Women, Privacy and Modernity in Early Twentieth-Century British Writing

Women, Privacy and Modernity in Early Twentieth-Century British Writing Wendy Gan

Women, Privacy and Modernity in Early Twentieth-Century British Writing

Also by Wendy Gan FRUIT CHAN’S DURIAN DURIAN

Women, Privacy and Modernity in Early Twentieth-Century British Writing Wendy Gan Associate Professor, School of English University of Hong Kong

© Wendy Gan 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 right 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: 978–0–230–53585–5 ISBN-10: 0–230–53585–2

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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 Gan, Wendy. Women, privacy and modernity in early twentieth-century British writing/ Wendy Gan. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–53585–5 ISBN-10: 0–230–53585–2 1. English literature—20th century—History and criticism. 2. English literature—Women authors—History and criticism. 3. Women in literature. 4. Privacy in literature. 5. Home in literature. 6. Space in literature. 7. Women—Identity. 8. Modernism (Literature)—Great Britain. I. Title. PR116.G36 2009 810.9’9287—dc22 2008034845 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

To my grandmother, Mdm How Huai Tiang

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Contents

Acknowledgements

viii

Introduction

1

1.

Reconfiguring Domestic Space for Female Privacy: the Garden, the Study and the Room

20

2.

Public Privacy: Women, the City and the Car

47

3.

Privileging Privacy: the Pre-Modern Role Models of the Witch and the Primitive

76

4.

‘We Have Gone Recreation-mad’: Leisure, Privacy and Modern Domestic Identity

104

5.

The Loss of a Private World: Women, Privacy and Novels of Adultery

130

Conclusion

158

Notes

163

Bibliography

172

Index

181

vii

Acknowledgements One cannot help but incur many debts in the long years of writing a book. The generous research grants from my home institution, the University of Hong Kong, helped to kick-start this project while it was still an amorphous entity in my head. A more recent grant from the Hong Kong Research Grants Council (RGC) has also been instrumental in enabling me to take a year off to write and finish this book. Amongst my colleagues, I would like to thank in particular Douglas Kerr, Chris Hutton, Katherine Baxter and Julia Kuehn for their encouragement and willingness to help read anything from a chapter to my entire manuscript at moments when I was sure my writing was becoming an incoherent mess. Outside Hong Kong, Max Saunders, Lilian Chee and Genevieve Abravanel were also willing and helpful readers of my work. Shirley Lim was always ready with a kind word and astute advice on how to go about the process of getting a book published. I would also like to thank the anonymous reader for Palgrave who made invaluable suggestions that helped widen this book’s scope. I also owe a debt of gratitude to the various research assistants who have helped me through the years, most notably Amy Chan for undertaking to organize and archive my forbidding pile of materials and Flo Chan for her ability to dig out now and again an interesting source. A special thanks must also be extended to Gaye Gould for her proofreading and indexing work on this book – she is, as always, a model of efficiency and accuracy. Then to my friends and family who have contributed to this book in so many ways not always visible in the finished product. Thanks to Tina, Yee Wan and Kelvin for the laughs, the conversations that ranged from the intellectual to the trivial and for enriching my life here in Hong Kong. To Emil who was the first to hear me expound on this book and sense that, after many years of grappling with this topic, I had finally cracked it, my love and thanks as always. To my friends from church (Jennifer, Emily, Donna, Kacinee, Jim and Wilson in particular) who have always enquired kindly of my work and even prayed for me and my project, thank you all for your loving support through the years. I can happily say that your prayers have been granted for the Lord is viii

Acknowledgements ix

good and faithful. Finally to my family, who have always been slightly mystified by what exactly I do huddled over books and laptop, thank you for your unfailing love over the years. Portions of Chapter 4 have been previously published in Wendy Gan, ‘Leisure in the Domestic Novel Between the Wars’, Women: a Cultural Review, 17.2 (2006): 202–19. Reprinted by permission of the publisher (Taylor & Francis Ltd, http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals).

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Introduction When Miriam Henderson, the heroine of Dorothy Richardson’s 13-part novel Pilgrimage, moves to her new lodgings in London, we are treated to a highly detailed description of the garret room that is to be both her revered refuge and oppressive trap in the years to come. We are shown the worn carpet, the faded wallpaper, the arrangement of furniture, the windows, its views – but this is not mere scene-setting. Richardson is not writing the kind of novel where an interior becomes ‘a memorial to personality’ in the fashion of Dickens, a way to imply character through a displacement on to a character’s things, but a modernist novel where everything is restricted to only Miriam’s subjective point of view (Tristram, 23). The interior does not speak of Miriam’s personality; instead the room only exists because of Miriam’s presence there and the fact that she is there, avidly recording its minutiae, captures the centrality of rooms to a woman immersed in the flux of modernity. The room is thus a signal, however humble it may be, of its status as a distinctly modern achievement for a woman. Miriam is almost obsessed with rooms. Throughout Pilgrimage, she consistently examines rooms, carefully recording how they make her feel – ecstatic in the hotel room she pays for on her cycling holiday; delighted with the Wilsons’ charming guest room; revitalized by her ‘clear cold room’ at Mrs Bailey’s (Pilgrimage 2, 321). Such attention suggests that rooms and interiors are central to her consciousness and her sense of self as a subject of modernity. This stress on rooms is not usually how the cutting-edge modernity of Pilgrimage has been portrayed. As the Bildungsroman, and even Kunstleroman, of a young modern woman, Pilgrimage has often been interpreted in terms of Miriam’s journey out and away from the domestic home. At 17, she leaves home to teach in a school in Germany and henceforth enters the public world of earning her own living and being independent, trespassing and traversing once-forbidden public spaces. The narrative thrust seems to be outwards and while the pleasures and freedoms of the city of London do receive much attention from Miriam within the novel, it is often forgotten that Miriam’s interiors are similarly new and modern too. In leaving home, Miriam exchanges her old 1

2 Women, Privacy and Modernity

domestic interiors for new kinds of interiors – offices, rooms in lodging houses, shared flats, her precious room of her own. Morag Shiach has rightly argued that the focus on the city and flânerie in recent accounts of women and modernity and also of Pilgrimage elides the importance and influence of interiors in an understanding of modernity and modernist cultural production.1 Shiach’s work in bringing the neglected interior back into consideration highlights a female preference for non-domestic, non-traditional interiors. Shiach shows that Virginia Woolf’s attention is drawn to the study and to fluid, light spaces in contrast to her remembered childhood spaces, rigid and bound. Meanwhile Richardson’s Miriam has a horror of domestic space, particularly of suburbia and opts instead for urban spaces and unconventional domestic interiors. Indeed Miriam’s various rooms are as important to her modernity as her adventurous forays into the city. New forms of interiors thus stand alongside the city in defining a woman’s experience of modernity but why were the former of such importance to women? Discussing Miriam’s sensitivity to rooms, Shiach identifies something which I consider an important thread in a multi-faceted understanding of women and modernity. Analysing a passage from Richardson’s last published ‘chapter’ of Pilgrimage, ‘March Moonlight’,2 where Miriam escapes into the solitude of a top floor room, Shiach writes: Miriam’s articulation of this secure solitude in her room seems to offer some kind of alternative to the flâneur’s fascination with transient and anonymous urban encounters, which has been so systematically offered as an authentic modernist subjectivity. Miriam Henderson’s aspiration is for protection from the coerced and the casual encounter . . . (261) In opposition to the usual modern paradigm of the urban experience of the flâneur or flâneuse, Shiach in her reading posits the modernity of the ‘secure solitude’ of Miriam’s room. In effect, Shiach speaks of privacy. Privacy has been defined succinctly by Barrington Moore as ‘a desire for socially approved protection against painful social obligations’ (6). The language is close to Shiach’s ‘protection from the coerced and the casual encounter’ and this suggests that Miriam’s near-fetishization

Introduction

3

of interiors expresses a deep desire for privacy and especially for spatial privacy. By extension, this need for privacy provided by the new interiors of Miriam’s life is also central to her experience of modernity and her understanding of herself as modern. By the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the idea of access to privacy, as evidenced by the increasing representations of women desiring to be private in fiction and crystallized by Woolf’s call for a room of one’s own, had become more appealing as well as increasingly necessary to women. Privacy was becoming a key component of life for the modern woman, providing her with the space to affirm an alternative identity apart from a traditional domestic role or even the seemingly more progressive role of a wage slave. Privacy too was a means for a woman to process the upheavals of modernity. If privacy has been defined as a way to shield oneself from the grasping hand of social convention, then in the fast-paced modern world, privacy was also a crucial respite to momentarily protect oneself from the impact of change, to pause and reconsider one’s place in modernity.

