mass reading public increased the demand for books and made the Edwardian period a time of unprecedented literary activity. This was due, in part, to the cheaper price of a novel as it was no longer considered a luxury, and in part, to its size, as it was smaller and could be read in many places.2 New genres were in the process of formation along with different sets of literary conventions. Although Edwardianism was different from modernism, it was never the less radical. Modernism reconstructed the past and asserted a new identity. Edwardianism was thought to favour continuity and tradition, but the fiction often belies this. Many novels view change as essential, for example, H.G. Wells’s Tono-Bungay (1909) The New Machiavelli (1911), and Arnold Bennett’s Clayhanger (1910). There was an influx of women writers (as this chapter attests) and it was new for women to be the central subjects of fiction. A striking number of women topped the bestseller lists in popular romance and children’s fiction; Marie Corelli, Baroness Orczy, Florence Barclay, Elinor Glyn among others.3 The most commercially successful Edwardian adaptation of the Ruritania romantic genre was Elinor Glyn’s Three Weeks 86

Women Writers 87

published in 1907, in which she broke taboos with her account of an older woman’s desire for an upper-class young man.4 As central subjects, they were no longer women who were defined by their domestic desires. The two major themes of marriage problems and work dominated serious fiction and often had a powerful feminist slant. For example, Violet Hunt’s The Workaday Woman (1906) describes the lives of independent working women, and Mrs Humphry Ward’s Daphne (1909) looks at marriage and divorce law reform in a radical way.5 The traditional narrative of female dependency in Edwardian heroines became obsolete. For example, Elizabeth Robins, The Convert (1907), tells of a society beauty, converted to the Suffragette cause, who displayed sympathy for the underprivileged.6 All literary texts incorporate various discourses which the narrator’s voice ultimately controls, negotiates and presents a certain point of view.7 The women in question, to varying degrees, were wordsmiths; they understood how to utilise narrative control and steer discourses in certain directions. If they were to use these skills in their autobiographies, they could disguise or change the balance of personal issues. It is this competence which would allow them to create the perspective they want. So it would not therefore be surprising if these skills were openly employed in their ‘factual’ writing. As Storm Jameson makes plain: ‘I am an accomplished professional novelist, and nothing, but nothing, would have been easier for me than to draw a portrait which, without telling a single lie, would be dishonest from beginning to end, intelligent, charming, interesting, and a lie’.8 But, having made the reader aware of this possibility, Jameson took pains throughout her autobiography to display her efforts to be honest. Silences in these autobiographies are not by subtle omission; these writers are explicit about the subjects and events that they have no intention of revealing. It is worth mentioning briefly at this juncture that, of all the autobiographers examined, questions of accuracy and truthful portrayal feature more strongly in these writers than in other groups of professions. There are further problems when these autobiographers have drawn on, and adapted, personal experiences to present a similar episode in both a work of fiction and their autobiography. From personal experience as readers, we all know that the more a tale is told and re-told, the more minor adjustments can occur and supersede the original. In point of fact, Rosamond Lehmann wrote: ‘so much of “my life story” has gone, in various intricate disguises, and transmuted almost beyond my


own recognition, into my novels, that it would be difficult if not impossible to disentangle “true” from “not true” ’. 9 Naturally this is not true for all writers. As readers, we are not readily in the position to know the truthfulness of recounted events. Indeed, given that novels are such a multifaceted form of discourse and use various elements to form an organised whole, an examination of these texts along a fiction/autobiography/ ‘truth’ axis would prove unproductive. Therefore, with the above markers in mind I intend to put to use a different theoretical frame unused in this book, in order to unpick selected aspects of these complex autobiographies. I shall work with some of the ideas of the movement of l’écriture féminine, founded in the mid-1970s by several women writers, including Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray, in order to see if they provide a useful explanatory model for autobiography of this kind. In a bid to produce a comprehensive survey of fiction writers within this period an extensive trawl through the Penguin reference publication of Biographical Dictionary of Women (1998) and The Oxford Companion to Edwardian Fiction (2002) uncovered 312 female fiction writers.10 But only ten of these had written autobiographies. A further ten were unearthed from the ‘Penguin Dictionary’ and four from William Matthews British Autobiographies: written and published pre 1951. Whilst I cannot claim that this survey is totally comprehensive, the scrutiny of some 500 entries would appear to be near complete. From these 500 plus entries, only 24 autobiographies were mentioned. As barely 5 per cent of women fiction writers wrote autobiographies, it was interesting to discover if there was any correlation between the desire to write an autobiography and the genre of fiction of that writer. Research revealed that of the 24 writers, eight wrote romances, five produced historical romance, two used sensational and sexual themes, two wrote children’s books, one was a crime writer, three undertook feminist fiction and three wrote social and political novels. This leads pro tem to a further observation that, of these autobiographical writers, approximately 75 to 85 per cent would be classed within the lowbrow area of the market with 15 to 25 per cent in the middle-brow section.11 Of these 24 autobiographies I intend to draw, on two lowbrow (Elinor Glyn and ‘Rita’ Humphreys), one middle-brow (Baroness Orczy), and one high-brow writer (Storm Jameson) a 50/25/25 divide. There appear to be two main reasons which motivate these women to take up writing. On the one hand, there is the practical need to earn a living, either for independence or due to family financial problems; on the other hand, there is a will to creativity which is stimulated by

Women Writers 89

emotional and physical extremes. The most obvious of these was the need for a livelihood. Berta Ruck and H.M. Swanwick acknowledged that, ‘it was obvious that all of us would have to earn a living as soon as possible.’12 Swanwick obtained unsatisfying employment: ‘For a good many years, what ever work I did was scrappy [ ... ] although I was not without cravings for a profession.’13 She recalled, ‘reporting lectures at Cambridge [ ... ] when the Manchester Guardian employed me for “descriptives” ’.14 Ruck began her employment, ‘illustrating books for children,15 and Orczy wrote short, sensational stuff for magazines,’16 For Storm Jameson, her academic education won her her first opportunity to work in a publisher’s office.17 She then set about publishing her thesis as a serious work on European drama and received mixed reviews.18 However, Glyn and Humphreys had been published writers before experiencing financial embarrassment after marriage. For ‘Rita’, Mrs Desmond Humphreys, a broken engagement, instigated by her parents made her realise her need for money, independence and romance: ‘I determined I would write something worthy of the effort; would achieve independence, and show that I could support myself.’19 Furthermore, for Humphreys: ‘literature must mean a livelihood as well as inclination!’20 Netta Syrett and Baroness Orczy did not mention the need for a livelihood. Their motivation was to improve upon the general standard of novels already in print. Syrett, the eldest of ten children, became a teacher and wrote plays for children. But after reading, ‘one after the other, a number of novels dealing with the terribly restricted life led by women whose youth coincided with mine, I began to think a counterblast to this picture might conceivably be due.’21 This counterblast arrived in the form of feminist fiction with a strong edge of sensationalism.22 In point of fact there was a strong emergence of new themes at this time, especially those that focused on Edwardian heroines who were doctors, nurses, teachers, journalists and so on.23 Orczy’s motivation, in the first instance, arose from her father’s financial situation.24 Later in her autobiography she ascribed her motivation as her desire to administer a stiff corrective to extant fiction writers: ‘People who come from the wilds of Derbyshire, who know nothing of life.’ Orczy, on the other hand had: ‘studied in art and music, history and drama, [so] why shouldn’t I write.’25 Elinor Glyn came from a comfortable upper-middle-class background. She described herself as: ‘almost the first society woman to become a novelist, and this was an innovation not well looked upon either by my friends, or by the general body of critics of that date.’26 According to


Glyn, she had led an agreeable life, went to amusing house-parties, and wintered in Cannes or Monte Carlo or Rome.27 What she had not realised was how profligate her husband Clayton was.28 Clayton overspent, gambled and mortgaged the property and finally, ‘had the shocking bad luck to lose over £10,000!’29 He saw his heart problems as the answer. Instead of obeying medical advice, he attempted to foreshorten his life by excesses, and live on capital: ‘After that – the deluge!’30 Unfortunately he lived seven years longer than he had planned in spite of his: ‘categorical refusal to undertake treatments [ ... ] to stop smoking a dozen strong cigars in a day’.31 Glyn’s answer to the burgeoning financial crisis was more practical. By 1911 there was no choice other than to increase her writing output and claim substantial advances for her novels to prevent bankruptcy. The Reason Why was a resounding success but subsequent novels starting with Halcyone [sic] were failures. She recorded: ‘As my only conscious object, by this time, was to make enough money to keep myself and all the family in comfort, and pay off Clayton’s debts, I am afraid that this experience did not tend to improve my literary style’. 32 Glyn was a total romantic. She felt that her creative talent became compromised when faced with practical necessities. She was reluctant to face the harsher side of life and found the fundamentals of everyday survival destructive to her creative powers: ‘I refused to remember the sufferings of millions [ ... ] who starved in the towns to maintain England’s wealth, and saw only the wonderful prosperity’. 33 She needed to romanticise life and ignore unpleasantness in order to write. What is clear is that most of the low-brow writers did not have an all-consuming desire to write. Practical imperatives were part of the driving force for these women to become writers. By contrast, a high-brow writer like Jameson believed that she would be published, and she supplemented her income until that time writing articles, working in a publisher’s office and teaching working women literature. 34 This leads to the question of the influence and presentation of the relationship between the emotions and the body. Conventional wisdom at the time would have upheld the Western tradition that privileged mind over body. But illustrations from these writers of this period appear to challenge this theory of writing and should encourage us to reassess the ideas of l’écriture féminine as exemplified by Cixous and Irigaray. Cixous wrote that the body rather than the mind has been marginalized in traditional literary histories. Their idea of ‘Writing the

Women Writers 91

body’ or ‘letting the body be heard’ are clearly attempts to refute the sense of writing as a strictly mental activity. Cixous and Irigaray developed the idea of l’écriture féminine which challenged these traditional notions by refusing to accept this separation. Cixous’s The Laugh of the Medusa (1975) developed the theme of the fluid and less constrained experiential nature of women’s writing.35 This has some potential for my analysis. Examination of the wordsmiths’ autobiographies indicates that what makes them hang together is the powerful case they make, for the notion that the body and mind are in fact interconnected. Illness, death, love, pregnancy and birth can all be linked to intensified artistic peaks of productivity. For Elinor Glyn this was a recurring rite. After the birth of her second daughter she contracted rheumatic fever and was expected to die. She recorded that in: ‘a fit of rebellion against the idea of dying young, to which I had hitherto been quite resigned, and had, in fact, cherished as being rather touching and romantic! I determined that whatever followed [ ... ] I should write a book’.36 Re-reading her journals, she found them so amusing that she decided to make them into a book: ‘No one imagined that I could be serious when I announced that I would write a book, but the poor invalid had to be humoured’.37 This near death experience resulted in The Visits of Elizabeth published in 1900. Again in 1902 following a fall when diving in Egypt, Glyn was seriously ill. The pain was so intense that she was given morphia intermittently for months. During her fitful recovery: ‘I was filled with an impulse to write, and the idea of the story came to me [ ... ] which I called The Reflections of Ambrosine’.38 In each of these instances, illness and near death experiences became a creative discourse for survival in which her suffering generated a positive and heightened productivity. The idea as ‘writing the body’ particularly arises with these wordsmiths’ when they are describing a psychological upset. Love affairs, whether forbidden or unrequited, engender ‘high’ points of creativity. Humphreys’ broken engagement (mentioned earlier) brought on a serious illness from which she might have died. Sent to Scotland, she was: ‘determined [to] write something worthy’.39 Amidst Humphreys’ battle for physical and mental health, Dame Durden was written and published. In point of fact Humphreys did marvel how, with such handicaps, as she saw it, a writer, especially a woman writer, coped. Her suggestion was to keep the: ‘brain in “compartments” [ ... ] not an easy matter. When to this is added a measure of personal unhappiness, money troubles, domestic storms, it

92


seems a wonder that the imaginative side of one’s personality can escape’.40 What appears to be is so interesting here is that Humphreys and Glyn do not display any awareness of how their adversities had been part of their driving force. Naomi Mitchison, on the other hand, recognised the emotional link with creativity and observed that: ‘For most of my life my love relationships [have] affected my writing’.41 She returned to this phenomenon more than once: ‘Presumably this is true for everyone in the arts; we swim much more in the emotions. In order to observe we have to be thin-skinned, easy to hurt, and perhaps we observe too much for comfort’.42 But, rather than thinking personal unhappiness was unproductive for writing, Mitchison viewed it as necessary and a possible advantage. Furthermore, she believed this to be a normal reaction and part of an artistic temperament. Mitchison was writing her autobiography in 1979 and may well have been aware of the new ‘thinking’, but she was observing her creative past, and how her work was subject to emotional controls. What is clear is that, according to these writers, the relationship between positive and negative in the role of creativity is a dynamic one. When illness or death obtruded into the lives of these writers, the paradoxical effect was to fuel their creativity. However, when the body was being used to create something (a child), then many of the writers experience a diminution of the creative urge. This connection between creativity and reproduction is foregrounded explicitly by Jameson, who equated her pregnancy, and later her hysterectomy, with intellectual death. Storm Jameson recorded of her pregnancy that in 1915: ‘I had leisure during these months to write, and I tried to finish my novel. I failed completely. My mind had lost its power to concentrate: the energy was still there, but the sap did not run. Surprised I thought: It must be the child’.43 Her premise that creativity can only take place in either the body or the mind, but not in both at the same time, further attests to her view of an affinity between these two generative elements. Further, it appears that, when the question of a hysterectomy arose, the creative potential was seen to be at risk. Some ten years after the birth of her son, Jameson recorded her hysterectomy. Before leaving hospital she noted that she would have liked to ask the doctor: ‘whether a woman whose womb has been taken from her can still write books?’44 We cannot know, but it seems reasonable from the evidence to surmise that Jameson was making

Women Writers 93

the link to her experience ten years earlier, in which the reproductive organs had an impact on her writing powers. It appears that whether the reproductive body is useful and productive or useless and removed, it was held by Jameson to have a direct influence on the creativity of the mind. In this notion, the fertility and creative production are focused in dialectical opposition, and to the detriment of any imaginativeness or originality. This example draws me to formulate the notion that the binary forces of negative/positive are operative. Similar to the examples above it appears that, when the body is ‘negative’, that is suffering from love, illness, and near death experience the mind is ‘positive’ with heightened activity. Writing is of course a form of production. But when the body is ‘positive’, that is being creative in its reproductive function, intellectual creativity waned. Having established a connection between the mind and body at an inspirational, creative level for these writers, it seems plausible to extend the attention to the mind/body paradigm in order to see how this influenced the content of their fiction writing. I have already suggested the majority of these women novelists in this survey wrote for a low-brow market. It is well documented in numerous biographies, biographical dictionaries, anthologies, that the majority of these writers have called upon personal experience and known events. Due to the intrinsic romanticism that many of these writers have exhibited, personal experience influenced them in three distinct manners. Let us now turn to more specific textual characteristics. Firstly, the unconscious recycling of real-life experiences: secondly, the deliberate avoidance of personal exposure: and thirdly, the opportunistic deployment of personal experience as a sort of ‘copy’. Syrett, writer of plays, novels and fairy stories was unaware how much of her ‘life’ was the material for her work until she wrote her autobiography: ‘the fact is that in my earlier books I have made more use of personal experiences than I quite realised when I undertook this backward glance’.45 To gauge to what extent this took place is difficult because in her autobiography she openly stated: ‘Much of the past I have no intention of unravelling at all, in spite of the modern craze for “frankness” ’.46 For Orczy her personal life had a more discreet and neutral bearing on her fictional writing. She clearly affirmed that her choice to write historical romance stemmed from her reclusive nature and a fascination with history: ‘I never really cared for social life I [sic]


didn’t find that modern thought and modern views of life attracted me sufficiently to place my romantic stories in the setting of today’.47 This aversion to contemporary times, and her desire for her romances to have historical accuracy, did not necessitate drawing on personal experiences. Indeed, this avoidance of the deeply personal was carried through to her autobiography, where highly emotional areas were not revealed. Other than to tell us of the supreme happiness she has had from her marriage the only details of this marriage that Orczy provided were: I can only thank God on my knees [ ... ] It was during that time that my life was turned from darkness into light [ ... ] that I met the man who from that day became and remained all the world to me. The subject is secret and sacred to me so I will not speak of it except to say this [ ... ] My marriage was for close on half a century one of perfect happiness and understanding, of perfect friendship and communion of thought.48 In like manner the First World War was a closed subject: ‘Those terrible years 1914–18, on which I cannot bear to dwell in thought even after all this time, were – as far as my life’s work was concerned – very fruitful for me’.49 Neither Syrett nor Orczy had consciously used private thoughts and affairs in their work. Syrett was frankly surprised that her life had seeped into her fiction. This could also be true for Orczy but, due to her withdrawn existence and silence in her autobiography it would be difficult to make connections. These aspects of silence are an important theme and will be examined in a later chapter. Writers like Humphreys, Glyn and Jameson consciously drew upon their lives as subject matter. Humphreys found that her fictional representation of painful experiences had been cathartic and had obviated a need to include them in her autobiography. She wrote: ‘the first years of my marriage are the most difficult to endure. What they meant to me may have been betrayed by my books. [Dian’s Kiss, Saba Macdonald, and The Grandmothers.] I cannot describe them here’.50 Yet Glyn, a consummate romantic, robustly recycled her own disappointing experiences in her fiction. I have written above that part of her driving force as a novelist was to earn money; but I would suggest that it was important for her also to explore her disappointments, especially the lack of romance in her marriage.

Women Writers 95

Glyn lays bare in her autobiography various snubs from Clayton. How a friend of his had made a pass at her and had kissed her. She told Clayton whose reaction: ‘ “No! Did he? Dear old Bob!” and he continued to tie his tie’.51 Similarly a few years later in Switzerland, she was again spurned by Clayton: ‘The setting was ideally romantic, but Clayton only laughed at my “spring fancies” [ ... ] I felt much aggrieved at his want of sympathy, and wrote detailed descriptions of love-scenes with an imaginary lover in this idyllic setting’.52 At this time Glyn bought a tiger skin (which caused her to be immortalised in rhyme).53 She sensually draped herself: ‘caressed its fur, looking, I imagine, much as my caricaturists have portrayed me ever since. Instead of being impressed with my charms Clayton laughed so heartily at me I was snubbed’.54 She claimed that: ‘my romance, I realised, was over, after only two years of marriage’.55 Yet her unrequited emotions acted as a catalyst to write and to fill the demonstrative void in her life. Ten years later these incidents were re-lived in Three Weeks, her most famous novel. Glyn mused: ‘Perhaps if I had really had a lover there I could not have written all my wild imagination pictured in my disappointed soul’.56 Later, in her autobiography she records a measure of contentment from these emanations. Thoughts seemed to flow into my head as though a force from beyond was putting them there [ ... ] I felt every word that I wrote most intensely [ ... ] The book meant everything to me; it was the outpouring of my nature, romantic, proud, and passionate, but for ever repressed in real life by the barriers of custom and tradition, and held fast behind the iron mask of self-respect and self-control which had, perhaps fortunately, been locked round my throat by Grandmamma long years before.57 But these were by no means the only episodes appropriated in her novels. Elizabeth Visits America, His Hour, Letters from Spain, and Love’s Hour fictionalise (respectively) pre-war America, Imperial Russia, Royal Spain and post-war Hungary. The Damsel and the Sage was generated from talks with Lord Milner. It is of interest that unrealised emotions can engender just as strong a driving force, and affect creativity just as much as those of illness and near death experiences. Jameson’s use of personal experience was more straightforward. It was her habit to write things down as soon as they happened and in as much detail as possible. This recording was a crucial tenet of her

96


practice as a writer both in her fiction and for her autobiography. She recalled from a note in the margin of a notebook that: I began my first attempt to write well – that is, with unromantic plainness. That Was Yesterday was meant to be an account of what happened to me between going to Kettering in the autumn of 1913 and the setting off to London at the end of 1918 [ ... ] I wrote in the third person, and omitted or changed the order of events to give it the form of a work of imagination.58 But she was at pains to point out that she did not leave out events: ‘humiliating to me’ or try to: ‘soften my own follies, failures, and the atrocious flaws in my character’. 59 Similar to Glyn, they were an attempt to lay to rest her own painful memories but, unlike Glyn, they were not embellished into an escapism or romantic idealism. For example, in Glyn and Humphreys et al., fact and fiction were often confused, inflated and conflated; in Jameson they were woven closely together. To illustrate this it is necessary to undertake a close reading of a specific episode in None Turn Back (1933) and to look closely at Jameson’s use of the same source material in her autobiography (1969). In None Turn Back, Hervey Russell’s life parallels that of Jameson’s own. Hervey, the heroine of a number of Jameson’s novels, and her alter ego, suffers through pre-and post-operative episodes that fictionalise Jameson’s own ordeal. In fact sentences and paragraphs, word for word can be traced from her fiction to her autobiography. For example in her autobiography Jameson writes: ‘ “Poor Thrawn girl, come back again.” In the dream I wondered what on earth “thrawn” meant. I half turned my head. The hill, the night, the voice, lapsed into vapour’.60 In None Turn Back it became: ‘ “Poor thrawn girl, come back again.” In her dream she wondered what on earth the word “thrawn” meant. She half turned towards him’.61 Moreover, in her autobiography she wrote: ‘I was furious with my body: it had been as soundly and strongly built as a ship or a tree, and ought not have succumbed to my neglect. I could not forgive it’.62 The fictional working of this was: ‘She felt very angry that her body, as strong and soundly built as a tree, should have been spoiled by her long neglect and hard youth. It had rallied so many times to her will that she could not forgive it for failing her’.63 Illustrations like this are countless in her writing. When Jameson had exhausted the usefulness of her notebooks, full of events in her life, she announced that she intended to have control and to maintain this control over them: ‘Over

Women Writers 97

twenty years or so I recorded many thousands of spoken words. I shall destroy the lot when I have finished this book. (Destroyed on the 26 of March, 1965.)’64 The examples from Glyn and Jameson show that they drew heavily on semi-autobiographical material for their fictional writing. To have this amplified and acknowledged in their autobiographies can be both informative and problematic. The conventional wisdom and methodology surrounding ‘truth’ in fiction/autobiography is fine, as far as that aspect goes. Paul Eakin has argued that it is ‘reasonable to assume that all autobiography has some fiction in it; as it is recognised that all fiction is in some sense necessarily autobiographical.’65 The embroidering, romanticising and fictionalising of these episodes, taken from their lives, did not matter. They were creating a novel and there was possibly a cathartic release. They would not have had any inkling that they may one day write an autobiography. My point is that the writing of these fictions often closely followed the events that were utilised and the autobiography followed after some timeslippage. This is a point I shall return to in the chapter, ‘Memory and Accuracy’. The most popular and least acclaimed of literary genres was the lowbrow historical romance and romantic fiction. Journalists such as Andrew Lang enthusiastically promoted romance (historical and contemporary) as a serious alternative to domestic realism, and had taken it seriously down-market.66 Indeed, Malcolm Bradbury derided romantic fiction in his largely misogynist, The Modernist British Novel 1878–2001: ‘Women writers produced pieces of well-done tosh [ ... ] Glyn’s sex on a tiger skin in the age of imperialism [ ... ] and sentimental tracts’.67 Humphreys was told that her earlier novels were: ‘not of such special merit [ ... ] these six books [ ... ] too romantic an idealism for the ordinary reader’.68 Faced with such disparaging serious critical acclaim, I would suggest that, many of these women novelists saw autobiography as a medium in which they could raise their status and achieve critical praise. For the most part, these autobiographies begin in childhood memories; expand on family lineage, progress through education and their journeys into a career in writing. They record their personal struggles and successes and incidents surrounding friends, family and professional acquaintances as one would expect. In Humphreys’ autobiography, chapter headings are as the reader would imagine; ‘First Memories’, ‘Youthful Experiences’ ‘First Results of Popularity’ and so on. Then, for some, there is a marked shift. The style becomes an invective, typical of


an ‘improving’ article. Without warning, the reader is then regaled with an essay on moral issues. Humpreys made candid attacks against, Suffrage and the New Woman who she found: ‘More and more lax [in] her moral standpoints, less and less evident [in] her feminine charm [ ... ] girls took to cutting off their hair and cutting up their skirts and smoking cigarettes in the street’.69 And underneath this proselytising tone appears the desire for women to remain romantically feminine: ‘But as I studied the New Woman and her pretensions I foresaw that she would not be of essential value in the making of our laws [ ... ] she could not utilise a man’s methods of independence without loss of her own feminine values’.70 Humphreys followed these commentaries with her earlier style of autobiography as if nothing had taken place to interrupt the flow. There is no longer the use of ‘I’ or ‘me’. But this attempt at objective, authoritative writing of a higher calibre is compromised by her use of emotive punctuation and italics for emphasis. Although the reader is presented with her attempt as a serious-minded philosopher of life capable of discriminating comment on social and cultural changes, her interrogative rhetoric lacks impartiality and a measured tone. To her credit, she recorded some belittling remarks about the seriousness and intellectual standard of her writing. The fame and success she had from writing light-weight romances became a disadvantage when the novel Calvary was published. In this she wanted to tell the tale of the soul and its journey to the ‘light’. Critics commented: ‘We accept ‘Rita’ as a writer of pleasant stories, we cannot accept her in any sense whatever as a teacher of religious dogma!’71 The critics were hostile to her work, and she believed their dislike was due to her change of genre: ‘Is one’s work never to progress? Never to speak of anything but trivialities even when trivialities have ceased to exist as work?’72 She had to accept that her intellectually inconsequential novels ‘stand as the high-water mark’ by which she was judged and recognised.73 A sense of embarrassment, discomfort and frustration mark her defensive, short spirited sentences: ‘A groove for everyone, [sic] and everyone for his groove [ ... ] and so on, and so on’.74 More than 20 years after Calvary was published she again attempted to disseminate dogmas and opinions in her autobiography, in an endeavour to present work of a more ‘intellectual’ genre. Although Glyn’s autobiography is similar to Humphreys in its underlying aim – that of a conduit to recognition as a serious writer – she lacks Humphreys’ unease with the genre that had made her famous. Glyn’s autobiography began with her opinions on writing

Women Writers 99

this ‘history’ and the first sections concern romance in life as it was her overriding concern: ‘the dominant interest, in fact the fundamental impulse behind every action, has been the desire for romance’.75 Chapter titles reflect various stages in her life: ‘Out of the Past’, ‘Looking back upon the naughty nineties’, and ‘The writing of Three Weeks’. But at chapter 11, similar to Humphreys, there was a change; the autobiographical writing ceased and a discursive treatise entitled: ‘An Earnest Discussion of the Theory of Re-incarnation’ follows. This change in orientation is accompanied by explicit political comment. Glyn made pronouncements about the war on everything from French etiquette, French soldiers, inefficient women’s fund-raising, and stress of war on manners. Another chapter has remarkable discussions that cover the morals of society, divorce, sex, social opinions and much more. Her anger was razor sharp and contemptuous when faced with what she took to be the idle attitude of the French: ‘One should never judge a nation by the scum which appears upon the top’.76 It hardly appears to be the same writer, the blunt and acerbic pitch is disquieting, even shocking, compared to the tone of her novels. Open any page at random in Three Weeks and one is assailed by sentimental and romantic narrative: ‘and she smiled a strange, sweet smile, “do you know, I find you like a rare violin which hitherto has been used by ordinary musicians” ’.77 Yet in her autobiography there is an intransigence that belies her hitherto sentimental romanticism. This expositional writing is similar to that of Humphreys in that many paragraphs open with a question, followed by the answer: ‘What has become of the proud old French race? The French of today are an astonishing people. Ungrateful, emotional, dramatic, crafty and self-seeking; polite only for appearance’s sake’.78 The abrupt change from autobiography to political and social commentator changed swiftly back to ‘conventional’ autobiography. It appears that once they have, in their opinion, established themselves as serious writers, they can move on without rancour to the next stage of their autobiography. This lack of rancour might be explained by Nietzsche’s notion of ressentiment.79 Both Glyn and Humphreys were steeped in romanticism. They deployed disappointments and various hurts in their lives as material for their novels, thus experiencing the comfort of a natural catharsis. They were forward-looking, well-travelled and prepared to develop their next novels. To have rancour, they would need to hold on to past injustices, remember and recast negative events. But their reworking, in the form of novels, made negative aspects positive. According to


Nietzsche, to be motivated by rancour and resentment, a person looks for evil and needs to recriminate and distribute blame. Furthermore, they want others to be evil in order to consider themselves good.80 For consummate romantics, such attributes would be impossible. In fact, from the analysis of Glyn’s autobiography, it seems that criticisms of her novels did not rest very high on her agenda. She was a successful and popular novelist; her works reprinted many times. In her estimation: ‘given a good deal of happiness to a large number of people in all parts of the world [ ... ] the million-copy edition of my books which was published in 1917 helped to keep up the spirits of lonely wives and sweethearts’.81 Glyn believed that she faced censure because of her status in society which frowned upon a society woman becoming a novelist. This led, she believed, to an image as a pioneer in feminine causes, which was in fact untrue: ‘I always opposed the giving of the vote to women’.82 The other assault was upon her poor literary style, in particular her ‘faulty and ungrammatical’ blunders. Titled people, among her friends, point to the ‘actual grammar [and] wording [ ... ] her “cursed facility” [ ... ] that has robbed me of serious consideration of literary people’.83 These ‘defects’ convinced her that this was the cause of her being debarred from achieving the literary status she desired. It did not occur to her that her low-brow romantic plots were part of the equation. To pursue this theory of low-brow writers seeking a more polemical status from their autobiographies, an examination of Storm Jameson’s autobiographical content, high-brow novels and intellectual capital will provide balance and inclusiveness for this part of the survey. Armed with a first class Honours degree in English Literature and Language and a M.A. in modern drama in Europe, she began to write and secured a position at a publisher’s. Her first book, the genesis of which was her M.A. dissertation, was earnestly reviewed: The dramatic critics took me seriously and very hard. In a majestic column in The Times, A.B. Walkley spoke of a ‘female Nietzsche’: at even greater length, under the title ‘The Young Person in Print’, Mr St. John Ervine dismembered the book with Ulster savagery; for good measure he said I ought to be spanked.84 At the time she was ‘terribly mortified’ and ‘astonished’ but not sufficiently so to prevent her writing and publishing her first novel,

Women Writers 101

The Pot Boils. Jameson entered the genre of social and political novels, which dealt in particular with the encroaching brutalities of fascism, the General Strike, war and the problems of men’s and women’s relationships. She also published many articles and in time became the first woman president of the International Association of Poets, Playwrights, Editors, Essayists, and Novelists (PEN), succeeding from such distinguished writers as John Galsworthy, H.G. Wells and J.B. Priestley. Her public success and literary acclaim came from her serious, highbrow novels and recognition of her intellectual competency. So for Jameson there was no need to use her autobiography to disclose and display her ability to have opinions on public issues; her novels and articles were witness to this. Instead, Jameson wrote from the: ‘wish to discover before it is too late what sort of person I have been, without allowing vanity and cleverness to soften the outline of the creature’.85 Although she had drawn hugely on her own life experiences for her novels, her wish was to write with sincerity. Throughout her autobiography she displayed a self-consciousness of the effort this required. The reader is told how she began each day of writing by: ‘tearing up part, much or little, of the previous day’s work and rewriting it in the interests of dryness and accuracy’.86 Unlike Orczy and Syrett, Jameson did not shy away from painful episodes. For example, she described what she considered to be her only passionate affair in her life: ‘What follows has been torn up and rewritten five times; I must finish with it, lying as little as possible’.87 this intrusion into her own narrative discourse highlights her concern that readers may forget that this autobiography was not fiction. Similar reminders are provided throughout the text by the insertion of date references as a self-conscious reminder to its factual content: ‘I am writing this on the 17 of November, 1961’.88 Jameson’s autobiography is candid and unembellished. It is undoubtedly about her and not a platform for political or biographical comments. The exacting effort she took makes her style refreshingly straightforward. To cite an instance, in her upfront manner, Jameson would write a private thought, quite likely held by many, that would pass unvoiced. For instance, during her pregnancy she remembered: ‘I loathed the deformation and heaviness of my body, and envied every thin young girl I saw, the poorest and the plainest’.89 In another raw incident before her divorce from her first husband she clearly recalled: ‘One icy night in the winter of 1916 I exasperated him into throwing

102


me out of the house. I had nothing over my sleeveless cotton overall, and I crouched against the hedge, shivering, raging helplessly, for two or three hours’.90 Such candour had been hitherto unseen in the recording of these times. Divorce is skimmed over and certainly no incidents of marital brutality have been aired. This bleak period in her life is fictionalised in That Was Yesterday (1932). But for Jameson her autobiography is about her, not a biography of others, not a channel for dogmas and not an outlet to gain public status. From this research the need for these writers of fiction to write autobiography was not high on their agendas; 95 per cent did not undertake the task. But the majority of those who did were writers of low-brow fiction. If we follow this paradigm what becomes clear is the desire for recognition from the critics, their peers and presumably the public. They already had a huge following from the public; witnessed by the number of their novels that were published; for example, Glyn wrote over 80, Ruck about 150, Mitchison around 80 and so on. However, although they were prolific, they did not achieve the high status for their work that had been reached by many women writers in the nineteenth century. During that century, writers such as George Eliot, Jane Austin, the Brontes and others had dominated the literary scene and had held cultural power. From the 1890s onwards there seems to have been a concerted effort by male writers such as Henry James, H.G. Wells and so on to retake the central ground and marginalise women’s writing. With this they had some success, and these romantic writers found that their creativity was not given credence. It was not valued, and indeed, was unlikely to be appropriated later as part of the Great Tradition. This snub to their productions obviously had an effect. The remedy which some took up was to write autobiographies. The other side to this model – that of the high-brow writer – bears witness to the above, as writers like Jameson, herself prolific, writing some 45 novels in addition to serious articles and pamphlets, had no need to seek intellectual success in her autobiography. Unlike the low-brow writers, she had achieved praise and high status in her public career. There was no need to prove the critics wrong or, more importantly, increase her self-esteem. In the introduction the inherent difficulty in analysing the work of professional writers was pointed out. The narrative control could, at times, be in danger of becoming banal and a series of platitudes. This style is put to one side when they write about the events which subsequently become part of the plot in their novels and again, when they

Women Writers 103

break from autobiographical recording to that of narrating their strictures on various themes. This narrative becomes dynamic. The change in syntax and style indicates that much more is attendant here than the retelling of a particular controversial point. Rhetoric, interrogative markers, clipped sentences are all suggestive of a writer unused to developing a sustained discussion. It gives rise to a sensation of constraint and the struggle to provide a worthy logical discourse. This emotive style undoubtedly destroys the objective polemical tone needed for earnest recognition and would certainly negate the serious content receiving the critical acclaim they desired. If we remain with the idea of Glyn and Humphreys as representative of low-brow writers and Jameson as representative of the high-brow, the question of the connection of the mind and body as a joint creative force has no noticeable differences in the outcome, in the writing of these two groups. They were equally subject to the powerful pull of illness, death and love as stimulating to their work; and did recognise this. It is the emotional temperature and cultural capital of their discourse that separates them. Thus as a body of autobiographical writings they provide useful ammunition for some aspects of Cixous and her promotion of, the l’écriture féminine position. But it is only in these autobiographies that it is a useful concept.


Part Two


7 The Frontispiece Image in Autobiography

The chapters that follow, unlike the earlier five chapters, are organised by theme. The first in this section of the book discusses the hitherto ignored aspect of the frontispiece photograph, and is closely linked with the chapter that follows, ‘Prefaces, Prologues, Forewords and Introductions’. The study of frontispiece photographs has significant importance in the formation of women’s personal identity and consciousness. Linda Haverty Rugg wrote that: ‘This [the photograph] is a subject deserving serious attention, for it is precisely uninterrogated presentations of photography and autobiography that can work toward the most powerful support of ideological assumptions. But, I decided instead to concentrate on [ ... ] the self in language and image’.1 Photography, placed in conjunction with autobiographical texts, helps us to unpack these identities and the notion of ‘self’. In my opinion, the function of the Frontispiece Image raises many questions. What are we to assume from the first images that the writer wants us, the reader, to take with us through the book from the beginning? How does the introduction of photographs into autobiographical texts help or complicate the autobiographical form? Why did the autobiographers select that particular image as a portrayal of the ‘self’? Do women from different professions or classes tend to select similar or different images of themselves? These questions need a full discussion because, as a part of the autobiographical narrative, these images are allied to notions of personal identity and consciousness contained in the body of the text. Therefore we need to look at what makes this meaningful, and see how conscious and unconscious processes and social mores take on meaning and exercise an effect.

107


The photograph is the first representation of the author that the reader encounters before a word has been read, and is therefore intrinsically involved in the construction of a character and its biography. Hodge and Kress’s notion is appropriate that, ‘it is not enough to simply analyse language [ ... ] meaning resides so strongly and pervasively in other systems [ ... ] in a multiplicity of visual, aural, behavioural and other codes’.2 It is through one’s looks that we become superficially known and it is this symbiotic relationship between character and appearance which informs our preconceptions. But whilst photographs are powerful, they do not speak for themselves and as Susan Sontag suggested, they are invitations to deduction.3 Often these frontispiece images have either no text and date or no caption to provide the function of ‘anchorage’ and ‘relay’ as demonstrated by Barthes.4 It seems to me that these images invite an array of interpretations. It is crucial not to argue that the portraits perform a means of straightforward disclosure. I would suggest that these images function as a form of concealment, a cloak or obfuscation and present the reader with a puzzle to decode. Before analysis of specific visual texts, a brief historical background to photography and explanatory details of visual concepts that will be drawn upon is needed. Since the first photograph in 1826, the popularity of photographic portraits swiftly grew for mid-Victorians, and by the 1850s there were fears that the endless reproduction of the individual’s image would impinge his uniqueness. 5 For some people, photography was accepted as a trade and, as such, it reinforced formal divisions between art and manufacture, and created new ones.6 By 1890 photographic societies were forming, and the medium became increasingly popular. Following the trend in this period of market and industrial growth, the demand for photographs necessitated further mechanisation and simplification for individual, nonprofessional use. Photographs began to be taken for many reasons; as a response to a public/private occasion, to copy and conform to fashion, to please artistic taste. As with existing art forms, distinct conventions developed. These drew from the distinctive codes and protocol for portraiture which had existed over centuries. Stock poses and backgrounds conformed to predictable expectation. For example, Richard Brilliant wrote of the ‘sanitising of facial expression, and the imposition of conformist attitudes [ ... ] [which] allows the successful portraitist to encase his subjects within the masks of convention’.7 It is due to these Victorian conventions that we see a number of formulaic expressions and it is this

The Frontispiece Image in Autobiography

109

that formed part of the photograph’s repertoire. As Patricia Holland commented: ‘Experimentation or innovation are not welcome, and intrusive ‘artistic’ elements, or a naturalism that attempts to “get behind the mask” would not keep faith with the client’.8 It is this aspect of the diluting of the expression, for reasons of propriety, which can be productive for this discussion. But people realised that unlike the portrait painting, which was to produce an ideal of the sitter, the photograph was more modest in scope. Photography’s use within the growing new institutions evolved and allowed those who wanted to observe and keep records to operate this form as a documentary archive. With the invention of the process which used half-tone plates, limitless reproduction of photographs became possible. The police, hospitals, and prisons could all find uses for this new invention.9 This opened the gates for use in advertising, books and newspapers, and from 1880 these publications abound with photographs. These visual texts were coined ‘Documentary’ by the film critic John Grierson in 1926. In fact ‘documentary’ came to have a far wider discursive use than that of photography and set up the rhetoric that the camera would provide truth, facts and immediacy; a boon for advertising, journalism, scientific, and legal evidence.10 The individual’s desire to be photographed expanded the value of the photograph as observation, as evidence and as a ‘truth’. The procedures for extracting and evaluating ‘truth’ and actuality in discourse were believed to exist in photography and the emergence of this ‘evidential force’ gave these documents the power of neutrality.11 I do not think photographs, even in this period, can be interpreted as neutral and so I would agree with Jack Horley that: ‘a good documentary photograph is never neutral. It has a point of view’.12 Horley believed that the notion of operating a camera to interpret man and his environment had dangers. In particular that it could develop into a ‘plea for pity, a committed search for relevance – a sermon not a photograph’.13 If this is the case, to appropriate the notion that images can have fictionality, and apply this to domestic and professional portraits, is useful. By 1914 it was clear that even the most direct and ‘sincere’ photograph could be tailored to any point of view, and could be distorted to suit any political camp or party. This being the case for documents, newspapers and legal disclosures, why not use it for the inventing/reinventing of an individual? It is necessary to look closer and specifically at the contexts of photographs as autobiographical

110


endorsement. This being the case, what becomes of paramount significance is the selection of the photography which is to represent the author on the frontispiece. The capacity of these photographic images to persuade, cajole and manipulate the reader should not be underestimated. Initially, the discussion will engage with the suggestive and productive ideas of Barthes and later in the chapter the ideas of Susan Sontag will be selectively and critically deployed. In order to develop his theory Barthes appropriated the Latin terms, ‘Studium’ and ‘Punctum’; terms which need defining to make my argument clear. The ‘Studium’ is a culturally informed reading of the image, one that interprets the signs of the photograph. He used this to define what is stimulated by many photographs of a similar topic that gives an: ‘average affect, [ ... ] a kind of human interest [ ... ] a general enthusiastic commitment, of course, but without special acuity’.14 It is what an observer would take in if showing: polite interest: they have no punctum in them: they please or displease me without pricking me: they are invested with no more than studium. The studium is that very wide field of unconcerned desire, of various interest, of inconsequential taste: [ ... ] it is the same sort of vague, slippery, irresponsible interest one takes in the people one finds ‘all right’.15 For Barthes the second level and more consequential aspect of the photograph is its punctum, the element that: shoots out like an arrow, and pierces me [ ... ] this prick, this mark made by a pointed instrument [ ... ] refers to the notion of punctuation, and [the photographs] are in effect punctuated, sometimes even speckled with these sensitive points; [ ... ] This second element which will disturb the studium [ ... ] also: sting, speck, cut, [ ... ] A photograph’s punctum is that accident which pricks me [ ... ] is poignant to me.16 For the purpose of this discussion, it is the punctum within these frontispiece photographs of women autobiographers that is of prime importance. This is because the punctum is unintentional and is not generalised: ‘the studium is ultimately always coded, the punctum is not’.17


111

Of the autobiographies in this research, it appears that 25 per cent had frontispiece photographs. I say ‘appears’ because several volumes show signs that they have been ‘filleted’, and with other copies I cannot be certain if different editions exist which contain photographs. From this cache, by far the most popular form is that of a head and shoulders to three-quarters image, professional portrait of the writer, often in the year of writing. Some 75 per cent of autobiographers opted for this, and it is this that I shall concentrate upon in my chapter. The remainder were equally divided between a portrait of the author as a child, and an amateur photograph already in the autobiographer’s possession. The first study is of an author who uses for her frontispiece photograph one taken as a child, Katharine West (Figure 7.1), who was a Voluntary Aid Detachments (VAD) and writer. The image presents what Barthes would have denoted as an ‘average affect’ [sic].18 It is a studio photograph.19 She is posed to portray purity and innocence. She wore the fashion of the early nineteenth century which tended to a layered look, tiered with collars, lace and frills. But there is conscious artifice to the arrangement of this scene. The narrative props were obviously provided by the studio, and from the young subject’s gaze and demeanour, hold no attraction for her. For the young West the interest lay outside of the frame and to the left of the photographer, but does not encourage a smile. This photographer’s study mimics the conventions of portrait painting of earlier centuries in that; the photograph is a generic idealisation of young girls, not a personal portrait. West’s untitled image is one of novice-like ingénue; she is doll-like, her helmet of fair hair is modestly, lightly covered with a lace, loose fitting bonnet. The pursed, ‘rose-bud’ mouth and demur mien transmit stillness. The eyes gaze towards the camera almost free of emotion, though tinged with sadness and no hint of amusement. The background is replete with historical and deeply mixed messages. West wears a seventeenth century, Puritan-style dress, and stands at an Indian marquetry table. The light is directed fully at her long dress; this gives her face a gentler focus which completes the celestial glow. On the one hand, the impression is of the subject’s demure appearance; and yet on the other hand, it reminds the reader of the romanticism in a Gainsborough or van de Neer painting. West has a naïveté that is controlled and conventional. As a child she did not have authorship of this image, it is a manipulation by her parents and by the photographer. The pose must have

112


Figure 7.1

Katharine West


113

imbued her parents’ fantasies about their offspring, but it also bears the hallmarks of the dominant conventions used in professional studios to distract the viewer. Portrait conventions popular with earlier Victorians are mimicked; the photographs deliberately conceal the ‘real’ child. Rather than the anchorage closing down a search for visual clues, this image acts as a cloaking mechanism. This stimulates the need for examination because there is a great deal of social fantasy going on. West contested the representation foisted upon her. She made it plain that there was a difference between what she had to wear and what she herself would have chosen. In the opening pages of her book she described the photograph and commented: First her fine hair is fig fluffed out around her neck, her straight fringe combed over her forehead. Then her pinafore is taken off to reveal a white nun’s veiling dress. For where her elders see a delicate little girl with skim-milk skin and speedwell eyes, she knows herself to be a rumbustious tomboy keen to exercise untrammelled limbs, and impatient.20 West was aware of the mismatch between her photographic appearance and the essence of her personality. Her text takes issue with conventional upbringing and the anchorage between self and image is shattered. For example, she recalled: My pictures of that summer are overlaid with a yellow, bilious varnish of irrational depression. The largest of these pictures is (as usual) of myself, sitting this time at an upright piano in some dingy, fly-blown morning room of the hotel. In front of me on the music rack is a German book called DAMM. Beside me sits my music mistress [ ... ] but my prevailing memory is of an intangible atmosphere, a pervading sense of everything being a little twisted, rather horrid, and very far from ‘usual’.21 We are not told what was ‘twisted’ and ‘far from usual’, but it appears obvious that her parents wanted to re-write the family life through photographic fictions. But these are not included in her autobiography; there are no other photographs in her book. She wrote: ‘My behaviour sadly disappointed both my parents. It became for myself one of those

114


shameful memories – and I have all too many of them – which seize you by the scruff of the neck as you lie awake at night, and shake you pitilessly.’22 West recognised the lies that were formulated by this visual memory, and yet she invites the reader to view her as this romantic naïve apparition. In fact this iconoclasm appears to be important to her throughout her autobiography. She was keen to strip away the carefully constructed representation that her parents wanted to remain for posterity. We cannot know West’s motives, but such contradictory textsu (visual and narrative), in her book are puzzling. From her autobiography I would conjecture that West is demonstrating that a life cannot be reconstructed by the will of others in visual images alone, and that the ultimate control of how her life was to be depicted lay with her written word. It is clear that this photographic image is a fabrication. It was the image that the parents wanted to be projected of their ‘angel’ for all time. The photograph actively promotes nostalgia and incites reverie. As Susan Sontag noted: ‘all such talismanic uses of photographs express a feeling both sentimental and implicitly magical: they are attempts to contact or lay claim to another reality.’23 Whilst the relationship with her parents may have been complicated, West took control of this parental, photographic authorship and interpretation in her decision to use this image. West used her frontispiece photographic image ‘against the grain’. Instead of it being for the reader the likeness of the child she once was, the reader is informed that it was in fact a ‘false’ representation. The distorted and falsifying aspect in this photographic arrangement sets up a ‘fiction’ or puzzle that needed to be decoded. The question and establishment of the notion of masking in photographs of autobiographers as young children, raises a similar question as to whether the masking trait is apparent in frontispiece photographs that depict the autobiographers as adult. This scrutiny is divided into two parts, each of which focuses upon a different facet of these portraits. The first examines the use of a snapshot from a private album and the second, and by far most popular with these autobiographers, examines the studio photograph. Actress and writer Nancy Price (Figure 7.2) is of particular interest because she employed both amateur snapshot and studio portraiture in pivotal roles.24 She used a non-studio photograph for the frontispiece and one taken in a studio for the back dust-jacket. Price was a distinguished actress and part of Sir Frank Benson’s Company; a benefactress


Figure 7.2

Nancy Price

115

116


to the theatre when she sold her yacht and all her possessions to help its survival; and a patriot, when she spent a gruelling ten months at sea in the First World War . These alone attest to her role as a commanding and committed public woman. But throughout her autobiography she referred to herself as a countrywoman: ‘I find myself ever more at ease with country-folk than city-dwellers, with the vagabond rather than the sophisticated’.25 Her text is ‘peppered’ with anecdotal tales of country people and her many pets and animals. There is a generous selection of photographs throughout, the majority of which are of animals, with their owners, in country settings. Equally, we are told of her career, political and social milieu. She was held in affection and esteem by Princess Louise, Queen Mary, Ladies Oxford and Asquith and the Duchess of Hamilton, to name but a few. Of the literary ‘greats’ almost too numerous to list, she recalled: ‘That men have both accepted my companionship and also given me theirs has been a source of rich experience to me’. 26 These companions included Yeats, G.K. Chesterton, Kipling, de la Mare, Sitwell and Sackville -West. She was herself the writer of more than a dozen novels. At the political front she was the acquaintance of and dined with, Chamberlain, Lloyd George, Baldwin, Macdonald, Attlee, and Winston Churchill. She had lived in Hampstead, Russell Square, Bloomsbury and Kensington, and at the time of writing, owned a cottage in Sussex and a flat in London. Her autobiography shows the two very distinct spheres of her life; the private countrywoman and the very public actress, who was author and friend to the rich and famous. The point here is that Nancy Price was much more than the countrywoman image that she chose to exhibit on both the dust-jacket and in her frontispiece photograph. The frontispiece photograph appears to have been selected from her album and bears the legend, ‘Boney’s Service – Love Nancy’. Boney, a parrot is perched with flapping wings upon a tennis racket held by Nancy. She is in profile, laughing, eyes twinkling with obvious enjoyment and totally absorbed in the game between the two of them. The parrot’s wings, either flexed ready for flight, or pointing skywards as he settles down, suggest lightness and exhilaration, a stretch for freedom. The energy and movement evoked by the parrot’s wings truly capture the slice of a ‘moment-in-time’. Barthes has argued: ‘that this insertion of the “natural and universal” in the photograph is particularly forceful because of the photograph’s privileged status as a guaranteed witness of the actuality of the events it represents’.27


117

The naturalness of the mise en scène ascribes more ‘truth’ to the image. Price’s status here is predicated on the ‘realism’ of the codes which articulate the essence of her subject, and it is this latent power that ascribes meaning to the reader. With this visual text there is a full consonance between image and written text. The area of difficulty lies in its relationship between the text and the image (Figure 7.3) on the dust jacket. The back cover photograph on Price’s book is obviously a studioposed image required by the publishers. Price, seated with her three dogs, appears perfectly groomed. She gazes directly at the camera lens with a merest hint of a smile. Her simple dark jacket, skirt and checked cravat are subdued and suggest country comfort rather than a fashionable town suit. The deliberate positioning of the dogs, although asymmetrical, does create balance to the image. But coupled with the lack of narrative background and the stiffness in this photograph, the deliberately arranged poses appear contrived. We know that the function of this dust-jacket studio picture is to be a visual message, aimed to sum up a character, along with the ‘blurb’, to give a ‘pre-taster’ to the prospective reader of how to appreciate and understand this writer. But I do not believe that these stylised images, do in fact lead to a ‘true’ representation of the writer. They are cold and sterile and produce what Barthes described as an average affect. What the reader sees is a codified version constructed by a professional eye. It is brash, clear and uncompromisingly bland. It tells the reader little and, with a cursory glance, does not invite speculation. This studio photograph is squarely set in the sphere of advertising. The hollow effigy is a glamorised, theatrical representation of a marketing ideal of a countrywoman. Some frontispiece photographs deceive in a more subtle manner. However the question remains; are all studio photographs so obvious in their portrayal of myths? Do such photographs automatically foreclose speculation? And do some signifiers escape and cause a punctum and conjecture? It is possible to argue that this studio photograph attempts to co-operate Price into a discourse about reproduction and ‘family life’. The puppy is the same breed as the parent dogs. Thus this image allays any anxieties the reader may have about the sexual orientation of the writer. But how do studio photographs operate for women in public official roles? For this, photographs of headmistresses, Frances R. Gray, first High School Mistress of St. Paul’s Girls’ School (Figure 7.4) and Lilian M. Faithfull, formerly Principal of the Ladies College Cheltenham (Figure 7.5) will be used. 28 Both women had had highly successful careers as headmistresses. Gray was also a J.P. and awarded

118


Figure 7.3

Nancy Price – dust cover


Figure 7.4

Frances R. Gray

119


Figure 7.5

Lilian M. Faithfull


121

an O.B.E. Faithfull, also a J.P. was a Fellow of the King’s College London. There is a strong narrative content in Gray’s clothing which is referenced by the broad social context of wearing a university gown. The background is out of focus with only a blurred outline of a high, stonecarved mantelpiece. One of the few props is an imposing chair similar to that in a courtroom and used by a magistrate. It has a shoulder height back, leather padded seat and back-rest with wooden arms on which Gray rests her arms. There is a formality and seriousness displayed which conforms to society’s expectations in its parodying of the conventions of masculine portraiture of statesmen, generals and aristocrats. Gray is seated and turned three-quarters to face the camera. The steady gaze is directed uncompromisingly towards the viewer. Her features, of full, pleasantly shaped eyebrows, wire-trimmed glasses, nose and mouth in proportion and mouth bow-shaped, slightly upturned present an enigmatic and controlled self-awareness. The image is lit to the left of the photograph to create a glow to her face, accents the white of her blouse and adds emphasis to the whiteness of her hand which holds her mortar board. The left hand is in her lap, the palm open and faced upwards in a manner that suggests vulnerability and openness. They are small, fine and white; the hands of a sensitive woman. Gray leans slightly towards the camera, taking control of the frame. This is a woman who is comfortable with herself, her achievements and at ease with the power she wields. It is as if the assemblage of a dignified appearance is necessary to legitimate her place in the public arena. Again this composition is what Barthes would define as, ‘an average affect, almost from a certain training [ ... ] a kind of general enthusiastic commitment [ ... ] but without special acuity’. 29 This photograph has a studium which presents a summing-up of a ‘life’ common to people who occupy exemplary positions in the public eye. Headmistress Lilian M. Faithfull’s photograph (Figure 7.5) has many similarities to Gray’s. There is the three-quarter pose with the lighting to the left of the camera. It illuminates her forehead and whitens part of her hair, drawing the eye to the forehead, accentuating the serious mind. The gaze directed at the camera in a similar steadfast manner to that of Gray. Then the comparisons diverge in a subtle way. There is no background or props to signal this person’s status. The dress she wears is completely plain and is barely identifiable. It blends into the dark background and dissolves totally into nothingness at the bottom of the frame. Faithfull’s left hand is raised to the chin in a classic,


contemplative pose. Her only adornment is a ring on her middle finger, which is centrally placed within the frame. The exposed forearm and wrist are slightly thick which suggests capability. In a similar fashion to that of Gray’s, her hair is long, taken-back in a bun, not entirely grey. There is a short, tightly curled fringe, divided symmetrically from the centre of her hairline to either side of her head. It is symmetrically arranged and underscores a nature that is controlled, ordered and trained. Her expression restricts most of the potential to ‘read’, and gives rise to an impassive face, captured in the instant of posing. There are no narrative signifiers to identify her social status. To all intents and purpose an ‘average affect’ has been imposed. What is the viewer/reader to make of portraits with so few cultural signifiers? We need to ask ourselves, ‘Why so much concealment?’ However concealment is not the entire case. It is important to recognise that for both of these stock poses, the sanitising studio production did not cloak everything. There is a punctum or sensitive intent present in the photographs. Here, it is Gray’s expression of her inner self. In her photograph, the mortar board, gown, dark jacket and skirt, and the chair, play homage to the masculine oeuvre of respectability and provide the anchorage. But the latent competence is emitted firstly by the feminine blouse. This is not a sober, masculine shirt and collar. From neck to waist there is a white, narrow lace ruffle, topped by a rounded neck edge that is gently rolled. From the drape of the neckline this is probably silk, soft and sensuous. Moreover, the hair which at first glance appears to be stereotypical of a Victorian/Edwardian Headmistress was taken up in a bun. The style demanded a tightly coiled finish at a time when women’s lives were constrained. Gray’s style bears fealty to that fashion but, and an important but, hers is softer with a suggestion of allowed disorder. There is a slight wispiness in the natural silver-coloured wave which is allowed to express a soft ripple across the hairline. This marginally untrammelled style suggests approachability.30 According to T.J. Clark, there need only be a ‘merely suggestive sign of allowed disorder; which is conventionally seen as a sign of woman’s sexuality’.31 In both male and female formal portraits the wearing of a hat, cap, and so on, would be considered essential to complete the ceremoniousness of the image. Gray rebuffed this convention and chose to hold her mortar board and reveal her hair. Wendy Cooper stated that all women are aware of the effect of their hair and in this simple act of eschewing convention Gray appears to be no exception.32 The pose with all its


123

signs of conventionality to reveal, in fact, deliberately cloaks the concealed woman and promotes orthodox standards. The popular mythologies, as enacted by the photographer, serve to protect and promulgate protocol; but the incomplete ‘uniform’, as a small act of defiance, thwarts the code of false openness to emit a snatch of a candid and unfeigned image. There is a lack of congruence between the structure of feeling of the written text and that of the visual text. It is this ‘feeling’ in her text that I believe has ‘escaped’ to disturb the intended cloaking effect. Faithfull’s photograph was taken when she had retired. This may in part answer why she chose not to wear her gown. It does not answer why there are no cultural references in the background and no visual clues to limit conjecture and provide anchorage. The composition privileges the subject and avoids loose signifiers which would be open to interpretation. But I would suggest that other codes have prevented this. Faithfull’s display as a content and contemplative older woman, with no attachment to cultural codes of representation, is once again not what it purports to be. Her life was defined as a headmistress. She lived at the school and the college for many years and it was only later that she bought a cottage a short distance from the grounds. Her social life was with people connected with education, and marriage, if undertaken, would have ended her career. For Faithfull, retirement was problematic. She wrote: ‘to become a woman of no importance! Already there is a subtle change in the attitude of friends and acquaintances, or does one imagine it? – a suggestion that one is a back number, or a rather faded likeness of oneself’.33 Interestingly, the blank background of this composition, rather than providing closure to speculation, instead connotes in Faithfull’s life: ‘the silence all around one is very strange and oppressive and rather ominous for the future’. 34 Faithfull’s self-image changed from one of a powerful and professional woman to that of, in her terms, a nonentity. In this scene, the punctum is produced by the lack of signifiers to guide and inform. She is stripped of status both pictorially and in life. The exception to this is the studio lighting privileging her forehead suggesting a subtle, luminescence and offers hope, ‘Here lies salvation [ ... ] it will sting one into indignant refutation. Something must be found to be done [ ... ] One cannot sit meekly for the rest of one’s life’. 35 But a resolution and understanding of this portrait can only be perceived when combined with the last chapter of her autobiography. Therefore this photograph’s position at the frontispiece causes obfuscation. The tranquil image becomes one that is closed


and bleak. She has reached a turning point. The photographic background shows her without clues to her past or her expectations for the future. The desire to present a secure contemplative woman has an unconscious hidden agenda, that of a dissolved past without a concrete future. Here there is evasion and obfuscation. In the linking of the photograph to the text latent codes fuse which essentially ‘unmask’ and become authoritative. It therefore appears that studio portraits, more than personal ‘snaps’, can complicate the efforts of the viewer to ‘read’ the image. These professional frames aim to represent the manner in which their subjects would appear to view life. But there is a further level of complexity when the frontispiece photograph is one of a painted portrait. Richard Brilliant wrote that portrait artists avoided strong expressions of feeling ‘because traditionally they are thought to reflect transitory states of being and are therefore an obstacle [ ... ] to capture[ing] the essential self, existing beneath the flux of emotions.’36 Writer Elinor Glyn (Figure 7.6) used for her Frontispiece Image a portrait by Philip de Laszlo. Glyn’s full-face likeness projects a level gaze, but is winsome and fey. The frame is designed to focus the viewer on this face. Of course, this is a photographic reproduction of a painting, probably a charcoal drawing. But we do not need to apply different analytical methods to it because the use of this particular image is an act of choice, similar to the selection of a photograph. There are no narrative background distractions and only a largepearled necklace and earrings to offer social status. The one bared shoulder is seductive, and entices the viewers’ eyes to the pale slim neck and red lips. The long fiery-red hair has a reasonable amount of styling, but is not too organised with its suggestion of soft femininity. The silkorganza shawl is seductively draped over her hair. Both ends seem to emanate from the same side, baring the shoulder evocative of discarded propriety. The muted iridescence of the gown’s colour created Glyn as an ephemeral winged creature. She appears as a fantasy apparition; romantic and inaccessible. This is an image which would be in keeping with the expectations of readers of low-brow romantic novels. But, as her autobiography attests, Glyn was a prolific, hardworking writer. Aristocratic by birth, she became the family breadwinner and churned out some 80 volumes to pay her debts. For Glyn to select this representation of herself for her frontispiece conceals much of her character. It is candid in its aim of signifying a public image of a writer of romance and candid in recognising what Glyn considered herself to be; a true romantic. In this it is shrewd marketing. But Glyn’s autobiography does not


Figure 7.6

Elinor Glyn – portrait by Philip de Laszlo

125


define her life as a romance. Indeed she frequently found herself unrequited in sterile situations. To be successful, an early photographer needed to adhere closely to portrait painting conventions. From what I have shown above, this is relevant for women autobiographers. As Patricia Holland wrote: ‘Photographers are commissioned because they conform, and any intrusive “artistic” elements [ ... ] that attempt to get behind the mask would not keep faith with the client.’37 These stock poses and backgrounds produce the desired average affect of a studium style photograph and are, I believe, beneficial as a cloaking mechanism. In their predictability they reduce the incisive and interrogative gaze at the sitter. With the compliance of the sitter, the professional photographer can forge a photographic image through judicious and artful manipulation. The writer maintains some ‘authorship’ of his/her image. But the photographer’s intervention into the creation of this conceit highlights the fact that the portrait is the work of two people, and the autobiography, by definition, the product of an individual. The effect of this intrusion is clearly displayed in Nancy Price’s image on the dust-jacket of her autobiography. The ‘authorial’ role played by the photographer in the process of composition, pose, framing, editing, and other means of control changed the power of Price in the subtle ways already discussed. The reader is made aware of the differences in the two projected images. As Barthes noted: ‘In front of the lens, I am at the same time: the one I think I am, the one I want others to think I am, the one the photographer thinks I am, and the one he makes use of in his art’.38 Studio photographs may distort aspects as in Price’s dustjacket photograph; or self-glorify, as in Glyn’s oil painting, which has exotic and narcissistic elements. From selection and arrangement there emerges a tone which is personally and socially revealing. This will be more evident with an amateur photograph, which will often be taken at a time when the sitter was happiest, and will radiate vitality because an actual situation has ‘life’ and a fascination. It is the subjectivity of a ‘natural’ image that encapsulates the individual. But for both studio and amateur photographs, the punctum is an unknown and unreliable element. Gillian Rose reminds us: ‘many writers argue that an image may have its own effects which exceed the constraints of production (and reception)’.39 Fragments from these studies can punctuate the image for the viewer in a personal manner. In all the studio photographs of the autobiographers as adult, there is an absence of surrounding narrative background, contrary to Romantic


127

portraits of the first half of the nineteenth century. This lack can be seen as an attempt to prevent loose signifiers, and would suggest that the meaning of the photograph can be arrived at without this visual aid. There is a preconceived agenda, no spontaneity and no intended element of chance. When a background is introduced, as in the photograph of a young girl, there is an element which makes the deliberately arranged pose in the studio appear disruptively contrived and invite examination. If a background is present in the adult poses, it is indistinct as can be observed in Gray’s portrait. These absences focus attention onto the sitter. These portraits conformed to the formality of a portrait-making situation and appear also to conform to the expected demeanour of the genre. There is gloss, formal stillness and a heightened sense of composure. What I find important in the art of concealment is a distanced, unaffected expression, and a lack of emotion. In the main, the sitter’s pose exhibits a threequarters image, their gaze is not at the viewer so eye contact is avoided, which draws a ‘veil’ across the soul. As Sontag noted: ‘In the normal rhetoric of the photographic portrait, facing the camera signifies solemnity, frankness, the disclosure of the subject’s essence. [ ... ] For politicians the three-quarter gaze is more common: a gaze that soars rather than confronts’.40 This is the look of most of these professional women. The exception to this occurs in those portraits of actresses. We see this in both Price and Vanburgh and interestingly in Glyn’s painted portrait. For the actresses I would suggest that this is due to their being used to all manner of poses. But for others, such as Glyn, Sontag’s observation that, ‘facing the camera signifies solemnity, frankness, the disclosure of the subject’s essence’ has more validity.41 In the chapter, ‘Women Writers’ I showed how low-brow writers like Glyn were often at pains to exhibit a seriousness not shown in their work. The clothes remain an explicit part of the narrative because as I observed, the dress of headmistresses Gray and Faithfull presented a dignified appearance which was essential to their participation in the public domain. Of course, an analysis of the ‘costume narrative’ has been an important part of film analysis.42 But it is important to extend such analyses to the photograph. As John Tagg rightly noted: ‘Power then, is what is centrally at issue here: the forms and relations of power which are bought to bear on practices of representation or constitute their conditions of existence.’43 This dignified yet feminine approach is also exhibited in the photographs of women doctors. These professional


women needed to emulate masculine seriousness, but also desired to show their feminine side. As Joan Riviere noted: women who wish for masculinity may put on a mask of womanliness to avert anxiety and the retribution feared by men. [ ... ] Not long ago intellectual pursuits for women were associated almost exclusively with an overtly masculine type of woman, who in pronounced cases made no secret of her wish or claim to be a man. This has now changed.44 These studio photographs conform to the de rigueur of both portraiture and masculine formal pose. Social roles, however enacted, are like masks or disguises, carefully assumed by these women in order to locate themselves in a society conditioned to recognise and identify these forms of representation. Tagg claimed: ‘The portrait is therefore a sign whose purpose is both the description of an individual and the inscription of social identity. But at the same time, it is also a commodity, a luxury, an adornment of ownership of which itself confers status’.45 As such, as Barthes recorded, myths in photographs aim at reconciliation with society.46 These women were buying into the hegemony of the myth of a professional image. This visual biographic information has important consequences for how we read ‘a character’ and events within a life. According to Rugg: ‘Photographs and autobiographies work well together as signs to tell us something about the self’s desire for self-determination.’47 The enfolding of text and image leads to a more conclusive and encompassing interpretation of the autobiographer’s life, and in some instances a new and different perspective maybe emphasised. These autobiographical images, upon close examination, can necessitate a re-thinking of their meaning. It is for these reasons that I believe these frontispiece photographs can obscure, deflect or act as a cloaking mechanism. The reader begins the autobiography with a visual signifier of the autobiographer. This sets up certain expectations which often are not realised in the manner expected. This revelation causes what Barthes described as ‘photographic “shock” ’.48 This surprise may not only be for the viewer/reader but also for the sitter. As Barthes pointed out: ‘photographic “shock” [ ... ] consists less in traumatizing than in revealing what was so well hidden that the actor himself was unaware or unconscious of it’.49 Autobiography is rarely intentionally


129

fictionalised; it is usually a fault of memory. But with chosen photographs the writer’s intent is to present the image of how they would like to be seen; an exaggerated image based on a truth. Therefore I submit that these photographs are often evasions rather than display and identification.

8 Prefaces, Prologues, Forewords and Introductions

Set alongside the frontispiece photograph, these introductory sections are the first contact the reader has with the writer and I believe instigate similar questions. For example, what expectations is the reader given in these antecedent chapters? Do these preliminary guides all perform in a similar manner? Do women from different professions tend to include similar or different topics? Does the use of a prefatory work help or complicate the autobiographical form? Given the position of these chapters as part of the marginalia, we need to ask whether a similar evasion is undertaken by these texts. Finally, with these questions in mind, it will be of interest to establish if the writing at the margins of their work is representative of that in the main body of the text. Within the cohort of autobiographies examined for this book, 80 per cent of professional writers and doctors, 60 per cent of nurses, and 50 per cent of artists and headmistresses produced prefatory chapters. The most popular designation was ‘preface’ (50 per cent), followed by ‘introduction’ (26 per cent), and ‘foreword’ closely followed by prologue (14 and 10 per cent respectively). From the outset, any coinage for these precursory texts raises issues of definition.1 All these prefatory titles in some form are perceived as introductory remarks at the beginning of a book, as an explanatory section, or as a treatise on the subject. In fact these prefatory chapters use the ‘summarising’ function least of all. To varying degrees, the main areas highlighted by these autobiographers are: the encouragement by friends to write, self-deprecatory remarks, use of linguistic devices such as metaphor, and concerns about memory which entails problems of verisimilitude. Moreover, although these preliminaries come before the main body of the work, it is highly unlikely to be the first section to be written. 130

Prefaces, Prologues, Forewords and Introductions

131

These women were not only among the forerunners in their chosen professions, they were among the forerunners of professional women who chose to write about their experiences. There were few antecedents for them to follow. The readily available models would be from male autobiographies. Because of this I briefly examined examples of male texts, as similar prefatory texts may have had some influence on the form and content for these women. Fifteen male autobiographies were selected from professions comparable to those of the women autobiographers. What is very noticeable is that all of these male autobiographers, in some form or other, display self-confidence. For example, if friends and colleagues are mentioned it is in the manner of a formal acknowledgement. Painter John Lavey extended: ‘grateful thanks to Katharine Fitzgerald and John Stewart Collis for helping me to put my stray memories together.’2 Headmaster Guy Kendall wrote both a preface and an introduction. In the preface he recorded that he was encouraged to write by the success of his two books on education. But in the introduction that followed, he noted the discouragement of friends who stated that: ‘I don’t think you will find a large public for a book of that kind.’3 Yet he had the confidence to go ahead. If there are any self-deprecatory remarks, they are tinged with humour and would cause the reader to query any implied humility. Adrian Brunel, a film editor, noted his: ‘unspectacular part in a spectacular background [ ... ] and I apologise if I appear to have recaptured that feeling of importance’.4 Such confidence in the legitimacy of writing about their lives is epitomised in the forthright address by schoolmaster Frank Fletcher. He encapsulates the style of many male autobiographers: This book is neither an autobiography nor a treatise on the theory of education. It is a volume of reminiscences, personal and educational, set in an autobiographical framework. I proclaim no dogmas and denounce no heresies: such principles as I suggest are those I have worked myself [ ... ] The result is an incomplete but not, I hope, untruthful picture.5 Finally, in a similar vein, Lord Riddell was even more succinct and incisive: This begins in October 1908 and ends in July 1914, thus covering, more or less, the six years before the war [ ... ] Some of the entries may perhaps be regarded as of historical importance. As before I have


thought it necessary to make certain omissions. The profits will go to the Newspaper Press Fund.6 However, although this accomplished self-possession does not appear to be the province of female autobiographers, there is evidence that some did attempt to emulate this style. Nearly half of the autobiographies by women doctors and headmistresses used the introductory section as a preliminary treatise of the scope and subject that was to follow, compared with 10 to 15 per cent of novelists, nurses and artists. This summarising device produced preliminary sections that are the longest of all the prefatory chapters and cover three to five pages. Lilian M. Faithfull laid bare the difficulties of running a large girls’ college, how successful she was and her methods of achieving this eminence. Nothing external to the college is mentioned here. There are no concerns or opinions about difficulty of remembering, difficulty in writing, help from friends, or questions of veracity. In fact in their delivery and content many headmistresses follow the male paradigm described above (headmaster Frank Fletcher). For example, Faithfull recorded: ‘I give the result of personal observations and reflections on the happenings of a working life – some record of its humours, its problems, its joys and anxieties. The pressure of professional life leaves little time for ordered meditation’.7 However, Dr Mary Scharlieb used her opening remarks to encourage other women to take up the cause of medicine. Her autobiography had: ‘been a delightful task’ and ‘not written for my own sake [ ... ] [but] to convince medical women students and junior practitioners that a successful, happy, and useful career can be, and ought to be, the guerdon of their toil’.8 To survive and be proficient headmistresses and doctors would need to acquire a mode that was common currency. This approach leads me to believe that their formal training for their professions has, for some, provided them with confidence, and a tone and style of writing that is exhibited in the antecedent chapters, is bolstered by professional training and provided a means of overriding inherent patriarchal restraints. We need to remember that these women grew up in the late Victorian era, where there were strong patriarchal controls, and powerful definitions of femininity which partially continued into the Edwardian period.9 It is therefore not surprising that they needed to assuage charges of unfeminine behaviour that could accrue from this form of self-promotion. These women enlisted distinguished males to


133

write brief testimonies in the margins of their texts, or cited male friends who encouraged the project. For example, Violetta Thurstan claimed Prince Yusupov in Russia among her friends who had urged her to ‘write down all this’.10 Others gratefully acknowledged the support and advice that they had received from ‘literary’ men. Dr Isabel Hutton noted the help she had experienced from Mr H. Fitchew with revisions to her work.11 Similarly, painter Estella Canziani thanked her friend Mr S.C. Kaines Smith for, ‘worrying me until I wrote this book; and the late Mr E.V. Lucas for [ ... ] his untiring interest and kind advice’.12 A more fulsome intrusion and endorsement could be achieved when these antecedent chapters were written by acclaimed men. Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) May Wedderburn Cannan had a Foreword by Basil Blackwell in which he praised her ‘integrity, courage and loyalty’.13 ‘Rita’, Mrs Desmond Humphreys, was plied with accolades from Sir Philip Gibbs. He wrote that: In the history of English fiction the name of ‘Rita’ will not be forgotten [ ... ] a pioneer of freedom in using fiction as a medium for truth and reality at a time when England was still very ‘Victorian’ [ ... ] I salute the author of Peg the Rake and of many other tales.14 Although Lillah McCarthy secured ‘An Aside’ from George Bernard Shaw, the extraordinary regard he felt for her was limited to her work as an actress, and he makes no mention of her prowess as an autobiographer. Nevertheless, these assertions of the autobiographer’s credibility are a feature that is not present in male autobiographies. These women needed to have their confidence bolstered. Thus recommendations by men functioned to legitimise the writing and frequently drew attention to the feminine qualities of the writer, which would assuage charges of unfeminine self-promotion. The endorsement for them to write was not only forthcoming from eminent patriarchs. Artists, more than any other group, focused on the role played by friends within their peer group. For example in their prefaces, Lillah McCarthy, Maude V. White and Estella Canziani (actress, composer, painter, respectively) foreground their friends as instrumental in their decisions to record their lives. McCarthy acknowledged that it: ‘would be worse than ungracious, downright dishonest: this book owes its very life to them. Without their help I should never have been born in print. Without them I could not have learned to talk alone’.15