Women, privacy and the private sphere Etymologically, the word ‘private’ comes from the Latin root meaning ‘deprived’ and to be private thus meant being deprived of status, office and community. The initial connotations of privacy were negative but privacy’s etymological roots are also a reminder that without the contrast of the wider social group, without the contexts of social relations, the deprivations of privacy cannot be transformed into privileges. Privacy and community are less enemies than siblings, both essential components to social life. Privacy, then, concerns the relation of self and community. It is not merely about being selfishly isolated and alone but a way to modulate social control, even countering it to a certain degree. In a rigid social environment, privacy preserves a small breathing space, providing privacy from others while also enabling self-expression, the privacy to do something else or to be someone else. It protects from social intrusion, allowing the ‘temporary withdrawal of a person from the general society through physical or psychological means’ (Westin, 7), while leaving the door open for a return to communal life and social relations. The pattern is of a ‘rhythmic oscillation between privacy and a more publicly oriented existence’ (Moore, 42–3).

4 Women, Privacy and Modernity

The formation of the private sphere through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries perfected this alternating pattern of public life and privacy, particularly for men. The private sphere, while taking a man away from a public community, compensated for this with an alternative domestic social world complete with its own hierarchies and communal activities. Thus within the domestic homes of England, a man could escape from public life to be alone and yet still remain connected with a small domestic community, otherwise known as the family. Such a sophisticated form of deprivation was the preserve of the male breadwinner of the family. The world of home and hearth functioned as a refuge for the male head of the family from the hurly-burly world of work and city life and yet prevented him from feeling too cut off from society as his family constituted a miniature social world around him. The man of the house could thus choose to withdraw into his study or other such private rooms to be on his own or emerge to be sociable when tired of his own company. The role of women in this set-up was then to protect the privacy of the male head of family within the domestic home as well as to establish a ready-made domestic community for him. If, for men, the relation between private and public spheres provided a perfect dynamic of self and community, for women, oscillating between private and public was still a highly vexed movement. Women’s care-giving role in the home has tended to create a view of femininity as other-centred, giving little or no legitimation for a woman to focus on her own needs, including privacy. Besides, where could a woman be private? If a man could retreat from the public sphere into the private world of domesticity to drop his social masks and evade the pressures of social conformity, where could women mostly situated in the private domestic home go? Where was the private sphere’s equivalent to the public sphere’s private sphere? Where was the space to which a woman could retreat to shield herself from the demands of convention and society? These are questions that this book hopes to find some answers to but it is obvious that the private domestic sphere where women were usually consigned was not a satisfactory answer. The assumption is that women may enjoy privacy there, but, in spite of its branding as part of the feminine world, the home is a patriarchal space providing women with little room to be private unless certain conscious steps are taken to appropriate privacy for themselves.

Introduction

5

The paradox of this situation for women is that, over the centuries, privacy had been increasingly privileged as desirable, though it was the privacy of the family, not of women within the family, that was usually emphasized. Privacy has held different historically specific meanings through the ages. In the Renaissance, for example, as James Knowles has identified, the right to privacy was, not surprisingly, related to class and status. The rich and the powerful could retreat and be private, but, even so, privacy was less about being alone than being able to be private with a chosen few. Privacy was thus not individual but communal and this was echoed architecturally with private rooms serving as public reception rooms, open to servants and visitors. For Renaissance gentlewomen, who, as members of the elite, were the rare women who could enjoy privacy, the practices of privacy were similar. Privacy was shared with a servant, a child, or other women of the household.3 The Renaissance conception of privacy as more communal than solitary was generally not challenged except with regards to the family unit. The family was increasingly perceived as deserving of greater privacy, and, by the seventeenth century, the growing architectural consensus was on building houses that created greater privacy for the family. Architects of great houses gradually began to separate servant quarters from the rest of the household by introducing backstairs specifically for servants, eradicating through-rooms with the use of common corridors and increasing the number of specialized rooms by ‘transforming into rooms what had previously been mere objects of furniture’ (Orest Ranum, quoted in Bold, ‘Privacy’, 116). So the locked writing desk expanded into a writing room or study. The nineteenth century saw further spatial developments in privacy, this time amongst the middle classes. Work was segregated from domestic housing as those who could afford to moved their domestic households into the suburbs away from the city. The house was to be private and inviolate and the ‘gates, drives, hedges and walls around house and garden’ were physical reminders of the desire for privacy (Davidoff and Hall, 361). Suburbia was the ultimate symbol and physical expression of privacy but as the nineteenth-century feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman was well aware, ‘Such privacy as we do have in our homes is family privacy, an aggregate privacy; and this does not insure – indeed, it prevents – individual privacy’ (quoted in Spacks, Privacy, 4). The private nature of the domestic

6 Women, Privacy and Modernity

home did not ensure privacy for its inhabitants, especially not its women. Thus while the move towards increasing familial privacy can be clearly seen through changes in domestic architecture and the rise of suburbia, the journey towards individual privacy and in particular women’s right to solitude is less consistent, even though the desire for this kind of privacy was not entirely absent through history. Sasha Roberts, writing on the reading practices of Renaissance gentlewomen, has identified space in closets, studies and bedchambers for women to read in private. This suggests that despite the dominant culture and practice of privacy then, privacy as a solitary and individual practice could occasionally emerge as attainable. The eighteenth century was similarly alive to the idea of individual privacy and recognized the appeal (and dangers) of privacy to women. Expecting to write about physical privacy, Patricia Meyer Spacks discovered in her study of privacy in the eighteenth century that it was psychological privacy that held sway. Living in a socially intrusive age, the inner spaces of the mind were still easier to appropriate for privacy than physical space, and this was especially true for women. Psychological privacy, however, was seen ‘as a problem both social and personal’ (Spacks, Privacy, 7): The topic generates anxiety about the degree to which social prescriptions should control individual lives and ingenuity about ways to avoid the restrictiveness of convention. It encourages reflection about the value of isolation and worry about the difficulty of controlling those who internally absent themselves. (7–8) Thus, though by the eighteenth century individual privacy in the form of psychological privacy was increasingly being recognized, its status was still troubled. Desired for its affirmation of the individual apart from society and yet perceived too as a threat to convention and social order, the social value of individual privacy was still ambiguous. Psychological privacy for women also hinted of danger as through privacy there was the opportunity to elude the control of social supervision. Combined with a contemporaneous feminism that focused on the right of women to be treated as individuals and equals of men and

Introduction

7

an increasing feminization of national culture, the continued push towards familial privacy in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century gave the question of individual privacy and privacy for women an additional fillip. The movement into suburban privacy peaked in this period as the lower middle classes and the better-off sections of the working classes flooded into suburbia. The strength of suburban culture with its emphasis on domesticity, privacy and the everyday has led critics such as Alison Light to identify a ‘privatisation of national life’ (9) as well as an accompanying feminization, particularly in an interwar period that was also politically inward-looking.4 This private, feminine and domestic turn privileges privacy and interiority as the common mode and in an environment where the private is valorized and feminism promotes an attention to female needs, a demand for women’s privacy is a reasonable conclusion. With women as the full-time inhabitants of this suburban domestic world, women’s access to privacy was thus high on the agenda. Though the reality of achieving actual privacy was still problematic, the awareness of a need for privacy and of its importance to women was definitely growing. It is telling that a novelist like Elizabeth von Arnim who was deeply concerned about privacy found success in the first few decades of the twentieth century. Von Arnim, who possessed a keen appreciation of privacy and its elusiveness for women, was quick to recognize the failings of the domestic home with regards to women’s privacy. Her first work, Elizabeth and Her German Garden (which I shall discuss later in my first chapter), was a piece of delightful whimsy which nonetheless bore a subtext of a woman in search of some privacy within her own home. Her sharp awareness of how home is, at best, a compromised space for women and, at worst, a man’s space, is most clearly displayed in Vera. Written partly in revenge after her disastrous marriage to the tyrannical Lord Russell, Vera rewrites the given that home is a woman’s domain and a place where a woman might find privacy. Young Lucy, on marrying Wemyss, infamously based on Lord Russell, discovers that not only is her life now to revolve round Wemyss’s demands but that control of domestic space, that supposedly feminine sphere of dominance, is firmly in the hands of her husband. Wemyss takes an inordinate amount of pride in his domestic spaces and routines and brooks no dissent from his newly-wed wife as to how things should be run. The house in Vera is a man’s space, decorated by Wemyss,

8 Women, Privacy and Modernity

financially maintained by Wemyss, and with rules created by Wemyss. Lucy is to be enveloped and absorbed into his space. The only area where Wemyss’s dominance is muted is in the personal sitting room of his now-deceased first wife Vera. Located at the margins of the house on the top floor, Vera’s room is a temporary but not complete refuge from the control of Wemyss. For Vera, escape from Wemyss means a constant retreat into spaces that Wemyss cannot invade – spaces of the mind and imagination represented by an evocative painting of the countryside in her room, the row of Baedekers that were Vera’s reading material, and, ultimately, through suicide. Death offers Vera her space and privacy at last away from the prying supervision of her husband. Von Arnim’s Vera suggests that a woman has no place even in her own home, that the notion that home is the woman’s sphere is a hollow illusion. A woman desiring privacy must search out other spaces of refuge and escape beyond male control. For Vera this search ends tragically and we are left wondering if Lucy will fare any better as we leave her smothered in her husband’s all-encompassing embrace. Vera thus articulates von Arnim’s recognition of the importance of privacy and space for women and her understanding that the home is often the last place to achieve that. The lack of privacy in the domestic home for women thus made it even more urgent for women to carve out spaces of privacy for themselves. If the domestic home is a woman’s place of work, the site where social forces act and impose upon her, then a way to access privacy – physical or psychological – is required to enable a respite from these domestic obligations. Even though von Arnim was sceptical of the domestic home providing physical privacy for women, nonetheless it was one of the first places women began to look at in their search for privacy.5 The garden, for example, as an adjunct space to the domestic home, outside and yet still part of it, provided women with a spatial alternative, a place to escape to, and, in its privacy, a woman could affirm a self other than her domestic identity. Capturing a room to oneself, be it a study within the home or a rented room, could also provide a woman with opportunities to enjoy privacy within the private sphere. Beyond the home, incidental spaces of privacy could be stumbled upon by simply walking in the city or exploiting the enclosed space of the car for a moment alone while journeying.