White recounted that she was: ‘very much astonished, for it never occurred to me that anyone would care to read anything I had to say about myself’.16 In a similar manner Canziani was ‘pressed’ by friends: ‘to write some of my reminiscences’.17 Over three-quarters of Canzini’s preface is allotted to a declaration of the part each friend played in encouraging her. Support from renowned patriarchal figures and friends provided the cachet of approval and highlighted their insecurity about their writing. However, this lack of self-belief is further disclosed, in the marginalia, by the presence of self-deprecatory remarks which allude to the worthiness of the project. The novelists, as professional writers, were aware of the difficulty and complexity of the autobiographical genre. Nancy Price wrote: ‘it is just a glancing back [ ... ] what mattered to me and this in a very inadequate way I have tried to set this down’.18 Similarly, Netta Syrett believed her life: ‘too ordinary to be worth recording’.19 But the selfapologetic prose of the nurses and VADs is very different. Had their careers not led them to take part in war work, their experiences would not have been incredible enough to inspire any interest to record it. The awareness of this did cause anxiety, insomuch as 25 per cent of this profession and a similar percentage of writers recorded their concerns. VAD and journalist May Sinclair noted: ‘This is a journal of impressions and nothing more.’20 Nurse M.A. St Clair Stobart is more explicit about the worth of her writing: from personal intimacy of disentangling my humble life [ ... ] I want to stress the fact that I lay no claim to greatness or notability [ ... ] as an unknown and insignificant individual, I have just done throughout the years those things, normal or abnormal, that came along to be done [ ... ] I trust that some interest may be found in my simple narrative.21 Even VADs such as Baroness de T’Serclaes, who acknowledged that she had had a ‘short and shocking adventure’ as the ‘Heroine of Pervyse’, deflected any form of self-promotion by closing the prologue with a quixotic tone: ‘Did it all really happen – to me? Sometimes it is hard to believe ... . What a life it’s been! What a life!’22 In a more direct manner, headmistress Marion Cleeve confronted the issue of self-promotion: ‘The egotism of such a record is inevitable and must be excused’.23 These various devices presented a lack of self-advocacy and provided a buttress against charges, by the reading public, of unfeminine behaviour, in that they presented themselves as non-assertive


135

Edwardian women. I now want to look at the use of metaphor, and its effect, in the marginalia. This device was not used by any of the artists; but it was taken up by almost 20 per cent of doctors, practically 25 per cent of the headmistresses, nearly 50 per cent of nurses and 80 per cent of the writers who were part of this survey. My research uncovered that two main strands of feminine metaphoric imagery were used. For doctors and nurses images that smouldered, seethed, fermented and blazed with desire were employed. Whereas professional writers put to use metaphors from a similar semantic field of tangled wools, threads, and roots. The doctors and nurses appear to have recourse to romantic novels and those of the writers employ imagery from a domestic and private sphere. Dr Elizabeth Bryson began her introduction with a meditation on the complexity of memory. She questions in a self-reflective manner: ‘We cannot understand memory. It seems certain that everything we experience, see, hear, or feel, leaves an impression perfect, indelible and inevitable in the mysterious region of memory’.24 However a complete change in style and tone follows. The passage reiterates the tenets of the earlier paragraphs, but a ‘writerly’ expression and tone take over. The memory became: a long tunnel of the past, cheered on by bright gleams of sunny memories and flickering lights [ ... ] then we come unexpectedly to a red smoulder of desires not understood and strange and sullen resentments, and the red smoulder may blaze up into a fierce flame [ ... ] and we come out of the tunnel and the gleam and throb of feeling is gone too [ ... ] and how illuminating as their uncertain light makes known to us unsuspected preferences and unacknowledged desires.25 In a similar shift in style, former nurse and Commandant in Chief of the VADs, Dame Katharine Furze, began in a reflective mood and with a ‘philosophical spirit’.26 The tone and style then change: ‘to express on paper what has been seething inside [ ... ] the urge to write has been like a [sic] ferment at work inside me.’27 These novelistic traits are taken on more fully by headmistress Sara Burstall.28 She launched her autobiography with passionate, emotional imagery, delivered in the third person: On a spring evening in 1874 an ardent schoolgirl stood on Westminster Bridge to look at the sunset. [ ... ] The passionate force of youth seethed


within her; the beauty of that storied scene and that flaming sky stirred her soul to a burning indignation [ ... ] Turning westward she saw between her and the crimson of the clouds, a vast black bulk, Milbank Prison, like some monstrous beast from the river of slime. Women may be and are, she remembered, prisoners. [ ... ] Fifty years after, a grey-haired woman [ ... ] remembered her girlhood and its passionate despair.29 The ‘flaming sky’ suggests a Turner painting whilst ‘monstrous beast [ ... ] river of slime’ reminds the reader of Dickens’ Bleak House. The alliterative use of soft feminine/sexual sounds as in, ‘seethed, storied and stirred her soul’ exhibit her intensified emotional temperature. There is strong sexual tension and a suggestion of impropriety. However, when Burstall wrote about social/political issues and on women’s struggles they elicited the strong plosive, masculine sounds of ‘black, bulk, and beast’. But it is important to note that all of this excitable writing is conveyed in the third person. At one and the same time the reader is drawn into Burstall’s ardent fervour, but also is distanced by the defamiliarising aspect of third person delivery. Here the particular interest in these extracts rests on two main points; the conspicuous effect of these metaphors, along with the intensity of the language which resides in the margins of their work. Both Burstall and Bryson use a colour code in the symbolism of this emotional observation, which in these very visual renderings, appear to draw on images from Victorian narrative paintings.30 But rather than disguising or softening the underlying social/political message, the idiosyncratic semantic field draws attention to the ideas which are not totally subsumed by their novelistic tone. For headmistresses and doctors, schooled in professional methods, to write of emotional subjects would have been anathema. Their efforts to secure an exemplary feminine discourse in the main body of the text are compromised as their emotional temperature has broken through. So in a last ditch attempt to express sentiments through metaphors, they lacked the nous and nuance to produce a ratified account which would escape particular notice. Instead it appears that in the move away from their constraints of ‘official’ writing, they were unable to rein in their delivery. From this ‘breech’ in normative discourse, the reader witnesses an atypical ‘bodice-ripping’ display of pent-up agitation as the writers shrug off their professional attire and release subjugated emotions. Bryson, Furze and Burstall all show, in varying degrees, strong sexual tensions and hints of impropriety. Also, in Bryson and Furze we read


137

different and competing discourses in the prefatory chapters. There is no reason why these should not be coterminous, but such a stark contrast of discourses raises important and interesting issues of these women’s struggle with their intrusion into male dominated professions. The prefatory discourses display their anxieties of their role in society. To use a learned female professional voice would support their incursion into the public domain, but the pointed intrusion of novelistic devices, that they were unable to control, exacerbates this uncertainty. In fact this novelistic phrasing displays a range of authorial quotation and vitiates the autobiographical genre. However, the metaphors used by professional writers in the preliminary chapters refer specifically to the difficulties of the genre in particular, where to start and how to edit the numerous references they have acquired. The process, which is so unlike writing fiction, appears to them as a muddle. Storm Jameson found that she had to wrestle with: ‘the dark tangled roots of feeling and action’.31 H.M. Swanwick was: ‘reminded of dealings with a bag of wools, not too carefully kept, when the first ball taken out is entangled with a second and that with half a dozen more.’32 In a similar vein Netta Syrett wrote: ‘Actually I find the task of deciding where to begin unexpectedly difficult. Which thread out of the tangled skein memory shows me shall I choose for the unravelling of the past?’ [sic]33 The use of metaphor by these professional writers is as an illustrative tool. The reader can easily identify with the difficulty of the task and is moreover, subtly led to expect veracity from all this effort. What stands out from this analysis is the difference in the tone and language that these different professions engage in. Obviously writing competency is expected from the wordsmiths, but what does surprise is the lack of restraint on the part of headmistresses and women doctors. The novelists’ analogies are reasonable, neutral and under control. The images appear to be selected to illustrate, in an unaffected manner, an explanatory model of the initial problems that beset them. As skilled wordsmiths the novelists understood, and are comfortable with, literary devices. Hence the reader is given metaphors that do not transgress the tone and structure that surrounds them. It appears that in the margins, the literary style is determined by the degree to which the experience of writing is new. With the headmistresses and women doctors, the contrast with the lack of vitality in the main text may be accounted for by their attachment to a mode of writing that they used in their professional lives. Therefore, to record their lives accurately they resorted to the similar emotional economy needed


daily in their professional world. For doctors and headmistresses this was one of duty, caring, probity and control. In point of fact, these autobiographers called attention to this absence of passion. Burstall remembers: ‘her girlhood and its passionate despair’34 and in similar manner to the others, Swanwick recorded: ‘the wish to express the intense desire which possessed me all my youth’.35 In the early period, or in the margins of their lives, passion abounded. Later in the main part of their lives, as in the main body of the text, professional conduct dominated. Frivolity and passion appear to be subsumed and are excised from the texts. From this analysis on issues of confidence and the use of literary devices the importance of probity and veracity need to be discussed. This feature was totally ignored by all headmistresses, broached by only a fifth of all doctors and artists, but three-quarters of nurses declared an interest, and interestingly, all writers called attention to this intractable subject for autobiographers. Further, these writers’ commitment to aspects of verisimilitude divides into three categories, intentional editing, meditations on the elusiveness of truth and memory, and a desire to be as candid as possible. The omission of this topic of truthfulness by headmistresses, the majority of women doctors and artists may be explained in two ways. The artists who omitted any thought on this had produced in the main, ‘charming poetic memoirs’. The exclusion by all headmistresses and the majority of doctors needs to take into account their professional ethos. They would take integrity as a given, and would take into account the content of their autobiographies. Firstly, their autobiographies were chiefly about their professional, public world. Therefore there would be little need for evasions of a personal nature or for the benefit of friends. Secondly, for headmistresses making inroads into a patriarchal profession, their training would cause them to emulate masculine modes of rectitude in their report writing. This appears to have impinged into the record of events in their autobiographies to produce a pedestrian manner, cool and factual. Degrees of emotion and bias would not be part of their work and writing. For doctors, similar codes would obtain. In addition, their scientific background did not call for conjecture and passionate delivery. Concerns about the possibility of a candid and accurate account are by far the most common issue in the margins. The autobiographers who raise this problem display a rigorous exactitude to produce a frank and forthright autobiography. The main reason presented for explicit selfcensorship tended to be the desire to protect others. Romantic novelist


139

Elinor Glyn made reference to Pepys’ diary as a genuine and intimate record because it was not intended for publication. For herself: I have kept locked diaries for years, in which I have tried to set down the unvarnished truth [ ... ] but I cannot publish these now, since many of the people referred to in them are still living. [ ... ] [I will] set out truthfully [her italics] [ ... ] as can be published at the present time.36 Whilst Glyn was unequivocally keen to protect her friends from exposure, Jameson exposed the problems that ensue with gaps and ellipses: ‘I feel an ineffaceable repugnance to writing about close friends [ ... ] This falsifies the record at once. But what else can I do? Nothing.’37 Her resigned tone illuminates her frustration in this. Actor and writer Nancy Price used active, demonstrative verbs: ‘I will set down as truthfully as I can the images I see. These images I have endeavoured to present as they appear to me.’38 In a similar manner, nurse and writer Amy Borden noted: ‘I have not invented anything [ ... ] they [memories] recount true episodes that I cannot forget [ ... ] Any attempt to reduce them to order would require artifice on my part and would falsify them’.39 Although Furze recognised that in order to be accurate they may face problems of objectivity, she shared the sentiment that honest expression was more important: Though I have tried to write objectively – almost laconically and in pedestrian style – some people may find parts of this book too emotional [ ... ] describing not only the events and contacts but also their effect on one’s personality. I have chosen the later process hoping that it may be accepted as an honest and sincere expression of deep feeling [ ... ] we should not waste time on maintaining reserve [ ... ] it is of human realities, as such, that I have tried to write.40 For professional writers issues of veracity were of especial concern. An accomplished exponent of such rigour is Storm Jameson who questioned whether she had the ‘coolness’ to be able to produce an objective and dependable account. But it was only a momentary wavering. She warns the reader that nothing would have been easier for her than to have written: ‘one of those charming poetic memoirs which offend no one and leave a pleasant impression of the author’.41 But Jameson wanted to produce a ‘warts and all’ rendering of herself, but as I mentioned


above, friends were not exposed to this explicitness. In this she faced and understood the duality of perception: ‘I am trying to do something entirely different. Trying, in short, to eat away a double illusion: the face I show to other people, and the illusion I have of myself – by which I live. [sic]’42 This ‘double illusion’ is also raised by dancer Isadora Duncan: ‘How can we write the truth about ourselves? Do we even know it? There is the vision our friends have of us; the vision we have of ourselves; and the vision our lover has of us. Also the vision of our enemies. [sic] And all these visions are different’.43 In these quotations we see the problem, similar to that mentioned in the above chapter on ‘Images’, ( raised by Barthes in Camera Lucida and again examined in The Lover’s Discourse) that of multiple layers of perception.44 The act of writing a prefatory chapter, rather than providing clarity, adds a further layer of perception. Derrida found it necessary to view prefaces in the terms of supplementary and supplement.45 The term ‘supplement’ implies ‘a thing or part added to remedy deficiencies, to provide further information to something already complete’.46 Therefore, if we consider the etymology of the various prefatory terms, it is clear that, as Derrida noted: ‘the preface harbours a lie’.47 In Derridian terms, if a text is self-sufficient, there is no need for it to be added to. The supplement/prefatory chapter is an exterior addition and surplus. As I have already suggested, these additions similar to those of the frontispiece photograph, can act as a cloaking mechanism in their ‘strange and deceptive status’.48 Indeed we may do well to heed Hegel’s comment which advised his readers: ‘Don’t take me seriously in a preface [ ... ] and if I speak to you outside of what I have written, these marginal comments cannot have the value of the work itself’.49 I began this chapter with a series of questions about the function of the prefatory chapters in these autobiographies. To perform in an introductory capacity, and to elucidate in preparation for what was to follow, does not appear to be crucial. There is a division between those like Faithfull and Scharlieb who took on the ‘template’ provided by male autobiographers in similar professions, and between those who presented and almost floundered under considerations for contemporary, cultural mores. This division indicates a sense of confidence and accomplishment on the one hand, but on the other hand the category has those who appear uncertain of the image they wished to present. Their narrative presents the problems that they had in trying to make a ‘fit’ with the earlier genre definitions. Should they present themselves as


141

self-confident and forthright, similar to their male contemporaries, or should they present themselves as self-effacing individuals and thus avoid public vilification? If they chose the risky route, the above study indicates that there was a conflict between the expectations given in the marginalia and between the actual content in the main body of the text. This anomaly between the introduction and the main text can perform as a cloaking mechanism as witnessed in Bryson, Burstall, and Furze; it can become exceptionally revealing and provides a powerful contrast with what was to follow. It is worth repeating that, in the autobiographical genre, women were trying to insert themselves into a discursive practice which was largely masculine. In this they would encounter a range of power nexuses within the patriarchal, professional practices. Already in the public sphere, male autobiography had normative legitimacy and had accrued powers of ‘correctness’. But if women were to deviate from the genre as determined by centuries of male writing, they might be viewed as outsiders and not seen as role models for other women. For the autobiographers who followed the male ‘template’, it appears that a prefatory chapter would, for them, anchor or stabilise the reading of the main text that was to follow. With this aim in mind, the use of male endorsements and the adoption of male prefatory styles played an important role. In a similar fashion, comments by friends, urged them to write and provided what Roy Porter calls a ‘modesty formula’.50 That is, to produce a text at the behest of someone else, preferably that of a distinguished male. Yet in their function as an expository exercise, the chapters examined here cloak rather than elucidate. Whether the summative function of the prefatory chapter is used or not, there is, in common with most autobiographies (male or female) an element of authorial control in the manner that the reader is enjoined to read what is to follow. This control is extended when the question of the difficulties which surround ‘truthfulness’ were raised in the margins. The author’s control and intention of a premature closure in this is clearly presented, and leads to a culde-sac for the reader, closing off lines of expectation and enquiry. This cloaking device extends to examples of the use of further literary devices which trouble the prefatory chapters, in that the sentiments expressed and the manner of expression are not those of the main text. The autobiographers that used metaphors elicit different realms of experience that are aspects triggered by oppression within their professional lives. This is witnessed in Bryson, Burstall, and Furze. Metaphors


are always available from other discourses and may have given these writers a space to express what may have been unsayable. This issue of silence will be investigated in the next chapter. For now, it is sufficient to recognise the role of the metaphor in these marginal chapters. These professional women had written intelligent, logical narratives with appropriate decorum. Then, having done justice to their careers and provided a text as a role-model, they release a ‘fragrant nose-gay’ of the feminine woman that was subsumed under a professional cloak. Much in the manner of the punctum witnessed in the frontispiece image, which these texts are set alongside, these prefatory chapters subvert and punctuate.

9 Silences

This chapter works on the premise that what is not here in the text is often as meaningful as what is. I want to produce a method of interpreting these absences or silences. Silences have an identity and we need to establish what it is. Susan Sontag noted: ‘A genuine emptiness, a pure silence are not feasible – either conceptually or in fact’.1 This discussion will attempt to construct an explanatory model to address the problematic area of silences, and to produce a method whereby silence, in its many forms, can be constructively analysed and shown to be as informative as the written word. Textual silences are the aspects that can be revealed through the appraisal of various stylistic configurations and devices, such as punctuation, ellipses, pace, tone, and spatial use of the page. Since ‘silence’ is such an umbrella term and comes with a raft of connotations, I have chosen to describe all these configurations of silences under the term of ‘textual gap’. This I believe, will provide for a freer examination and give cohesion to the various forms into which this rhetorical device can morph. There are few theoretical works on autobiographies which address the subject of silence. For example, William Dilthey, James Olney, Simon Denlith, Regina Gagnier, Mary Jean Corbett, Liz Stanley, Laura Marcus, Julia Swindells, Mary Evans, and others, have not considered silence as part of their remit.2 Silence, when it is addressed by Virginia Woolf and later by Dale Spender, is read by them in the light of the gendered sentence and gendered language, and is almost exclusively stylistic.3 Woolf’s points were echoed by Hélène Cixous and the écriture feminine school who aimed to celebrate women’s writing and thus remove the repression that could produce silence. In 1995 Maroula Joannou positioned the ‘feminine’ as identified in silence, absence, and incoherence. She identified the reason for this as the dominance of patriarchal 143


discourse. But for Tillie Olsen, Joanna Russ and Philippe Lejeune, it is the silence of the unwritten; the reasons why, in the past, women and (Lejeune included men) have failed to commit to paper, be it fiction or otherwise. In Olsen’s ground-breaking book Silences, her concern was with the reason why women have produced little written work. She was not concerned with what she called ‘natural silences’, but the unwritten – the ‘hidden’ silence of work aborted, deferred or denied, which did not come to fruition.4 She accounts for this silence by censorship in one form or another. Censorship by the self, political or cultural, self-doubt, fear of reception, are all suggested by her as reasons for not writing. Whilst it could be argued that the textual gaps that are of interest in the current chapter are a form of Olsen’s ‘censorship’ model, I would suggest that the textual gaps of interest here were attempts to break through or subvert repression. It seems to me that, if we deploy Olsen’s paradigm, the achievement of these professional women in writing their autobiographies is all the more impressive. Olsen’s model, of course, deals with the constraints which pre-date the act of writing, or inhibit it altogether. What I want to address here is the silence which occurs during the act of writing itself. Literary theorists, however, do address the problem of silence in fictional writing. Roland Barthes, Pierre Macherey, Patricia Laurence, Sanford Budick and Wolfgang Iser, recognise and engage with gaps and omissions in fictive situations.5 For example, Iser and Laurence cite specific novels and each concentrate on a particular area. In their separate works, both examine negation and absence as a starting point, which can then be linked to the social context of oppression and exclusion from public spheres. Laurence brings to the fore the position of women as ‘silent and observing rather than as speaking subjects of their own lives’.6 In this work on silences Macherey, as a Marxist philosopher, does imply that texts should be investigated to find the hidden ideological views of the writer. I intend to ignore this aspect of political affiliation, as this is not part of my remit. Instead his theory on the ‘unsaid’ and the ‘unsayable’ may be used in creative ways, to engage with his rhetorical question: ‘Can we make silence speak?’7 But it needs to be remembered that these theorists are working from an exclusively literary perspective. However, the work of theorists John Cage, Michel Foucault and Susan Sontag can be helpful in this. John Cage, writing in his seminal work, Silences in music, insisted: ‘There is no such thing as silence. Something is always happening that makes a sound.’8 Sontag’s essay ‘The Aesthetics

Silences 145

of Silence’ is directed at the artist who works in the audible, visual and performative fields.9 What is useful for this study is the way she insists that silence does not exist in the literal sense, and her idea of silence as termination and as continuity is thought provoking. Of particular interest is her notion that silence implies its opposite and that it has an identity: ‘ “Silence” never ceases to imply its opposite and to depend on its presence; just as there can’t be “up” without “down” [ ... ] so one must acknowledge a surrounding environment of sound or language in order to recognise silence [ ... ] any given silence has its identity’.10 Sontag is useful as a spring-board for this study of textual gaps as her ideas may be critically and creatively used as part of my overall work in this area, to enable a model of ‘reading’ silence in its many forms. To read a text for what is not there is difficult as the exploration of silence uncovers a number of problems in the limits of language. As I showed in earlier chapters, narrative can both reveal and conceal. The question therefore arises; can the same be said of silence? The reader must be able to understand the implications of the moments of ‘silence’ to establish the relevancies to the adjacent events and the context in which it is found, as this will reveal much about the meaning of that particular silence. Furthermore we need to examine if there is a clear division between experiences that can be articulated and those which are inexpressible. Since there are many forms of textual gaps, it is necessary to establish the distinctions and, where appropriate, the reasons for these omissions and examine the stylistic devices utilised. To help formulate this approach these textual gaps will be analysed under the following headings: first, silence as a deliberate play for reasons of tact and protection of the living, second, silence as reticence and fear of reception, and third silence due to tragedy. Before this, in order to provide the rigour for a useful methodology to examine ‘silence’, it is necessary to start with an appraisal of the fundamental authorial capital of the autobiographer. There is, it must be said, a degree of ambiguity in silence as a communicative tool, and an effort must be made to minimise this and prevent claims of textual gaps which in truth, do not exist. For example, Laura Knight, the painter, was keen not to have any material ties. When she married in 1903 she recorded: ‘Harold and I did not intend to set up house. Neither of us wished to do so, nor could we afford it. Everyone knowing this gave us trunks, hatboxes, writing-cases and collar-boxes as wedding presents’.11 In point of fact, they spent their time travelling from Nottingham to Cornwall, to Holland, to London and many more locations. They lived


a bohemian life alongside other artists, often in a communal house. It is apparent that for her and her husband their art was all important. For them, freedom from domesticity and to be itinerant was essential. Knight does not write about babies or children either for herself, or for any of the other artist couples. Yet this should not be read as an avoidance of the question of a childless marriage. Whilst not explicitly stated, it is implicit that their lives did not permit domesticity, and was complete without its encumbrances. Similarly, there are two notable absences in headmistresses’ autobiographies. One perspective, the absence of any record of male relationships in the headmistresses’ autobiographies could appear odd. But placed in context, it can be seen that these women worked in a landscape often insulated from society at large. Many lived a cloistered existence on the school premises, where social contact with men would be minimal, and in addition to this, marriage would have cost them their position. From another perspective, their important role as the educators of middle-class, female children, would make the public airing of their opinions on current movements and political controversies unprofessional. Therefore it was not until they retired and moved away from the school that they recorded personal intimacies. The actual silence in their professional working life remained a silence in their autobiographies. For example, Marion Cleeve and Frances R. Gray made no mention of a private life other than very minor isolated instances.12 Therefore as far as can be ascertained, these textual gaps are not silences or evasions. These brief examples outline an important area of this methodology and need for rigorous awareness of the context. I now want to deal with my first aspect of silence; the need to protect others. At least 50 per cent of headmistresses made fleeting references to female companions throughout their autobiographies. Few were ever named, and some were given the nomenclature of initials which at first glance appears suggestive of the eighteenth century novelists’ and Victorian novelists’ device; a letter followed by a dash or a date. But on closer examination there appears to be censorship surrounding particular individuals. For example, headmistress Lilian M. Faithfull noted that she: ‘was blessed with a [unnamed] friend who made my holidays [sic] perfect refreshment. She also had more leisure; so she made the plans’.13 When Amy Barlow introduced ‘L’ to the reader it is initially unknown whether the person is male or female. She wrote: ‘L. and I managed to find a very delightful old cottage in the country, three miles from the school, and here we spent a very good three years.’14 There is

Silences 147

nothing unusual with that; but there follows a few pages on: ‘L. played centre forward and Margaret Thornton, who had been at Roedean was an outstanding back.’15 This anomalous treatment of fully naming one friend and of cloaking the other friend in mystery stands out starkly. The reader is jolted by its oddness. The narrative itself moves swiftly along, in an attempt to normalise the memory, and to prevent the reader from having a moment to contemplate the nature of this relationship. Barlow could have omitted her friend’s full name at the friend’s request, or it could be an attempt to diminish the importance of the relationship and elicit closure. As a means for both of these, it fails dismally. If we look at her treatment of other friendships and relationships, a pattern emerges. Barlow recorded her early romances with her brother’s cricketing friends and with grammar schoolboys, and used their full names. Men friends in her early twenties were named except for three. These three had made romantic advances and were rejected: ‘T.F., H.H., and W.J’.16 It appears that throughout her autobiography there are dual standards. Acquaintances were noted in full, whereas close or intimate relationships were coded in initials. The rejected young men may have gone on to marry and would not want their advances made public, and her close female companion would most probably have had professional status and a need for anonymity. Equally in these instances Barlow may well have feared disapprobation, loss of reputation and loss of social respectability for these intimate friends. Silence here is due to the social values which foment the need for censorship as a means of self-protection. The gap between public opinion and private opinion appears to be too great, and leads to silence. However, rather than rendering invisible, the use of initials has in fact drawn attention to the friendships, and leaves a space for alternative readings. The question arises as to why an autobiographer would leave a topic unresolved and susceptible to interpretation by the reader. Marriage, divorce and the deaths of parents are all central moments in anyone’s life. It is thus of some consequence that the record of these received summary attention in these narratives. Headmistresses record little or nothing of their family background. Their parents, if referred to at all, are shadowy figures, and in fact few begin their autobiographies with any detail of childhood. None relate the death of either parent. When we come to look at writers/artists and especially actresses, the involvements are more pronounced, and as we have seen, the father is nearly always the major force. An exception to this


is if the daughter inherits her mothers’ artistic talent to become a painter (Laura Knight), or musician (Liza Lehmann). However the records of their fathers or mothers only extend to the help or influence on their careers. Nurses and, to a slightly lesser extent doctors, gave the family genealogy and began with grandparents, followed by parents and siblings. Aside from sketchy references to the family in their early lives, the family, in the main, had little place in these autobiographical texts. Parents and siblings often received no further mention until their deaths. The cursory manner in which they are dealt with within the text is not the only point of interest here. It is noteworthy that the emotional temperature is volatile. Dr. Gladys Wauchope and Dr. Octavia Wilberforce are two fine examples of this. Wauchope wrote: ‘My father died in 1917. As soon as I qualified I was appointed the lowest post.’17 In a similar fashion Wilberforce recalled: ‘My father was desperately ill and he died two days later on 19 January 1914. I had thought that at Christmas [ ... ]’.18 Musician/composer Mathilde Verne record of her mother’s death is no different: ‘My mother died in August, and a few weeks later I travelled to Frankfurt.’19 This peremptory treatment of their parent’s death raises two concerns; what is missing from the text, and the emotional economy engendered when the deaths are announced. Unlike my first example of the silence in which the autobiographer’s discretion is activated, this gap may arise from the writers’ social and/ or emotional proclivities. These women were at the forefront of professional innovations for their gender. Working in the public sphere, they were determined to shake off society’s dominant patriarchal myths that had ossified to make a rigid formulation of what made a woman feminine. They had set themselves apart from ‘normal’ emotional family life to strike out alone and make a career for themselves, and furthermore, to write about this experience. For them, it was their professions that made them different and warranted the recording, not their family experience. This textual gap during these women’s middle years focuses the reader’s attention exclusively on their independent success. It is of interest that this undivided concentration on career interests was exemplified by Freud. In his autobiography, he covered in detail his desire to secure space away from his parents. He pushed his private affairs to the margins of his autobiographical text because the only relationships that mattered to him were those with science. He did not write of his mother and only fleetingly about his father.20 Freud had

Silences 149

recognised that he emphasised his intellectual achievement to the detriment of writing about his mother, and it appears that this can also be said of these professional women, although they do not acknowledge this in the narrative. But this does not answer the question about the briefness of delivery and the prolepsis when death is described. The emotional and written economy that envelopes the autobiographer’s account of their parents’ death can be a consequence of social/ cultural aspects. At the turn of the century, people still died at home often surrounded by family and friends which gave a strong support mechanism. Death was more visible and seen as inevitable. Chris Shilling noted: ‘There was a resignation about one’s own death, an acceptance that nothing could be done about it.’21 Doctors and nurses would be able to rationalise death and accept what Shilling refers to as its ‘inevitability and universality’. 22 Moreover, the prospect of death would not alarm and disturb so much, as religion would allow for the possibility of a ‘good death’. 23 Where the silence does occur is in lexical breakdown. In the attempt to speak of that which is ‘beyond words’ or narrate the unnarratable, such as death, a textual gap develops. In these texts of Wauchope, Wilberforce and Verne, these prolepses strike as non-sequiturs because the chasm from the subject of the parent’s death to the subject that follows, impresses upon the reader in its stark contrast. The disharmony in the content produces a rupture in the time-continuum and the tempo of the narrative does not allow time for contemplation of this important event, and the reader is moved onward. Unlike the ellipses accentuated by punctuation, which I examine below, the pace of the narrative does not allow the reader a spatial arena to assimilate their own reactions. The impulse from the swiftness of the change in topic should divert attention away from the textual gap, and allow the autobiographer to disguise or conceal their emotions in an attempt at a discreet change of emphasis. We should take on board Vieda Skultan’s assertion that: ‘emotions are culturally constructed, they have a bodily base’.24 We can suggest that these women, brought up in the self-restrained Victorian era, would find it almost impossible to encapsulate their emotions in this difficult experience. It would be what Macherey refers to as ‘moments of silence’ in areas where written speech would be insufficient. These moments of silence are able to reveal what the text ‘cannot say’.25 From this as readers we should take the writer’s inability to describe her emotions as a clearer expression of these emotions and as a testament to their power.


If we consider Macherey’s theory in his chapter, ‘The Spoken and the Unspoken’ where he urges the reader to recognise a ‘certain absence’ [sic] in order to have knowledge of the text that ‘silence shapes all speech’.26 But we also have to consider whether this silence is hidden and what it is. It is pertinent that: ‘What is important in the work is what it does not say. This is not the same as the careless notion “what it refuses to say”, although that would be interesting: a method might be built on it, with the task of measuring silences [sic] whether acknowledged or unacknowledged’.27 In the broadest sense my chapter is about ‘measuring silence’, the issue that Macherey chooses not to address. However, from the examination of the various forms of textual gaps a methodology for ‘measuring’ silence will emerge. Marriage, another family issue, received in many ways comparable treatments when the episode was highly emotional. For the most part, the reader is not introduced to the prospective husband and often midparagraph an announcement is made. Bertha Ruck, writer and illustrator, had written on various small assignments she had received, when she blandly interjected: ‘Shortly after this I got married to Oliver Onions.’28 In a corresponding fashion actress Lillah McCarthy remarked: ‘In April I was married’.29 This is swiftly followed by a letter from George Bernard Shaw. Three chapters later we are told of a Desmond McCarthy who was: ‘quoting with punning aptness’.30 The reader can only conjecture that this was her husband. But nothing more was written. Towards the end of the book McCarthy recalled meeting, at a golf club, a charming man, whom within a week: ‘I promised to marry’.31 There had been no mention of the divorce or the death of her first husband. It is only by close observation that clues are to be found in the text, from which assumptions can be made. She wrote that in the spring of 1910: ‘I was very ill and, a weak suffering creature, was taken off to stay with Mr and Mrs H.G. Wells’.32 There is no mention of her husband’s concern or role in this. A year or two later she received a death threat and had a stalker. A girl friend moved in with her until the man was caught: ‘I was so ill afterwards that I went away to Partenkirchen to rest before the trial’.33 Once again her husband was not involved. McCarthy appears to have censored her first marriage difficulties and subsequent divorce because of her fear of public disapprobation. As May Wedderburn Cannan had stated: ‘in those days, of course, divorce was a rarity and a stigma’.34 This huge textual omission in her autobiography cannot fail to be noticed by the reader. McCarthy had constructed a ‘wall’ of silence leaving a lot of unanswered questions.