Introduction

9

Privacy, class and modernity When I speak of women and privacy here, it is mostly middle-class women that I am thinking of. Von Arnim, though she married into the aristocracy, wrote for a middle-class, middlebrow audience and her analysis of the domestic woman’s lack of privacy in the home is based on a leisured upper-middle-class woman’s life. This study will be slanted towards the middle-class woman simply because the appeal of privacy to women across the classes was uneven and it was among the middle classes that privacy and its ability to protect from social pressures tended to be of greatest interest. Amongst young workingclass women, there were some such as Winifred Foley and Angela Rodaway to whom privacy was a priority and important in enabling them to hold on to a sense of self other than what society had consigned them to. Foley, when a child, was fond of reading privately in the privy, conflating a mental privacy opened up by the act of reading with the only physically private space in her working-class home. As a young woman, she also took refuge in her long walks in the city on her days off to regain an identity apart from her job as a maid. Rodaway’s strong yearning for a room of her own and for holidays alone doing nothing but reading and writing in the library was deeply connected to her ambitions to be a writer, against the grain of her working-class background. Yet in working-class women’s memoirs and autobiographies, privacy is seldom central to identity formation. Instead the crucial markers of working-class feminine identity were friendship and community networks, the pleasures of consumption, the negotiation of romantic relations to achieve a companionate marriage and the attaining of a suburban home. Privacy tended to feature only as a side-effect of the new suburban home, enabling the workingclass family to be at last respectably private in their everyday life. With a suburban house possessing a bathroom, a scullery, and at least two to three bedrooms, there would be no more shared lavatories or wash days with neighbours, no more using the public bathhouses and no more shared beds. A move to the suburbs thus granted a working-class family the dignity of bodily and familial privacy. Beyond that, personal individual privacy was little thought of; working-class women had other more pressing concerns. For middle-class women, however, privacy was more of an issue. In a period of growing convergence between middle-class and

10 Women, Privacy and Modernity

working-class women, it was a means to mark class differences as well as to identify oneself as modern and emancipated. Privacy, after all, required time, space and money – things that were often unavailable to working-class women and that, traditionally, middle-class women had greater access to. Of course, as von Arnim demonstrates, time, space and money were not usually the middle-class woman’s to deploy for her own benefit but for her husband and family. Increasingly, too, middle-class women, particularly if their family incomes had contracted and they were thus able to afford fewer servants than before at best and at worst only a daily char, were bearing the brunt of more housework and higher standards of housekeeping and childcare. What could act as a class differentiator for middle-class women was the pursuit of privacy, for then a distinct sense of middle-class subjectivity is preserved, one that stands aloof from and above the work of housewifery going on in middle-class and working-class households all over. Thus Jan Struther’s upper-middle-class domestic woman Mrs Miniver can pause in her hectic schedule and reflect on her day, to focus on the art of living and not the ‘mechanics of life’ (93). What Mrs Miniver enjoys, despite her busy domestic routine, is a life of the mind with its accompanying wider view of the world and the ability to have this life was something that privacy could offer a middle-class woman. The affirmation of a separate identity apart from the domesticity was thus an affirmation of a middle-class identity, superior to the working classes in its awareness of a more reflective private level of life beyond the humdrum and mundane. Privacy was also one of the ways for the middle-class domestic woman to claim a modern subjectivity for herself and in doing so reaffirm her status as middle-class, as one up-to-date with modernity and indeed ahead of those beneath her. Women’s relationships with modernity have been complex, subject as they are to the varying, often gendered, representations and manifestations of modernity and to the nuances of history. In some versions of modernity, it is woman who is modernity’s exemplary subject – an erotic and commodified spectacle, symbolic of the unconscious, hedonistic and dangerous, best epitomized by Lulu in G. W. Pabst’s Pandora’s Box. This feminized and sexualized take on modernity, however, had no room for the married domestic woman at all. In other versions, modernity is a man’s world, and, though the domestic woman might function as modernity’s binary opposite, she still had little place at the centre of

Introduction

11

this narrative. At least there was a role for her, however, and by questioning and challenging the more dominant, masculine narratives of modernity further, we can start rethinking the relation between the domestic woman and modernity. More masculine narratives of modernity cluster around two main knots of thematic concentration: the story of order, progress, and the promise of better and greater things; and the more affective and sometimes socially discordant thrill of the new that can bring disorder and destruction. With the acceleration of the processes of modernization from the late nineteenth century on, modernity has been sometimes viewed as a continuous march of progress. Economies were growing more sophisticated and globalized; technologies of transportation (cars, rail, air transport) and communications (telegraphy, radio) had leapt ahead dramatically; the labour process had become more ‘rationalized’ and ‘scientific’ through Taylorism, thus increasing productivity; the franchise was expanding making more men and women eligible to vote; and the democratization of consumption was transforming shopping into a pleasure and the cornerstone of a modern sense of self. This process of progress, however, was uneven and the traumas of the Great War and the Great Depression undermined any assumptions of the smooth ascent of humankind. Nonetheless, the shaky progress of modernity did promise improvement and material betterment, a ‘vision of the “good life” of a decent standard of living, a pleasant home and time to enjoy it’ (O’Shea, 16). This is a version of modernity that promises better things to come. In contrast, the other dominant thread in narratives of modernity emphasizes change and the excitement of the new with a nod towards chaos and destruction. Modernity, with its constant pursuit of the new, achieves a giddy transcendence of the mundane, the banal and the traditional. Eddying around this centre are the familiar notions, too, of literary and artistic modernisms with their Poundian mantra of ‘make it new’ and their refutation of the dead weight of the past in favour of the potential of the liberating future. Spatially, the city becomes the site for these changes, for the renouncing of the old and the embracing of the new. But while the city represents the cuttingedge of capitalism, technology and ideas, and excites the senses with its spectacles and opportunities, it is also a place of anomie and alienation. The rush of the new brings with it a break with old certainties and familiar modes of being with resultant anxieties.

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Heterogeneous, multi-faceted, and often contradictory, the elements consistent to these various narratives of modernity are dynamism and change: To be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and our world – and at the same time threatens to destroy everything we know, everything we are. (Berman, 15) Even a more negative view of modernity emphasizing loss of stability and roots nevertheless captures a sense of upheaval and turmoil. Such a take on modernity necessarily assumes a modern subjectivity that is active and outward directed, breaking away from the past and, by association, with family and domesticity: To become the autonomous, self-defining subject of modernity, each person must break with the safe and comforting sphere of their childhood where their identity was defined for them by others. (Johnson, 477) It is this version of modern subjectivity that has made domestic women’s relation to modernity problematic. The journey out and away from the home is a familiar one for most men. The necessities of work and earning a living propel men out of the home. For middle-class women who remained single and harboured ambitions beyond a domestic existence or simply could not afford to be kept at home, this break from the family and the past and entry into a larger but unknown public world was also a possible move. For these women, this script of modernity was one they could appropriate, and for some feminists this was a script that combined both modernity and feminism. Thus not surprisingly the modern women we encounter in fiction quite often are single, independent from family, earning a living usually in the city, and feminist, if not always in name, at least in inclination. We think of Mary Datchett, Virginia Woolf’s suffrage worker in Night and Day, and Miriam Henderson, Dorothy Richardson’s heroine in the ultimate Bildungsroman of the modern woman in the early twentieth century in Pilgrimage. Both women have broken away from family and live alone in London, enjoying a

Introduction

13

modern life encompassing the novelties of work and new social networks of friends based on political and literary interests.6 If a modern subjectivity is dependent on a break away from the home, however, where does this leave the many women who did not or could not leave the family and in fact were defined by their relation to domesticity? Does this suggest then that such women were hence excluded from modernity, doomed to remain icons of tradition, ‘untouched by the alienation and fragmentation of modern life’, and an example of the past that modern men and progressive single women were meant to leave behind (Felski, 16)? Feminist scholars such as Rita Felski, Lesley Johnson, Alison Light and Judy Giles argue otherwise. It is not the fault of women but that of a conceptualization of modernity that perceives modernity as an adventurous journey out, as an entry into the unknown contrasting with the known safety of the domestic home. Bringing specifically domestic women back within the fold of modernity thus requires a rethinking of what modernity means and, in particular, imagining the subtle changes of modernity registering within the private sphere as well. For the domestic sphere was definitely not exempt from the changes of modernity. The act of arriving at suburbia itself for lower-middle-class and working-class housewives, as Judy Giles points out, was already a key modern moment. Suburbia has usually been imagined as antimodern in its staid domesticity, and yet, for many women, suburbia represented their participation in modernity. Through suburban life women experienced material progress in the form of a bathroom or even running hot water and took on a new role as a ‘scientific’ and ‘rational’ manager of the home. For middle-class women, the interior of the home was itself expressive of modern times. New sensibilities in interior design were changing the physical look of the home from the clutter of the Victorian age to a more clean-lined and minimal style of furnishing. Christopher Reed’s articulation in Bloomsbury Rooms of a Bloomsbury modernism that began its assault on the walls of domestic rooms also suggests that the domestic interior was not excluded from modernist experimentation and could indeed become the site of a revolution. According to Nicola Humble in The Feminine Middlebrow Novel, middle-class domestic manners were also giving way to a bohemian informality that again belies the notion that the home was unchanging.