Silences 151

These breaks in the continuity and the ensuing silence require an active reader and permit alternative and multiple readings. There is doubt and uncertainty in the texts. In the example above, it is implicit that Desmond McCarthy no longer existed for Lillah McCarthy, but the ‘whys’ and ‘wherefores’ intrigue the reader. Iser noted when writing about fiction that: ‘Whenever the reader bridges the gaps, communication begins. The gaps function as a kind of pivot on which the textreader relationship revolves.’35 As a literary device this is only partially true for a reader of autobiography. In a work of non-fiction these gaps engender distrust which in turn can weaken the narrative. What is implicit here has undermined McCarthy’s position, and left her open to the risk of conjecture. At this juncture it would be useful to appraise the use of extracts from complimentary reviews and documents found in artists’ and writers’ autobiographies, followed by the use of letters found in doctors’ and nurses’ autobiographies in their use of ‘filling’ silences. It is commonplace to think of these quoted extracts as a strengthening agent, a supporter of the truthfulness of an event. But, as I pointed out in my earlier chapter on prefaces, due to the deprecatory nature of many of the women’s texts, quotations can also be taken as a means of using another’s discourse. They can explicate what may be difficult or embarrassing for the autobiographer to write. However, if this is the case, why do they include extracts at such length and quoted in full? This textual gap operates on two levels. First, it acts as a barrier against charges of immodesty and embarrassment, but in the second instance, the supposed indelicacy that they wish to avoid is forfeited in the self-promotion and obvious pride that these artefacts narrate. The composer, Liza Lehmann, presents sections which run from five to ten pages and all are flattering: ‘The Press however, was most kind, [ ... ] the composer, who is Mme Liza Lehmann; and excellently has she done her work. Delighting all hearers with melodies that are fresh and spontaneous [ ... ] She was simply clad. [ ... ] In personality charmingly English, artistic temperament in every line and movement.’ [sic]36 Further reviews, articles and interviews which shed light on her character and appearance abound. Actress Lillah McCarthy concentrated on the use of letters from fans from all strata of life; the general public, titled admirers and famous people. To further increase the narrative authority of letters from friends such as George Bernard Shaw, Mr Asquith and John Masefield, they are reproduced in their own handwriting. Letters were selected to demonstrate her acting ability. Henrietta Watson wrote: ‘you positively


mesmerised me. I was glued to your extraordinary expression – I never knew you possessed that wonderful, terrible power.’37 In a similar vein Lady Tree wrote: ‘I cannot tell you how splendid and wonderful I thought you this afternoon. I was moved and enthralled.’38 The information imparted in these insertions would have been difficult for the autobiographers to have written. It is what Foucault noted: ‘Silence itself – the things one declines to say, or is forbidden to name, the discretion that is required ...’.39 The use of third party narrative generates an objective temperature to a subjective impulse. But this usage entails a latent and faux modesty. Their silence about their achievements contrasts with the fulsomeness of these artefacts, and creates an imbalance. These writers are implying that it is not they but others who are saying it; a form of modesty by proxy. There would be a natural reticence imposed by cultural and ideological discourses of Victorian/Edwardian women in public and private spheres. Of all the professions for women, performers would be aware of public opinion, and in some quarters, of the low status given to actresses. They were happy to make references to their work, placing it within the general milieu of its kind, but felt unable to articulate how they ‘saw’, interpreted or evaluated their own worth. Rather than risk vilification by creating wrong impressions, they preferred to present their proof of competence as established by the press and fans, to ‘speak’ for them. Their silence made a safe space for them to step back into and, in a figurative manner to say: ‘here is the proof, it has been established in the public domain’. Doctors and writers tend to employ letters as a medium when delicate topics need to be addressed. Dr. Octavia Wilberforce used letters she sent to and received from Elizabeth Robins to make known her emotions during times of particular difficulty with her family. Miss Robins, her friend and confident, was almost her only emotional support at a time when the family were trying to force her to marry, and had refused financial support in her quest to become a doctor (her father had cut her out of his Will). The letters back and forth were so extensively used that in places her narrative became an epistolary form. This usage gives the autobiography a sense of immediacy and leads the reader to believe in the veracity of the telling. But there are many occasions when there is a blurring of the boundaries within the narrative between her writing, and those of the letters. They are included in the autobiography without the usual notifiers of date, addressee, or of closure, by the letter writer, and without indentation on the page. This indistinctness causes confusion about the authorial ‘voice’. The letters allow the

Silences 153

autobiographer to remain silent, but her position is implicit. Similar to the articles and reviews used by actresses and writers, letters present a distanced rhetoric which anaesthetises the experience. M.A. St. Clair Stobart, nurse turned writer, combined a clinical exactness in a documentary format which implies a full account, but in fact contains important evasions. Each paragraph began with an italicised heading; ‘Tennis, Cricket, Music’ and so on. Stobart was adept at appearing to ‘tell all’ in her rigorous record of her life. It continued throughout, whether the narrative covered family events or listed literary achievements. There is neither emotional attachment to this work in the public domain, nor attachment in the writing of personal family detail. She did not ‘miss a beat’ when in mid-paragraph she moved from the tale of her Corps being honoured by an inspection by the Duke of Connaught, to: ‘In 1911, I committed matrimony for the second time. [...] He accompanied me on all my expeditions, but always and only, as had been understood between us, in the capacity of an orderly [Red Cross]. I seldom saw him’.40 This appears to be an unambiguously positive account; but the word ‘committed’ jars. To commit murder, to commit suicide, to commit adultery is appropriate for a description of those dispiriting acts. But to commit marriage, whilst lexically correct, is suggestive of a joyless occasion rather than one of celebration. Stobart’s husband, a retired barrister and former judge, could precipitate the use of ‘commit’ due to connotations of legalese. But I submit that it is more than this, and that there is a latent shadow of a passionless marriage, a prosaic contract between the two of them. The narrative is incomplete. It is what Macherey describes as an ‘area of shadow’; there is a possibility of something more, much remains unsaid.41 This is borne out when, later in the chapter, she admitted that she insisted that a promise of obedience was removed from the marriage service and how her husband: ‘a kindly and most self-effacing man who ever breathed. [...] and played so graciously a subsidiary marital role’.42 From this point on, a quarter of the way through her book, her husband received no further mention. Sandwiched as these extracts are between the autobiographer’s own words, like a ventriloquist, they ‘speak’ for the autobiographer without causing the calumny possible from their own writing. By this I mean that it allows images and emotions to be articulated to the reader through a mediator. There is safety in this. The autobiographer is saying; this is a view of me, but I did not write it. She controls the divisions between her narrative and silence. If the reader is offended or disagrees,

154


it is not the autobiographer’s words, and can only work if, as readers, we forget that it was selected by the autobiographer. Their silence over immodest issues can secure their approbation. I now want to examine how the layout on the page has significance in the role of textual gaps. The first part of this examination concentrates on the use of elliptical markers and the second part will focus on the combined effect of these elliptical markers and the language. First, it must be stated that elliptical marks do not always indicate a sense of pain or gravity. Cannan, a Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) in France, sprinkled her narrative with ‘...’ as the final notation to a paragraph. In parts one and two of her autobiography which she called ‘Growing Up’ they were less frequent and reinforced a trailing-off of the paragraph subject, rather than an end. For example: ‘so I think it must have been a private arrangement of our own ...’, or ‘They’ll be a handy lot ...’.43 However in Part Three, ‘The War Years’, these elliptical markers increase in frequency and start to appear mid-sentence as well. At the same time the level of detail increases: ‘He [Major QuillerCouch, became her lover] had to ride over to an Aerodrome ... The last mile through a wood full of honeysuckle, broom and wildflowers and cornflowers ... The ride home, about ten o’clock with the moon still up, no wind to speak of’.44 This usage of ... has a literariness and a fictionality about the style. There is a dream-like quality and ephemeral beauty that the reader is encouraged to complete. It maybe possible to say more in another manner but: ‘does it denote a true absence’?45 At this stage of her writing, the elliptical marker simply indicates what might be missing in the text; an emotional shorthand, or ‘silence as the source of expression’.46 The diegetic excess appears to make the writing poetic. However this usage changed. Cannan and Quiller-Couch rendezvous in France. It is at this point that the minutiae of detail are coupled with an extraordinary excess of ‘...’ and both alternate with an extraordinary economy of implicit writing. To make this plain it is necessary to use a quotation of some length: There, looking down into the waters of the Seine, hurrying by and having known other wars and other lovers, he asked me to marry him ... And then went back to Rue Turbigo and in that queer highceilinged room in the Paris-France that had suddenly become home, sat on his bed and darned some socks and sewed on a button. He had washed a shirt and hung it to dry on a piece of string stretched

Silences 155

across the room; and we did not know that it was to be our only housekeeping ... It was our last day so we went out to Meudon and walked there [ ... ] I walked with him to the Gard du Nord, he carrying his pack. I was wearing his ring and as the train pulled out he put his dark head down on my hands and kissed them ... The train pulled out. When I could see and hear again I found the entrance to the Metro ...47 Notwithstanding that the reader is given a huge amount of detail, there are textual gaps. The excess of detail serves to both anaesthetise the emotion and deflect from it, and importantly to imprint this very visual experience onto the reader, in the manner it exists for Cannan. The mimetic detail keeps her memory alive. This also allows her to skip over the painful cracks. The ellipsis suggests that text is missing from the sentence and that this creates the illusion that the missing text occurs through a gradual trailing into silence. In essence, this literary device both draws the reader’s attention and emphasises the silence. Silence here is symbolic of something she was unable to express in words. We can begin to understand ‘silence’ as a voice. Where the autobiographer cannot speak, silence does so in her place. Cannan appears to be giving an unexpurgated telling but it is in fact, in part, a filled silence, and in part, a foreshadowing. By leaving out elliptical markers, she does not give the reader space to contemplate this. Instead she moves swiftly to forewarn what is to come; mask the sexual element and give poignancy to the above minutiae of detail: ‘The train pulled out. When I could see and hear again I found the entrance to the Metro.’48 The detail is incomplete and the short prolepsis conjures the depth of her suffering on the station. There follows an extract from a letter Major Quiller-Couch sent to his father, stating his intention of marrying Cannan. The position of this letter is poignant. It provides a buffer and the illusion of mental space to write a difficult passage. Cannan’s writing becomes staccato and repetitive: There were letters. It was very cold [ ... ] A bitter cold. Then the parlourmaid brought a telegram. I got up. A voice I didn’t know said, ‘I think this is for me.’ I took it from the silver tray [ ... .] The Army Council expressed sympathy. Actually I had known it for some time, but I still hoped. Now there was no hope. It was the end of the world.49

156


Her Major had died. The evident change in her style from long sentences sprinkled with elliptical markers, which slow the narrative pace and allow the reader to think, to a tone that is curt with fore-shortened sentences, firmly encase a silence around his death and her pain. This different rhythm denotes a more psychological textual gap than before. However these elliptical markers are deployed to an even greater effect in similar psychologically stressful situations. An accomplished composer, Liza Lehmann wrote an account of the death of her son, during the war, from pneumonia. Hitherto her writing had composure and freely flowed with a plethora of lightly romantic expressions. For example, ‘Meanwhile my two little boys had been born and I was far more wrapped up in “living poems” than in any art.’50 The chapter, ‘My Sons’ entices the reader to anticipate a full account of a painful, but unknown nature: ‘I now approach a part of my life’s story of which I can scarcely bear to write. But it must be done for the sake of continuity and completeness, as well as other reasons which I regard as a duty’.51 Her son Rudolf, 17 and a soldier: ‘was just able to reach home - literally in time to die’.52 It is at this juncture that her narrative style begins to show, what she herself believed, she had kept under control. She continued: ‘he was past saving and in one week – on March 12th, 1916 – he was gone’.53 The strain of writing out such painful memories is palpable and its force impinges on the reader. There is a tautness apparent which makes articulation difficult and which allows only the ‘bare-bones’ to be given ‘for the sake of other boys and mothers’.54 To articulate this suffering, which at base she does not understand, Lehmann resorts to rhetorical questions: Oh! How can I write of it? How can I bear to speak of such anguish as I have endured? Truly I do so only from a sense of moral obligation. I wish to blame no one; such feelings of bitterness as I may have felt I have tried to conquer.55 But there appears to be a conflict between the momentum of the desire to expel the episode, and the intensity of the rational need to stifle expression. The silence here is the withdrawal from the facts of the event. It is self-denial of the awfulness of what has happened and could also reside in society’s expectation of self-control and a ‘stiffupper-lip’ in conditions of extreme adversity. Her language has become burdened by the emotion of this tragedy, for which she can find no

Silences 157

meaning, and it is at this point that her hard-held fight for narrative control is overrun and the unchecked emotions burst through. The frequent use of rhetorical interrogative phrases erupts harshly from her earlier style, creating a gulf between pre- and post- Rudie’s death. The heartbreak in the short imperative and interrogative sentences is linguistically crushing: How do you bear it? ... I have not the solace of a strong faith; my religion had been of the vaguest; [ ... ] But now! – if it were humanly possible to penetrate behind the veil – to find a clue – to know a little – ever so little more – could any effort be too great? I wanted to find my child! [sic] God help us!56 These short sentences combined with exclamatory marks and frequent ‘dashes’ create a sense of haste and omission. Lehmann wanted to ‘gallop’ through this and have done with re-living the experience. These spurts of narrative and stops and hesitancies realise a sense of emotional and textual stammering. Again, this rhythmic patterning and incomplete sentences is redolent of novels of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The elliptical marks: ‘... ’ add to the pause which strengthens the earnestness of the record; a case where less is more.57 To cope with the enormity of the tragedy her mind needed to reduce the experience into smaller ‘bite-sized’ compartments. In times of extreme suffering the easiest way to handle the pain is to segment thoughts, and Lehmann’s divisions showed the ‘cracks’ and blanks of the emptiness, and the grasp for some reality to make sense of her injury. Indeed, writer ‘Rita’, Mrs Humphreys did declare that: ‘One has to keep one’s brain in “compartments,” so to say, and it is not always an easy matter.’58 Humphreys wrote incompletely about her two marriages and divorce. She broke off an arranged engagement and resolved to marry without consent. I render the quotation below as it appeared spatially on the page: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . I had begun to care very much for someone else [sic] [but] Over that troubled time of family dissension I will drop the veil of silence. All concerned in it are long dead. I wish them no worse purgatory than the recognition of their mistakes and their effect! 59 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .


Not only had Humphreys mentally ‘compartmentalised’ difficulties in her life she ‘compartmentalises’ the page by using elliptical markers and line breaks as firewalls. The next record of her marriage, a few years later, indicated problems. Humphreys was prepared to acknowledge that there were mistakes, a particular ‘compartment’ in her life, but she was not prepared to elaborate. The use of close textual reading has allowed the possibility of a pattern of devices to emerge which expose ‘silence’. Interpolations such as parentheses, brackets, dots, dashes and ellipses create a physical space and forewarn a textual gap. The autobiographer may have imagined that by ‘drawing a line’ literally and metaphorically under a subject, their censorship would be accepted by the reader, and that it would be accepted that there was nothing more to be said. But these devices mark an emotional tone which changed the pace and they are a form that needs to be read. As Sontag aptly wrote: ‘Notably, speech closes off thought [ ... ] silence keeps things “open”, everyone has experienced how, when punctuated by long silences, words weigh more’.60 The examples above have shown how this pause or silence gathers attention and are invitations to explore what is not written; a space for conjecture. But for Lehmann, to rationalise her experiences into compartments, and to be honest, induced incoherence in parts of her narration. Her style oscillated between the broken sentences and passages of prose that pour paragraph upon paragraph which form a eulogy to her young son’s attributes: ‘As a tiny mite, [he] wrote some verses that were quite out of the ordinary, besides composing little melodies of much character and charm.’61 These sections relate positive aspects; they tell of happier times and convey hope that some good may occur from her tragedy. From the prose style it is evident that Lehmann experienced comfort in this recall. The distortions in her language are signs of the struggle between pure explicit grief, an inevitable reaction, and a conscious effort to consider the wider and more altruistic arena of moral obligation. This desire for something concrete and positive from shock and chaos is not unusual. As a consequence, the breaks in language mirror the breaks of silence accorded to the problems of how to write of, and bear her disconsolate grief. This inner battle is apparent not only in the lexis and syntax but also in what might be called a technique for catharsis. This unvoiced silence is embodied in Lehmann’s syntax. By this I mean the manner in which the divisions of paragraphs and incidents are amplified visually to the reader. For example: My son never complained; and when he lay ill at home, his one desire was still to go back to Woolwich and his work there, for he loved it.

Silences 159

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . After Rudie’s death, his instructors and the Commandant wrote that he would have made a splendid soldier. I think, however, that, failing the spur of war, his natural gifts lay more in the direction of art or literature – An omnivorous reader from childhood – (he learnt to read surprisingly early) – he had an innate love of beauty.62 I would suggest that this is a method for handling pain; and that it is a therapeutic technique for making the ‘whole’ into containable segments. It is not an attempt at a modernist structure. Modernist texts, of course, although they can use ellipsis, work by radically destabilising the central speaking voice and by working with juxtapositions which draw from different contexts. The ellipses in these texts do not function in this way. Indeed Laurence Sterne’s writing is emblematic here. This narrative type has its origins in Tristram Shandy, where structure was also concerned with figurations of silence.63 Sterne used his designs to chart themes and emotions into his work. In a less graphic form, these autobiographers employ similar tactics. Chapter divisions and divisions within chapters, syntax, semantics and tense shifts provide the initial markers which make up the lexicon of silence. The structure on the page mirrors the emotional turmoil; it is horror that has stimulated stylistics. It appears that, at the time of writing certain events were inexpressible or the autobiographer’s language was inadequate. The compartmentalised experience with its emotive burden produced a marked consonance between form and content. In an effort to censor, the autobiographer allows jumps, jerks, and lumpiness into the narrative. In fact, the more the autobiographer’s emotions were aroused, the more the emotional content became unbounded, and structures of silence were brought in to ‘shore-up’ against the impossibility of ‘telling all’. It appears that the greater the emotional content, the less there is written. There remains one unexamined aspect that I alluded to earlier; why an autobiographer would leave a topic unresolved and open to conjecture. Why place themselves in a position to be mis-read? Why would they take that risk, given that with silence, people will always assume, or think the worst? Yet this aspect of silence – a form of risk-taking – is prominent in these texts. It could be that some did not have the imagination to see any risk to themselves; that they naively believed that the words on the page were sufficient to contain and provide closure, and that the reader would accept this and move on unquestioningly. This notion can only apply when there is conscious control in the writing, under the assumption that words invite an opinion and that with the


unwritten no inferences can accrue.64 But for some, it could be that the risk-taking was all important. These professional women had marked themselves off as different from other women by the fact that they had entered new territory in their professions and in the public arena. They had differentiated themselves, and would be thought of as exceptional. But maybe some feared that they were not exceptional, and that to leave spaces in their narrative for the reader to fill would make them more interesting. The myths created would become the explanatory model of who they were. Roland Barthes’ work in Mythologies is pertinent here.65 In this he showed how certain images or ideas constitute a first layer of meaning which, in turn, is transformed into ‘myth’. The original image of these women was possibly that of a ‘blue-stocking’, dowdy, professional woman. This is emptied out, and becomes a signifier for a second, mythical level of meaning. For example, the intimidating, bluestocking headmistress can become a woman of mystery and intrigue when she chooses not to reveal her relationships. The professional woman’s original history is crushed by the ‘new’ myth and her image becomes instead the form that carries the concept of a risqué and more interesting woman. If we understand myths as explanatory frameworks in which cultures can make sense of potentially confusing schema, then we can argue the notion that these women wanted to break out from the defined image that society had for them, and then to remould the myth which was a risky undertaking. The fear expressed in their prefaces of their worthiness to write an autobiography can be quashed by engagement in the formation of a new myth. This confirmed them as exceptional. Yet these areas of incompleteness invite active intervention. In effect, the autobiographer has used silence as a way of opening up a distance between the reader and the author. The space on the page is suggestive of providing a time for exploring thoughts. So if the reader decides that an issue is not closed, it is not. It is this silence that gives the text life. The reader is given power to fill the spaces. Macherey, writing about fiction, advocates that a book may appear: ‘incomplete; because it has not said everything, there remains the possibility of saying something else’.66 Of course I am not advocating that every tiny detail of every thing that can be written in a given situation must be included. But as Macherey explained: ‘all speech envelops itself in the “unspoken” ’, in other words: ‘in order to say anything, there are other things which must not be said’.67 Robert Lougy proposes that: ‘It is the opposition or otherness which bestows such structure on the work, and even though

Silences 161

the text cannot speak of such divisions, it identifies through its silences.’68 We understand the narrative when equal significance is given to both words and silence. This is a statement that holds true for these autobiographies. I noted in my introduction to this chapter that Cage and Sontag contended that there is no such thing as silence. I believe that this chapter has shown that their statements hold true for these autobiographies. I also acknowledged the usefulness of Macherey’s literary theories to enable readers to look beyond ‘silence’ to reveal the text and consider: ‘What is important in the work is what it does not say.’69 I shall make three assertions. The first is that silence prohibits closure. The second is that psychological inhibitions usually lead to unintentional silence. The third is that silence is an indication that things are not as they should be. Silence has an identity and can be ‘measured’. But in order to make full use of my methodology and the insights that it provokes, we now need to judiciously incorporate the notions of self and identity of these autobiographers, and to follow this by an examination of memory in Chapter 11.

10 Self and Identity

This chapter discusses the usefulness of autobiography in historical research. It is recognised that this is, to some extent, still a controversial area of study. All earlier chapters written about each individual profession have, without a direct allusion to subjectivity, dealt with what these women understood to be their world and, in some cases, an acknowledgement of the difficulties of writing about it. Identity will be studied in this chapter and memory in the following one, to show how they can be used to expand on the historical understanding of a period and that, if analysed with intellectual rigour, can have a valid historical contribution. To help provide a clear understanding it is necessary to give a brief résumé of a number of significant signposts in the development of the study of the subjective and its ambiguous position in historical studies. The problem with analyses of women’s autobiographies is that, for the most part, the debates are heavily theoretically based with few illustrations from autobiographical texts and indeed, use few examples of autobiographies to substantiate their position.1 This does not apply to the seminal work of Regenia Gagnier who undertook a comparative study across social class and gender, utilising middle-class and working-class autobiographies in the nineteenth century.2 My approach will foreground the conclusions I have drawn from close textual analysis and not from an inductive, a priori, theoretical position. I want the theory to emerge organically from my response to the texts and not as Corbett suggests to have: ‘valued the observer over the participant’.3 The object of my work here is to redress the ratio of primary material to that of theoretical analysis and make a sound case to show how these autobiographies can be used to expand on the historical understanding of a period. 162

Self and Identity 163

Individual identity is necessarily a problematic concept but the work initiated by the School of Annales in France, in particular their work in promoting the histoire de mentalités in an interdisciplinary approach, is germane to my examination.4 I intend to take up and continue with the position stated by Malcolm Chase: ‘Historians working in the documentary tradition see subjectivity and gaps in a piece of evidence mainly as mechanical problems: I want to argue for taking subjectivity and silence more seriously, and for their admission as evidence’. 5 The issue of gaps and silences was addressed in my two earlier chapters and I aim to illustrate here that they are both part of the subjective moulding of a text and cannot be dismissed as ‘mechanical problems’. However, some historians find difficulties in the autobiographical mode. For them, the problem is that no matter how closely autobiographers stick to the ‘facts’, the writing down of them ‘storifies’ both the protagonist and the events recorded. Indeed many of these autobiographers concede this. Burstall, a headmistress, professed: ‘A difficulty confronts me here. The exigencies of a connected and continuous narrative may lead me to convey the impression that all ideals described were reached, and that this is a record of a perfect performance. Nothing could be further from the act’.6 The tradition of autobiography necessitates a coherent narrative at its centre. But autobiography is predicated on intense and sometimes halfremembered ‘moments’ which structure the tale. It is essential to human culture to construct coherent narrative, even though subjectivity and the self may be structured by the contrast between intense epiphanies and longueurs. My overall objective is to argue for taking these subjective texts more seriously, and for their admission as useful evidence in the compass of history. The arguments against using ‘self-writing’ to form an understanding of identity in a period are derivatively summarised by the notion that history is objective and autobiography is subjective. On the question of identity, Patricia W. Romero congratulated Martin Pugh for being: ‘among the first historians [ ... ] to recognise how invalid most memoirs of the period are.’7 But Mary Jean Corbett suggests that if enough subjective accounts are read: ‘the grounded position of the writer in her own experience as constructed in autobiographical texts’ will provide a fuller version of historical truth.8 However, Wilhelm Dilthey, considered as one of the founding fathers of modern autobiographical theory, offered a broad concept of autobiography: ‘In autobiography we encounter the highest and most instructive form of understanding of


life.’9 He saw it as a mode of understanding to which everyone has access, and it is this inclusive concept of historical consciousness, which is similar to that propounded by the Annales School. More recently John Tosh takes the view that: ‘No picture of the past could be complete without a reconstruction of its mental landscape.’10 and that the ‘study of collective mentalities is concerned in the first instance to recreate the emotions and intellect of people living in conditions very different from our own, so that their humanity can be more fully realised’.11 Henri Berr greatly influenced Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch empowering them to found the Annales d’histoire économique et sociale which became, in the 1950s, a very influential historical journal.12 Georges Duby followed on closely from Bloch; he believed that the study of particular crises can give a privileged access to an understanding of the way people thought.13 Their aim was to make the New History comparable with real sciences, and to argue that the study of mentalities was not just a matter of insight and imprecise moments of understanding. But the most fascinating development to come was the new study of the history of mentalities and ideologies: the study of the beliefs and the ways of seeing in a given culture. Febvre’s classic text A New Kind of History caused some controversy, but was necessary for redefining historical time, because these academics were not dealing with events, but attitudes which needed to be studied over a longer period.14 It seems to me that the approach of the Annales history is most fruitful for this kind of work. This may seem surprising, since they do not concern themselves with female writing or aspects of feminism. However, subjectivity is a broad issue and should not be corralled into debates about feminism as it has often been. For the second part of this study, I propose to use recent work on memory undertaken by psychologists who have investigated autobiographical memory.15 I find it thought-provoking that, after having formed this practicable approach, I unearthed two quotations; one from each discipline, but proceeding from a similar position. Adorno suggested that subjectivity: ‘is the form of the objective, the how (not the what) of reality.’16 The later observation by social psychologist Jerome Bruner: ‘a life is not “how it was” but how it is interpreted, reinterpreted, told and re-told’ because in turn this provides a study of the social and cultural factors of the period.17 Dilthey had pleaded the case for social psychology to be used to substantiate historical analysis, but this was not incorporated until Fromm joined the


Frankfurtians in 1932. In this connection, the work in the 1980s of social psychologists such as David Pillemer and others will be useful to the argument that I shall develop here, and continue in Chapter 11.18 The history of the mentalities of an era needs to include the remembrances of many perspectives in order to illuminate social, political and cultural phenomena. Earlier chapters have demonstrated that the professional women discussed in this work have exhibited shared frames of mind and dispositions within their specific groups. Their professional accomplishments, within their groups, nurtured certain characteristics. However, my research demonstrated a variation between the professions in the emotional temperature of their writing. I now want to take this one stage further, again in an all-inclusive sweep of these professions, to examine the treatment of personal identity. This should provide a riposte to the dominant public/historical opinions which abounded, and were privileged, at the time. For example, Edwardian novelist, Netta Syrett notes: ‘In writing of the Victorian era the younger novelists seem to have forgotten that what is known as the “Woman’s Movement” was in the ‘eighties already well recognized, and in the ‘nineties in full swing.’ She continued that she believed a ‘counterblast’ is necessary to correct the many novels, ‘dealing with the terribly restricted life led by women whose youth coincided with mine.’19 Indeed, feminist historians and critics have applied a not dissimilar template. For instance, although a fin-de-siècle phenomenon, the New Woman has been used in more recent years as an explanatory model by late twentieth century feminist literary historians. However, they historicized it as: first generation, 1880–1890s and second generation up to the 1920s New Women. Firstly, I intend to use examples of these women’s writings to mount a rebuttal to the popular images depicted in the press. Secondly, I want to take this a step further and analyse the ‘unspoken’ elements of the ‘New Woman’, those of clothing and hair. These are issues which are traditionally an exclusive female preoccupation; topics which are rarely disinterested. Fashion and hair are never merely decorative or neutral, according to Konig: ‘Fashion is a code, a symbolic vocabulary that offers a sub-rational but instant and very brilliant illumination of the characters of individuals and even entire periods.’20 Such an important point as this needs developing. However for the purposes of this chapter it is sufficient to briefly introduce it as an exemplar of the usefulness of subjective observation to


the social and cultural identities of the era. It is quite clear that these are enabling devices for the exploration of female identity and selfhood in these autobiographies. Sally Ledger describes the New Woman as having a multiple identity: ‘a feminist activist, a social reformer, a popular novelist, a suffragette playwright, a woman poet; she was also often a fictional construct.’21 Yet, in spite of later mentioning that the availability of higher education for women was blamed by many for their push into the public sphere. Ledger does not include any of the professions in her description. If, as Ledger continued: ‘the centrality of marriage, dissipation in the role of motherhood, and economic imbalance were seen to be in jeopardy’22 by this new circumstance, prominence needs to be given to what women in the professions understood as their position. Although not named by Ledger these professional women were clearly forging new identities for their gender. It would be difficult to trace, in a manageable way, all the historical nuances and definitions of identity, self and subjectivity. The history of subjectivity has been extensively discussed elsewhere, but I will give a simplified overview and say something of the current position which informs my argument. 23 The Oxford English Dictionary records that the ‘self’ was recognised as a ‘living formative element’, sometime between the mid-sixteenth and mid-seventeenth centuries, and that the modern idea of ‘selfhood’ or ‘integrated rhetoric of self’ emerges. During that time there was an increased self-awareness and the sense of self as connected to natural and moral philosophy, as well as society. It was Descartes use of ‘I’ that marked a point in the beginnings of exploring the self, as an individual as opposed to a social act. This writing hailed a heightened sense of self and some historians suggest that a preoccupation with the subjective characterises modernity. 24 In the late seventeenth century John Locke argued in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), that the self is a product of experience and education and ‘consciousness’, ‘self-consciousness’ and ‘human nature’ gained common usage, accepting the relationship between individualised subjectivity and a shared or common nature. 25 This established the basis for the definition of modern subjectivity. This rise of the rational self in the early eighteenth century coincided with a decline in religious belief, and the seeing of man as rational, autonomous, and in control of the universe. The new intellectual Enlightenment myths preferred the elitist model of the self-made man, whilst the masses, that is, the lower classes, women and ‘irrational’ others, continued to practise the relegated religious beliefs.


Concerns were expressed that due to commercial pressures and egotism, individuals were becoming divided selves and not to be relied upon for a genuine sense of moral duty.26 Hume maintained that this limited interest in others was accounted for in terms of self-interest. 27 Moving into the nineteenth century, the hallmarks of Romantic thought placed a greater faith in the individual imagination and de-emphasising rationality. They concentrated on the soul for the nature of understanding as a means of exploring an intense inner consciousness. Memory and the uniqueness of personal perspective was a more meaningful guide than objective observation. The journey of self-discovery became the crucial Romantic practice. 28 As the nineteenth century progressed, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche envisaged the lone individual in complete isolation from the universe. And in the fin de siècle, psychology focused upon the meaning of individual differences. The ‘discovery of the unconscious’ was a crucial breakthrough by Freud. He opened up new notions of selfhood and dark and dangerous desires. The fashion became to understand yourself, to express yourself, to develop your potential and be yourself. The autobiographers in this survey would have been aware of this new ethos and the search for an inner truth. So it would not be unreasonable to speculate that they would, to greater or lesser degree, have been influenced by Freudian thought. In which case, the notion of verisimilitude and inner subjectivity would be paramount in their autobiographies. In recent times, we now challenge the notion, held since the Renaissance, of a core inner personal identity. Work by Derrida and in particular that of Foucault challenge the belief in human agency. They argue for the primacy of semantic signs and the ‘death of the author’ and they consider conventional understandings of subjectivity to be misguided. Finally, before proceeding with my analysis, I want to make plain how I shall be using some terminology, which is in itself an area of discussion between different academic positions. Theorists sometimes refer to ‘identity’, sometimes to ‘the subject’, ‘subjectivity’ or ‘the self’. These different terms are not always particularly significant because, in some way or other, they denote interest in the individual’s subjectivity. However, for some theorists, these differences are worth close attention, if only because they may suggest deep historical and political changes.29 For the purposes of this book, my position is that these expressions are interchangeable. It is the ‘identity’ that is the object of


this study, which is formed through a personally created, interpretative understanding of that individual’s experience, which is then subjectively recorded. Some academics argue that the self can be studied as an ‘object’, without concern for the context or self-portrayal of the individual. Charles Taylor does not participate in this view: ‘We are selves only in that certain issues matter to us. What I am as a self, my identity, is essentially defined by the way things have significance for me.’30 Anthony Elliot expresses a similar position, noting that self-interpretation is crucial to the formation of the self, although this will not provide complete transparency. Further, he maintains that in self-fashioning, an individual’s subjectivity is shaped by external influences, which constitute a: ‘colourful backdrop for the staging of human experience and the drawing of self-identity.’31 These are views that I share. That is not to say that it is simply a question of external influences, because social, cultural, political and historical contexts are embedded. It is for this reason that the subjective writing of these women has importance in the widening of knowledge of an era. As Taylor recorded: ‘My identity is worked out, only through the language of interpretation which I have come to accept as a valid articulation of these issues. To ask what a person is in abstraction from his or her self-interpretations is to ask a fundamentally misguided question’.32 In summary, the women’s autobiographies that are part of this survey share in common many elements of a similar ‘backdrop’. Their different professions meant that the social, cultural and academic influences would operate in complex ways. They would produce representations of subjectivity which were heterogeneous. It is these ‘selves’, these subjectivities that develop the mentality of an era. In The Times newspaper from 1900–1920 it is quite clear that on the whole, female topics are either trivialised or treated ironically. The jaundiced tone is focused on Suffrage, demonstrations and the New Woman.33 Other columns relating to women are short and in the minority. These focus on Women’s Union, Women as Medical Inspectors, District Councillors and Factory Inspectors. The main impression of the New Woman is one which gives rise to images of rioting and civil disobedience. This partial journalism engendered a letter in The Times, 16 July 1907, signed: ‘A Woman who writes for her Bread.’ The lengthy letter was printed in full for many column inches, displaying fervent emotional prose. She writes of the: ‘ill of sex jealousy [ ... ] Men are jealous of everything women do outside the nursery and the drawing room [ ... ] they


want to keep women out ... they are jealous of all intellectual work that women attempt, of all the success they achieve’.34 This fervent (albeit marginal) reaction appears to be atypical within the central forum of professional women. Yet in printing this lengthy and extreme position the establishment found their opinions justified, and the myth of the New Woman (as radical, as decadent, as having masculine attributes, as poor mothers, as lesbian), was fuelled. Ethel Raglan, among others, redresses the casual misogyny present in popular journalism: ‘If the poor girls can do nothing right and exhibit so many faults, it is curious that they have the brains to occupy important positions in the work place.’35 Her tone became ironic as she rightly identified that heads of influential businesses employ girl secretaries: ‘Was it because they were fortunate enough to get the one girl who happened to be the exception to the rule?’36 Rose Macaulay’s weariness with the biased commentaries was recorded by a reporter from the Guardian, 13 November 1925. Macaulay was lecturing on ‘Women as News’: An enormous number of books were written about ‘women’, and as for the press, she thought sometimes that if a future chronicler were to study the files of our newspapers he would get the impression that there had appeared at this time a strange new creature called woman who was receiving great attention from the public [ ... ] Men insisted on generalising about women. Instead of regarding them as so many millions of individuals with separate temperaments and outlooks [sic].37 Unfortunately for women at this time, articles and letters directly promoting women’s points of view in the public domain were in the minority. As a rebuttal, these women wrote articles and books which positioned them in a resistant stance against the dominant patriarchal point of view. The idea of woman as represented in the dominant codes, and circumscribed by male views, motivated them to write. They used a register and tone which had a scholarly objectivity, which was set against the emotive outbursts of both the male journalism and the emotional female stance. They have both inserted themselves into, and taken on, the male, public writing arena and mode of writing, in order to assert their own sense of identity. One distinctive view emerged as a rebuff to the use of ‘New Woman’ as an identity; that of the term ‘modern girl’. This coinage was taken up by these women autobiographers. It suggests that for them, the term ‘New Woman’ may have had pejorative connotations. They did not


decry, deride or find the new woman too extreme. Instead many women thought her commonplace. Raglan recorded: It is a fashion to deride the modern girl, just as if no modern girl had existed before; but if we took the trouble to consider the question at all, we should be bound to realise that in every generation the girls of their particular period have been labelled ‘modern’.38 Unlike Raglan, who was an observer of these young women, Diana Cooper was a ‘young modern’. She recalled: ‘There was among us a reverberation of the Yellow Book and Aubrey Beardsley, Ernest Dowson, and Max Beerholm. Our pride was to be unafraid of words, unshocked by drink and unashamed of ‘decadence’ and gambling – Unlike – Other – People, I’m afraid’.39 Much of the thrust of both primary contemporary sources and later secondary sources dwelt on the word, ‘rebel and rebellion’. Yet, the female autobiographers that I have examined, who existed at the centre of these areas, did not seem to have such feelings and did not view their actions as seditious. Raglan continued: We did not hear so much talk then about insubordinate daughters, but I think this was chiefly due to the fact that we were so intent on enjoying ourselves. We did not think about rebelling, for the simple reason that we were unaware we had anything to rebel against! [sic]40 This notion of incorrect reporting was taken up by Faithfull: ‘I do not think there has been much subjection of women in bygone ages as is commonly supposed; the limitations of their activities were often selfimposed [ ... ] Few had ambitions for any other life.’41 Notice needs to be taken of these personal observations to address the balance of the extreme and partial position projected in the newspapers and to ensure an inclusive record of the mentality of the period. That is not to say that there was a clear-cut perspective from women who were not active suffragettes. Novelist Bertha Ruck also used the terminology ‘modern girl’. When asked by interviewers her opinion on this Modern Generation she became quite cross with the idea that the ‘modern girls were so very different from me’.42 She was at pains to show how alike each generation is; instead of cars she whizzed about recklessly on bikes, and became ‘perfectly cheery on soda [and] never employed “Darling, if I don’t have a drink right now I shall pass out” [sic]’43 However she did not decry the young, but noted that they lived


on their nerves more and have ‘speeded-up standards’. Twice married and a nurse in war time, Baroness T’Serclaes exhibits a different perspective of women in the public realm. T’Serclaes as a keen motor cyclist in 1912 competed in trials on her ‘open-framed Scott, a powerful but trustworthy machine. [ ... ] I taught myself how to take a motorbike to pieces [ ... ] I did not want to depend on anyone if I could help it’.44 In fact, these unusual skills of mechanics and self-reliance served T’Serclaes well when serving in Flanders. Granted, this was not runof-the-mill, but points to the feeling of equality that some women experienced. In this era of changing female identity, Headmistress Sara Burstall recognised the need to provide curricula that would give: ‘a sound preparation for professional or business life. But the difficulty lies in the fact that the future of so many girls is uncertain. They may not eventually decide or need to earn a living in a professional calling’.45 When young, Dr Gladys Wauchope suffered from similar uncertainties. She recollected hankering to go to Oxford to read classics, but instead: ‘my parents thought French an essential part of education and “finishing school” ’.46 But schooling and parental opinions were not the only categories which tried to maintain the traditional identity of young women. For example, Dr Scharlieb who had attended university and proceeded to study medicine, remembered good-natured surprise and acceptance when: ‘Giving the results of an examination Dr Gervais remarked “Oh, to think that I have lived to give the Scholarship in my own subject to a woman! But there, it was an excellent paper and it can’t be helped!” ’47 Headmistress Lilian M. Faithfull similarly found support: ‘We were breaking new ground, and, although on the whole kindly help was more abundant than unkindly criticism, we were aware that women were on their trial as administrators, and we often had to plough a lonely furrow’.48 These autobiographers vouchsafed a female identity on the cusp of inevitable change, by dint of hard work; not change wrought by extremes and rebellion. In Faithfull’s words: ‘We were very conscious of the fact that we had to establish traditions.’49 These shared experiences provide a less sensational telling of the New Woman. They show a thoughtful resistance to extremist images of professional women, and, provide in answer, a measured and realistic portrait. This is not to say that these women did not anticipate or experience hostility or obstruction. Simply, the majority of educated women who moved into public and hitherto male spheres acted pragmatically in

172


accord with the demands of the moment. Moreover, they did recognise and deal with adversity. Faithfull taking up the masculine metaphors from the grand narratives observed: Like men, women wanted new worlds to explore, and the old well-worn tracks would no longer satisfy them [ ... ] they longed for a great adventure [ ... ] facing the supreme difficulties and strain of an Antarctic or Mount Everest expedition [ ... ] so the pioneers of the women’s movement ignored opposition, met difficulties with a high-hearted courage, lived Spartan lives of incessant work and self-sacrifice.50 Nevertheless, not all women approved or identified with the modern girl but their disapprobation fell short of any condemnation. Headmistress Marion Cleeve had more steadfast and disapproving observations to make in relation to teaching, it must be said. She feared that new trends would dissipate the dignity of the teaching profession: ‘With the best will in the world, I am not able to admire the “modern girl”. I see in her vaunted independence only the satisfaction of self-instinct. I ascribe her scorn of tradition to self-conceit’.51 But these were not concerned with rebels as portrayed in the overblown propaganda. Novelist ‘Rita’ Humphreys was excited by: ‘the first eight years of this new century [which] were years of marvels!’52 But as time progressed she claimed to: ‘have studied the New Woman and her pretensions.’ And Humphreys used ‘New Woman’ in a pejorative way. ‘I foresaw that she would not be of essential value in the making of laws.’53 Her experience informed her that the more liberty achieved, ‘the more and more lax her moral standpoints, less and less evident her feminine charm.’54 Humphreys recognised that, as with many new movements, the essence of the original drive can be corrupted. She presented a commonplace fear of decadence and immoral descent which may arise from these changes. But hers was an opinion rarely expressed by these autobiographers. It is appropriate to end this section with a quotation, at length, from headmistress Frances Gray who summed up an alternative and realistic sentiment on the modern girl: It is surely ridiculous to maintain that each generation since the days of Queen Elizabeth has been worse than its predecessor [ ... ] And finding that it is the young who are in fault. One is sometimes


tempted to think that our dissatisfaction is with ourselves, which we thrust deep down below the level of consciousness, undergoes some transformation in the mysterious crucible of the unconscious mind and reappears in the dissatisfaction of others [ ... ] There are many things done by young people of the present day that I could wish not done, [ ... ] But the outrageous libels on the younger generation that some novelists and playwrights have produced have very little foundation in fact [ ... ] But any woman who has lived half a century in close touch with young people [ ... ] knows the tales of the novelists and the playwrights are wildly exaggerated and are often manipulated so as to be utterly untrue.55 There were few female journalists in the period 1900–1920. Therefore the commonly held, and read, views of what women thought, were put into the public arena by men. These female autobiographers, sought to redress this articulation. However, whilst they have not used the terminology, ‘subjectivity’ ‘identity’ or ‘point of view’, they wanted to address the incorrect, negative and largely male partial opinion engendered by the ‘Press’. Their writing demonstrated their understanding of this new coinage of womanhood, and caused them to set into action a rebuttal, by using their own terminology; that of the ‘modern girl’. This awareness of their identity in society can be further developed through an examination of non-verbal expression; in particular the aspect of image through dress and hair, which can provide an articulate image of selfhood. The chapter on nurses did examine the attitudes towards uniforms. But what I want to do now is to ‘read’ their subjectivity through the evidence of non-verbal signifiers. For example, the opposition to women doctors was crushing. Institutional, social, economic and sexual obstacles needed to be overcome, all of which would be seen as de-sexing or en-masculating. At the start of medical college, Bryson was keen to appear grown-up: ‘I was eighteen. My hair went up and my skirt was let down. The hair was easy; the tadpole tail was turned into a coil at the nape of the neck and pushed under my academic trencher’.56 This was just the beginning of Bryson’s fascination with fashion detail. She qualified as a doctor and moved into surgery, but her interest continued to fill the pages. We learn that when she first began: ‘Walking the Hospital’ skirts were still long [ until a student appeared in a skirt ] at least six inches off the ground, and attracted a great deal