14 Women, Privacy and Modernity

While the physical domestic landscape was visibly changing for women, the role of the housewife was, through consumption, also in the process of being modernized. In charge of the domestic sphere, the housewife participated in modernity by being a consumer of products meant for the betterment of her home and family. The role of chief consumer encouraged women to see themselves as ‘agents of modernity’ and, in so doing, ‘invited women to see their place in the modern world, not in the workplace, politics or commerce, but as “modern” housewives in the modernized home, financed through their increased control of household funds’ (Giles, 111). Modernity for housewives was thus very much envisioned as within the home. This rehabilitation of the seemingly ‘non-modern’ space of the home is one way of bringing both working-class and middle-class domestic women within the narrative of modernity but there are other ways as well. Thus far, the experience of modernity has been focused on two distinct and opposed locations – the world beyond the home with its appeal of aggressive transformation and the home itself, seemingly staid but in fact changing at a more gradual pace. Yet there is also the ambiguous space between home and the outside that a domestic woman often traverses in her shopping and domestic errands, an in-between space that, in a sense, allows her to leave home without really leaving home. For those domestic women for whom the lure of the world outside was still strong but who were tied to their slow-changing domestic environments, being modern could be reimagined as a to-and-fro journey encompassing uneven levels of progress. The pattern of consumption provides a template of the potential of an outward and return movement in this in-between space. The housewife leaves home under the guise of her role as domestic consumer to enter the city to purchase goods and be an agent of modernity, only to return eventually to her more familiar domestic setting. In this way, she experiences the excitement of the wider world but remains loyal, willingly or not, to her bonds to the domestic sphere. Privacy offers a similar to-and-fro journey, a way to combine the outward-directed pleasures of modernity – adventure, freedom, autonomy – with the more tied situation of domesticity. With the practice of privacy, a domestic woman could thus leave the confines of her own home and the strictures of a domestic identity, exploring an alternative physical world – be it a garden or the city or a holiday

Introduction

15

space – as well as an alternative mental world and yet ultimately return to domesticity. Even if a journey away from the home was not possible, privacy could still at the very least be salvaged within the domestic setting. The point of privacy then was to create a counterpoint to domesticity via the physical removal to another location or simply a mental absence. The return to mental privacy was, of course, the last resort in a modern period which offered a range of possibilities in the pursuit of privacy. For the middle-class domestic woman, privacy thus provides access to a modern subjectivity that encompasses moving between varying sites and meanings of modernity. By being private, be it physically or mentally, she momentarily turns her back on the domestic sphere, allowing her to share in part the modern journey away from the home that modern men and single women could attempt. Privacy gives the middle-class domestic woman the space to imagine and experience an alternative identity, an alternative life. In this sense privacy is an emancipatory practice, a means of finding the freedom to imagine oneself differently from what society has ordained. But, as a temporary measure, privacy is also an ameliorative practice, a means of coping with a sometimes less than ideal domestic situation for women while preserving some sense of entitlement and autonomy or else providing a refuge from the ravages of domesticity before a return to the demands of the home. Privacy thus provides a fragment of freedom for a middle-class woman to hold on to that also helps maintain her self-identification as middle-class. In practising privacy, physical or psychological, she engages in being more free, less restricted, and less of a drudge than her working-class counterpart. In experiencing varying levels and sites of being modern through privileging privacy, she establishes her class superiority. This class superiority is reinforced in the ways by which privacy partakes of the pastoral form. The pattern of retreat and return of privacy just described is deeply reminiscent of pastoral and, unsurprisingly, a number of the women characters I study in this book retreat to places of nature to be private, be it the domestic back garden, the countryside of the Chilterns, or an Italian castle by the sea. The retreat is often a private one, usually taken alone, and it is at this point that pastoral, privacy and privilege converge. The luxury of a pastoral retreat is also that of a private retreat and such privilege is usually only conferred on members of the better classes of society. For the middle-class

16 Women, Privacy and Modernity

domestic woman, the search for privacy can sometimes parallel and collapse into a search for a pastoral retreat. By pastoral I do not mean literary pastoral for there are no lovelorn shepherds and shepherdesses spouting verse nor any humble rustics nor any idealized notion of a Golden Age in the texts I consider and, in fact, quite often the literary pastoral universe is sociable, rather than solitary. Yet in a few texts such as Lolly Willowes and Elizabeth and Her German Garden there are scenes celebratory of nature and an awareness of nature’s power to heal the stresses and strains of life that comes in a private encounter with the natural world. This is pastoral more at the level of content as Terry Gifford would describe it – texts that deal in part with an individual and personal response to nature and the countryside (2).7 At an even more abstract level, the texts I look are pastoral in their consistent sensitivity to pastoral’s key underlying structure of the dialectical relation between two locations, the retreat and return from one to the other, a movement generating insights into the nature of both locations. The play of locations for women writers, however, is not always the traditional pastoral dichotomy between the country and the city but more usually that of the domestic home and the space of the non-domestic. If these works are pastoral in any way beyond that of a content expressive of the joys of nature, it is because there is a staged removal from one place to another that enables critique and new understanding of the dual locations involved. Retreating from the domestic home to the countryside or even to the city or simply into the car enables the domestic woman to take a step back and reflect on herself, her domestic role, and her place in modernity. This is the luxury of a macro-view on life and the middle-class domestic woman in participating in the fundamental movement of pastoral retreat and return in her search for privacy underlines her privileged status in being able to engage in this larger view of life. That her retreat is not always to the country but to the ultra modern city or car is a reminder, too, of her modernity and that pastoral private retreat can now take place in new forms.

Desiring privacy, vanishing privacy The difficulty as always was finding the privacy to retire and indulge in a broader perspective of life. The chapters that follow reveal

Introduction

17

the desirability of privacy to women (mostly middle-class and some working-class) and also its elusiveness. With privacy identified as a marker of being modern and also of class status, middle-class women in the early twentieth century found innovative ways to be alone and private and to claim privacy as central to their identities. The search began close to home with gardens and a demand for a study that could placate patriarchy by remaining safely within the domestic sphere. Yet the middle-class women in search of privacy were also wary of replicating an isolationist version of masculine privacy best represented by the man’s study, and, in Chapter 1, I argue that the more neutral ‘room’ was dominant in the imaginations of women as a space that could provide both solitude and community. Connection with others, whether friends or the rest of the family, was still important to women, and the generic room, as opposed to the study, was a space and concept that could encompass both privacy and community for women as long as they controlled access to the room. Straying further from home, Chapter 2 looks at the new spaces of modernity that women could exploit for privacy. The public space of the city, for example, offered surprising potential for women to experience privacy. Indeed, the dynamics of urban relations made the city streets an ideal place to be mentally alone and physically undisturbed. The city acts not just as a contrast to the private home in terms of the public–private opposition but also in providing women a refuge of public privacy away from the oppressiveness of the home. The city was thus an escape from the enforced solitude of the home as well as a retreat from the fixity of identity that the domestic sphere imposed. Modernity provided not only the city streets as an unusual place to be private but also the car. For middle-class women welloff enough to own and drive a car, the car was a mobile capsule of privacy. Usually seen as a symbol of modernity, being glamorous and technologically advanced, the car was also a place to be alone, and, in it, a woman could experience the privacy to throw off her official roles as wife and mother and also find the space to consolidate a fragmented self in preparation for her return to the domestic sphere. The first two chapters follow the search for spaces that can provide privacy for the middle-class woman. Chapter 3 takes the search for privacy in a different direction by examining novels that attempt to shift feminine identity from an other-centred domestic role to premodern models of the witch and the primitive that allow women to

18 Women, Privacy and Modernity

privilege privacy at the core of their selves. Sylvia Townsend Warner playfully proposes the role of a self-seeking, nature-loving witch as an alternative to being a selfless spinster aunt, while Rose Macaulay puts forth the primitive as a potential identity for a woman wishing to be left alone. Yet, these alternative identities are still difficult to hold on to, revealing the elusiveness of privacy for women. This is a topic that is picked up again in Chapter 4 which looks at privacy through the discourse of leisure for domestic women. Though leisure for housewives was advocated as a sign of the modernization of the private sphere, there was a disconnect between theory and experience. The modern housewife was meant to enjoy leisure, and privacy was part of the package, but the realities of the latest discourses in housekeeping insisted on higher and higher standards of housecraft and childcare, and the decline in especially middle-class households employing servants also meant that more women had to engage in the physical labours of housework themselves. Leisure, and by extension the enjoyment of privacy, then became increasingly internalized and a means to mark a classed identity. My final chapter examines the inherent threat of women’s privacy to a patriarchal society. The space of privacy may be restorative, a means to reconcile and prepare a woman to return to society, namely her domestic community, yet it also carries the potential for deviancy and, in particular, sexual deviancy. Privacy, in allowing the space for an alternative imagining of self, could also facilitate the acting out of this alternative. The suburban wife, fuelled by romantic fantasies, could escape into her own private space and easily transform herself into her alter-ego – a romantic and adulteress lover. Looking at two novels of adultery by women based on a real-life case of adultery and murder in the interwar period, what is of interest is how privacy is quite often central to the narrative. The adulterous heroine could never have got so far without access first to a psychological privacy that enables the imagining of a different self and romantic relation, and then the physical privacy to engage in a love affair. What is also of interest is how the misuse of privacy for sexual deviancy leads to the taking away of such privileges of privacy. Studying the interwar adulteress we find another tale of vanishing privacy for women. The female search for privacy in the end reminds us that modernity as experienced by women was hardly a linear progression towards greater and greater freedoms and privileges. Much like the

Introduction

19

tension between conservatism and modernity in women’s lives that Alison Light has drawn attention to in Forever England, the study of women and privacy in the early twentieth century reveals modernity as an uneven process, simultaneously delivering promises of emancipation and shutting down opportunities. Modernity in the early twentieth century can only have been an oddly mixed experience and, through the lens of privacy and the experiences of women, we notice how modernity is often about the movement between differing realms of the modern, shifting from an accelerated pace of change to a more slow and stately progress and back again. Privacy with its creation of an alternate world, another level of reality – sometimes physical, sometimes psychological – helped create the impression of moving through multiple modern worlds and in doing so, enabled domestic women to imagine themselves as modern.

1 Reconfiguring Domestic Space for Female Privacy: the Garden, the Study and the Room

Jane Austen, who according to her nephew wrote her novels in the common sitting-room subject to constant interruption, was, not surprisingly, sensitive to the delicate manoeuvres required to be private. In Sense and Sensibility, Elinor Dashwood patiently and cleverly plots her way to be alone with Lucy Steele in the common drawing-room under the guise of helping the latter with a filigree basket so as to speak further about Lucy’s engagement with Edward Ferrars. Marianne Dashwood, similarly desiring to be private and less careful of social niceties than her elder sister, rudely opts out of card-playing, plants herself in front of the pianoforte, and ‘wrapped up in her own music and her own thoughts’ escapes into her own private world in the midst of card-players and Elinor and Lucy in the corner (135). Privacy is achieved but only with the aid of a prop – be it music or basket-work – to act as a screen and is taken still very much in the company of others. Privacy then is located in the interstices of social intercourse and community, a hidden privacy of the mind. Elinor, conscious of Edward’s growing affections for her, daydreams privately in between her everyday activities amongst her family while affecting a semblance of normality: There were moments in abundance, when, if not by the absence of her mother and sisters, at least, by the nature of their employments, conversation was forbidden among them, and every effect of solitude was produced. Her mind was inevitably at liberty . . . (107) The lapses in familial and social duties create the ‘effect of solitude’ and Elinor is wise enough to take advantage of such gaps to pursue her 20

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own thoughts. Still ‘Elinor can have no private thoughts but the press of the social world breaks in upon them’ (Haggerty, 229). Elinor’s strategy for privacy is vulnerable to the demands of her immediate community. Her sister Marianne engages in less invisible practices of privacy, happy to indulge in solitary walks and evading company as much as possible. Marianne’s seeking out of physical privacy is viewed as unbalanced and indecorous at times but Austen was well aware of the advantages of this kind of privacy too. Troubled emotions sometimes required physical space to manifest and the solitary walk could be a potential refuge as could the bedroom – in Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth Bennett retreats to her room to privately anguish over Darcy’s role in breaking up Jane and Mr Bingley’s affections – but as Catherine Morland’s struggle to find a private place to be on her own after receiving a distressing letter in Northanger Abbey reveals, private space could be difficult to find indeed: As soon as she dared leave the table she hurried away to her own room; but the housemaids were busy in it, and she was obliged to come down again. She turned into the drawing-room for privacy, but Henry and Eleanor had likewise retreated thither, and were at that moment deep in consultation about her. (145) Where could a woman be alone? And once alone, how could she protect her privacy? Where Austen’s heroines understood ‘that privacy [did] not altogether depend on physical situation’ and tended to locate privacy instead within the inner and inviolable space of the mind, by the early twentieth century, the demands from women were, in Virginia Woolf’s famous words, for rooms of their own, for physical privacy to accompany and preserve mental privacy (Spacks, ‘Privacy’, 4). Interiority was too fragile a form of privacy; a woman needed a physical buffer as well. The search for this spatial buffer began close to home. Between 1880 and 1914, the garden, usually conceived as feminine, came into focus as a potential space for women to be alone, but as it proved to be a compromised space, other spaces within the home such as the study and the more neutral and generic room were explored by feminists and women writers such as Virginia Woolf as possibilities. Central to my argument in this chapter is a conception of privacy as offering solitude but providing the option of

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being in community too. If the domestic sphere provided men with both solitude and company, women in search of physical privacy required something that could also give them this duality. As a feminized space that could be appropriated for female privacy, the garden had the advantage of combining solitude with community; it could be enjoyed singly or shared. Its communal aspect, particularly its legacy of heterosexual coupling à la Adam and Eve, however, was also its failing as the woman in the garden had little control over when and with whom she shared it. Her husband, children and visitors were liable to invade at a time when she wished to be private. The move to the study for a more protected form of privacy was thus potentially ideal. Demanding a study was a means to legitimize a call for greater physical privacy as well as to challenge patriarchal spatial hierarchies within the home. A space dedicated to intellectual pursuits, usually gendered masculine, the study offered women a different relation to space and privacy from the garden with its feminine associations with nature. Yet the kind of exclusive privacy that a study offered was also viewed as problematic for women and it is interesting to see feminist calls for a study shift into calls for a room. While a study offered respite from demands of female other-centredness, it was also an exclusionary and isolated space, deeply entrenched in masculine domestic power. As such, the desire for female spatial privacy has been expressed through demands for a more gender-neutral space – a room – hence allowing opportunities for both exclusion and inclusion, solitude and community all at a woman’s control, unlike the overly porous borders of the garden. This chapter will first examine changes in spatial awareness where I hope to show that, at the turn of the twentieth century and through its early decades, there was an emerging consciousness of the role domestic space played in shaping lives and behaviour and an attempt to refashion it for modernity. Domestic space was finally being politicized and with this came a greater recognition of space as a privilege and a powerful one at that. Privacy for women thus developed a spatial dimension and one of the earliest domestic spaces to come to attention as a site of female privacy was the garden. In the second section, I thus examine the garden as a potential private space for women. As an adjunct domestic space also often associated with femininity, the garden was a sanctioned place for women to withdraw to, though it was not without its drawbacks. In the third section, I focus on a

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space within the domestic home that women began to challenge and appropriate – the study – and the ways by which this gradually became a championing of the gender-neutral and not necessarily domestically located room.