174


of attention especially from the men: we gazed in wonder at her boldness: when we spoke she tossed her head. Soon we were all wearing shortened skirts! 57 Moreover, her parenthesis ‘bookmarks’ the phrases into the readers’ mind, and the elliptical silence which follows from the exclamation mark: ‘skirts!’ make it plain that these young trainees understood the mores of sexual attraction. She remembered many: beautiful heads of hair – Alice, with golden curls; Jessie, nicknamed ‘Coppertop,’ with shiny masses of smooth hair coiled on top of her head [ ... ] Any ‘painting of the face’ belonged to the theatre, or else to ‘the scarlet woman’ of the street [ ... ] I remember being asked to speak to one of the newcomers who was offending our sense of propriety by wearing her towsy hair adorned with splashes of pink and lavender ribbon.58 These value-laden and subjective elements which occur here are a tiny extract of the amount given each time Bryson remarked on fashion. Her detailed observations which were always partial if not censorious set strong boundaries of the acceptable and nonacceptable. In fact the details she used about hair and ‘looks’ is more commensurate with the public idea of the acting profession than that of medicine. For example, actress Liliah McCarthy not only mentions hair colour but bolsters public myths that surround ideas of hair colouring as sources of identity. She recorded audience reaction to two characters that she played: Mercia with auburn hair, Helena with golden hair and other roles with her own naturally dark hair: ‘Flowers came, jewels and letters. I now know why it was that Mercia used to break so many hearts; [ ... ] I have found the clue. It is the golden thread of Ariadne.’59 There followed several years without such adoration until she played Helena in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: ‘Then, suddenly, the sun of adoration shone again and lo! The clue was clear. Those intervening years were dark because my hair was dark. Mercia had auburn hair. Helena’s was pale gold.’60 She further implied that when she did not wear a wig of auburn or gold she could win approbation and cast a spell on her audience and critics: ‘but they never loved me. But as Helena in a golden wig, I was again beloved.’61 From two very different professional arenas these writers display a strong sense of a feminine self and a common point of view. The reasons are not too dissimilar. In both arenas


they want sexual attraction. For the women doctors, it was important to show their femininity as disproof to assertions by the male medical fraternity. For actresses it was not only their personal success with admirers, but it also had importance as a measure of professional triumph. Dr Isabel Hutton is one of many doctors who showed a similar preoccupation with hair and dress codes.62 She questions the motives of a lecturer’s wife who attended the classes each day, seated in the front row: Was it [ ... ] because she enjoyed admiration? She wore violets or lilies of the valley, little sable tippets, high-heeled shoes, smart clothes and a delicious musky perfume. One morning she tripped into the lecture theatre with ash-blonde hair, which had been midbrown on the previous day [ ... ] From that day it began to be (quite erroneously) whispered by some that, before her marriage, this lady had been a tight-rope walker, by others that she had been nightly shot out of a circus cannon and, worst of all, a ballet dancer.63 Although Hutton is not expressing her own point of view, she remembered the mentality of a certain class and its disapprobation in a specific era. She then appears to contradict herself. In the following extract the reader is left uncertain as to whether Hutton was, or was not, a dancer: [ I ] admired this gentle lady, had played her accompaniments when she sang innocent little songs [ ... ] I felt a great affinity with her, for I too was a dancer, though I had the sense to keep it very dark! A girl might sing and play the piano or a stringed instrument – though not a wind – instrument, but might not dance except in the ballroom in the arms of a man.64 In passages such as these, we see a wide range of concepts about the formation of personal identities. The stricture of social rules and standards illustrated here expressed how important it was to do the right thing. The lecturer’s wife appeared to break the guidelines for acceptable behaviour and was immediately denigrated by general consensus. We can only conjecture her reasons for taking such a step. She cannot have been unaware of the risk. Seated in the front row of lectures she openly courted attention and possibly this was her only

176


way of making her move towards that of the New Woman; possibly the staid and subdued role of a lecturer’s wife allowed for little self-expression or passion. She openly desired her feminine self to be recognised. In my final extract from Hutton: The graduation ceremony [ ... ] We were solemn of mien, dressed in the unaccustomed garb of black academic gowns and fur-edged magenta hoods [ ... ] We women wore white dresses, with which we had taken the greatest care as if we had been arrayed as brides, but they were all hidden by the voluminous black gowns, made only in male sizes. We had every right to be robed in the purest white, for we were indeed vestal virgins who had led nun-like lives, resisting all amorous delights and leading what was in fact a cloistered life. There was a variety of hair-styles, [ ... ] ‘Merry Widow’ curls were the most bewitching, but there were top-knots, ‘pompadours’ and great plaited buns.65 This paragraph is packed with social and cultural subjective significance, juxtaposed with that of the fairytale reference; the transforming of the ugly duckling into the swan. Although not explicitly mentioned, there is a rebuttal to the falsehoods being plied to society, via the Press, about the de-sexing aspect that professional training, especially medical, was said to have upon women. For example, Sir Almroth Wright, an eminent pathologist believed that education would cause: ‘extinction of a woman’s reproductive faculty.’66 Hutton fully understood the powerful connotations that a ‘severely tailored costume’, ‘woollen’, ‘grave’ and ‘aloof’ presented, as much as she knew the power of ‘sweeping skirts’, the sensual purity of ‘white kid’, the luxurious haptic stimulation of silk underwear, and of ‘yielding’ and ‘smiling’ to emote the senses. The former served as a mask which identified with the power and sobriety of the masculine world of medicine. She drew attention to her feminine appearance and seemed to confess to, and display, a feminine identity to the reader. Her autobiography gives the impression of a narrator who was determinedly feminine, and that this was superseded and suppressed by the pressure of her professional life. Their sense of self determined to combat the masculine scientific world of anatomy and human dissection with feminine sexuality. This appreciation of the dual identity acted as a ‘shoring-up’ against popular claims of the emasculating affects that professional careers engendered.


Interrogation of autobiographies written by headmistresses revealed a similar sense of self. When Faithfull attended an interview she knew that: ‘For women on these occasions dress is a matter of almost as great importance as a suitable manner. It is wise not to be too smart, for it may argue that you are not serious-minded, but rather “on pleasure bent.” On the other hand, dowdiness means dullness’.67 Exact fashion detail followed: ‘I was conscious that I was at a disadvantage in being young, and chose discreetly a black-and-white dress and small cottage bonnet with strings, quite in the fashion.’68 Faithfull understood the power generated by ‘correct’ use of fashion. Her dress, in a subtle manner, is imitative of male formal attire, the ‘black-and-white dress.’ But this signal to masculine formality is set against a feminine ‘bonnet with strings’. To combine the two spheres produced a discreet mix of social identities; namely those of abduction/assimilation of male power signifiers, blended with the essentially feminine. Following a later appointment, Faithfull’s accomplishment with non-verbal communication prevails when she decided: ‘quite seriously to wear always sumptuous dresses of moiré antique, and to rustle along corridors! [ ... ] to create an impression.’69 It is here that the visible lushness of silk is combined with the swishing sound of a body elegantly clad, to produce a mode of ‘power-dressing’ without compromising her femininity. As Peter Corrigan writes: ‘The fabrication of a dignified appearance is essential to legitimate participation in the public domain.’70 With an image similar to that created by female doctors, these women metamorphose to state new public identities. However, headmistress Marion Cleeve had a different notion of fashion and identity. Cleeve noted: ‘I sometimes wonder whether dignity and devotion have not gone out with dowdiness.’71 In contrast to Faithfull, she associated drabness with vocation and quiet dignity. She continued: ‘I remember when the purchase of a new costume was an excitement for the whole staff room and the mere mention of a silk lining a thrill.’72 What is compelling here is that the silk clothing Cleeve admits to is a hidden ‘silk lining’, unlike the: ‘show of a bright silk petticoat.’ that Dr Hutton found desirable and the ‘sumptuous dresses of moiré antique’ espoused by Faithfull. Cleeve found that clothing’s importance had been too elevated, and erroneously believed that it should be ignored. Her comment: ‘how distinctly traceable, even in such superficial matters as dress, manners and deportment, is the influence of the headmistress.’73 But she was very


much in the minority in her view that fashion was superficial. This could account for her self-knowledge that she lacked: ‘what is curiously termed presence [sic] [ ... ] and that there was something amiss with my manner may be deducted from the fact that I was half-way through my headmistress-ship before strangers ceased to conclude that I was my secretary.’74 In adjuring to dowdiness as an appropriate image, synonymous with the duty and devotion of a headmistress, Cleeve had failed to have an assertive, powerful image. Possibly her cloistered life had dimmed her awareness to visual, non-verbal display and to an understanding of the male gaze. This was a mistake on her part, because another, less powerful, image is produced, although the image was no less symbolic. She typified a woman undertaking a subservient role rather than that of a professional woman in command. This difference between these two headmistresses may be explained by the different social standing their schools held. Lilian M. Faithfull was the Principal of the Cheltenham Ladies College which catered for the comfortable middle and upper-middle-classes. Her perspective induced her to see dress as an important tool. Cleeve had worked as a headmistress in an ordinary High School, in an industrial town, and provided education for the local burghers’ daughters. I wrote earlier, fashion and hair are never neutral. To be successful these professional women instinctively recognised the need to use the de rigueur of male dress codes and blend them with female sensuousness, to make a distinctly powerful and new sense of self. From these three professions discussed, all exhibit the need to write about visual attributes. They knowingly display knowledge of the power of non-verbal communication. Knowingly, because women are so often the objects of a male gaze, they are generally more likely to be aware of the control visual influences have. Implicitly, some of these roles reinforce a vision of ‘femininity’ which is in fact covering an iron resolve. In The Fashion System, Roland Barthes analyses the signifying relationships between fashion and image. For Barthes, fashion connotes: ‘an essentially tyrannical authority’.75 According to Barthes: ‘the garment’s most poetic reality: as a substitute for the body, the garment, by virtue of its weight, participates in man’s fundamental dreams [ ... ] It is a garment’s weight which makes it a wing or a shroud, seduction or authority’.76 Indeed, for these women it was not ‘seduction or authority’ but a distinct amalgam of the two to create their identity in a changing society. These Edwardian women instinctively knew how to present their different public ‘selves’, even


to the point of understanding the connotations that adhere to the weight of a cloth. Barthes’ interest in the visual, that created a ‘look’, and in identity can also be investigated using Foucault’s writing on power.77 The power of dress could be defined within Foucault’s thesis of the dividing practices that play a particularly important part for an individual’s knowledge/power paradigm. He was of course writing about physical confinement of one type or another; prisons, hospitals and schools, and so on. But the power I refer to is the strength of the environment/profession of which they were part. As doctors and headmistresses they were part of an organised system; albeit that the headmistresses were more structured and restricted than the doctors. The claustrophobic scholastic, all female, environment would chasten all but the most avant-garde teacher. This is shown in their attitudes to fashion; ‘hidden’ feminine linings rather than flamboyant silken petticoats. Observations from their peer group, governors and parents would operate as a surveillance which would ‘discipline’ their external image. I would suggest that this strict hierarchical observational arrangement could extend to individuals identifying themselves with particular clothing and hair fashion. Certainly it appears that for many of these women, teachers in particular, the arduous task of writing about their feminine aspects, from both a subjective view point and from a political view point, was almost impossible. The texts displace attention from direct expression by giving attention to indirect expression. Furthermore, how close did these autobiographers want the reader to get to the way they perceived the world? They divert the raw material of feminist issues onto hair and clothing, and without overtly broaching the mine-field of womanliness and ‘femininity’. They displace debates about selfhood/identity on to the world of appearance, not a world of thoughts, and this fulfills their desire for self-determination. It is what Camilla Stivers calls: ‘the construction of the self through the narratives about others [ ... ] intersubjectivity’.78 The ‘others’ in these examples are non-verbal indicators, but they spell out and shape what was occurring in the public arena of social and cultural change. From what I have outlined above, I am not suggesting that these texts reflect their own period, but that they can be used to widen the debate of their time. The distinctive voice of these educated women, although subjective, provides a counterbalance to the myth-making popular press, and acts as a force to re-draw consensual boundaries. Philippe Lejeune suggests that autobiographies are: ‘not just a summary moulded

180


into a stereotyped form, but a detailed and concrete narrative that expresses a personality and provides the possibility of formulating judgments other than the ones suggested.’79 What I see as important in these elements is the usefulness to history of these subjective recordings. They lie in part with the recognition that they were individual experiences, not an undertaking of a totality. They are a series of revelations, emotions and expectations which can, if read as part of the ‘jigsaw’ of a period, form an aggregate of the consciousness and experience in a given time. But this is only part of my methodology. The aspect of memory needs to be examined in conjunction with these subjectivities in order to further cement the appropriateness of autobiographical material to historical knowledge. This important topic follows in the next chapter in order to do full justice to the debate.

11 Memory and Accuracy

This chapter will develop a case about the usefulness of autobiographical writing for the discipline of cultural history, by examining the perennial problem of the reliability of memory, of the accuracy of its recall, and the problematic manner of its rendering in language. I shall use some of the recent work on memory produced by David C. Rubin, Daniel L. Schacter, and David B. Pillemer as psychology practitioners and theorists of memory.1 My reasons for doing this are two-fold. One is that the use of scientific findings in the structure of recall will help us to deal with the problem of memory and ‘accuracy’. The second is that in the conflation of two different disciplines (textual analysis and psychology), new insights may be uncovered. The question of style needs to be addressed as this does, in part, exacerbate the notion that autobiographies are creative acts rather than reflections of actual experience. This enquiry asks whether it is the limits of narrative structure that are the root cause of this assumption, rather than the accuracy of the memory itself. These women autobiographers’ methods of presenting the causality and the interconnectedness of events, rather than presenting a linear, temporal recording, make them open to charges of ‘storifying’ their lives According to Pillemer and Rubin, autobiographical memory studies have become an expanding area of study since the 1980s: ‘an area that mixes rigorous, controlled laboratory methods and theory with everyday questions.’2 It is this ‘theory with everyday questions’ that is important here. Their work shows that an autobiographical memory is recalled as words, often as stories and is: ‘similar to the narrative structure of other social communication and the recall of autobiographical memories is usually a social act.’3 Furthermore, imagery is an important component, and it is this imagery that, ‘leads 181

182


to the specific, concrete details that make memories seem more accurate, thoughtful, and believable.’4 Emotions are another major part of autobiographical memory. According to Rubin: ‘Unlike narrative and imagery, emotions are traditionally seen as outside cognition rather than as an aspect of it [ ... ] emotions can have profound effects on autobiographical memory.’5 It is for these reasons of narrative structure, imagery and emotions that some historians take issue with the veracity of autobiographical recordings. I find that the science-based case studies of Pillemer and Rubin provide a paradigm that is an appropriate study method for the truthfulness of autobiography. The combination of the findings of scientific research with the textual analysis of autobiography will help to demonstrate that these texts can contribute to the history of consciousness of a specific group. This chapter is divided into two interconnected parts each of which focuses on a different facet of ‘truth’ in autobiographical memory and narrative. The first deals with the aspect of truthful accounting and the style of writing; an area touched on in ‘Prefaces’. Second, from this examination of the veridical6 content, an investigation into the reliability of memory over different time spans will be analysed, using Pillemer and Rubin’s work on autobiographical memory/Personal Event Memory (PEMs) and flashbulb memory. Rather than write a detailed synopsis of their practice, I propose to present it by examples and analysis from the autobiographies themselves. The explanatory model for this discussion will concentrate on the interesting phenomena of women who write two autobiographies, a number of years apart, which cover a similar period.7 Storm Jameson’s No Time Like the Present, 1933, and Journey from the North vol. 1, 1969 have long periods of overlap. Thurstan’s, on the other hand, first written in 1915 as Field Flying Hospital, was recalled again 63 years later in 1978 as The Hound of War Unleashed, and covers identical periods. Using ‘memory work’ theory combined with close textual analysis, I will examine style, tone, and emotional temperature which may alter but, the core original memory may be still intact and remain the same; it is the recall of the peripheral where these changes may take place. Mark Freeman sums up the four main objections to autobiographical writing as being none other than fiction: For some, in fact, the entire genre can only be deemed hopelessly fictional, since unlike real life, which presents us with question

Memory and Accuracy 183

marks, censored passages, blank spaces, rows of asterisks, omitted paragraphs, and numberless sequences of three dots trailing into whiteness, [ ... ] provides an illusion of completeness [ ... ] autobiography becomes much more problematic, for not only is there that omniscient, synoptic, after-the-fact coherence, [ ... ] but there is also an additional psychic load bound up with the simple fact that the object of one’s scrutiny here is oneself. In addition to the problem of false coherence, therefore, there are problems such as wishful thinking, defenses, illusions, delusions, and so on, all of which will likely find their way into one’s story.8 Put bluntly, what the argument of this extract does show is an inability to uncover the appropriate métier for analysis of autobiographical texts. The four objections raised (ellipsis, narrative style, identity/subjectivity and memory/accuracy) are indeed part of autobiographical narrative structure. My earlier chapter ‘Silence’ facilitated a reading of elliptical marks and textual space. Identity issues were assayed in the previous chapter, and throughout this book a scrutiny of women’s autobiographical modes has been undertaken. What remains paramount is the question of narrative structure. We tend to equate narrative structures which are usually vital for the reader’s engagement with fictionality. When an autobiography has an explicit fictional structure, the reliability of the memory is called into question. Rubin is useful here, as he offers an alternative to Freeman’s assertions on narrative patterning: ‘[it] does not get in the way of accurate autobiographic reporting or interpreting but rather, provides a framework for both telling and understanding.’9 As Malcolm Chase aptly writes: ‘All autobiographical memory is true. It is up to the interpreter to discover in which sense, [and] for which purpose.’10 As the use of fictional narrative styles appears to be one of the most problematic areas, I shall begin by answering the charge of ‘false coherence’. There are limits for narrative structures when they present highly coherent subjective experiences and a coherent sense of self, because a sense of identity and subjective experience need to be contextualised. To appear coherent, narratives need two characteristics: firstly, a range of information and secondly, narrative organisation. The amount of information gives the attributes of characters, scene, and the activity. These provide important information about the setting within which events occur. The other ingredient, narrative organisation, provides temporal and causal dimensions. The need, stated by psychologists Bruner and Feldman, is: ‘To understand how a life history is told or how

184


it is interpreted is virtually impossible without a grasp of narrative structure.’11 Without this grasp, the conjunction of incidents leads to charges of ‘storifying’. So, for coherence, narratives need orienting, framing and reference, all of which are evaluative guides and causal links provided by the autobiographer. Yet these causal links are not solely a fictive artifice. According to psychologists, autobiographical memories are stored as stories and recalled as verbal or written narratives. Rubin suggests: ‘The narrative structure of autobiographical memory seems similar to the narrative structure of other social communication.’12 In her seminal work on autobiography, Estelle C. Jelinek also finds that: ‘The narratives of their [women] lives are often not chronological and progressive but disconnected and fragmentary, or organized into selfsustained units rather than connecting chapters.’13 The criticism that women’s autobiography is circuitous has been roundly made over the years, and equally roundly rebutted by feminists. But what these critics have missed is that circumscribing an event will clarify the meaning. The ‘traditional’ autobiographical genre of chronological linear recording, espoused by male writers and critics, could in fact omit the essential core of an event by imposing ‘the order of the next day on the cord of the previous day.’14 Virginia Woolf suggested in ‘A Sketch of the Past’ why she believes so many autobiographies and memoirs are failures: They leave out the person to whom things happened. The reason is it is so difficult to describe any human being. So they say: ‘This is what happened’; but they do not say what the person was like to whom it happened. And the events mean very little unless we know first to whom they happened.15 If, as Rubin suggests, our ways of understanding are through narrative and causal links, then to make sense of their lives, autobiographers need evaluative narrative to produce a candid retelling. Causal writing is identified by Faithfull, a headmistress, as the most natural method for exactness: ‘There maybe some subconscious process going on in our minds, but certain it is that in some strange way events big and small in the far past fall into a kind of shape, and make a clear and fairly complete picture.’16 Subjective evaluation provides the framework from which the event is to be interpreted, and carries possibly the greatest amount of input concerning the meaning of the events. Furthermore it conveys how they should be interpreted and


understood. Thus to understand a ‘life’ history, a coherent structure gives order to the autobiography and gives meaning to the era’s mentality. Another part of the objections to autobiography’s ‘synoptic, after the fact coherence’ relates to the fact that it is written years after the scene that is recalled. These women autobiographers intuitively recognised and responded to this issue of distant memories. Both Mitchison, a novelist and a Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD), and Faithfull express positive benefits from a lengthy gap before retelling the events: But the content of the diaries? [sic] can I fairly use these for checking my own memories or should they be sent down the memory sieve? Clearly the memories, as they come into consciousness sixty or sixty-five years later have been censored. [sic] There is an element of sub-conscious choice.17 Faithfull’s responds thus: Time makes its own [sic] selection for memory, and determines what shall remain to form the distant past, and what shall disappear. When one comes closer to the present, however, the mass of detail overwhelms one. It is hard to see the wood for the trees, to distinguish the small from the great, essentials from non-essentials, that which is of value from the trivial and absurd. There is little or no perspective.18 Clinical studies carried out by Sven-Ake Christianson in 1990 found that memory, even 40 years after the event, held many details and were remarkably consistent.19 Faithfull has found that distance has given clarity to the main issues, and filtered out the incidentals and longeurs of life. This is not an act of ‘forgetting’ according to Weber, but an act of choice. The point I would argue here is that narratives need some evaluation and causality to be meaningful to the reader and to historical research, and thus advance an understanding of the mentality of an era. Mitchison in her chapter called, ‘The Evidence’ ventures: ‘There are two ways of writing this book. One is by an act of acute remembrance, [ ... ] But I have something else of a very definite kind. First of all there are the diaries [ ... ] So I can use these to check my memories’.20 Psychologist Craig R. Barclay remarked that context is often the initial stimulus for remembering and it is the framing process that brings: ‘context to consciousness’.21 For many autobiographers, diaries provide

186


framing and context, either as extracts or by alluding to them for material corroboration to promote authority. In like manner, letters, newspaper cuttings and reported speech are frequently used by these autobiographers to give the appearance of authorial probity which help to counter charges of ‘after the fact coherence’.22 Interestingly, when writing their autobiographies, accuracy is mentioned as a concern by all the novelists, most nurses and VADs and many artists. But there is scant mention of the difficulty of truthful recall by doctors and headmistresses. I would surmise that, due to their professional status and the need because of this to write factual reports etc., they trusted their ability to recall and record accurately. On the other hand, due to the interpretative nature of their professions, writers, painters, musicians and actresses would be more aware of possible variants. It seems likely that the coherence within the professions which I have noted in terms of approach, style and discourse, also extends to the field of memory recall. As part of the narrative construct, diaries are useful in situating memories in the correct time frame. But if diaries are not available, are we to trust the autobiographer’s remembrance of incidents? Duncan, a dancer, and Humphreys, a novelist, express these concerns showing the reader that every effort has been made to give accuracy. In ‘A Chapter of Memory’ Humphrey recalls: ‘how often I had agonized and suffered in my own search for truth.’23 Similarly, Duncan notes: ‘I am trying to write down the truth, but the truth runs away and hides from me. How find the truth?’24 According to studies by psychologists Steen F. Larsen, Charles P. Thompson, and Tia Hansen,25 people in general are quite accurate in judging everyday time events: ‘temporal judgments are normally unbiased estimates of actual time in the past’.26 In essence, scientific research affirms the probability of accuracy in these accounts. Autobiographies examined here use canonical narrative framing devices for the purpose of coherence, and so does autobiographical memory. Autobiographers rely upon causal links for orienting context across a time span, and so does the memory. I have asserted that causal links and ‘after the fact coherence’ are not purely ‘story-telling’, but a scientifically established part of remembering an event. I now want to look briefly at imagery and emotions as part of this remembering. Imagery is a part of the metaphor of taking a picture: ‘it makes vivid memories vivid.’27 and leads to the specific, concrete details that make memories seem more accurate, thoughtful, and believable.28 Pillemer found that: ‘Women could recount experiences in the past and provide compelling, precise, and often visceral detail.’29


For example, Dr Caroline Matthews graphically captures a memory of a Field hospital: Orderlies, Serbian and Austrian, removed dressings, as at each table a surgeon examined the injured limb. Here were exposed huge gaping wounds in the quivering flesh, there a leg lay bared with muscles and vessels veritably dissected out from knee to ankle – the stench abominable – (a case of post-typhus gangrene).30 Matthews was describing a dreadful scene. In this she brings together non-verbal, vivid, visual and sensory images, into a cohesive narrative. Pillemer remarks that in clinical studies, highly emotional memories have a: ‘highly sensory component’ which becomes a: ‘story-like verbal memory narrative.’31 He records that: ‘Research studies on the whole have shown that memories of momentous events are almost always accompanied by visual imagery, and other forms of sensory experience.’32 Further, he implies that this visual detail is also found in less powerful circumstances. 33 In fact a study by Brewer in 1988 provided evidence that visual imagery helped to give people confidence about their accuracy of recall. 34 So far from being a colourful fiction, these detailed writings are indeed a more accurate depiction. A further component of imagery in memory is its pervasiveness, something that was observed by Dr Bryson, a female doctor: How strange a thing is memory! How continuous it is! How the emotion of an early experience remains to colour and tinge and flavour all succeeding similar experiences! [ ... ] Here memory becomes clear and sharp as her very words and the very tone of her voice come back to me.35 Pillemer notes that these involuntary memories are triggered at any time and by various stimuli.36 Accordingly, details in these autobiographies add to the text’s authenticity, but do not render them more fictive. The more importance that is attached to a memory, the more consistency there is in the reconstruction, and the more vivid is the visual imagery attached to it. If this is so, the wealth of details women autobiographers supply in their imagery and causal links is far more than a fictive device, it is the essence of their accurate recall. One final point of memory recall that is relevant to my research is that of ‘Flashbulb’ memory. This is a term coined by R. Brown and

188


J. Kulik in 1977 and connotes the recalling of novel or shocking incidents. ‘ “Flashbulb memories” are a sub-category of PEMs and have the categories of who, what, and where, similar to those of news reports.’37 One special feature of this type of recall is the vividness of the memory, which suggested the photographic ‘flashbulb’ metaphor. Another feature, according to Pillemer, is the unusualness of flashbulb memories which come from: ‘their content, which focuses on mundane personal circumstances that are not linked in a meaningful way to the facts of the newsworthy event itself.’38 He continues: ‘At times of high emotion, concomitant details may be automatically recorded in memory alongside more general structural characteristics.’39 This appears to be true not only for extreme incidents but also for less traumatic occurrences and those of a celebratory nature. Put plainly, there is strong evidence that people never forget the circumstances in which they ‘heard the news’. From various researchers work, spanning some 20 years, Weaver concluded that this special property of flashbulb memories leads to their high (absolute) level of confidence in the recall.40 For example, Louise Jermy, a VAD, links the invitation from her father for a place to see the Grand Coronation Procession of King Edward VII with an anecdotal tale of Sir Oliver Lodge and the occasion of: ‘a gentleman to dinner who was one of the pioneers of the X-Ray light, I forget his name,’41 [ ... ] he was one of the martyrs to science.’42 She recalls the episode of this gentleman upsetting the wine and dropping things, and his subsequent distress. The memory remains for this particular dinner party among many, because of the invite to the Coronation Parade. Neisser and Harsch’s studies in 1992 used flashbulb memory data designed to address the issue of veridicality.43 Brewer used these observations to show that most of the errors in the data recovered were retrieval errors and not reconstructive errors. By this, Brewer means that there was an accurate recalling of the wrong time-slice, due to strongly emotional circumstances. ‘Wrong time slice’ in these terms means that the correct action itself was recalled, but the initial beginning or knowing of the experience can be confused. Brewer’s research found that 97 per cent of respondents recall contained retrieval errors, and only 3per cent reconstructive errors. Furthermore: ‘it [Weber’s Law] implies that the increase in errors with time does not reflect forgetting in the ordinary sense. The information in memory is not decaying or disturbed by interference; small differences become less noticeable at a larger distance in time’.44 Also, recall increases with the importance of


the event remembered. This finding is important for the scrutiny of the veridicality of autobiography, because it is always formed at some distance in time from the events. It is this aspect of PEMs or autobiographical memory, those of retrieval errors, rather than reconstruction that is evident in Violetta Thurstan’s work. Because of the unusual nature of narrating the same experience 60 years apart, they provide the ideal vehicle as witness to the ‘memory work’ study. My sense is that this is the nub of the issue: that the autobiographer’s repeated use and careful location of PEMs helps us to use them as evidence for a history of mentalities. The complexity and many facets of core memories, differently woven over the years, need to be studied. One further point, before presenting my analyses of these accounts; I must confront at the outset a charge that these autobiographers simply copied and adapted from the earlier autobiographies. This would be an obvious premise were it not for the complexity of the structural changes, tone and identities presented in the recall (alas too many to address here). Suffice to say, as a general overview, that if these were cases of simple ‘stealing’ or reproduction of events, it would be transparent. But what they in fact show is commensurate with the scientific case studies mentioned earlier. An interesting example of retrieval errors occurs when Thurstan attributes her reasons for writing her memories. In 1915 the writing of this ‘life’ story was a means of being useful during convalescence.45 In 1978, she ascribes it to a meeting with Prince Yusupov, who had frequently featured in this autobiography: ‘ “You must write down all this. There are so few people now who know [ ... ] and how poignant was the suffering of the people.” [ ... ] All the time I was in Russia I used to scribble notes about the places we went to.’46 The distortions between the two autobiographies (usefulness in 1915 and instigation by a Prince in 1978 version) do not point to the unreliability of autobiography, as many detractors would assert. It does in fact confirm Pillemer, Rubin and others’ assertions that PEMs and autobiographical core memories are sustained over the years. As Pillemer writes: ‘Memories of personal life episodes are generally true to the original experiences, although specific details may be omitted or misremembered, and substantial distortions occasionally do occur.’47 It would not be unreasonable to surmise that in 1915, things she had taken in her stride and appeared to be the right action, 60 years later appeared a heroic adventure. The medal she received, accolades from peers, press, and friends, over a lifetime of achievements, would surely present her actions in another vein.48


These two accounts of Thurstan’s experience are when she and fellow VADs were ordered to leave Belgium by the Germans. The first extract is from 1915, the second 1978. 1915 I was personally very thankful not to have my belongings looked at too closely, for I had several things I did not at all want to part with; one was my camera, which was sewn inside my traveling cushion, a little diary that I had kept in Belgium, and a sealed letter that had been given me as we stood outside the station at Brussels by a lady who had implored me to take it to England and post it for her there, as it was to her husband in Petrograd, who had had no news of her since the war began. I had this in an inside secret pocket. [ ... ] We were ordered into the train ... At the next station we stopped ... we were each given a bowl of soup. It was very good and thick [ ... ] At Cologne [ ... ] We were ordered out of the train [ ... ] Some coffee was a great comfort, and we were able to buy rolls and fruit for the journey [Days later in Petrograd] One errand remained to be done. I had not posted the letter given me by the English lady at the Brussels station to her husband in Petrograd, wishing to have the pleasure of delivering it myself after carrying it at such risks all through Germany [ ... ] I made inquiries for this Englishman, picturing his joy at getting the long-deferred news of his wife ... but imagine the blow it was to hear that he had a Russian wife in Petrograd!49 1978 Part of the Brussels station had been cleared for our large party of about one hundred and fifty English women [ ... ] The crowd thinned, but there were still a number of people waiting to see what was going to happen. I felt a tug at my skirt and I looked around. ‘Hush,’ whispered a voice. ‘Don’t look at me, [sic] I want to ask you a great favour.’ She produced a letter, ‘I have not had any news of my husband since the Boche arrived. I have no money. He must help me. I have written to him and I ask you to take the letter.’ ‘I am so sorry, I cannot do that – They are sure to search us.’ [ ... ] ‘You are English, Yes? I am Belgium, but my husband is English [ ... ] I have no money I shall starve.’ She said beginning to cry. I wavered, [sic] it seemed awful not to help this poor woman. ‘Where is your husband?’ ‘He is in St Petersburg. He is a teacher of languages there.’ [ ... ] the envelope had been pushed into my hand ... I hastily put it under my left armpit [ ... ] I managed to put it under the elastic of my


knickers. I thought it would be safe there for the present. [ ... ] it was Cologne. We were allowed a cup of coffee and a biscuit each [Petrograd] As I threw off my dirty clothes I found in the hem of my coat the letter [ ... ] I had folded it up small and had managed to hide it in what I felt sure was a very safe place [ ... ]The envelope had a Petrograd address on it and I thought I would try to find this husband of hers somewhere and give myself the pleasure of telling him I had seen his wife, [ ... ] One of the clerks at the reception knew the name [ ... ] ‘Oh yes, he has been here nearly a year. He is a teacher of English, and he and his wife live quite near us.’ ‘But his wife is in Brussels!’ ‘No, I assure you Madam, they have a little flat just across the road from us.’ I showed him the envelope. ‘Then I am afraid he has two wives, Madam’.50 There are two very different styles presented in these two extracts. The first, written in 1915, is plain, informative writing without emotion; matter-of-fact realist observation. In its simplicity there is no space for flowery sentiment. We are told that she wrote this autobiography: ‘in snatches and at odd times, on all sorts of stray pieces of paper and far from any books of reference.’51 The freshness in the extract is indicative of the whole; an immediacy that is created by her unvarnished style and by the lack of time she had to order or make sense of the events. Thurstan asks her co-workers to: ‘perhaps forget the imperfections in remembering that it has been written close to the turmoil of the battlefield’ (my italics).52 This close proximity does not allow her to attribute meaning and significance. It has a rawness which captures the mentality of the time; an ethos of doing your duty without recognition would have been natural at the time. For Thurstan, to deliver a letter was a simple, yet risky, act of kindness. Her narrative looks out towards the suffering of the soldiers, the peasants, and the country with an overarching concern for the wounded. The heroes are other people. She records peasants fleeing: ‘some on foot, some more fortunate ones with their bits of furniture in a rough cart drawn by a skeleton horse or a large dog. All had babies, aged parents, or invalids with them.’53 Her finely drawn observations replicate the suffering and allow her understanding and feelings for others to shine through. In this version, Thurstan is more effaced and is more inclusive, using ‘we’ and ‘our’. But, in the telling of others’ misery, she tells about herself as a nurse and a woman. In the 1978 retelling, she places herself at the centre as a heroine, which indeed she was. It was not until September 1917, two years after


writing her first autobiography, that she was awarded the Military medal, (one of only 20 women to be so honoured).54 Written from the perspective of some 60 years, feted as a hero, the style became that of romantic retrospection and romantic sentiments. She uses her novelistic verve to aggrandize her achievements. The tone is intimate, persuasive and conversational. Her use of interrogative and exclamatory punctuation, and reported dialogue heightens the drama. It is a style that should bolster the immediacy and realism. My intention here is to expand and consolidate; one, the effectiveness of autobiographical recording and two, demonstrate how the different identities which form from writing about the same experience do indeed provide an interpretation of the mentality of that era. This does not mean that the autobiographer is falsifying or foisting meanings onto it. From his contemporary studies, Mark Freeman notes: ‘What we are doing is remembering and narrating, which means situating the experiences of the past – rewriting them – in accordance with and in relation to what has happened since, as understood and reunderstood from now, the moment of narration’. 55 Therefore the cultural impact of a given era and experiences of the autobiographer impose changes on the mentality of the writer. This in turn, is reflective of the era it is written in, but the core memory remains intact. My point here in using close textual analysis is to show that, similar to Pillemer and Rubin’s findings, the core remembrance of written autobiography remains. The changes that have taken place are in the meaning given to the episodes. These meanings are not only personal, but help us to establish the mentality of one specific group in one specific historical period. For example, what does ‘suffer’ in the second telling is her identity as a self-effacing, sensitive and caring nurse and woman. The pronouns ‘we’ and ‘our’ are rarely used and the ‘I’ becomes all too prominent. The narrative content also suffers from a ‘sanitizing’ vocabulary. The: ‘Blood-stained uniforms hastily cut off the soldiers were lying on the floor – half-open packets of dressings were on every locker; basins of dirty water, men were moaning in pain, calling for water [ ... ] and the canon never ceased booming.’56 This is typical of her writing in 1915. By 1978 accounts of similar incidents were recorded: ‘A Major told us that a very fierce battle was going on at Mons, there was great confusion and a large number of wounded were lying unattended.’57 The horror becomes marginalized and the import of the second autobiography has drifted to who she met and the ensuing dialogues.