Recognizing the politics of space: rethinking domestic space and privacy The female search for the space to be private came at a time when spatial awareness was altering. Stephen Kern has argued that the perception of space underwent fundamental changes between 1880 and 1919 as a result of new technologies of communication, travel and capital. Space was now seen as dynamic instead of inert, full instead of empty, an entity that had the means to shape and change lives in definite ways (Kern, 152). With this came a consciousness of space as an instrument of power and ideology. From a Foucauldian perspective, such a conception of space is familiar. For Foucault, space is neither neutral nor innocent but invested with power as space becomes a means of disciplinary force and surveillance. Foucault’s work concentrates on the disciplinary role of space in penal institutions but women writers were alert to the role of domestic conventions and, increasingly, domestic spaces in producing disciplined subjects, in particular, though not exclusively, women. I would like to briefly consider here Florence Nightingale’s fragment ‘Cassandra’ and Virginia Woolf’s investigation into the lack of women geniuses in A Room of One’s Own and her personal insights into her domestic history as related in her memoirs and essays written for the Memoir Club. Though Nightingale’s embittered and impassioned plea against the emptiness of middle-class women’s lives was written in 1852 and privately printed and circulated in 1859, her analysis of the middle-class women’s plight resonates strongly with Woolf’s. Looking at these texts together is instructive as they reveal startling similarities and continuities about domestic oppression but also an interesting difference as Woolf’s critique of domestic life expands on Nightingale’s attack by taking on a more spatial turn, suggesting that, in the early twentieth century, an awareness of the politics of space was emerging. Nightingale’s ‘Cassandra’ is a powerful, though slightly melodramatic, indictment of a domestic system that consistently reduces women to inconsequentiality. Gifted with passion, intellect and the

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desire for moral activity, Nightingale presents women as denied the opportunities to explore any of these. They are to repress their passions, for Victorian middle-class women claimed to have none; they have no time of their own to study and develop their intellect nor can they pursue a vocation for fear of neglecting their domestic duties. Nightingale lays most of the blame at the door of a familial system that uses its women blindly, ‘not for what they are, not for what they are intended to be, but for what it wants them for . . . If it wants someone to sit in the drawing-room, that someone is supplied by the family, though that member may be destined for science, or for education’ (404, italics original). This system is thus one that dooms a woman to triviality for it refuses to help her fulfil her destiny as a human being and instead insists on her compliance to a system that deems a woman’s time as non-valuable and hence, available for interruption and for the use of others, usually men. At the heart of the hollowness of women’s lives, for Nightingale, is the absence of meaningful time for oneself. ‘Cassandra’ is full of complaints about the lack of personal time: Women never have an half-hour in all their lives (excepting before or after anybody is up in the house) that they can call their own, without fear of offending or of hurting someone. (402) A few pages on, Nightingale complains once more that women ‘can never pursue any object for a single two hours, for we can never command any regular leisure or solitude’ (408). There is no time to pursue systematically a worthwhile subject of study or an occupation or vocation, no time for a woman to develop anything beyond superficiality. A woman’s time is too much subject to familial demands and the expectations of conventional society for her to follow through with anything else but her trivial and time-consuming domestic duties. ‘Cassandra’, privately printed in its first incarnation, never saw a wide circulation until it was published in 1928 as an appendix to Ray Strachey’s history of the women’s movement in Britain, The Cause. With its impassioned plea for women to be allowed meaningful occupation in their lives by a Victorian woman of note who managed single-handedly to establish nursing as a potential vocation for women, it is an unsurprising choice for inclusion in a feminist history.

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Its publication in 1928, a year before Woolf’s classic A Room of One’s Own, makes for an interesting comparison.8 Woolf, in attempting to answer the question of what conditions are necessary for women to write, comes up with an answer that overlaps with Nightingale’s assessment and yet differs significantly, signalling a shift in approach and attitude. Like Nightingale, Woolf recognizes that a woman’s lack of personal and solitary time is a serious obstacle, but unlike ‘Cassandra’, which stops short of practical answers in favour of an air of lament and tragedy, Woolf offers a materialist solution – sufficient income to pay for a room of one’s own and, as Julie Robin Solomon has noted, with ‘[c]ontrol over “space,” over “rooms,” over property in a capitalist society’ inevitably comes ‘control over time as well’ (333). In charge of a space of her own, a woman’s time then becomes her own. The shift in focus from the need for time to the need for space is what is of interest to me for it suggests that Woolf is representative of a new generation that is more aware of the politics of domestic space and the importance of privacy in spatial form. Her Bloomsbury colleagues were of a similar mind, particularly in the view that Victorian domesticity required renovation to better accommodate not only modern women and their demands for spatial domestic reforms and privacy but alternative sexualities.9 Christopher Reed in Bloomsbury Rooms identifies a domestic modernism concerned with rethinking and reshaping the spaces of domesticity to suit modern lives at work in the murals and interior design projects of Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell and Roger Fry. Often derided as merely amusing and considered insignificant when compared to the heroics of International Style modernism, Bloomsbury modernism nonetheless was considered part of the vocabulary of the modern in its time. Its modernity sprang from a collective alienation from Victorian forms of domesticity and ‘a yearning for an appropriate home’, a home ‘with the power to connote – and even create – new ways of life’ (Reed, 6). In Bloomsbury’s use of a Post-Impressionism vocabulary in home decoration as well as its playful style of historical quotation and pastiche, domestic interiors were transformed into art as well as vibrant spaces signalling modernity and ushering in new forms of sensuality and domestic relations. This urge to re-evaluate and transform domestic space no doubt grew from a deep unhappiness with old forms of domestic space and

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organization. Woolf’s essays for the Memoir Club and her memoir ‘A Sketch of the Past’, describing her late Victorian upbringing, are fascinating for the way they resonate with ‘Cassandra’ in its depiction of the empty social rituals that women were supposed to participate in but also for their recognition of the ways domestic space has shaped and oppressed her. Her essays are steeped in spatial consciousness and Woolf cannot explain her childhood family life or the move to Bloomsbury without first describing the space she has grown up in: But it is the house that I would ask you to imagine for a moment for, though Hyde Park Gate seems now so distant from Bloomsbury, its shadow falls across it. 46 Gordon Square could never have meant what it did had not 22 Hyde Park Gate preceded it. (Moments of Being, 182) The dark, quiet house crowded with the possessions and members of three families (the Duckworths, the Stephens and Thackeray’s granddaughter from Leslie Stephen’s first marriage) was a haphazard space filled with odd-shaped rooms and additions built to accommodate everyone. It was a house with gendered and competing centres. There was the tea-table, ‘the heart of the family’, where Julia Stephen, a picture of maternal love, reigned (Moments of Being, 118). There was the parental bedroom on the first floor – ‘the sexual centre, the birth centre, the death centre of the house’ (118). There was also Leslie Stephen’s sacrosanct study on the top floor, described by Woolf as ‘the brain of the house’ – yet another centre for the brain is an organ that controls all other organs (119). The gendered spatial divisions of the house reinforced Victorian hierarchies of distinct public and private spheres. The space dominated by Woolf’s mother was permeable and open to all, representative of Julia Stephen’s role as the Angel in the House, ministering to others’ needs. Her father’s study in contrast was private, distant and intellectual. Unsurprisingly, the competing spatial economies of the house were experienced by Woolf as full of difficult-to-reconcile divisions and contrasts: ‘Downstairs there was pure convention; upstairs pure intellect. But there was no connection between them’ (Moments of Being, 157). Woolf constantly found herself oscillating between these differing realms of the downstairs drawing-room where her feminine

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sympathies were called upon and the upstairs world of her bedroom and her father’s study where intellect and study were privileged: Thus I would go from the drawing room, where George was telling one of his little triumphs . . . up to father’s study . . . Rising he would go to the shelves, put the book back, and ask me gently, kindly; ‘What did you make of it?’ . . . Then, feeling proud and stimulated, and full of love for this unworldly, very distinguished and lonely man, whom I had pleased by coming, I would go back to the drawing room and hear George’s patter. There was no connection. There were deep divisions. (157–8) This lack of cohesion, of focus, is precisely what Nightingale complained of in ‘Cassandra’, at one point likening a woman’s activity to a painter painting five pictures at the same time, devoting a paint stroke to each intermittently (409). Woolf’s experience of incoherence, though, is expressed spatially as she identifies her problem as one of never inhabiting a unified space and one under her control. Woolf’s analysis also identifies her spatial marginalization in her own home. The drawing-room revolves round George Duckworth; the study is clearly her father’s domain. Woolf is a bit player in these spaces; they are never her spaces where she is central. Woolf did have her own bedroom but this was a space whose privacy she had incomplete control over, subject as it was to intrusions by male members of her family, even infamously at night when in her bed.10 Woolf’s awareness of the spatial element in her domestic oppression led her to the recognition that domestic arrangements, including space and domestic architecture, needed to be reformed to enable women greater control over their own time and space, to be, in effect, private. She was not alone in this. Her sister Vanessa, on the death of their father, uprooted the remnants of the family to a new location and inaugurated new domestic interiors and arrangements: At Hyde Park Gate one had only a bedroom in which to read or see one’s friends. Here Vanessa and I each had a sitting room; there was the large double drawing room; and a study on the ground floor . . . white and green chintzes were everywhere . . . we decorated our walls with washes of plain distemper. We were full of experiments and reforms. We were going to do without table napkins,

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we were to have [large supplies of] Bromo instead; we were going to paint; to write; to have coffee after dinner instead of tea at nine o’clock. Everything was going to be new; everything was going to be different. Everything was on trial. (Moments of Being, 185) The conventions were changed as were the domestic environs and the spaces endowed to the Stephen women for their use and control.11 The changed spatial sensibilities emerging in the early twentieth century were not only at work amongst the upper-middle-class, artistic avant-garde represented by Woolf and her Bloomsbury colleagues. Amongst working-class feminists and reformers a spatial consciousness especially with regards to the working-class house was invigorating the analysis and critique of working-class oppression. Margaret Leonora Eyles, in The Woman in the Little House, argued that the great enemy of the working classes was not drink as Lloyd George had suggested but ‘their uncomfortable way of living’ (55). Eyles, in an interesting move, made the connection between the desire of working-class men for political revolution to domestic discomfort and unhappiness, caused by a fractious, overburdened housewife trapped in an oppressive house ill-designed for her work. As Eyles pointed out, women lived and worked in houses designed by male architects who did not ‘live and move and have their being in their houses’ and thus, created houses of maximum inconvenience to the workingclass housewife (italics original, 38). Having lived in such a house herself, Eyles spoke from experience. Eyles’s plan for improving working-class lives was largely focused on the home: ‘One big part of the remedy is in the homes of the people’ (italics original, 57). Hers was a twofold approach. There was the importance of providing better amenities for the house – a shed outside to save having to bring a muddy pram or bicycle into a narrow hallway, hot water on tap in the kitchen, an upstairs lavatory or, even better, a bathroom. There was also the need to improve the layouts of workingclass houses to create greater convenience and privacy. Eyles recommended separate openings for bedrooms into a common landing for privacy and a back entrance for the coalman and the dustman to prevent them from dirtying the entire house when they did their work. In conjunction with this new consideration of reforming workingclass housing, privacy was becoming a subject of interest too. Incidentally, most of Eyles’s suggestions for improved amenities concurred

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with that of the Women’s Housing Sub-Committee of the Advisory Council to the Ministry of Reconstruction, which had been set up to advise the government on the building of ‘Homes Fit for Heroes’. The Sub-Committee was charged with ‘independently investigating the design of working-class houses’, and part of its mandate was to discover ‘the importance of privacy’ as well as ‘the desirable number and size of rooms’ (Burnett, 219). Their recommendations included a minimum of three rooms on the ground floor, three bedrooms above with two rooms large enough to hold two beds, a larder, and a bathroom. The provision of more bedrooms and a bathroom were indications of the Sub-Committee’s concern for privacy, for the additional bedrooms would facilitate the separation of the sexes in terms of sleeping arrangements, while a separate bathroom would put an end to the practice of bathing in the common areas of the scullery or living-room. Eyles was also concerned with privacy and the rather more intangible gains in desiring better-designed houses – those of beauty, comfort and graciousness. Eyles, curiously echoing Bloomsbury domestic aesthetics, was in favour of bringing more beauty into the home, though her methods were less flamboyant than murals and more in the way of creating cleaner, more comfortable environments. Privacy was also important to her and she advocated the provision of more space for the working-class woman and family: she and her family need the graciousness of empty space and room to move without touching each other; they need, but never get, privacy . . . For five years of my life I was never alone for one single instant. (54) Greater leisure for the working-class family was also stressed, especially the opportunity for the working-class domestic woman to move physically beyond her house and explore new spaces. For as Eyles argues: It is the social circle and the culture and the fun she gets out of life that makes the leisured woman so gracious and charming, so broad and interesting; shut up in a tiny house all day, concerned with washing and cleaning and cooking, she would soon get dull and gauche and brusque. (89)

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Eyles’s argument was thus thoroughly spatial, concentrated on refashioning domestic interiors as well as allowing working-class women the mobility to be out of the house. In a period concerned with thinking about and building homes fit for returning workingclass heroes, Eyles’s uniquely domestic and spatial viewpoint on the problems of working-class life is indicative of a growing, cross-class awareness of a spatial politics at work and the importance of physical privacy in everyday domestic life.12

Middle-class women, privacy and the garden Even though spatial privacy was increasingly foregrounded as crucial to women of all classes, the forms which this could take varied, unsurprisingly, across the classes. For the working-class woman, if she had even the leisure to be private at all, private space often came in the shape of a separate bathroom where her ablutions would be unobserved and she could be alone.13 Some memoirs of working-class girlhoods also stress the importance of the privy as the one place many a bookworm could be left alone to read in peace.14 Though the domestic home could also be oppressive for the middle-class woman, there were nonetheless spaces that could function as escapes, one of which was the garden.15 With the move of the middle-classes into the less crowded suburbs from the mid-nineteenth century on, gardens were now within their reach. Though having a garden was a means to ape aristocratic life, for the middle-classes, gardens were less about an object for public display than about privacy and domestic life: Although the middle class did use the size and appearance of their gardens to demonstrate their wealth and status, they designed their gardens as closed and private preserves . . . The garden was regarded as an extension of the private house, requiring the same preservation from public gaze. It was in effect a private retreat. (Constantine, 389–90) For the middle-classes, it was thus the more private back garden, rather than the front garden oriented towards the public, that was of greater importance. As an adjunct domestic space, the garden occupied a liminal position; it was both part of the domestic world and yet not quite of it. This ambivalence allowed women the chance to

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appropriate the garden for themselves as a site of independence and emancipation. The garden has long been symbolically associated with femininity. The hortus conclusus, or the enclosed garden, has often been used to represent female sexuality, in particular female chastity. Gardens and flowers are commonly used as metaphors to describe women and girls. For women to claim the garden as feminine (though on terms set by men) seems unproblematic. Yet the gendering of the material garden, the actual place itself, is complicated and the garden has become a scene of a tussle between the sexes. Despite the associations with femininity, the history of women as gardeners with a right to the garden and a hand in its construction has been hidden. Undoubtedly there were aristocratic women through the centuries who commissioned gardens of their own but few women would have actually physically gardened, unless they were weeding women, employed in the lowliest of all garden tasks.16 Indeed, seen from this perspective the garden has largely been a male preserve. Head gardeners and gardeners were usually men, and the hard physical labour that gardening demanded ensured that men continued to hold sway in the garden. Even in postFirst World War working-class gardens, gardening was conceived as a man’s job: ‘while the father gardens, the children play, the mother does the housework’ (quoted in Bhatti and Church, 191). A woman might be symbolically queen of the garden, a decorative spectacle in a fitting environment, possibly even the commissioner and owner of a garden but when it came to an actual engagement with the garden, designing, making, working on it, she was a presence secondary to the man in the garden. With the entry of Jane Loudon, garden writer, and the boom in feminine interest in gardening in the mid-nineteenth century, some of these gendered assumptions were to be challenged. The flower garden had traditionally been the woman’s preserve and for nineteenthcentury middle-class women, working in the flower garden was considered ‘within the bounds of propriety’ (Bennett, 90). Taking advantage of this assumed feminine proclivity for the flower garden – ‘the management of the flower-garden . . . is pre-eminently a woman’s department’ – Loudon advocated a much more active approach to gardening for women (Loudon, quoted in Hoyles, 81). With the right equipment, clothes, and detailed instructions on technique, Loudon believed that women could do physical work in the garden such as

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digging without losing an ounce of their femininity. Her physical approach to gardening signalled the transgressive potential of gardens for women. Though Loudon accepted the place of women in the domestic home and garden and did not challenge the conventional link between women and flowers, her push for women to physically take charge of their gardens ‘embodie[d] the spirit of women trying to break the bounds of what was thought acceptable, at a time when feminism was at a low ebb’ (Hoyles, 95). The garden could thus represent ‘a space of female liberation and self-determination upsetting the active masculine/passive feminine opposition more traditionally associated with gardens’ (Morris, 61). By the late nineteenth century, the potential of the garden for transforming femininity and even for feminist sentiments was growing increasingly clear. As more and more women gardened in a period when women outnumbered men dramatically and questions were raised as to what one was to do with the numerous single women about, the idea of elevating gardening to a career for women seemed a natural one.17 Gardening schools for ladies were set up with the goal of training young women to become gardeners. With their aesthetic sense and an inclination for flowers and plants which was deemed ‘natural’, the founders of these gardening schools supposed that their graduates would be preferred to a stubborn and recalcitrant male gardener. Besides, the rise of influential female garden designers such as Norah Lindsay and Gertrude Jekyll suggested that women’s talents in the garden were finally being recognized. But the garden was transgressive not only for the ways it could offer women physical activity, and even a career and financial independence, but also through its provision of a place of contemplation and refuge, ‘an escape from the confines and demands of the family’ (Harris, 117). The garden could provide privacy for the middle-class woman. Though Alfred Austin was the first to pioneer the garden autobiography or garden romance genre with his 1894 book, The Garden That I Love, Elizabeth von Arnim’s Elizabeth and Her German Garden published in 1898 was the book that started off a fashion for the genre.18 Where previous gardening books tended towards more practical gardening advice, the garden autobiography or garden romance was a more personal and subjective format, with the garden described reflecting the personality of the owner. Lynne Hapgood has suggested that the overwhelming success of Elizabeth and Her German Garden