Storm Jameson’s two autobiographies present similarities to those of Thurstan in that they were written decades apart. But they differ. Jameson’s autobiographical structuring alters; the first text is more thematic and the second text is chronological and linear. A major difference in Jameson’s two retellings is the manner in which she deals with emotional temperature in her writing. To demonstrate this I have selected extracts telling of the death of her brother in the First World War. In 1933 Jameson recalls this terrible time alongside other incidents that show how the ‘quick spirit’ was drained from her mother. A few months before his seventeenth birthday he had joined the Flying Corps, and he was not seventeen when the War broke out and his squadron was posted to France. He earned the Médaille Militaire on the retreat from Mons, and in 1915 the D.C.M., ‘for conspicuous coolness and gallantry on several occasions in connection with wireless work under fire.’ My mother was not surprised but she hid her feelings. That year, too he passed his pilot’s tests in France – 2nd Lt. Harold Jameson, No. 6 Squadron. No. 19 Squadron. No. 48 Squadron. No. 42 Squadron. In 1916 the Military Cross, ‘for conspicuous gallantry in action. He attacked a hostile kite under very heavy fire. Later, his machine descended to within 150 feet off the ground, when he got the engine going again and recrossed our lines at 1,300 feet and returned to safety. He has on many occasions done fine work.’ He had a little longer, then on January 1917 he was shot down while observing an enemy battery. His machine fell in no-man’s-land and some one [sic] of the infantry ran out and brought him in – he was dead.58 In 1969 this tragic event follows on in the chronological sequence of events. In 1915 she suffers a miscarriage, by 1916 she has a son, she finds a publisher, her father’s ship is sunk and he is in a concentration camp. The death of her brother in 1917 fills the chapter: ‘Harold was now a 2nd Lieutenant in the Flying corps. He had done his pilot’s training in France, in June 1915, after being given the D.C.M. “For conspicuous coolness and gallantry on several occasions in connection with wireless work under fire.” ’59 There follows a chatty letter and the recounting of his time on leave and his keenness to return to France in order not to be overlooked for promotion.


In April he went back to France, to No.19 Squadron, and after four months was promoted to Flying Officer. It must have been the late summer when I saw him again, in Whitby. He seemed little changed, still a broad-shouldered gawky boy in the R.F.C. tunic, no lines around his eyes, and no hardening of his slow shamefaced smile. [ ... ] His name was in the London Gazette again in December. ‘Military Cross. For conspicuous gallantry in action’ He attacked a hostile kite balloon under very heavy fire. Later, his machine descended to within 150 feet of the ground, when he got the engine going again and recrossed our lines at 1,300 feet and returned to safely. He has on many occasions done fine work. That month my mother was staying with me in Liverpool, [ ... ] She was still there in the first week of January when the telegram came, [ ... ] I stood in front of my mother with the telegram in my hand. ‘Open it’ I opened it and gave it to her ... Deeply regret to inform you that 2nd Lt Harold Jameson Royal Flying Corps was killed in action January fifth the Army Council expresses their sympathy ... She made the inhuman sound women make when they lose a son, a cry torn from the empty womb, and turned blindly, to go to her bedroom. I did not try to comfort her. What use? [ ... ] Later we heard what happened. He had been ranging our guns on a German battery when he was attacked from behind. His machine fell in No Man’s Land, and some brave souls of the infantry ran out and carried him to the trench: he was breathing but soon died. When I read this in the letter from the major commanding No. 6 Squadron, I felt a dreadful sickness in the centre of my body, an uprush of deathly fear – it was what he had felt in the first moment of falling. The moment he knew he had lost.60 The 1933 telling is brief and bare. She draws upon a factual tone, official discourse and newspapers and military documents as a means of holding her emotions in check. The narration has an anonymous quality which gives the reader the bare historical facts: ‘They leave out the person to whom things happened.’61 In 1969 Jameson uses newspapers and military sources to give the facts but there is no bifurcation between ‘historical’ fact and emotional memory. In this retelling, Jameson went back to what the experience ‘felt’ like. Moreover the reader begins to understand more fully the devastating effects of the First World War. The juxtapositioning of news articles and military discourse with stirring prose makes plain the nightmarish episodes of the era. The reader is confronted with his youthfulness, untainted by experience: ‘gawky


boy ... no lines ... slow shame-faced smile.’ We also learn that between the ages of 17 and 19 he earns the D.C.M. and Military Cross. Set against the formulated and sterile telegram, her mother’s reaction to his death is all the more heart-rending. It appears that in her earlier remembering she found it necessary to separate official details from emotional feelings. These are then released in a fervent outburst, but also as a separate and distinct occurrence. The vehemence of her emotions cannot be repressed. It is as if the concise biography of her brother’s foreshortened life was to be untouched by her embittered emotions: In 1932, what lying, gaping mouth will say that it was worth while to kill my brother in his nineteenth year? You may say that the world’s account is balanced by the item that we have with us still a number of elderly patriots, politicians, army contractors, women who obscenely presented white feathers. You will forgive me if, as courteously as is possible in the circumstances, I say that a field latrine is more use to humanity than these leavings.62 Here her pain is directed out towards the world. By 1969, the rancour has subsided and she recalls her inner pain: ‘I felt a dreadful sickness ...’ which emphasised with how she imagined her brother had felt. In these two accounts the reader is not faced so much by the problems of retrieval or reconstruction, though there is evidence of this. What these two extracts address thoroughly, I believe, is the place that emotion (structures of feeling), has in the history of a period. The ‘storifying’ of events in the memory and the retelling, by a competent writer, does not and should not detract from their credibility. Lawrence Langer, a Professor of English, suggests in his work on holocaust survivors’ writings that great writers with more imagination and artistry present the greater possibility of speaking the truth in nonfiction.63 The concerns of veridicality are addressed if we acknowledge that autobiographical episodes take place within a time frame. This has a temporal and spatial structure, and is linked by a causal arrangement which has an explanatory or evaluative order. Barclay affirms that: ‘Without each of these aspects, narratives would be meaningless and senseless’.64 Therefore events are shaped for narrative purposes with a view towards meaning and signification, not towards the end of somehow preserving the facts themselves. Furthermore, the narrative organisation within autobiographical narratives should not be taken as detrimental to its veracity because ‘memory work’ by psychologists


suggests otherwise. It is this work on memory that must be taken into account before rejecting autobiographical writing as an invalid tool for history. The analysis of ‘double’ autobiographies, such as those of Thurstan and Jameson confirms my earlier research and forms evidence of the accurate durability of memory. It also corroborates my notion that autobiographies are useful in informing us about the identity and mentality of an era. They give us access to the intimate landscape of specific social groups. A history of emotions is differently structured from social history, but is intimately connected with it: as I hope I have shown. Brewer’s experiments in 1988 revealed: ‘Personal memories are, in fact, reasonably accurate copies of the individual’s original phenomenal experience’.65 My understanding of his data is that in his experiments he used everyday, mundane experiences as examples. If these insignificant memories can accurately be reconstructed, then the content of autobiographies which usually concentrates on heightened occurrences of PEMs must have equal if not an improved aspect of veridical elements. As Schacter notes: ‘On balance, however, our memory systems do a remarkably good job of preserving the general contours of our pasts and of recording correctly many of the important things that have happened to us. We could not have evolved as a species otherwise.’66 In an earlier research study, ‘Who Remembers What? Gender Differences in Memory,’67 the results showed that women were believed to and did have better memories for conversations, (59 per cent favoured women, 6 per cent favoured men). Further, women were promoted as having and did have a better recall of exact details, (87 per cent for women, 2 per cent for men). In other aspects of memory recall such as accidents, injuries, romantic episodes and so on there was little gender difference. In other words, the above study proposes that autobiographical remembering is embedded in affective, interpersonal, social, cultural, and historical contexts. Finally I would suggest that these autobiographies are not from what Schacter calls ‘free recall’, that is, without any hints or clues.68 Most autobiographies are written using memory aides: diaries, letters, photographs and so forth. All these provide ‘scaffolding’ from which the intricate life sequences are reconstructed. Research carried out by psychologists indicates that when hints or clues are available, recall is significantly improved. Moreover, should the respondent be an older adult, the recall, in terms of accuracy, is in line with that of college students. This is another aspect which attests to the accuracy of autobiographical


memory. Schacter, among others, notes that modern practices of electronic recording of personal recollections will preserve testimonies of thousands of rememberers. In our earlier histories we need to rely on the written word. But in like manner, forgetting and distortion which can infiltrate individual remembrances can be counteracted by the overwhelming truths that emerge from ‘core elements’ that are shared by numerous rememberers.

12 Conclusion

Conventionally, a conclusion should sum up what has gone before, pull all the strands together and present a neat and strong résumé. But what a conclusion should also do is to suggest the wider implications of the project and to think about its continued development. During the incubation of this conclusion, Derrida’s words came to my mind: ‘one’s discourse leads to the conclusion that all conclusions are genuinely provisional and therefore inconclusive’.1 Undeniably we can draw some conclusions but like all good designs these observations generate possibilities for future research. This book attempted a comprehensive analytical survey of professional women’s autobiography in the period 1900–1920. It used four separate but linked areas of close textual analysis, visual methodology, silence as a medium of expression, and validation of memory. By identifying a sufficiently large survey of texts, the individual consciousness of professional women could give insight into the mentality of a specific group in a specific period. The first part of the book, divided by profession, focused on how women who occupied the centre of social, middle-class arenas understood their lives, their roles, and their history. To complement this, the second part of this book was organised by theme, in order to broaden the approach across the professional groups. My motivation has been to argue for autobiography to be recognised as useful to the study of the histoire de mentalités and to help to recoup a missing part of history. It appears that the concerted effort to enter the public sphere, gain a profession and income, played a significant role in these Edwardian women’s writing. The social and professional freedoms they had gained allowed them to write in a more unfettered way. This enabled these powerful women to break dominant male linguistic boundaries. 198

Conclusion 199

From the outset the most striking feature uncovered was the consonance within each profession, of the topic, structure, tone and style of writing. Each profession focused on common ground which dominated their writing. Headmistresses and women doctors provided insights that in many ways were not dissimilar. Headmistresses centred on their experiences within the confines of their institutions. Whilst women doctors were less physically bound by institutions, they endured far more psychological resistance from the patriarchal control within medicine. Both showed concern for their ‘feminine’ image, and the importance of feminine virtues engendered specific stylistic devices. The headmistresses deployed metaphors of divine providence, Christian calling and the belief in fate to construct notions of a vocational impetus. The doctors made striking use of fairytale metaphors and metaphors from girls’ and boys’ own stories, and these helped them to present their career choice as a vocation. But unlike headmistresses, these doctors presented themselves as heroines. Their metaphors undercut their adopted tone of a controlled passive voice which was imitated from male writing. The fairytale and religious metaphors provided a protective shield. It deflected attention away from what could be seen as unfeminine attributes. For example, women doctors had a highly scientific intellect and the desire to work with the body. Throughout their autobiographies, headmistresses and doctors were at pains to ‘silence’ unfeminine aspects and to promote their femininity in their visual characteristics. Their silence was a coping mechanism. For women doctors it was a way of standing against male hostility within the medical profession; for headmistresses it evolved from the controlling power nexus of men, and from their understanding that it was inappropriate for women to voice opinions on religion or politics. If we now turn to the autobiographies of nurses and Voluntary Aid Detachments (VADs) who struggled to record horror, disorder and confusion in estranged conditions, we experience greater stylistic contrasts and more extreme topics. Role reversal forged another boundary. Women in hospitals were active, and the injured were male and supine. Had there not been a war, I would conjecture that these women would have been the least likely of all the professions to record their lives. In their autobiographies, language boundaries were breached by a contrast of styles that veered from pragmatic scientific delivery to a hiatus of immense emotion described with pace, repetition, ellipses and ‘free’ form.

200


However, artists and practitioners worked in accepted arenas for women. The most outstanding characteristics I noted of the writing of these artistic women was the discovery of the strong divide in writing styles between those artists who performed in public, and those artists whose work was in the public domain. In their private world the writing flowed. They were confident and effusive. In the public world, a forbidden and dangerous arena, their language became dry, and important themes were curtailed. However, women painters and sculptors did not exhibit this structure or show such problems in expression. The final summary for this section turns to the work of professional writers. Given that these women were wordsmiths, and given the disparity of their writing genres and ability, there was some consonance. One of three reasons for writing was given; to earn a living, gain independence, or to alleviate family financial distress. The most striking disclosure in this cohort of autobiographers was their recognition of the affect which emotional upheaval and physical disability had on their creativity. Analogous to artists and practitioners, these writers fall into two divisions: those who wrote low-brow novels and those who wrote high-brow novels. Low-brow writers, by the insertion of a lengthy, ‘authoritative’ statement or series of essays that expounded on various public issues, disrupted the structure and flow of their autobiographies. This marked shift in style was an attempt to assert objective observation and to increase their stature as writers. This compartmentalisation produced a change of style and syntax and exhibits struggle and limitations. For writers of high-brow literature and ‘serious’, articles there was no need for this, and their autobiographies have a cohesive nature. Before giving attention to the second and thematic part of this book it is worth our time to briefly consider the stylistic eruptions of one form or another that occur in all of these autobiographies. Metaphors disrupt the works of headmistresses and women doctors. Public performance artists had sections of dryness sandwiched between sections of fluidity. Artists in the private workplace presented no such problems. Nurses and VADs were stimulated into stylistic form/content contradictions, whilst wordsmiths often found that their creativity levels were governed by physical and emotional states. Their different styles are all set in motion when traditional boundaries are breeched. The second part of the book focused on thematic issues that were common across the professions. Prefatory chapters and frontispiece

Conclusion 201

images addressed the way that these two aspects of the marginalia added to the whole experience of autobiography. This investigation challenged normative claims about the transparency of these artefacts, and thus raised the possibility that they operate ‘against the grain’. In so doing, do they still reveal and develop a more extensive self-representation? This consonance by profession, which was deployed in the structure, tone and style of the autobiographers, also obtains in the marginalia. The prefatory chapters appear to function ‘against the grain’, in that they do not prepare the reader for what is to follow. The devices in the prefatory chapters are intended to control the way in which the reader receives and interprets the information in the main body of the text. Headmistresses and women doctors often chose to follow ‘templates’ provided by male autobiographers in similar professions. Artists often preferred the ‘modesty formula’, and writers concerned themselves with questions of veracity. Nurses and VADs who took up professional posts after the war, (Commander-in-Chief of VADs, matrons) showed preference for the use of metaphors, and nurses and VADs who became professional writers after the war wrote of their concerns of veracity. All professional writers used both metaphors and raised questions about ‘truthfulness’. A similar control is evinced in the frontispiece photograph. The images have a powerful input. Selected by the autobiographer and carried as a representative image by the reader throughout the book, both prefatory chapters and the frontispiece image exhibit forms of authorial control and agency. Both operate less as an expository exercise and more as a means to deflect attention and obscure expression. The coupling of the image and prefatory chapter, in their place of prominence, sets up certain unrealised expectations. My research indicated that they are a flawed attempt at control. They are flawed because when close textual reading and visual methodologies are used, unexpected signifiers can be identified. These, combined with the main textual analysis, can provide insights into the autobiographer and the period. Instead of closing down speculation, the cloaking mechanism invites new areas of study and opens up fresh areas of understanding and exposition. Why did the majority of autobiographers do this? From the evidence this far, I would conjecture that they wrote the main text, read their text and then, in some cases, felt the need to exert control or ameliorate the impact. In Derridian terms ‘it [marginalia/supplement] adds only to replace.’2 It is possible that these autobiographers believed

202


that the visual image and first statements had power to direct the reader and affect the way that they would receive the autobiographical information. There could be reasons of insecurity about the frankness of their disclosures or a sense of propriety or concerns about being seen in a ‘good light’. Feminine inhibitions and insecurities may have been more prominent here. It is then necessary to reconsider how silences in autobiography intervene and amplify the understanding of the text. The complexity of ‘reading’ silences in autobiography makes a generalised summary difficult. It is sufficient to reiterate that there is no such thing as silence. My research showed that it has an identity and can be measured. If we turn to Foucault’s work in The History of Sexuality we can see that he proposed: There is not one but many silences, and they are an integral part of the strategies that underlie and permeate discourses [ ... ] Silence itself – the things one declines to say, or is forbidden to name, the discretion that is required between different speakers – is less the absolute limit of discourse, the other side from which it is separated by a strict boundary, than an element that functions alongside the things said, with them and in relation to them within overall strategies. [ ... ] We must try to determine the different ways of not saying such things, how those who can and those who cannot speak of them are distributed.3 If we give recognition to the prowess of memory, closely read the text, and if we recognise the cloaking mechanisms in the marginalia, acknowledge the silences, and probe the reasons for each, we will be able to raise debates to a higher level. Each of these entities combines to provide an insight into the mentality of the writer and by extension to discuss the period itself. These autobiographers have made public their senses of their personal experiences, but we must also recognise that ultimately some things are beyond expression. The ‘Identity’ and ‘Memory’ chapters are equally difficult to summarise. They are distinct in that the work undertaken in them provides the foundation to support the claim for autobiography as important to the histoire de mentalités. These autobiographers provided a redress against commonly held views in the public domain. They expressed feminine identity on the cusp of change, and they recognised that they needed to establish new traditions. As a suitable vehicle for historical research, the accuracy of memory is the most controversial aspect of

Conclusion 203

autobiography. These autobiographers were keen to record their own ‘truth’ not facts. But subjectivity is often considered to detract from the probity of autobiography. Yet it is invalid to deny these texts academic usefulness on the grounds of their subjectivity. All writing is partial at some level. This is where sharp divisions appear to exist. Both personal histories and public histories are constructed upon fragments of information. Public histories are written and based largely on documents created by individuals and groups with certain motives in mind, and are assumed to be objective. These fragments require the reader to work in order to fill in the gaps until there is a ‘narrative fit’.4 I suggested that psychologists who have studied ‘autobiographical’ memory have been useful in the validation of the accuracy of recall, as Personal Event Memories (PEM) have high veridical attributes. These one-moment-in-time events focus the rememberer’s personal circumstances and retain a vivid quality through the years. Bearing the above in mind, the discussion naturally moves to a further level about the autobiography’s borderline position on the fact/ fiction continuum. What it is necessary to say is that, in the period 1900–1920 such concerns are to a greater degree spurious. The writers of autobiographies in this survey were written in a less self-conscious time than those autobiographies of the later twentieth century and those of contemporary autobiographers available in the twenty-first century. By this I mean that these women were often reticent about recording their experiences, and their struggles to produce a narrative were hampered more by a sense of propriety, and less by the considerations of image, which are so evident in more modern autobiographies. My autobiographers worked with the concept of the authentic self, whereas modern writers tend to view subjectivity as an assemblage or bricolage. Having summed up all the important developments and now, rather than close down, it would be beneficial to consider ways of advancing this work. I take it as axiomatic that context is of prime importance in an analysis of this kind. I say this in response to the terminology and methodology that is currently being applied to some historical and some contemporary ‘life’ writing. This modern usage of referring to autobiographies as ‘witness’, ‘testimony’ and ‘evidence’ accounts could be applied to these texts. But these nomenclatures are usually linked with ‘trauma’ narratives and connote a different set of agendas. Witness, testimony and evidence have legal connotations and suggest a testifying of ‘facts’ to be proved or disproved. These remembrances

204


of 1900–1920 are meditations on a life that had aspirations, triumphs, difficulties and sadness, set in a specific context. They were, almost in their entirety, a-political, so we have to be careful to avoid any method which suggests that writers were traumatised victims. I remarked that one of the most startling outcomes from this analysis is the consonance within and between the professions concerning style, tone and content. However, much fruitful research could be undertaken if the ‘cake’ was cut in horizontal rather than vertical slices. Additional themes could then be examined, both by profession and then across the professions. Further areas of consonance have been touched on but need advancement. For example, the intricate area of stylistics is worthy of development here. Due to the pressures of space, I have not been able to deal with these instances where metaphorical usage and content coalesced in different professions. Had I been able to do so, I could have asked: why did it occur in some and not in others? Earlier I raised the issue of boundaries. These women had removed themselves from an earlier gendered construction of class and economy, with a swerve away from patriarchal and family values. The concept of boundaries as advanced by the anthropologist Mary Douglas are useful here, and may introduce new categories of similarities for the professions entered into by these women, as they have more mobile identities. Their identities were transformed by radical experiences. Mary Douglas has argued in Purity and Danger that every great revolution of thought touches on the nature of boundaries.5 This concept could be applied to language boundaries and knowledge boundaries. These women here, via education, have been provided with the opportunity of challenging the old boundaries between the sacred and the profane. This in turn calls into question male and female power roles, as these powerful women can traverse linguistic barriers and class barriers. Clearly, in an analysis of this sort, the ideas of Foucault and Basil Bernstein would be useful. The work of Bernstein in Class, Codes and Control: Volume 1, Theoretical Studies towards a Sociology of Language would be interesting because it helps us to explore structures of society.6 There is clearly more research to be undertaken in a broader project about the marginalia of autobiographical volumes. I examined prefatory chapters and frontispiece images. But there is also a need to work on the titles, dedicatory additions and the author’s manner of nomenclature in these works. Gerard Genette’s work on paratext would be

Conclusion 205

useful here. We could examine the way in which texts are framed to see how they may enhance, define, contrast or distance the reader. We would then examine what relationship these artefacts create between the text and the reader and enquire how the author/text/reader continuum is affected. They are precise authorial undertakings and therefore are part of the overall message. Genette himself asked in Introduction to the Paratext: ‘How would you read Joyce’s Ulysses if it were not called Ulysses?’7 All titles, however innocent, influence the reader, and this could be a useful means of furthering the debates I raised. Equally we need to focus attention on dedicatory passages and nomenclature to ask how much interpretative influence they exert. The point is how these all combine? Do they create limitations or do they widen the prospects of comprehension? Frontispiece photographs were examined as part of the marginalia, but there is much work that could be undertaken on the use of images throughout autobiographies, not just as a frontispiece. Does this change across the professions? Finally, during my research I unexpectedly uncovered a small number of autobiographers who wrote more than one autobiography, several decades apart, which covered a similar period in their lives. If one had more space, this could be a whole research topic in its own right. The contrast between the works of Wordsworth such as his 1805 ‘Prelude’ and his 1850 version could be an interesting point of departure. This would be of especial interest for research into structures of meaning and histoire de mentalités. The prospect of examining core memories across the decades could provide valuable insights into cultural/social change. Questions arise of subjectivity, perspective, legislation, cultural influences and will also provide insights into memory. The use of scientific psychological findings on the structure of recall could also be invaluable in assessing veridical ‘accuracy’, and useful in the history of autobiographical writing. Let us put it another way. Historians, journalists and lawyers recognise that witnesses are often unreliable. They forget, lie, exaggerate, and become confused. Why should these autobiographers be any different? True, the borderline between fact and fiction is fluid, but the evidential basis on which much history is written is thin. Simon Schama began his book, Dead Certainties: Unwarranted Speculations, with an eye-witness scene.8 At the end of the book he reveals that the narration was a fiction, formed from a number of contemporary

206


documents. His reason for this deception was to illustrate history as story telling. But in his use of this literary device, he is not far from the postmodernist conclusion that any historian’s ‘story’ is as good as any other. I am certainly not advocating this. I mention it in order that a perspective of balance and impartiality can prevail in our analyses of these voices from the past.

Notes All books published in London unless otherwise stated

1

Introduction

1. For example, C.F.G. Mastermann, The Condition of England (Methuen 1960, 1st pub. [1909]); Arnold Bennett, Our Women, Chapters on the Sex Discord (Cassell 1920); Sir Almroth Wright, ‘Letter to the Editor of The Times on Militant Suffragettes’ in Dale Spender, ed. The Education Papers, Women’s Quest for Equality in Britain: 1850–1912 (New York & London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987). 2. Trev Broughton, ‘Auto/biography and the Actual Course of Things’, in Tess Cosslett, Celia Lury and Penny Summerfield, eds., Feminism and Autobiography: Texts, Theories, Methods (Routledge, 2000), p. 242. 3. Maroula Joannou, Ladies Please Don’t Smash These Windows (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 1995); Nicola Beauman, A Very Great Profession (Virago, 1983); Alison Light, Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism Between the Wars (Routledge, 1991); Claire Tylee, Images of Militarism and Womanhood in Women’s Writing 1914–1962 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990); Valentine Cunningham, British Writers of the Thirties (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). 4. Roy Pascal, Design and Truth in Autobiography (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960); James Olney, Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980); Mary Evans, Missing Persons: The Impossibility of Auto/biography (Routledge, 1999); Gail Braybon, Evidence, History & the Great War: Historians & the Impact of 1914–18 (New York & Oxford: Berghann Books, 2005). 5. Regenia Gagnier, Subjectivities: A History of Self-Representation in Britain: 1832–1920 (New York: OUP, 1991); Claire M. Tylee, The Great War and Women’s Consciousness (MacMillan Press, 1990). 6. Suzanne Raitt and Trudi Tate, eds., Women’s Fiction and the Great War (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997); Joannou, op. cit.; Julia Bush, ‘Ladylike Lives? Upper Class Women’s Autobiographies and the Politics of Late Victorian and Edwardian Britain’, Literature & History, vol. 10, no. 2, 2001, pp. 42–61. 7. William Lamont ed. Historical Controversies and Historians (University College London Press, 1998). 8. The first use of ‘autography’ is given in the OED as 1644, as ‘the action of writing with one’s own hand; the author’s own hand-writing’. In 1796 in a review of D’Israeli’s Miscellanies, in an essay entitled: ‘Some Observations on Diaries, Self-Biography, and Self-Characters’ ‘autobiography’ is used. According to the OED the prefix ‘auto’ becomes prevalent in the nineteenth century, but is most usually attached to scientific terms. This could account for some of the problems that arise about the term ‘autobiography’ and the expectations from a text thus named.

207

208 Notes 9. Estelle C. Jelinek, ‘Introduction’ in Autobiography: Essays in Criticism (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1980). 10. Ibid., pp. 1–20. 11. Selected Writings of Wilhelm Dilthey ed. and translated by H.P. Rickman (Cambridge University Press, 1976). Also see Laura Marcus, Auto/biographical Discourses: Theory, Criticism, Practice (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), pp. 135–178. 12. Geist = expressions of the ‘spirit’; Erlebnis = concepts of ‘life’ the ‘lived experience’. 13. Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 1975. 14. For example, Virginia Woolf, whose concerns were with the individual experience. 15. Jan Montefiore, Men and Women Writers of the 1930s (Routledge, 1986). 16. Raphael Samuel, Theatres of Memory (Verso, 1994). 17. Jane Marcus, ‘The Private Selves of Public Women’ in Shari Benstock, ed. The Private Self: Theory and Practice of Women’s Autobiographical Writings (Routledge, 1988), p. 120. 18. Samuel op. cit., p. 20. 19. Wayne Shumaker, English Autobiography, 1954, in Jelinek, op. cit., p. 2. 20. Olney, op. cit.; Pascal, op. cit. 21. A.O.J. Cockshut, The Art of Autobiography (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984); J. Goodwin, Autobiography: The Self Made Text (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1993); Clinton Machann, ‘The Genre of Autobiography in Victorian Literature,’ Victorian Studies, vol. 39, no. 3, 1996. 22. Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (Great Britain: The Woman’s Press Ltd., 1979), p. 469. 23. Ellen Moers, Literary Women (The Women’s Press, 1978); Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (Bloomsbury, 1991); Patricia Meyer Spacks, The Female Imagination: A Literary and Psychological Investigation of Women’s Writing (MacMillan, 1976). 24. Joanna Russ, How to Suppress Women’s Writing (The Women’s Press, 1984); Dale Spender, Man-Made Language (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980); Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics (Routledge, 1985). 25. Jelinek, op. cit., p. xii, found that there was a: ‘tendency of women to write in discontinuous forms and to emphasis the personal over the professional.’ She also found that women wrote obliquely, elliptically or humorously in order to camouflage their feelings or play down professional lives. p. 15. 26. Benstock, op. cit., p. 2. 27. Liz Stanley, The Auto/biographical I (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992), p. 3. 28. Gagnier, op. cit.; Carolyn Steedman, ‘Difficult Stories: Female Auto/ biographies,’ Gender and History Journal, vol. 7, no. 2, 1995, pp. 321–326. 29. Valerie Sanders, The Private Lives of Victorian Women (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Whatsheaf, 1989); Sara Mills, Discourses of Difference (Routledge, 1991); Mary Jane Corbett, Representing Femininty (New York: Oxford University Press), 1992. 30. Gagnier, op. cit.; Stanley, op. cit.; Joannou, op. cit.; Broughton, op. cit.

Notes 209 31. Paul John Eakin, Fictions in Autobiography: Studies in the Art of Self-Invention (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press), 1985, p. 3. 32. Ibid., p. 3. 33. L. Anderson, T. Broughton, eds., Women’s Lives/Women’s Times: New Essays on Auto/biography (New York: State University of New York Press), 1997. 34. Cosslett, op. cit., p. 5. 35. Jo Spence, Putting Myself in the Picture: A Political, Personal, and Photographical Autobiography (Camden Press, 1986); Jo. Spence and Patricia Holland, Family Snaps (Virago, 1991), pp. 226–237; Stanley, op. cit., pp. 45–54; Annette Kuhn, Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination (London & New York: Verso, 1995); J. Stacey, Teratologies: A Cultural Study of Cancer (Routledge, 1997). 36. Kuhn, ibid. This is on the dust jacket. 37. Evans, op. cit., p. 2. 38. Ibid. p. 2. 39. Ibid. p. 143. 40. Benstock, op. cit., p. 2. 41. Susan Stanford Friedman, ‘Women’s Autobiographical Selves: Theory and Practice’, in Benstock, op. cit., pp. 34–62. 42. Patricia Waugh, Feminine Fictions: Revisiting the Post-Modern (Routledge, 1989). 43. Benstock, op. cit., p. 2. 44. Julia Bush, op. cit., pp. 58–59. 45. Cosslett, op. cit., p. 1. 46. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 134–135. 47. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (New York: Vintage, 2000, 1st pub. In Britain in 1982 by Jonathan Cape). 48. Campbell in Lamont, op. cit., p. 194. 49. Sally Ledger, The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the Fin de Siècle (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997). 50. David Powell, The Edwardian Crisis: Britain, 1901–1914 (Basingstoke: MacMillan, 1996), p. 95. 51. For example: 1902 the training of Midwives was introduced; 1903, the Society for Promoting Reforms in the Marriage and Divorce Laws of England was formed; 1906 Education Act provided food for schoolchildren, and medical inspections followed in 1907; 1911 National Insurance Act included maternity benefits; Old Age Pensions Act, 1908; 1918 Education Act, and a Maternity and Child Welfare Act; in 1919 a major Housing Act, and an act establishing a Ministry of Health’, Arthur Marwick, The Deluge (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1991). 52. Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (Bloomsbury, 1991). 53. Anne Wiltshire, Most Dangerous Women (Pandora, 1985). 54. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire: 1875–1914 (Abacus, 1999), p. 202. 55. Ibid., p. 202. 56. Sheila Jeffreys, The Spinster and Her Enemies: Feminism & Sexuality, 1880–1930 (Pandora, 1985), p. 86.

210 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67.

68. 69. 70.

2

Notes Hobsbawm, op. cit., p. 210. W.R. Gregg’s notion of emigration in Jeffrey, op. cit., p. 86. Hobsbawm, op. cit., p. 203. Ibid., p. 203. Ibid., p. 204. Susan R. Grayzel, Women and the 1st World War (Pearson Education, 2002), ch. 5. Samuel Hynes, The Edwardian Turn of Mind (Pimlico, 1991), p. 197. Susan R. Grayzel, ‘The Outward and Visible Sign of Her Patriotism’, 20th Century British History Journal, vol. 8, no. 2, 1997, pp. 145–164 (p. 65). Paul Ferris, Sex and The British (Michael Joseph, 1993). Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, vols 1–6 (Philadelphia: F.A. Davis, 1900–1910), in Ferris, ibid., p. 4. Knowlton’s Fruits of Philosophy, 1834 had sold a mere 1,000 copies a year until the court case when 50,000 copies were sold; Dr A.H. Allbutt, The Wife’s Handbook, 1887, had 41 editions by the mid-Edwardian period in Hynes, op. cit., p. 199. Marie Stopes, Married Love (A.C. Fifield, 1918); Margaret Sanger, Family Limitation (1914) quoted in Stopes. Geoffrey Partington, Women Teachers in the 20th Century in England and Wales (Slough: NFER Pub. Co. Ltd., 1976). The Tory Primrose League had over 500,000 members; the Mothers’ Union, 400,000 members and the Girls’ Friendly Society 240,000. See Sheila Rowbotham, A Century of Women: The History of Women in Britain and the United States (Viking, 1997).

Headmistresses

1. Sara Delamont, Knowledgeable Women: Structuralism and the Reproduction of Elites (Routledge, 1989); Carol Dyhouse, Girls Growing Up in Late Victorian and Edwardian England (Routledge, 1981); June Purvis, A History of Women’s Education in England (Milton Keynes & Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1991); G. Partington, Women Teachers in the Twentieth Century (Slough: NFER, 1976). 2. Camilla Stivers, ‘Reflections of the Role of Personal Narrative in Social Science’, Signs, vol. 18, 1993, pp. 408–425 (pp. 411–412). 3. Meagan Morris and Paul Patton, Foucault, Power, Truth and Strategy (Sydney: Feral Publishers, 1978) p. 8. 4. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Random, 1973), p. ix. 5. Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), p. 171. 6. Stivers, op. cit., pp. 408–425. 7. James Bryce, Assistant Commissioner to the Schools’ Inquiry Commission in the 1860s, noted that this appears to have remained within these social groups until the First World War. Purvis, op. cit., p. 68. 8. Lower, middle-classes were clerks, warehousemen, shopkeepers with the highest grade of artisans. Dyhouse, op. cit., p. 41. These had a family

Notes 211

9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22. 23.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

atmosphere which promoted the development of feminine skills. Purvis, op. cit., p. 70. This educational reform started suddenly in the late 1840s gaining momentum in the 1850s and 1860s. Purvis, op. cit., p. 73. Martha Vicinus, Independent Women: Work and Community for Single Women 1850–1920 (Virago, 1994), p. 24. Molly Casey, ‘Hemden House School Cavesham’, 1984, in Gillian Avery, ed. The Best Type of Girl: A History of Girls’ Independent Schools (André Deutsch, 1991), p. 225. Vicinus, op. cit., p. 23. For example, London University admitted women from 1878. Purvis, op. cit., p. 85. Prior to 1870 England lacked primary education. Compulsory school attendance after 1890 caused primary education to treble by1914 and the demand for primary teachers increased between seven to thirteen times the 1875 figure. In 1861 nearly 80,000 were employed as teachers in England and Wales; by 1911 there were 183,000. See Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire 1875–1914 (Abacus, 1999), pp. 150–178, 263. Lilian M. Faithfull, The House of My Pilgrimage (Chatto & Windus, 1925), p. 93. Jeanne M. Peterson, ‘The Victorian Governess’, in Martha Vicinus, ed. Suffer and Be Still (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1972), pp. 3–19. Avery, op. cit., p. 230. Amy Barlow, Seventh Child: the Autobiography of a Schoolmistress (Gerald Duckworth, 1969), pp. 13, 55. Elizabeth E. Lawrence, You Will Remember (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933), p. 21. Pre-Burnham rates of pay were varied. For example, for certificated headmasters it averaged £176 and for certificated headmistresses £126. See Dyhouse, op. cit., p. 9. Sara Burstall, Retrospect & Prospect: Sixty Years of Women’s Education (Longmans, Green, 1933), p. 55. Vicinus, op. cit., p. 25. Rates were approved in 1919 but were recommendations only. Due to postwar difficulties they were not implemented until 1925, and then at a reduced level, and still not on a par with men. See Partington, op. cit., pp. 15–24. Hobsbawm, op. cit., pp. 198–202. Faithfull, op. cit., p. 268. Burstall, op. cit., p. 216, 1933. Partington, op. cit., p. 74. Purvis, op. cit., p. 7. Ibid., p. 82. Delamont, op. cit., pp. 72, 102. For a detailed exposition of the high school model see Purvis, op. cit., pp. 76–81. Purvis, op. cit., p. 80. Partington, op. cit., pp. 55–60. Ibid., p. 85.

212

Notes

35. Hobsbawm, op. cit., p. 203. 36. B.L. Hutchins, ‘Higher Education and Marriage’, in Dale Spender, ed. The Education Papers: Women’s Quest for Equality in Britain 1850–1912 (New York & London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987) p. 328. 37. Ibid., p. 333. 38. Faithfull, op. cit., p. 63. 39. Burstall, op. cit., p. 200. 40. Arnold Bennett, Our Women and the Sex Discord (Cassell 1920), p. 29. 41. Ibid., p. 145. 42. Faithfull, op. cit., p. 68. 43. Burstall, op. cit., p. 112. 44. Ibid., p. 141. 45. Faithfull, op. cit., p. 92. 46. Partington, op. cit., p. 75. 47. Faithfull, op. cit., p. 101. 48. Burstall, op. cit., p. 140. 49. Ibid., p. 139. 50. Frances R. Gray, Gladly, Gladly: A Book about Learning and Teaching (Sampson Low, Marston, n.d.), p. 48. 51. Foucault (1995), op. cit., pp. 170–194. According to Foucault, disciplinary power achieves its hold through, Hierarchical Observation (HO), Normalizing Judgement (NJ), and the examination. HO concept signifies the connection between visibility and power; NJ; addresses non-conformity is punished and rewards good conduct as a means of discipline; examination combines the above which is classified and judged. 52. Ibid., p. 183. 53. Gray, op. cit., p. 267. 54. Ibid., p. 267. 55. Ibid., p. 268. 56. Barlow, op. cit., p. 50. 57. Ibid., p. 56. 58. Faithfull, op. cit., p. 64. 59. Avery, op. cit., p. 223. 60. Marion Cleeve, Fire Kindleth Fire (Glasgow: Blackie & Son, 1930), p. 40. 61. Foucault (1995), op. cit., p. 85. 62. E.M. Butler, Paper Boat (Collins, 1959) p. 33. 63. Ibid., p. 33. 64. Foucault (1995), op. cit., p. 178. 65. Ibid., p. 183. 66. Faithfull, op. cit., p. 127. 67. Ibid., p. 127. 68. Foucault (1995), op. cit., pp. 171, 172. 69. Ibid., p. 171. 70. Faithfull, op. cit., p. 127. 71. Ibid., p. 255. 72. Dame Katherine Furze, G.B.E., R. R. C., Hearts and Pomegranates (Peter Davies, 1940), p. 267. 73. Cleeve, op. cit., p. 60. 74. Ibid., p. 60.

Notes 213 75. Octavia Wilberforce, The Autobiography of a Pioneer Woman Doctor, ed. Pat Jalland (Cassell Publishers, 1989), p. 124. 76. Foucault (1995), op. cit., p. 172. 77. Anthony Elliot, Concepts of Self (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003), p. 84. 78. Gray, op. cit., p. 239. 79. Ibid., p. 69. 80. Chris Shilling, The Body and Social Theory (Sage Publications, 1993), p. 90. 81. Martha Vicinus, op. cit., p. 38. 82. Delamont, op. cit., p. 149. 83. Burstall, op. cit., p. 26. 84. Burstall, op. cit., p. 71. 85. Delamont, op. cit., p. 147. 86. Bertha Ruck, A Story-Teller Tells the Truth (Hutchinson, 1935), p. 115. 87. Vicinus, op. cit., p. 291. 88. Ibid., p. 65. 89. Faithfull, op. cit., p. 6. 90. Ibid., p. 66. 91. Ibid., p. 67. 92. Ibid., p. 67. 93. Vicinus, op. cit., p. 158. 94. Sheila Jeffreys, ‘Spinsterhood and Celibacy’, in The Spinster and Her Enemies: Feminism and Sexuality 1880–1930 (Pandora, 1985), pp. 86–97. 95. Barlow, op. cit., p. 27. 96. Ibid., p. 28. 97. Ibid., p. 85. 98. Ibid., p. 31. 99. Ibid., p. 84. 100. Ibid., pp. 84, 85. 101. Ibid., p. 85. 102. Ibid. p. 85. 103. Partington, op. cit., p. 60; Dyhouse, op. cit., pp. 59–66. 104. Cleeve, op. cit., p. 39. 105. Ibid., p. 202. 106. Ibid., p. 207. 107. Ibid. p. 207. 108. Ibid., p. 198. 109. Ibid., pp. 233, 234. 110. Ibid., p. 233. 111. Ibid., p. 212. 112. Foucault (1995), op. cit., p. 194. 113. Sara Burstall, English High Schools for Girls, Their Aims, Organisation, and Management (Longmans, Green), 1907, p. 58. 114. Gray, op. cit., p. 250. 115. W.B. Yeats, ‘The Lake of Innsfree’, in Margaret Ferguson, Mary Jo Salter, Jon Stallworthy, eds., The Norton Anthology of Poetry (W. W. Norton, 1996), p. 1084, in Cleeve, op. cit., p. 212. 116. Burstall, op. cit., p. 257. 117. Ibid., p. 257. 118. Faithfull, op. cit., p. 280.

214

Notes

119. 120. 121. 122.

Ibid., p. 280. Ibid., p. 284. Ibid., p. 284. Ibid., p. 160.

3

Women Doctors

1. Elizabeth Blackwell (1821–1910) Her family immigrated to the United States, where in 1844 she decided to become a doctor. Medical school refused to enrol her, so she studied privately until 1847 when she gained entrance to the Geneva Medical School in New York State. Awarded MD in 1849 and studied in London at St Bartholomew’s. In 1875 helped to found the London School of Medicine for Women. Biographical Dictionary of Women (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1998, p. 71). 2. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire 1875–1914 (Britain: Abacus, 1999), p. 212. 3. Ibid., p. 212. 4. Carol Dyhouse, ‘Driving Ambitions: Women in Pursuit of a Medical Education, 1890–1939’, Women’s History Review, vol. 7, no. 3, 1998. 5. Carol Dyhouse, ‘Women Students and the London Medical Schools, 1914–39: The Anatomy of Masculine Culture’, Gender History vol. 10, no. 1, April 1998, pp. 110–132. 6. Thomas Neville Bonner, To the Ends of the Earth: Women’s Search for Education in Medicine (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 10. 7. Salmon, E.J., ‘What Girls Read’, The Nineteenth Century, October 1886, pp. 515–529, quoted in Kimberley Reynolds, Girls Only? Gender and Popular Children’s Fiction in Briton, 1880–1910 (Harvester, 1990), p. 93. 8. Elizabeth Bryson, Look Back in Wonder (Dundee: David Winter & Son Ltd, 1967), p. 161. 9. Ibid., p. 194. 10. Bonner, op. cit., p. 128. 11. Ibid., p. 127. 12. Isabel Hutton, CBE, MD, Memories of a Doctor in War and Peace (Heinemann, 1960), p. 39. 13. Ibid., p. 136. 14. Dr. Caroline Matthews, Experiences of a Woman Doctor in Serbia (Mills & Boon, 1916); Dr. Flora Murray, Women as Army Surgeons (Hodder and Stoughton, 1920); Dr. Mary Scharlieb, Reminiscences (William and Norgate, 1924); Dr Ida Mann, The Chase (Australia: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1986); Dr. Octavia Wilberforce, The Autobiography of a Pioneer Woman Doctor ed. Pat Jalland (Cassell Publishers, 1989). In the larger sample of my research the bulk of the doctors use fairytale and childhood fiction. I have just focused on three doctors for clarity. 15. Dyhouse, Driving Ambitions, op. cit., p. 321. 16. Ibid., p. 327. 17. Ibid., pp. 322–324. 18. David Luke, ed. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm: Selected Tales (Penguin, 1982), p. 12.

Notes 215 19. Jack Zipes, Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion (New York: Routledge, 1983), p. 18. 20. Ibid., p. 24. 21. Ibid., p. 24. 22. A.S. Byatt, ‘Introduction’ in Maria Tatar, The Annotated Brothers Grimm (W. W. Norton, 2004). 23. Zipes, op. cit., p. 33. 24. Murray Knowles and Kirsten Malmkjaer, Language and Control in Children’s Literature (London & New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 53. 25. Sally Mitchell, The New Girl: Girls’ Culture in England, 1880–1915 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), pp. 14, 43. 26. Reynolds, op. cit., p. 103. 27. Ibid., p. 103. 28. Mitchell, op. cit., p. 15. 29. Knowles and Malmkjaer, op. cit., p. 83. 30. Ibid., pp. 88, 111. 31. Ibid., pp. 89, 93. 32. Mitchell, op. cit., pp. 112, 119. 33. Ibid., pp. 103–138. 34. Ibid., p. 15. 35. Ibid., p. 22. 36. Bryson, op. cit., p. 162; Hutton, op. cit., p. 39; Mann, op. cit., p. 16; Wilberforce, op. cit., p. 3. 37. Bryson, op. cit., pp. 7–9. 38. Ibid., p. 5. 39. Ibid., p. 5. 40. Ibid., p. 5. 41. Ibid., p. 5. 42. Ibid., p. 44. 43. Bonner, op. cit., p. 10. 44. Bryson, op. cit., p. 54. 45. Ibid., p. 54. 46. Ibid., p. 7. 47. Ibid., p. 19. 48. Ibid., p. 20. 49. Ibid., p. 17. 50. Ibid., p. 15. 51. Ibid., p. 15. 52. Ibid., p. 57. 53. Ibid., p. 26. 54. Ibid., p. 28. 55. Ibid., p. 28. 56. Warner, Marina, From The Beast to the Blonde: on Fairy Tales and Their Tellers (Vintage, 1995), p. xvi. 57. Dr. Gladys Wauchope, The Story of a Woman Physician (Bristol: John Wright & Sons, 1963) p. 16. 58. Ibid., p. 16. 59. Ibid., p. 15. 60. Ibid., p. 13.

216

Notes

61. Ibid., p. 26. 62. Ibid., p. 28. 63. Ibid., p. 28. 64. Ibid., p. 28. 65. Ibid., p. 40. 66. Ibid., p. 40. 67. Ibid., p. 41. 68. Ibid., p. 47. 69. Ibid., p. 48. 70. Ibid., p. 48. 71. Ibid., p. 49. 72. Mitchell, op. cit., p. 112. 73. Wilberforce, op. cit., p. 10. 74. Ibid., p. 10. 75. Ibid., p. 10. 76. Ibid., p. 15. 77. Ibid., p. 20. 78. Harriet Martineau, ‘The Young Lady in Town and Country: Her Health’, Once a Week, 25 February1860, pp. 191–192; in Mitchell, op. cit., p. 58. 79. Wilberforce, op. cit., p. 18. 80. Ibid., p. 18. 81. Ibid., p. 31. 82. Ibid. p. 35. 83. Ibid., p. 32. 84. Ibid., p. 33. 85. Ibid., pp. 28, 29, 36. 86. Ibid., p. 24. 87. Ibid., p. 26. 88. Ibid., p. 26. 89. Ibid., p. 26. 90. Ibid., p. 29. 91. Bryson, op. cit., p. 222. 92. Ibid., p. 190; Wauchope, op. cit., p. 45. 93. Hutton, op. cit., pp. 39, 40. 94. Ibid., p. 71. 95. Dyhouse, Driving Ambitions, op. cit., pp. 329, 330. 96. Warner, op. cit., p. xvi. 97. Zipes, op. cit., pp. 10, 11, 14, 15, 16, 33. 98. M. Halliday, Language as Social Semiotic: The Social Interpretation of Language and Meaning (Edward Arnold 1978), p. 44. 99. Andrea Dworkin, Woman Hating, in Zipes, op. cit., p. 170. 100. Mitchell, op. cit., pp. 103–138; Reynolds, op. cit., pp. 92–110; Knowles and Malmkjaer, pp. 41–80.

4

Nurses and VADs 1. Biographical Dictionary of Women (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books 1998), p. 476.

Notes 217 2. Anne Summers, Angels and Citizens: British Women as Military Nurses 1854–1914 (Routledge & Keegan Paul, 1988), pp. 237–270. 3. Ibid., p. 170. 4. Ibid., p. 194. 5. C.S. Peel, How We Lived Then (John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1929), p. 127. 6. Summers, op. cit., p. 223. 7. Ibid., p. 189. 8. Ibid., p .206. 9. By the end of 1910, 8,000 women, 26,000 by early 1912 and 50,000 on the eve of war. Ibid., p. 253. 10. Ibid., pp. 254–258. 11. Ibid., p. 250. 12. Ibid., p. 250. 13. M.A. St Clair Stobart, Miracles and Adventures: An Autobiography (Rider & Co., 1935), p. 84. 14. See Hugh Popham, F.A.N.Y. The Story of the Women’s Transport Service 1907–84 (Leo Cooper in assoc. with Seder & Warburg, 1984). 15. Summers, op. cit., p. 270. 16. Ibid., p. 269. 17. Ibid., p. 267. 18. Diana Cooper, The Rainbow Comes and Goes (Rupert Hart-Davis, 1958), pp. 117–129. 19. Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady (Virago, 1987), p. 171. 20. May Wedderburn Cannan, Grey Ghosts and Voices (Kineton: The Roundwood Press, 1976), p. 75. 21. J. Steveson, British Society 1914–1945 (Penguin Books, 1990), p. 84. 22. Susan R. Grayzel, ‘The Outward and Visible Sign of Her Patriotism: Women, Uniforms and National Service During the First World War’, British History, vol. 8, no. 2, 1997, pp. 145–164. 23. See Cooper, op. cit., p. 120; Cannan, op. cit., p. 95; May Sinclair, A Journal of Impressions in Belgium (Hutchinson, 1915), p. 20. 24. Dame Katharine Furze, G.B.E., R. R. C., Hearts and Pomegranates (Peter Davies, 1940), p. 332. Commandant in Chief of the VADs and subsequently Director in the Navy (equivalent to Rear-Admiral) and directly involved in the setting-up of the WAAF. 25. Stobart, op. cit., p. 96; Furze, op. cit., p. 291, pp. 364–467. 26. Peel, op. cit., p. 28; Furze, op. cit., p. 291; Sinclair, op. cit., p. 19. 27. Joanna Russ, The Female Male (The Women’s Press, 1985), p. 92. 28. Chris Shilling, The Body and Social Theory (Sage Publications, 1993), p. 191. 29. Michael Wheeler, Heaven, Hell, & the Victorians (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 31. 30. Wheeler, op. cit., p. 30. 31. Florence Farmborough, Nurse at the Russian Front: A Diary 1914–1918 (Constable, 1974), pp. 22–24. 32. Shilling, op. cit., p. 190. 33. Mabel Lethbridge, Fortune Grass (Geoffrey Bles, 1934), pp. 31, 32. 34. Ibid., p. 35. 35. Stobart, op. cit., p. 79. 36. Ibid., p. 362.

218 Notes 37. Ibid., p. 202. 38. Ibid., p. 167. 39. Violetta Thurstan, Field Hospital and Flying Column (G.P. Putman’s Sons, 1915), p. 178. 40. Ibid., p. 24. 41. Mary Borden, The Forbidden Zone (William Heinemann Ltd., 1929), pp. 51, 52. 42. Ibid., p. 52. 43. Ibid., p. 55. 44. Ibid., p. 60. 45. Ibid., p. 60 46. Thurstan, op. cit., p. 24. 47. Ibid., p. 178. 48. Farmborough, op. cit., p. 22. 49. Ibid., p. 42. 50. Stobart, op. cit., p. 320. 51. Farmborough, op. cit., p. 42. 52. Borden, op. cit., p. 55. 53. Bagnold, Edith, Diary with No Dates (Virago in assoc. Heinemann Ltd., 1978; 1st pub. 1918), p. 8. 54. Ibid., p. 59. 55. Ibid., p. 20. 56. Lethbridge, op. cit., p. 35. 57. Baroness, T’Serclaes, Flanders and Other Fields (George G. Harrap & Co., 1964). 58. Furze, op. cit., p. 175. 59. Cooper, op. cit., pp. 149, 150. 60. Farmborough, op. cit., p. 316. 61. Cannan, op. cit., p. 150. 62. Farmborough, op. cit., p. 390. 63. Stobart, op. cit., p. 354. 64. Farmborough, op. cit., p. 360. 65. Ibid., p. 390. 66. Cannan, op. cit., p. 94. 67. Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 182. 68. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume 1 an Introduction (Penguin Books, 1976), p. 27. 69. Stobart, op. cit., p. 340. 70. ‘Not So Quiet in No – Woman’s – Land’, in Miriam Cooke & Angela Woollacotts eds., Gendering War Talk (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton Iniversity Press, 1993) pp. 205–226. 71. Tate, Trudi, Modernism, History and the First World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), p. 83; Tylee, Claire M., The Great War and Women’s Consciousness (London: Macmillan, 1990), pp. 190–202; Higonnet, op. cit., pp. 215–216. 72. Higonnet, op. cit., p. 206. 73. Foucault, op. cit., p. 63.

Notes 219 74. Higonnet, op. cit., p. 206. 75. Foucault, op. cit., p. 64.

5


1. Sophie Fuller, ‘Unearthing a World of Music: Victorian and Edwardian Women Composers’, Women: A Cultural Review, vol. 3, no. 1, 1992, pp. 16–22. 2. Suzanne Raitt, ‘The Singers of Sargent: Mabel Batten, Elsie Swinton, Ethel Smyth’, in Ibid., pp. 23–29. 3. Deborah Cherry, Painting Women: Victorian Women Artists (Routledge, 1993); Germain Greer, The Obstacle Race: The Fortunes of Women Painters and their Work (Book Club Associates,1980); Caroline Fox, Dame Laura Knigt (Oxford: Phaidon, 1988); Sara Maitland, Vesta Tilley (Virago, 1986). 4. Roger Manvell, Ellen Terry: A Biography (Heinemann, 1968); Maitland, ibid. 5. Lena Ashwell, Myself a Player (Michael Joseph, 1936), p. 44; Isadora Duncan, All Sorts of People (Methuen, 1929), p. 27. 6. Julie Holledge, Innocent Flowers, Women in the Edwardian Theatre (Virago, 1981). 7. Ibid., p. 10. 8. Ibid., p. 11. 9. Ellen Terry, Sybil Thorndyke for example, Ibid., p. 18. 10. Cherry, op. cit., p. 1. 11. Ibid., Greer, op. cit. 12. R. Parker and G. Pollock, Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology (Routledge, 1981). 13. Cherry, op. cit., p. 7. 14. Lillah McCarthy, Myself and My Friends (Thornton Butterworth, 1933), pp. 15, 16. 15. Ibid., pp. 14–21. 16. Ibid., p. 14. 17. Ibid., p. 17. 18. Ibid., p. 20. 19. Ibid., p. 20. 20. Ibid., p. 21. 21. Lady de Frece, [Vesta Tilley], Recollections of Vesta Tilley (Hutchinson & Co., 1934), p. 22. 22. Ibid., p. 25. 23. Ibid. p. 25. 24. Ibid., p. 23. 25. Marina Warner, Joan of Arc (Weidenfeld &Nicolson, 1981), p. 156; Maitland, op. cit., p. 55. 26. Mathilde Verne, Vesta Tilley (Virago, 1986). 27. Gladys Storey, All Sorts of People (Methuen, 1929). 28. McCarthy, op. cit., p. 134. 29. Ibid., p. 208. 30. Ibid., p. 44. 31. Laura Knight, Oil Paint and Grease Paint (Ivor Nicholson & Watson Ltd., 1936, p. 40.

220

Notes

32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68.

Duncan, op. cit., p. 30. McCarthy, op. cit., p. 15. Ibid., p. 15. Ibid., p. 16. Verne, op. cit., p. 20. Irene Vanbrugh, To Tell My Story (Hutchinson & Co., 1948), p. 52. Ibid., p. 52. Ibid., p. 50. Ibid., p. 49, 50. Ibid., p. 58. McCarthy, op. cit., p. 66. Ibid., p. 89, 90. Ibid., p. 124. Maude V. White, Friends and Memories (Edward Arnold, 1914), p. 310. McCarthy, op. cit., p. 221. Vanbrugh, op. cit., p. 58. McCarthy, op. cit., p. 232. Ibid., p. 233. Ibid., p. 242. Ibid., p. 240. Ibid., p. 259. Ibid., p. 267. Ibid., p. 15. Liza Lehmann, The Life of Liza Lehmann (T. Fisher Unwin, 1919), p. 41. Ibid., p. 63. Ibid., p. 65. Ibid., p. 70. Ibid., p. 95. Ibid., p. 41. Knight, op. cit., p. 122. Ibid., pp. 1, 2, 48, 103, 129. Ibid., p. 49. Ibid., p. 40. Ibid., p. 41. Canziani, op. cit., p. 167. Ibid., p.167. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punishment: The Birth of the Prison (Vintage Books, 1995, 1st pub. 1977), p. 171. 69. Ibid., p. 176. 70. Ibid., p. 187. 71. Ibid., p. 170.

6

Women Writers

1. Claire M. Tylee’s bibliography provides an excellent listing year by year, of primary sources, and is helpful starting-point for locating forgotten works by women. The Great War and Women’s Consciousness: Images of Militarism and Womanhood in Women’s Writings, 1914–64 (Oxford University Press, 1997). For further detail, Sandra Kemp, Charlotte Mitchell and David

Notes 221

2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

Trotter’s The Oxford Companion to Edwardian Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), provides short biographical information, lists of works and synopsis of their most famous books. 6s. for a single volume as opposed to a first edition in three volumes at 31s. 6d, Edwardian Fiction p. xv. Kemp, Mitchell and Trotter, op. cit., p. xv. Elinor Glyn, Three Weeks (Virago, 1996, 1st pub. 1908). For more examples see Kemp, Mitchell and Trotter, op. cit., p. 267. Ibid., p. 127. Paul John, Fictions in Autobigraphy: Studies in the Art of Self-Invention (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1985), p. 10. Storm Jameson, Journey from the North, vol. 1 (Collins & Harvill Press, 1969), Recorded on the dust jacket. Rosamond Lehmann, The Swan in the Evening (Virago, 1982, 1st pub. 1967), p. 65. Biographical Dictionary of Women (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1998); Kemp, Mitchell and Trotter op. cit. I have placed, romance, sensation, sexual, children’s books crime within the low-brow category and historical romance as middle-brow. Social and political novels and feminist fiction can be either mid or high-brow. Bertha Ruck, A Story-Teller Tells the Truth (Hutchinson, 1935), p. 64. H.M. Swanwick, I Have Been Young (Victor Gollancz, 1935), p. 149. Ibid., p. 162. Ruck, op. cit., p. 65. Baroness Orczy, Links in the Chain of Life (Hutchinson, 1947), p. 91. Jameson, op. cit., 1969, p. 77. Ibid., p. 79. ‘Rita’ Mrs Desmond Humphreys, Recollections of a Literary Life (Andrew Melrose, 1936), pp. 36, 37. Ibid., p. 103. Netta Syrett, The Sheltering Tree (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1939), p. 5. Rosanne (1902) is one such. Syrett published over fifty volumes of fiction in all. Kemp, Mitchell and Trotter, op. cit., p. xiv. Orczy, op. cit., p. 8. Ibid., p. 84. Glyn, op. cit., p. 131. Ibid., p. 86. Ibid., p. 91. Ibid., p. 171. Ibid., p. 172. Ibid., p. 173. Ibid., p. 175 Ibid., p. 100. Ibid., p. 88. In Robyn R. Warhol and Diane Price Herndl, Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), pp. 347–362. Ibid., p. 92. Ibid., p. 93.

222 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80.

Notes Ibid., p. 105. Humphreys, op. cit., p. 37. Ibid., p. 58. Naomi Mitchison, Small Talk (London: Bodley Head, 1973. Uncorrected proof copy), p. 100. Ibid., p. 70. Jameson, op. cit., 1969, p. 91. Ibid., p. 315. Syrett, op. cit., p. 10. Ibid., Preface, no pagination. Orczy, op. cit., p. 111. Ibid., p. 58. Ibid., p. 146. Humphreys, op. cit., p. 38. Glyn, op. cit., p. 88. Ibid., p. 127. Would you like to Sin/with Eleanor Glyn/On a Tiger skin?/ Or would you prefer/To err with her/On some other fur. Recorded in, Glyn, ibid., frontispiece. Glyn, Elinor, Romantic Adventure (Ivor Nicholson and Watson, 1936) p.128. Ibid., p. 89. Ibid., p. 89. Ibid., p. 134. Jameson, op. cit., 1969, p. 282. Ibid., p. 283. Ibid., p. 240. ‘Thrawn’, northern word meaning: Perverse or ill-tempered, or twisted, crooked, bent from the straight. Storm Jameson, None Turn Back (Virago Books, 1984, 1st pub. 1936), p. 249. Jameson (1969), op. cit., p. 240. Jameson (1936), op. cit., p. 250. Jameson (1969), op. cit., p. 291. Eakin, op. cit., p. 10. Kemp, Mitchell & Trotter, op. cit., introduction pp. ix – xix. Malcolm Bradbury, Modernism 1890–1930 (Penguin Books, 1976), p. 70. Humphreys, op. cit., p. 44. Ibid., p. 258. Ibid., p. 218. Ibid., p. 193. Ibid., p. 194. Ibid., p. 194. Ibid., p. 194. Glyn (1908), op. cit., p. 2. Glyn (1936), op. cit., p. 234. Glyn (1908), op. cit., p. 142. Glyn (1936) op. cit., p. 233. Nietzsche made use of the French word ‘ressentiment’ for his notion on rancour as there is no equivalent word in the German language. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. W. Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1968).

Notes 223 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90.

Glyn (1936) op. cit., pp. 131, 132. Ibid., p. 131. Ibid., p. 130. Jameson (1969) op. cit., p. 79. Ibid., dust jacket. Ibid., p. 117. Ibid., p. 118. Ibid., p. 143. Ibid., p. 91. Ibid., p. 95.

7 The Frontispiece Image in Autobiography 1. Linda Haverty Rugg, Picturing Ourselves (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1997), p. 2. 2. B. Kress and G. Hodge, Social Semiotics (Penguin Books, 1988), p. 44. 3. Susan Sontag, A Susan Sontag Reader (Penguin Books, 1982), p. 358. 4. According to Barthes, the anchorage directs the reader to a meaning chosen in advance. It directs ‘not to the totality of the iconic message but only to certain of its signs.’ Anchorage is a control. Roland Barthes, Image Music Text (Fontana, 1977), pp. 38–40. 5. Sontag (1982), op. cit., p. 357. 6. Alan Thomas, The Expanding Eye (Croom Helm, 1978), pp. 7–22. 7. Richard Brilliant, Portraiture (Reaktion Books, 1991), p. 112. 8. Jo Spence and Patricia Holland, Family Snaps: The Meaning of Domestic Photography (Virago, 1991), p. 4. 9. John Tagg, The Burden of Representation (Basingstoke: MacMillan, 1988), p. 8. 10. Ibid., p. 64. 11. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (Vintage, 2000). 12. F. Jack Hurley, Portrait of a Decade: Roy Stryker and the Development of Documentary Photography in the Thirties (Louisiana: Louisiana State Press, 1977), p. vii. 13. Ibid., p. vii. 14. Barthes (2000) op. cit., p. 26. 15. Ibid., p. 27. Of course Barthes abandoned the distinction between the two definitions in ‘Part Two’, p. 60 onwards. 16. Ibid., p. 27. 17. Ibid., p. 51. 18. Ibid., p. 26. 19. Diana Cooper, The Rainbow Comes and Goes (Rupert Hart-Davis, 1958); Katharine West, Inner and Outer Circles (Cohen & West, 1958). 20. West, op. cit., p. 1. 21. Ibid., p. 70. 22. Ibid., p. 170. 23. Susan Sontag, On Photography (Penguin Books, 1977), p. 16. 24. Nancy Price, Into the Hour Glass (Museum Press, 1954). 25. Ibid., p. 134.

224 Notes 26. Ibid., p. 164. 27. Roland Barthes (1977) op. cit., p. 28. 28. Lilian M. Faithfull, You and I (Chatto & Windus, 1928); Francis R. Gray, Gladly, Gladly A Book about Learning and Teaching (Sampson Low, Marston, no date). 29. Barthes (2000), op. cit., p. 26. 30. Wendy Cooper, Hair, Sex, Society, Symbolism (Aldus Books, 1971), p. 65. 31. T.J. Clark, ‘Preliminaries to a possible treatment of Olympia in 1865’, Screen, 1980, 20 (1) 36. 32. Wendy Cooper, ‘Hair and Female Sexuality’, ibid., pp. 65–89. 33. Faithfull, op. cit., p. 283. 34. Ibid., p. 282. 35. Ibid., p. 284. 36. Brilliant, op. cit., p. 112. 37. Spence and Holland, op. cit., p. 4. 38. Barthes (2000), op. cit., p. 13. 39. Gillian Rose, Visual Methodologies (Sage Publications, 2001), p. 24. 40. Sontag (1977), op. cit., p. 38. 41. Ibid., p. 37. 42. Stella Bruzzi, Undressing Cinema: Clothing and Identity in the Movies (Routledge, 1997); Sue Harper, Women in British Cinema: Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know (Continuum, 2000); Sara Street, British National Cinema (Routledge, 1997). 43. Tagg, op. cit., p. 21. 44. Joan Riviere, ‘Womanliness as Masquerade’ in Victor Burgin, James Donald and Cora Kaplan eds. Formations of Fantasy (London & New York: Methuen), pp. 35–61; René Konig, The Restless Image: A Sociology of Fashion (George Allen & Unwin, 1973), p. 19. 45. Tagg, op. cit., p. 37. 46. Barthes (2000), op. cit., p. 28. 47. Rugg, op. cit., p. 9. 48. Barthes (2000), op. cit., p. 32. 49. Ibid., p. 32.

8 Prefaces, Prologues, Forewords and Introductions 1. From the New Oxford English Dictionary, 1984–1989 (Clarendon Press, 1989), 2nd edition: ‘Preface’, to make introductory or prefatory remarks, 1619; an introduction to a book stating its subject, scope, etc, 1989. ‘Prologue’, preliminary speech, esp. introducing a play, 1989. ‘Foreword’, introductory remarks at the beginning of a book, often by a person other than the author; ‘Introduction’, an explanatory section at the beginning of a book etc. 1989. 2. John Lavey, The Life of a Painter (Cassell & Co., 1940), p. 9. 3. Guy Kendall, A Headmaster Reflects (William Hodge, 1937), p. xiii. 4. Adrian Brunel, Nice Work: The Story of Thirty Years in British Film Production (Forbes Robertson, 1949), p. none. 5. Frank Fletcher, After Many Days: A Schoolmaster’s Memories (Robert Hale, 1937 ), p. vii. 6. Lord Riddell, More Pages from My Diary (Country Life, 1934), p. none.

Notes 225 7. Lilian M. Faithfull, In the House of My Pilgrimage (Chatto & Windus, 1925), p. 11. 8. Dr Mary Scharlieb, Reminiscences Williams and Norgate, 1924), pp. vii–viii. 9. Carol Dyhouse, Feminism and the Family in England 1880–1939 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989); Eric Hobsbawm, ‘The New Woman’ in The Age of Empire 1875–1914 (Britain: Abacus, 1994), pp. 192–218. 10. Violetta Thurstan, The Hounds of War Unleashed (St. Ives: United Writers Publications Cornwall, 1978), p. 8. 11. Dr Isabel Hutton, Memories of a Doctor in War & Peace (Heinemann, 1960); Margot Asquith, The Autobiography of Margot Asquith (Thornton Butterworth, 1935), p. none. 12. Estella Canziani, Round About Three Palace Green (Meuthuen, 1939), p.vii. 13. May Wedderburn Cannan, Grey Ghosts and Voices (Kineton: The Roundwood Press, 1976), p. 3. 14. ‘Rita’, Mrs Desmond Humphreys, Recollections of a Literary Life (Andrew Melrose, 1936), p. 3. 15. Lillah McCarthy, Myself and My Friend (Thornton Butterworth, 1933), p. 9. 16. Gladys White, Friends and Memories (Edward Arnold, 1914), p. vii. 17. Canziani, op. cit., p. vii. 18. Nancy Price, Into the Hour Glass (Museum Press, 1954), p. 5. 19. Netta Syrett, The Sheltering Tree (Geoffrey Bles, 1939), p. 5. 20. May Sinclair, A Journal of Impressions in Belgium (Hutchinson, 1915), p. ix. 21. M.A. St Clair Stobart, Miracles and Adventures (Rider, 1935), p. 10. 22. Baroness de T’Serclaes, Flanders and Other Fields (George G. Harrap, 1964), p. 17. 23. Marion Cleeve, Fire Kindleth Fire: The Professional Autobiography of Marion Cleeve (Blackie & Son, 1930), p. v. 24. Dr Elizabeth Bryson, Look Back in Wonder (Dundee: David Winter & Son, 1966), p. iii. 25. Ibid., p. iii. 26. Dame Katherine Furze, Hearts and Pomegranate (Peter Davies,1940), p. vi. 27. Ibid., p. v. 28. Sara Burstall, Retrospect & Prospect: Sixty Years of Women’s Education (Longmans, Green, 1933). 29. Ibid., p. xiii. 30. Sir John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti. 31. Storm Jameson, Journey from the North, vol. 1 (Collins & Harvill 1969), p. 16. 32. H.M. Swanwick, I Have Been Young (Victor Gollancz, 1935), p. 15. 33. Syrett, op. cit., p. 6. 34. Burstall, op. cit., p. xiv. 35. Swanwick, op. cit., p. 15. 36. Elinor Glyn, Romantic Adventure (Ivor Nicholson and Watson, 1936), pp. 1–3. 37. Jameson, op. cit., p. 16. 38. Price, op. cit., p. 6. 39. Mary Borden, The Forbidden Zone (William Heinemann, 1929), p. none. 40. Furze, op. cit., p. vi. 41. Jameson, op. cit., p. 16.

226

Notes

42. Ibid., p. 16. 43. Isadora Duncan, My Life (Victor Gollancz, 1928), p. 9. 44. Roland Barthes, A Love’s Discourse: Fragments (Jonathan Cape, 1979); and Camera Lucida (Vintage Books, 2000, 1st pub., 1980). 45. Jacques Derrida, ‘That Dangerous supplement’ pp. 141–164, in Of Grammatology (The John Hopkins University Press, 1976), p. 145. 46. Oxford English Dictionary, 1996. 47. Derrida, op. cit., p. x. 48. Ibid., p. xiii. 49. Hegel, ‘The Structure of Philosophic Language According to the “Preface” to Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Mind’, trans. by Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato, eds. In The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man: the Structuralist Controversy (Baltimore, 1970), cited in Derrida, op. cit., p. x. 50. Roy Porter, Rewriting the Self: Histories from the Renaissance to the Present (Routledge, 1997), p. 23.

9

Silences

1. Susan Sontag, A Susan Sontag Reader (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983), p. 187. 2. Wilhelm Dilthey in H. P. Rickman, ed. Pattern and Meaning in History (Harper & Row, 1961); James Olney, Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical (Princeton: Princeston University Press, 1980); Mary Jean Corbett, Representing Femininity, Middle Class Subjectivity in Victorian and Edwardian Women’s Autobiographies (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Simon Denlith, ‘The Uses of Autobiography’, Literature and History Journal, vol. 14, no. 1, 1988; Regenia Gagnier, Subjectivities: A History of Self-Representation in Britain, 1832–1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Mary Evans, Missing Persons: The Impossibility of Auto/biography (Routledge, 1999); Laura Marcus, Autobiographical Discourses (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994); Julia Swindells, The Uses of Autobiography (Taylor & Francis 1995). 3. Dale Spender, Man Made Language (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987). 4. Tillie Olsen, Silences (New York: Delacorte Press, 1978), p. 6. 5. Roland Barthes, Image Music Text (Fontana Press, 1977); Patricia Ondek Laurence, The Reading of Silence: Virginia Woolf in the English Tradition (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993); Pierr Macherey, A Theory of Literary Production (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978); Budick & Iser, Languages of the Unsayable (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989). 6. Laurence, op. cit., p. 57. 7. Macherey, op. cit., pp. 82–89. 8. John Cage, Silences (Middleton: Wesleyan University Press, 1968), p. 7. 9. Sontag, op. cit., pp. 181–204. 10. Ibid., p. 187. 11. Dame Laura Knight, Oil Paint and Grease Paint (Ivor Nicholson & Watson), p. 122. 12. Marion Cleeve, Fire Kindleth Fire: The Professional Autobiography of Marion Cleeve (London & Glasgow: Blackie & Son, 1930); Frances R. Gray, Gladly, Gladly a Book about Learning and Teaching (Sampson Low, Marston, no date).

Notes 227 13. Lilian M. Faithfull, In the House of My Pilgrimage (Chatto & Windus, 1925), p. 265. 14. Amy Barlow, Seventh Child the Autobiography of a Schoolmistress (Gerald Duckworth, 1969), p. 90. 15. Barlow, op. cit., p. 95. 16. Ibid., pp. 83, 84, 85. 17. Dr Gladys Wauchope, The Story of a Woman Physician (Bristol: John Wright & Sons, 1963), p. 46. 18. Octavia Wilberforce, The Autobiography of a Pioneer Woman Doctor (Cassell Publishers, 1989), p. 64. 19. Mathilde Verne, Chords of Remembrance (Hutchinson, 1936), p. 32. 20. Sigmund Freud, An Autobiographical Study (Hogarth Press, 1936). 21. Chris Shilling, The Body and Social Theory (Sage Publications, 1993), p. 188. 22. Ibid., p. 192. 23. Ibid., p. 179. 24. Vieda Skultan, ‘Silence and the Shortcomings of Narrative,’ Auto/Biography, IX (1 and 2) 2001, pp. 3–10, p. 5. 25. Macherey, op. cit., p. 87. 26. Ibid., p. 85. 27. Ibid., p. 87. 28. Bertha Ruck, A Story-Teller Tells the Truth (Hutchinson, 1935), p. 93. 29. Lillah McCarthy, Myself and My Friends (Thornton Butterworth, 1933), p. 66. 30. Ibid., p. 89. 31. Ibid., p. 233. 32. Ibid., p. 124. 33. Ibid., p. 151. 34. May Wedderburn-Cannan, Grey Ghosts and Voice (Kineton: The Roundwood Press, 1976), p. 28. 35. Iser, Wolfgang, Prospecting from Reader Response to Literary Anthropology (Baltimore & London: John Hopkins University Press, 1989), in Skultan, op. cit., p. 5. 36. Liza Lehmann, The Life of Liza Lehmann (T. Fisher Unwin, Ltd. 1919), pp. 110, 161. 37. McCarthy, op. cit., p. 130. 38. Ibid., p. 130. 39. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume 1 An Introduction (Penguin Books, 1976), p. 27. 40. M.A. St. Clair Stobart, Miracles and Adventures (Rider, 1935), p. 86. 41. Ibid., p. 82. 42. Ibid., p. 88. 43. Cannan, op. cit., pp. 48, 55, 65. 44. Ibid., p. 120. 45. Ibid., p. 82. 46. Ibid., p. 86. 47. Ibid., p. 140. 48. Ibid., p. 140. 49. Ibid., p. 144. 50. Lehmann, op. cit., p. 94.

228 Notes 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69.

Ibid., p. 207. Ibid., p. 211. Ibid., p. 211. Ibid., p. 212. Ibid., p. 211. Ibid., pp. 213, 224. Sontag, op. cit., p. 189. Humphreys, Mrs. Desmond “Rita”, Recollections of a Literary Life (London: Andrew Melroe, 1936) p. 58. Ibid., p. 37. Sontag, op. cit., p. 193, 194. Lehmann, op. cit., p. 213. Ibid., p. 212. Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy (J.M. Dent & Sons, 1991, 1st pub. 1760), p. 347. Macherey, op. cit., p. 87. Roland Barthes, Mythologies (Vintage, 1993), pp. 109–159. Macherey , op. cit., p. 82. Ibid., p. 85. Robert E Lougy, Insupportable Absence and the Writing Desire (2004). On line Internet Retrieved 25 October 2005, p. 18. Macherey, op. cit., p. 87.

10 Self and Identity 1. Shari Benstock, ed. The Private Self: Theory and Practice of Women’s Autobiographical Writings (Routledge, 1988); Sara Delmont Knowledgeable Women (Routledge, 1989); Laura Marcus, Autobiographical Discourses (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994); Liz Stanley, The Auto/ biographical I (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992). 2. Regenia Gagnier, Subjectivities: A History of Self-Representation in Britain, 1832–1920 (New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). 3. Mary Jane Corbett, Representing Femininity, Middle Class Subjectivity in Victorian and Edwardian Women’s Autobiographies (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). 4. William Lamont, Historical Controversies and Historians (University College London Press, 1998). 5. Malcolm Chase, ‘Autobiography and the Understanding of Self: the Case of Allen Davenport’, in Martin Hewitt ed., Representing Victorian Lives (Leeds centre for Victorian Studies 1999), p. 19. 6. Sara Burstall, Retrospect & Prospect: Sixty Years of Women’s Education (Longmans, Green, 1933), p. 50. 7. Patricia W. Romero, Sylvia Pankhurst: Portrait of a Radical (Yale University Press, 1987). 8. Corbett, op. cit., p. 178. 9. Wilhelm Dilthey, Pattern and Meaning in History (Harper & Row, 1961), p. 214.

Notes 229 10. John Tosh, The Pursuit of History (3rd edition) (Harlow: Pearson Education, 2000), p. 190. 11. Ibid., p. 213. 12. Lamont, op. cit., p. 190. 13. Ibid., p. 194. 14. Lucien Febvre: A New Kind of History from the Writings of Febvre, Peter Burke ed. (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973). 15. The vividness of the memory suggests the photographic ‘flashbulb’ metaphor. See following chapter for full analysis. 16. Theodore Adorno, ‘Subject and Object’, in Lamont, op. cit., p. 402. 17. Jerome Bruner, ‘Life as Narrative’, Social Research, vol. 54, p. 31. 18. David Rubin, Remembering Our Past: Studies in Autobiographical Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 1. 19. Netta Syrett, The Sheltering Tree (Geoffrey Bles, 1939), Preface. 20. René Konig, The Restless Image: A Sociology of Fashion (George Allen & Unwin, 1973). 21. Ledger, Sally, The New Woman, Fiction and Feminism at the fin de siècle (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997) p. 1. 22. Ibid., p. 1. 23. Anthony Cascardi, The Subject of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Roy Porter, Rewriting the Self: Histories from the Renaissance to the Present (Routledge, 1997). 24. Roger Smith in Porter, op. cit., p. 56. 25. Carolyn D. Williams, ‘Another Self in the Case: Gender, Marriage and the Individual in Augustan Literature’, in Porter, op. cit., pp. 97–118 (p. 98). 26. Enlightenment thinkers such as Addison, Mandeville and Fielding, see E.J. Hundert, ‘The European Enlightenment and the History of the Self’ pp. 72–83, in Porter, op. cit. 27. Ibid., p. 80. 28. Wordsworth believed that communing with nature was the way to get back in touch with the ‘self’. 29. Anthony Elliot, Concepts of the Self (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003), p. 9. 30. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 34. 31. Elliot, op. cit., p. 6. 32. Taylor, op. cit., p. 34. 33. A random selection of dates shows the following coverage, under various titles, that women received: 20 Feb. 1906, ‘Women’s Suffrage’; 3 March 1906, ‘Women’s Suffrage Movement’; 10 and 12 March 1906, ‘Women’s Demonstrations’; 19, 23, 25, 26, 29 31 October 1906, ‘Suffrage’; 5 November 1906, ‘Suffrage Demonstration in Trafalgar Square’; 1 November1906, ‘Deputation to Mr J. Morley’; 7 November 1906’, ‘Suffragettes Imprisoned’; 10 March 1908, ‘Women’s Suffrage: Economic Aspect’; 18 January 1908, ‘Suffrage and the Cabinet’; January – March 1910, contained suffrage articles on each day. Once war was declared and suffrage demands suspended, a more inclusive journalism takes over. January to March 1915, for example, ‘Women Doctors’, ‘Women for Farm Work’, ‘Women Gardeners’, ‘Women and the Law’, ‘Women and Medicine’, ‘Women Musicians’, ‘New Professions

230 Notes

34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62.

for Women’, ‘Women Tram Conductors’, ‘Women and War Work’, ‘Women, Dress and War’, etc. ‘A Woman Who Writes For Her Bread’, The Times, 16 July 1907. Ethel Raglan, Memories of Three Reigns (Eveleigh Nash & Grayson, 1928), p. 233. Ibid., p. 21. The Guardian, ‘From the Archives’ 3 July 2004. Raglan, op. cit., p. 232. This replicates Cooper’s idiosyncratic spacing. Diana Cooper, The Rainbow Comes and Goes (Rupert Hart-Davis, 1958), p. 82. Raglan, op. cit., p. 238. Lilian M. Faithfull, In the House of My Pilgrimage (Chatto & Windus, 1925), p. 9. Bertha Ruck, A Story-Teller Tells the Truth (Hutchinson, 1935), p. 80. Ibid., p. 80. Baroness de T’Serclaes, Flanders and Other Fields (George G. Harrap, 1964), p. 34. Sara Burstall, English High School for Girls: Their Aims, Organisation, and Management (Longmans, Green, 1907), p. 15. Dr Gladys Wauchope, The Story of a Woman Physician (Bristol: John Wright & Sons, 1963), p. 15. Dr Mary Scharlieb, Reminiscences (Williams and Norgate, 1924), p. 77. Faithfull, op. cit., p. 11. Ibid., p. 59. Ibid., p. 8. Marion Cleeve, Fire Kindleth Fire: The Professional Autobiography of Marion Cleeve (London& Glasgow: Blackie & Son, 1930), p. 83. ‘Rita’ Humphreys, Recollections of a Literary Life (Andrew Melrose, 1936), p. 100. Ibid., p. 218. Ibid., p. 258. Frances Gray, Gladly, Gladly: a Book about Learning and Teaching (Sampson Low, Marston, no date), p. 226. Dr Elizabeth Bryson, Look Back in Wonder (Dundee: David Winter & Son, 1966), p. 126. Ibid., p. 189. Lillah McCarthy, Myself and My Friends (Thornton Butterworth, 1933), p. 190. Ibid., p. 174. Ibid., p. 174. Ibid., p. 174. Arabella, Kenealy, ‘How Women Doctors are Made’, in The Ludgate, 1897, IV May, pp. 29–35. Also, Scharlieb, op. cit., p. 51, Wauchope, op. cit.,

p.45, headmistresses, Faithfull, op. cit., p. 178, Burstall, op. cit., p. 250, Cleeve, op. cit., p. 178 63. Dr Isabel Hutton, Memories of a Doctor in War & Peace (Heinemann, 1960), p. 18. 64. Ibid., p. 18. 65. Ibid., pp. 100–101.

Notes 231 66. Sir Almroth Wright, Letter to the Editor of the Times on Militant Suffragettes, (1912), in Dale Spender, ed., The Education Papers: Women’s Quest for Equality in Britain, 1850–1912 (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987). 67. Faithfull, op. cit., p. 101. 68. Ibid., p. 102. 69. Ibid., p. 148. 70. Peter Corrigan, ‘Dressing in Imaginary Communities: Clothing, Gender and the Body in Utopian Texts from Thomas Moore to Feminist Scifi’ in Body and Society, vol. 2, no. 3 September 1996, pp. 89–106. 71. Cleeve, op. cit., p. 82. 72. Ibid., p. 82. 73. Ibid., p. 15. 74. Ibid., p. 17. 75. Roland Barthes, The Fashion System (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983), 1st pub., 1967, p. 38. 76. Ibid., p. 126. 77. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punishment: The Birth of the Prison (Vintage Books, 1995), 1st pub. 1977. 78. Camilla Stivers, ‘Reflections of the Role of Personal Narrative in Social Science’, Signs, 18, 1993, pp. 408–425. 79. Philippe Lejeune, On Autobiography (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), p. 171.

11

Memory and Accuracy

1. David C. Rubin, Remembering Our Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1995); William F. Brewer, ‘What is Recollective Memory?’ in Rubin op. cit.; Daniel L. Schacter, Searching for Memory: the Brain, the Mind, and the Past (New York: Basic Books,1996); David B. Pillemer, Momentous Events, Vivid Memories (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). 2. Rubin, op. cit., p. 2. 3. Ibid., p. 2. 4. Ibid., p. 3. 5. Ibid., p. 5. 6. Veridical = truthful; See Pillemer, op. cit., p. 52 and Rubin, op. cit., p. 26. 7. Virginia Woolf, Reminiscences, 1907; Virginia Woolf, A Sketch of the Past 1939– 1940, in Moments of Being (St. Albans: Triad/Panther Books, 1978); Storm Jameson, No Time Like the Present (Virago, 1984), 1st pub. 1936; Storm Jameson, Journey from the North vol. 1 (Virago, 1984), 1st. pub. 1969; Violetta Thurstan, Field Flying Hospital (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1915); Violetta Thurstan, The Hound of War Unleashed (St. Ives: United Writers Publications Cornwall, 1978). 8. M. Freeman, ‘Rethinking the Fictive, Reclaiming the Real: Autobiography, Narrative Time, and the Burden of Truth’, in Gary D. Fireman, Ted E. McVay Jr, Owen J. Flanagan, eds., Narrative and Consciousness: Literature, Psychology, and the Brain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 115–128, p. 116.

232 Notes 9. Rubin, Memory in Oral Traditions (New York: Oxford University Press Inc 1998) in Schacter, op. cit., p. 15. 10. Malcolm Chase, ‘Autobiography and the Understanding of the Self: the Case of Allen Davenport’. In Martin Hewitt, Ed. Representing Victorian Lives: Leeds Working Papers in Victorian Studies Volume 2 (University of Leeds, 1999), pp. 14–26, p. 19. 11. Jerome Bruner, Carol Feldman, ‘Group Narrative as a Cultural Context of Autobiography’, in Rubin, op. cit., pp. 291–317. 12. Rubin, op. cit., p. 2. 13. Estelle C. Jelinek, Women’s Autobiography: Essays in Criticism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), p. 17. 14. Virginia Woolf, The Collected Essays Vol. IV (The Hogarth Press, 1967), p. 208. 15. Woolf, ‘A Sketch’, 1907 (1978 ed.) op. cit., p. 75. 16. Lilian M. Faithfull, You and I (Chatto & Windus, 1928), p. 147. 17. Naomi Mitchison, Small Talk (Bodley Head. Uncorrected proof copy. 1973), p. 26. 18. Faithfull, op. cit., p. 147. 19. Sven-Ake Christianson and Martin A. Safer, ‘Emotional events and Emotions in Autobiographical Memories’, in Rubin, op. cit., pp. 218–243, p. 222. 20. Mitchison, op. cit., p. 25. 21. Craig R. Barclay, ‘Autobiographical Remembering: Narrative Constraints on Objectified Selves’, in Rubin, op. cit., pp. 94–128, p. 100. 22. Diana Cooper, The Rainbow Comes and Goes (Rupert Hart-Davis,1958); Florence Farmborough, Nurse at the Russian Front (Constable, 1974); Dame Katharine Furze, Hearts and Pomegranate (Peter Davies,1940); Freya Stark, Traveller’s Prelude (John Murray, 1950); Octavia Wilberforce, The Autobiography of a Pioneer Woman Doctor (Cassell, 1989). 23. Mrs. Desmond ‘Rita’ Humphreys, Recollections of a Literary Life (Andrew Melrose, 1936) p. 181. 24. Isadora Duncan, My Life (Gollancz, 1928). P. 339. 25. Steen F. Larsen, Charles P. Thompson, and Tia Hansen. ‘Time in Autobiographical Memory’, in Rubin op. cit., p. 130. 26. Ibid., p. 130. 27. Rubin, op. cit., p. 3. 28. Ibid., p. 3. 29. Pillemer, op. cit., p. 53. 30. Dr. Caroline Matthews, Experiences of a Woman Doctor in Serbia (Mills & Boon, 1916), p. 31. 31. Pillemer, op. cit., p. 53. 32. Ibid., p. 54. 33. Ibid., p. 53 34. William F. Brewer, ‘What is Recollective Memory?’ in Rubin, op. cit., p. 39. 35. Elizabeth Bryson, Look Back in Wonder (Dundee: David Winter & Son, 1939), p. 27. 36. Pillemer, op. cit., p. 273. 37. Brewer, op. cit., p. 39.

Notes 233 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68.

Pillemer, op. cit., p. 35. Ibid., pp. 58, 61. Weaver, in Rubin, op. cit., p. 40. Wilhelm Rontgen, a German physicist, 1st Noble Prize for Physics 1901. Louise Jermy, The Memoirs of a Working Woman (Norwich: Goose & Son, 1934), p. 83. Brewer, op. cit., p. 42. Neisser & Harsch’s 1992 study of Challenger explosion, they collected data within 24 hours of the ‘flashbulb’ event. Larsen, Thompson and Hansen, op. cit., p. 131. Thurstan (1915), op. cit., p. 177. Thurstan (1978) p. 8. Pillemer, op. cit., p. 59. Veronica Hudd, in a telephone conversation with me, called her a ‘heller’ and described her as a ‘small person – big ideas.’ At the age of ninety Thurstan took a group of 40 Catholic friends to Hungary. ‘She found them “disappointing.” They were no fun. They only wanted to visit and do conventional things.’ Thurstan (1915), op. cit., pp. 84–86, 110. Thurstan (1978), op. cit., pp. 25, 26, 41. Thurstan (1915), op. cit., p. 178. Ibid., p. 178. Ibid., p. 11. Muriel Somerfield, Ann Bellingham, Violetta Thurstan: A Celebration (Penzance: Jamieson Library, 1993), p. 17. Freeman, op. cit., p. 123. Thurstan (1915), op. cit., p. 24. Thurstan (1978), op. cit., p. 14. Storm Jameson, No Time Like the Present (Cassell, 1933), p. 39. London Gazette 30 June 1915. Storm Jameson, Journey From the North, Vol.1 (Collins & Harvill Press, 1978), pp. 99–103. Woolf (1978), p. 75. Jameson (1933), p. 40. Lawrence Langer in Fireman, op. cit., ‘The Pursuit of Death in Holocaust Narrative’ pp. 149–166. Barclay, in Rubin, op. cit., p. 102. Weaver, in Rubin, op. cit., p. 41. Schacter, op. cit., p. 308. Elizabeth Loftus, et al. ‘Who Remembers What?: Gender Differences in Memory’, Michigan Quarterly Review, pp. 64–77, Winter 1987. Schacter, op. cit., p. 283.

12 Conclusion 1. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1976), p. xiii. 2. Ibid., p. 145.

234 Notes 3. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction (Penguin, 1990), 1st pub. 1976. 4. Craig Barclay, ‘Autobiographical Remembering: Narrative Constraints on Objectified Selves’. In David Rubin ed., Remembering Our Pasts: Studies in Autobiographical Memory (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), pp. 94–123. 5. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: an analysis of concepts of pollution and taboo (Routledge, 2000), 1st pub. 1966, pp. 115–129. 6. Basil Bernstein, Class, Codes and Control: Volume 1, Theoretical Studies towards a Sociology of Language (Routledge & Keagan Paul, 1971). 7. Gerard Genette, ‘Introduction to the Paratext’, New Literary History, vol. 22, no. 2, Spring, 1991, p. 262. 8. Simon Schama, Dead Certainties: Unwarranted Speculations (Penguin, 1998).

Index Notes: Entries in this index are arranged letter-by-letter order. Image references are shown in bold print. actors, see artists and practitioners Aesthetic Movement, 13 ambition, 22, 43, 44–5, 47, 49, 52, 74, 75, 77–8 Annales School, 5, 12, 163–5, see also Wilhelm Dithey artists and practitioners, 12, 70–85, 200 career acceptability, 71, 72 childhood, 43, 44, 71, 72–6, 84 children, 80 critical acclaim, 72 death, 78, 82–3 family, influence; relationships, 72–7 femininity, 75 marriage, 71, 77, 79–80, 82 narrative style, 75, 78, 79, 81, 82–3, 84 prefaces, 133 private life/public careers, 70, 71, 72, 78–9, 80–1, 83, 84–5 see also boundaries; private/public spheres; individual names Ashwell, Lena (actress), 71, 75, 76 Association of Headmistresses, 19 autobiographical canon, 5, 7 autobiography accuracy, 101, 186; scientific research, 181, 186 censure of, 100 consonance in, 199, 201, 204 critical acclaim, 102–3 critical approaches 3–10 critical reactions, 98–100 criticism in 1960s, ’70s, ’80s, ’90s, 6–7, 8 etymology, 4 as fiction or history debate, 2, 8–9, 12, 129, 182–3 historical usefulness, 12, 162, 181, 198

history of, 4–10 image, 8, 126, 129 male, 8 polemic style, 98–100 social commentary, 97–100 see also frontispiece images; memory; methodology; theoretical approaches Bagnold, Enid (VAD), narrative style, 65, 68 Barclay, Craig, R. (psychologist), 185–6, 195 Barthes, Roland, 12, 108, 110–11, 116, 117, 121, 122, 126, 140, 144, 160, 178–9 Barton, Amy (headmistress), 19, 25, 31–2, 146–7 Benthamite Panopticon, 27 birth control, 14–15, 21 Borden, Mary (Nurse), 60–3 boundaries, 70, 78–9, 80–1, 83, 84–5, 204 Brewer, William, F. (psychologist), 187, 188, 196 Brown, R. (psychologist), flashbulb memory, 187–9 Bruner, Jerome (psychology practitioner), 183 Bryson, Elizabeth (Dr), 38, 41–6, 51, 135, 173–4, 187 bullying, 47, 199, see also discrimination bursaries, 45–6 Burstall, Sara (headmistress), 20, 22–3, 30, 34–5, 135–6, 163, 171 Cage, John (writer), on silences, 144, 161, 226

235

236

Index

Cannan-Wedderburn, May (VAD), 56, 66, 133, 154–6 Canziani, Estella (painter), 82–3 prefaces, 133, 134 careers, 14, 19, 20, 21–22–23, 29–30, 31, 37, 48, 50, 71–2, 88–90, see also individual professions celibacy, 17, 22, 29, 30 childhood, 39, 71, 72–6, 84 children, 80 Christianson, Sven-Ake (psychologist), 185 Cixous, Hélène (philosopher), 88, 90, 91, 103, 143 Cleeve, Marion,(headmistress), 26, 28, 33–5, 134, 177–8 close friendships, see special friendships composers, see artists and practitioners consciousness, 166–7, 180, see also self-consciousness contraception, see birth control Cooper, Diana (VAD), 56, 65–6, 170 critical themes, 10–11, see also individual professions cultural context, 12–13 curriculum, see Headmistresses dancers, see artists and practitioners death, 35, 57, 58–9, 67, 69, 78, 82–3, 91, 92–5, 103, 147–9, 150, 156–8, 167, 193–5 Derrida, Jacques prefaces, 140 ‘self’, 167, 198, 201–2 Descartes, René, 166 destiny, 22, 23, 25, 45 diaries, use of, 4, 139, 185–6, 196 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 5, see also Annales School discipline, see Foucault discourse, 11, see also narrative; style discrimination, 37–8, 45, 47, 171, see also bullying doctors, 11, 14, 37–53, 199 bullying, 47 childhood memories, 39 close friendships, 51

death, 149 discrimination, 45 education, 39 fashion, hair, dress, 51–2 feminine/unfeminine, 37, 38, 42, 199 genre-specific conventions and influences, 39–42 history of, 37–8, 41–5 male doctors fear, 37–8 marriage, 50–1 medical training 37–8, 45–7, 50 mythical heroines, 39 prefaces, 132, 135, 136, 137–8 style, 38–9, 45, 135, 136 see also narrative; style; under individual names documents, 194, see also letters; newspapers; reviews Douglas, Mary (anthropologist), 204 dress, see fashion, hair and dress Duncan, Isadora (dancer), 71, 75, 76, 140, 186 education, 13, 18, 39 as harmful, 176 need for, 20 see also schools; universities Edwardian novelists, 86–7 Ellis, Havelock (sexologist), 15, see also birth control; Marie Stopes emancipation, see suffrage fairytale/folktale, see style Faithfull, Lilian (Headmistress), 19, 20, 22–3, 25, 27, 31, 34–5, 120, 120–2, 123–4, 127, 132, 146–7, 170, 171–2, 177–8, 183–5 family, 72–7 Farmborough, Florence (Nurse), style, 58, 63–4, 66–7 fashion, hair, dress, 14, 51–2, 56–7, 98, 111, 113, 117, 121–2, 123, 165, 173–9 fathers influence and relationships, 75–7, see also patriarchy Feldman, Carol (psychologist), 184

Index feminine, 45, 51–2, 98, 127–8 boundaries of, 75 definition of, 37, 38, 67–8 myths of, 45 unfeminine, 38, 42, 48, 199 virtues, 22 fiction, 86, see also Edwardian novelists fin de siècle, 13, 165, see also Edwardian novelists First World War, 3, 4, 5, 14, 37, 38, 94, see also nurses; chpts. on memory forewards, see prefaces form and content disunity, 60–3 Foucault, Michel, 17, 167 disciplinary power, 18, 26, 33–4 hierarchical observation, 26, 27, 28–9, 32, 35, 83–4 institutionalisation, 17, 26, 27, 83 normalising judgement, 26–7, 35–6 power of dress, 189 silences, 67, 69, 144, 202 see also headmistresses; silences Freeman, Mark (historian), autobiography as fiction, 182–3, 192 Freud, Sigmund (psychiatrist), 15 sexology, 31 silence, 148–9, 167 frontispiece images, 12, 107–29, 201 amateur/family album, 11, 116–7, 124–5, 126, 128 as child, 111–4 concealment/masking/mythmaking, 114, 116, 122–4, 126, 128, 129 control, 201 portrait, 125 portrait conventions, 1113, 26 revealing, 126; selection of images, 25 signification, 111–13 studio portraits, 111–13, 114, 116, 117, 121, 122–4, 126–7, 128 ‘truth’ 117, 126, 129 unreliability of, 3, 8–9, 111–24, 128–9 see also images; photographs; Roland Barthes; visual codes

237

Furze, Dame Katharine (VAD), 57, 135 Fussell, Paul (historian), 5 General Practitioners (GPs) see doctors Genette, Gerard (theorist), 204–5 Girls Public Day School Trust, 21, 26 Glyn, Elinor (low-brow novelist) 88, 89–90, 91, 94–5, 96, 97, 99–100, 124–5, 125, 127, 139 governesses, 18 Governesses Benevolent Institution, 18, 33 Gray, Francis (Headmistress), 24, 25, 30, 43, 117, 119, 119–21, 127, 172–3, see also narrative hair see fashion, hair and dress headmistresses, 14, 22–52, 23 ambition, 30 celibacy, 22, 30 curriculum, 21 destiny, divine calling, fate, service, 22–3, 199 illness, 28–9 institutionalisation, 25–9 marriage, 21–2, 29, 30, 31–3 maternal instincts, 29–30 narrative style, 146–7 pay and conditions, 19 prefaces, 132, 135–6, 137–8 religion, 17 restrictions, 18 retirement, 17, 20, 34–6 spinsterhood, 17, 29, 31, 79 teaching, 17, 26–7 unfeminine, 22–3, 29 vocation/service, 25, 199 see also careers; marriage; individual names Hegel, on prefaces, 140 histoire de mentalités, 12, 163, 165, 189, 191, 196, 198, 202–3, 205, see also Annales School history cultural, 13, 181 social, 13 history of consciousness see histoire de mentalités

238 Index Hobsbawm, Eric, on emancipation, 13–14, see also suffrage opposition to women doctors, 37 homosexuality, see special friendships Hume, David (philosopher), 167 Humphreys, ‘Rita’ (low-brow novelist), 88–9, 91–2, 94, 97–8, 99, 133, 157–8, 172, 186 Hutton, Isabel (Dr), 38, 41, 133, 175, 178 identity, 12, 168, 169, 171, 173, see also self and identity; subjectivity illegitimacy, 14 illness, 28, 48, 49, 65–6 imagery, 23, 39, 46, 48, 49, 60–3, 82–3, see also metaphors; narrative; style images, see also frontispiece images institutionalisation, see Foucault introductions, see prefaces Irigaray, Luce, 88, 90, 91, 103 Jameson, Storm (high-brow novelist), 87, 88, 90, 92–3, 94, 95–7, 100–2, 139, 182, 193–6 Jelinek, Estelle C. (writer), 5, 6, 7, 184 Jermy, Louise (VAD), 188 journalism, 169, see also documents; letters; newspapers journalists, 173 Knight, Dame Laura (painter), 75, 76, 82–3, 145, 148 l’écriture féminine, 4, 31–2, 43–4, 45, 49, 50, 51, 88, 90–3, 103, 143, see also Cixous Lehmann, Liza (composer), 76, 80, 148, 151, 156–7, 158–9 Lehmann, Rosamond (middle-brow novelist), 87–8 lesbianism, see special friendships Lethbridge, Mabel (Nurse), style, 58, 59 letters, 151, 152, see also documents; newspapers; reviews life-writing, see autobiography Locke, John, 166

Macaulay, Rose (writer & lecturer), 169 Macherey, Pierre (Marxist) on textual silences, 144 the unspoken, 149–50, 153, 160–1 male, gaze, 53 autobiobraphers, 131–2 journalism, 168–9 margins and marginalia, 12, see prefaces marriage, 21–2, 29, 30, 31–3, 49, 50–1, 71, 77, 79–80, 82, 150 masculinity, crisis in, 56 masking, concealment, 140, 141–2 in dress, 179, see also fashion; frontispiece images Mass Observation archive, 6 Matthews, Caroline (Dr), 187 McCarthy, Lillah (actress), 72, 74, 75, 77–8, 79–80, 133, 150, 151–2, 174 medical training, see doctors memory, study of 14 memory and accuracy, 13, 181–97, 205 affect of age, 196–7 distance from event, 185–96 emotions, 182 gender differences, 196 imagery in recall, 182; 187 personal event memory and flashbulb, 182, 188–92, 196, 203 retrieval errors, 189–92 see also truth memory work, 11, 182 mental landscapes, see subjective; subjectivity metaphors, 23, 39, 43–4, 46, 49–50, 135, 137–8, 141–2 as disruptive, 200 see also imagery; narrative; style methodology, 4, 10–11 military hospitals, 11, see also nurses; VADs; war zones mise en scène, 117 misogyny, 169 Mitchison, Naomi (novelist and VAD), 92, 185 Modern Girl, 5, 86, see also New Woman modernism mothers, 72, 74, 75

Index musicians, see artists and practitioners myths and myth-making, 117, 160, see also fashion; frontispiece images; masking; prefaces narrative coherence, 183–4, 185, 186 consonance, 199, 201, 204 literary style, 90, 100, 137 style, 43–4, 60–6, 75, 79, 80–1, 82–3, 84, 102–3, 181, 183, 191–2 see also silence newspapers, 194, see also documents; letters; reviews ‘New Woman’, the, 13, 98, 165–6, 169–70, 172–3, 176 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 99–100, 167, 222 non-verbal expression, 173–9, see also fashion, hair, dress novels and novelists, 12 prefaces by, 134 see also writers Nurses death, 58–60; 149 death, survival, 58, 65–6, 67 First World War, 54–6 history of, 54–5 language employed, 58, 60–6 nursing wounded, coping mechanisms, 63–4, 66 silences, 68, 69, 199 stylistic features, 58, 60–7, 199 themes and stylistics, 57, 60–3 see also narrative; silences; style nurses and Voluntary Aid Detachments (VAD), 54–69 objections to, 56 organisations, 54–5 prefaces, 134, 135 qualifications, 55 recruitment, 55, 56 training, 55, 56 uniforms, 56–7 omissions, see silences Orczy, Baroness (middle-brow), 88, 89, 93–4, 101

239

painters, see artists and practitioners patriarchy, 33–4, 36, 56 control, 48 opposition, 39, 48, 53 repression, 48, 49 see also fathers; misogyny patriotism, 55–6, 67 pensions, see retirement photographs, 8, 12, see also frontispiece images; truth photography, history of, 108–10 Pillemer, David B. (psychologist, theorist), 181, 186–7, 189 personal event memory and flashbulb memory, 182 point of view, see subjectivity portraits, see frontispiece images prefaces, prologues, forewards, introductions, 12, 130–42, 201, 204–5 confidence in, 132, 138, 140–1 contrasts to main text, 137 definition of, 130 Derrida, 140 endorsement and testimonies in, 133–4 Hegel, 140 male autobiographers, 131–2 masking/concealment 140, 141–2 metaphors in, 135, 137–8, 141–2 novelistic traits, 135–6 self-apologetic style, 134–5 summarising device, 132 ‘truth’ questioned, 138–40 prejudice, see discrimination Price, Nancy, 114–17, 115, 118, 127, 134, 139 private/public spheres, 5–6, 12, 18, 70, 71, 72, 78–9, 80–1, 83, 84–5 professions, see careers; and individual professions psychoanalysis, see Sigmund Freud psychologists, 14, see also Barclay; Brewer; Brown; Feldman; memory; Pillemer; Rubin; Schacter public sphere, see private/public spheres

240

Index

Raglan, Ethel (social commentator), 169 rancour, 99, 100, 195 recall, see memory reliability, 181, see memory religion, 17, 20 retirement, 17, 34–6, 123–4 reviews, 151 Rubin, David C. (psychologist, theorist), 181, 182 personal event memory and flashbulb memory, 182, 184 Ruck, Bertha (low-brow novelist), 88, 150, 170–1 Schacter, Daniel L. (psychologist and theorist), 181, 196, 197 Schama, Simon (historian), 205–6 Scharlieb, Dr Mary, preface, 132, 171 schools boarding, 18 Church endowed, 21 finishing, 46, 171 girls, 14, 18 grammar, 21 high, 21 private day, 18–19, 21 public day, 26 Schopenhauer, Arthur (philosopher), 167 self and identity, 12, 107–8, 162–80, see also identity self-censorship, 12, see also silence self-consciousness, 166–7, 203 self/self-hood, definition and history, 166–8 self-promotion, 191–2 sexuality, schoolgirl friendships, 29–31, see birth control; illegitimacy; special friendships signifiers, visual codes, 110, 122, 127, 128 silences, 12, 67–8, 87, 143–61 authorial capital, 145–6 censorship, 144, 147 communication, 145 concealment or revelatory, 52, 145 conjecture, 145, 158, 159–60

context, 145 coping mechanism, 199 emotion, 154–6 fear, 145 Freud, 148–9 letters and reviews 151–2, 153 on marriage, 150–1 methodology, 143, 145 myth-making, 160 omissions, 145 protection in, 145, 146, 152 stylistics, elliptical marks, page layout, 151, 153, 154–8, 159, 183 textual gaps, 144, 145–6, 150, 154–5, 158 in tragedy, 145, 147–8, 154–8 rhetorical device, 143, 156, 157 unspeakable, 58, 59, 69 Victorian novelists device, 146–7 see also Macherey; narrative; Sontag Smyth, Ethel (pianist), 72 social context, 112–13 Sontag, Susan, 114, 127, 143, 144 on silence, 158, 161 special friendships, 31, 51 spinsterhood, 17, 29–30, 31, 79, see also celibacy stereotyping, 13, 42, 77, 165, 168–71, 172–3, 176, 179–80 Stobart, Mrs St Clair (nurse), 55, 57, 66, 134, 153 Stopes, Marie (feminist), 15, see also birth control; Havelock Ellis Storey, Gladys (painter), 75 style, boys’ adventure stories, use of, 39, 40, 41, 52 cloaking mechanism, 52 consonance, 199, 201, 204 emotional, 199 equinine metaphors, 46–7, 8 fairytale, folktale, 39, 41–6 fonts, 45, 135 girls’ adventure stories, use of, 39, 40, 41, 52 institutionalisation, effect of, 23–4, 25–6, 27, 28–9 masculine metaphors, 172 melodrama as style, 48–9

Index style, boys’ adventure stories, use of – continued mythical heroines, 23–4, 39 novelistic (storyfying), 4, 49, 58–9, 135, 136, 137, 181, 184, 186, 192, 206 pragmatism, 59–60, 199 scholarly objective, 169 story-telling, 186, 206 see also discourse; Foucault; imagery; metaphors; narrative; and individual professions subjective, 162, 163, 185 subjectivity, 109, 163, 166, 173 definition, 167–8, see also frontispiece images; photographs; ‘truth’ suffrage, suffragettes, 3, 13, 15, 49, 56, 87, 98, 166, 168, 170, see also emancipation ‘surplus’ women, 14 Swanwick, H. M. (high-brow novelist), 89 Syrett, Netta (high-brow novelist), 89, 93, 94, 101, 134, 165 teachers, professional 18, 19 training, 19, 30 see also headmistresses textual gaps see silences theoretical approaches, 4, 9, 10–11 15, 67, 88, 162, see also memory work; visual methodology Thurstan, Violetta (Nurse), 60, 133, 182, 189–92 Tilley, Vesta (actress), 73–4 The Times newspaper, 168–9, 170 T’Serclaes (nurse), 65, 86, 87–8, 97, 108, 109–10, 114, 134, 171, 182, 183, 186, 195 unfeminine, see feminine uniforms, see fashion, hair and dress; nurses universities, women in, 14, see also education; schools

241

Vanburgh, Irene (actress), 76–7, 79 Verne, Mathilde (painter), 74, 76 visual methodology, codes, 108–9, 113, see frontispiece images; signifiers vocation, 25, see also destiny Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD), 46, see nurses wartime experiences, war zones, see military hospitals; nurses and VADs Wauchop, Gladys (Dr), 39, 46–7, 48, 148, 171, see also narrative West, Katharine, 111–14, 112 White, Maude (composer), 78, 133, 134 Wilberforce, Octavia (doctor), 28–9, 48, 49, 50–1, 148, 152 women, middle-class, 13–14, see also ‘New Woman’ women doctors, see doctors women writers, 86–103 autobiography used as polemic, 98–100 candour, 101–2 creativity and emotions, 90–3 critical acclaim, 98, 100, 102 high-brow novels, 88, 90, 100, 101, 102–3, 200, 221 low-brow novels 88, 90, 93, 97, 99–100, 102–3 motivation 88–90 novels 1890–1920, 86–7 novels as semi-autobiographical, 93–7 novels avoidance of personal, 93–4 self-conscious writing, 101, 166, 203 truth, 86, 101, 195 see also l’écriture féminine; narrative; style Woolf, Virginia, on silences, 143, 184 wordsmiths, see women writers World War One, see First World War Zipes, Jack (critical theorist), see fairytale; narrative

Gender, Professions and Discourse: Early Twentieth-Century Women's Autobiography

Gender and Discourse

Gender and Discourse

Gender and Discourse

Gender and Discourse (Sage Studies in Discourse)

Homeric Voices: Discourse, Memory, Gender

Gender in Early Childhood

gynecology and womens health

Homeric Voices: Discourse, Memory, Gender

Homeric Voices: Discourse, Memory, Gender

Gender, Language and Discourse (Women Andpsychology)

Gender, Violence and Security: Discourse as Practice

Autobiography and Gender in Early Modern Literature: Reading Women's Lives, 1600-1680

Positioning Gender in Discourse: A Feminist Methodology

Faith and the Professions

Gender, Language And New Literacy (Research in Corpus and Discourse)

Gender Talk: Feminism, Discourse and Conversation (Women and Psychology)

Gender and the Journal: Diaries and Academic Discourse

Early Modern Autobiography: Theories, Genres, Practices

Gender Identity and Discourse Analysis - Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture 2

Literary history womens writing britain

Literary Circles And Gender in Early Modern Europe: A Cross-cultural Approach (Women and Gender in the Early Modern World) (Women and Gender in the Early Modern World)

Autobiography

Autobiography

Autobiography

Autobiography

Autobiography

Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse, and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory

Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis: Studies in Gender, Power and Ideology

Women and Gender in Early Jewish and Palestinian Nationalism

Gender, Professions and Discourse: Early Twentieth-Century Women's Autobiography

Gender and Discourse

Gender and Discourse

Gender and Discourse

Gender and Discourse (Sage Studies in Discourse)

Homeric Voices: Discourse, Memory, Gender

Gender in Early Childhood

gynecology and womens health

Homeric Voices: Discourse, Memory, Gender

Homeric Voices: Discourse, Memory, Gender

Gender, Language and Discourse (Women Andpsychology)

Gender, Violence and Security: Discourse as Practice

Autobiography and Gender in Early Modern Literature: Reading Women's Lives, 1600-1680

Positioning Gender in Discourse: A Feminist Methodology

Faith and the Professions

Gender, Language And New Literacy (Research in Corpus and Discourse)

Gender Talk: Feminism, Discourse and Conversation (Women and Psychology)

Gender and the Journal: Diaries and Academic Discourse

Early Modern Autobiography: Theories, Genres, Practices

Gender Identity and Discourse Analysis - Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture 2

Literary history womens writing britain

Literary Circles And Gender in Early Modern Europe: A Cross-cultural Approach (Women and Gender in the Early Modern World) (Women and Gender in the Early Modern World)

Autobiography

Autobiography

Autobiography

Autobiography

Autobiography

Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse, and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory

Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis: Studies in Gender, Power and Ideology

Women and Gender in Early Jewish and Palestinian Nationalism

Recommend Documents