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(eleven editions were printed within the first year of publication) can be attributed to the way it captured a suburban zeitgeist centred on the garden as a treasured repository of nature: her account spoke to the needs of the time, to grasp the vanishing remnants of a lost golden age and integrate them into the new social formations, and to legitimise women’s need for an identity beyond that of wife and mother. (Hapgood, 103) Writing of suburbia and the suburban imagination, Hapgood’s account of the text is mainly focused on von Arnim’s evocation of nature within the garden and her passion for her garden as establishing a suburban leitmotif. Yet the tail end of the quote also suggests a recognition that the garden romance genre is a feminine, possibly feminist, one and that the garden is positioned as part of a woman’s world (98). For von Arnim, the garden was a means to articulate a love of privacy and a woman’s need of it for the sake of preserving her sense of self.19 Written as an informal diary, von Arnim’s novel lightly weaves descriptions of her garden with her personal expressions of delight at it, her trials with her gardener as well as amusing anecdotes of her husband and children, the April, May, and June babies, and her various house guests. While von Arnim’s witty and charming book celebrates the beauty of nature and the garden and the joys of imaginatively putting the garden together each season, what also impresses the reader is her love of being alone and how her garden provides her with this protected space of privacy. Having persuaded her husband to take up this neglected estate in Prussia, she spends six weeks there on her own supposedly to supervise the renovations but in reality happily ensconced in the garden on her own, delighting in its wild glories. Inside the house are the workmen and a burdensome domestic identity, but outside, in the garden, is freedom. So completely fulfilled in her solitary state is she that she forgets even to write to her family and her husband is forced to pay her a visit to rebuke her. With the family established in this new home, the garden continually functions as a private escape for Elizabeth from domestic duties: The garden is the place I go to for refuge and shelter, not the house. In the house are duties and annoyances, servants to exhort and admonish, furniture and meals . . . (33)

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The house, supposedly a domestic retreat, is a site of work for the woman and a place where a sometimes irksome identity as mistress is imposed on her. The garden, in contrast, is a haven where Elizabeth may be simply herself and for this to happen, the garden must remain a solitary experience. Though there are occasions when she surrounds herself in the garden with her babies, carrying her role as mother into the garden, her preferred way of enjoying the garden is on her own and it is at such moments when her appreciation of her garden is at its most intense and lyrical. To keep her garden as private as possible, her gardening team is a skeleton staff of two as she does not like taking a turn in the garden and having eyes follow her (73). In her sequel to Elizabeth and Her German Garden, she speaks again of not liking to meet her gardener at all while in her garden and also of the importance of being out of sight of the house while in her garden. Indeed, the title of her sequel, The Solitary Summer (my emphasis), taken from her decision to spend a summer without any visitors at all so that her ‘soul may have time to grow’, highlights von Arnim’s continued emphasis on solitude and complete privacy (3). The garden thus becomes a feminine space given over to escape and privacy, a place where a woman may claim a right to her individual identity apart from being a wife and mother. A glance at some of the other garden romances that appeared in the wake of von Arnim appears to confirm this nexus of garden, privacy and female identity. Flora Klickmann’s The Flower-Patch Among the Hills depicts a weekend cottage garden as an escape from her hectic London job and a means to recharge her spirits. It is also exclusively a female world. Klickmann is usually idling in the garden alone or working on her garden with two female friends, Virginia and Ursula, who are frequent guests to her cottage. A Garden in the Suburbs by Mrs Leslie Williams, while rather more practical as a gardening book than most garden romances, similarly conveys the impression that her suburban garden, nicknamed ‘The Oblong’, is primarily her space. Though her husband may be found under a tree and occasionally exhorted to mow the lawn, the garden is the fruit of her solo labour. In The Garden of a Commuter’s Wife, Barbara Campbell is almost as fervent as von Arnim in her love of her garden and the privacy it offers.20 Having been spotted on the piazza by a visitor, she decides in future to sit in the cherry tree, hidden from view, so that no one can ‘despoil [her] of garden privacy’ (Campbell, 127) Even the wild birds

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which shelter in her garden and woods are offered her protection from having their privacy invaded by bird-watchers. Like von Arnim, the garden is her sanctuary and a place to evade visitors and be idle and solitary: It is delicious sometimes to do nothing simply for its own sake. As I leaned luxuriantly back and alternately looked down the vista of the long walk toward the sun garden and into the rose arbour closing my eyes and merely breathing in fragrance and sound, I was no longer the commuter’s wife who breakfasts at seven, and is obliged to, partly at least, observe the conventionalities but a Lotus Eater listening to the nightingale. (269–70) The garden also offers Campbell the opportunity to momentarily redefine herself from a suburban wife conforming to convention to the more exotic identity of a decadent Lotus Eater. Yet Campbell’s garden privacy is slightly differently weighted from von Arnim’s and reveals the ease with which the individual privacy the garden offers a woman may slip back into a familial and group form of privacy. Having settled back in her family home with an English husband indulgent of his wife’s desire to return to America, Campbell’s garden is less about an escape from onerous domesticity than a reunion with family, in particular with the spirit of her deceased mother, symbolized by an old apple tree at the centre of the garden fondly called ‘The Mother Tree’. While both Campbell and von Arnim may detest the nuisance of unwanted callers invading their garden and privacy, Campbell is much more open to the presence of her husband and father in her garden than von Arnim is. With views that inclined towards feminism, von Arnim was not above a quick jibe at her husband’s expense, and, on receiving one of his putdowns after her attempt to please him with a gift of baby owls backfires, she writes that she went out of the house into the garden ‘more convinced than ever that he sang true who sang – Two paradises ’twere in one to live in Paradise alone’ (33).21 In contrast, Campbell’s garden though a feminized space is one that welcomes men, especially the men of her family. Her garden privacy is not simply about the privacy of the individual but encompasses the privacy of the family unit, marking a return to the familiar model of domestic privacy as preserving the privacy of the family group and not its individual members. As such the

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text ends with a vision of familial love and a reminder of companionable marriages across generations and classes. Her father presents her with a book with ivory miniatures of two couples – Campbell’s parents and the new generation of Campbell and her husband Evan – and the book closes out on the happy marriage of another couple within the household, that of the cook Martha and the stablehand, Tim. Campbell’s garden becomes an earthly reworking of the Garden of Eden. Instead of expulsion, homecoming; instead of broken relationships, the celebration of marriage. Ultimately the garden’s Edenic heritage is too strong and the image of the woman enjoying her privacy in her garden shifts into an image of the heterosexual couple. Though men are often marginal in accounts of women’s gardens, they nonetheless make important appearances, particularly at the end. Klickmann’s tale of her flowerpatch concludes with her marriage and the arrival of her husband, nicknamed the Head of Affairs, at her country cottage and garden, bringing to an end the all-female realm that the garden was. Williams’s suburban garden, though primarily her love and responsibility, nonetheless has its ‘Adam’ (as she calls her husband) within it. Even von Arnim, fiercely protective of her personal privacy and space, ends The Solitary Summer with she and the Man of Wrath reconciled and in a gentle embrace with ‘[her] head resting on his shoulder, and his arm encircling [her] waist’ (190). One is often part of a couple in a garden and Adam is never far off. In fact, Adam can never be far off for usually Adam owns the garden. Though garden romances constructed gardens as women’s spaces, the fact that gardens were not owned by women was often elided. Von Arnim may use her own pin money to furnish the garden with plants but the land is her husband’s. As such the woman in her garden was liable to be usurped at any moment. Mandy Morris’s reading of The Secret Garden confirms this pattern. Mary Lennox, born in colonial India, connects to the strange English landscape through her passion for gardening and a secret walled garden on her uncle’s estate. As Morris argues, Mary’s love for gardens positions her as English, despite her colonial Indian background, and ‘essentially’ feminine (66). Her discovery and recovery of the derelict walled garden marks it as her space. At this stage, the garden is Mary’s secret and a place over which she has autonomy but on introducing her cousin Colin, heir to her uncle’s estate, to the garden, her place is usurped. Hysterical and effeminate

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Colin feels the regenerating effects of the garden and is transformed into an active, athletic young boy who takes over the narration of the secret garden from Mary when his father returns and discovers his dramatically altered son: It is now Colin who asserts his identity – ‘“I’m Colin”’ – whereas Mary is silent. Her dialogue has been reduced in frequency until she says no more; her regeneration into a passive feminine girl child is complemented by her marginalized position and silent tongue. (73–4) Sidelined and silenced, the character of Mary in The Secret Garden reveals the potential of the garden space for female independence but also the ease with which control may be taken away from her by the rightful male owners and heirs to the garden. In the face of this downbeat end for Mary, Morris optimistically imagines Mary’s silence as resistance – perhaps she lingers in the garden still ‘reluctant as ever to return indoors’ and to prescribed femininity, perhaps she will grow up to reclaim the garden as the author of The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett, did in her own life (76). Perhaps Mary, realizing the compromised space of privacy and independence that the garden offers to women, is pondering on what other spaces she can appropriate.

Negotiating for spatial privacy: the study and the room The garden may be a feminized space where a woman can be alone for a while but with its porous borders allowing all and sundry in and its Edenic heritage that privileges the heterosexual couple, it is a space that cannot offer complete privacy for women. At the centre of the garden’s inadequacy for women is that its ownership is usually in male hands. So while a woman may occupy a garden and enjoy its advantages, she is helpless to prevent the entry of its male and rightful owner. The alternative would be to own and control a space of privacy outright and if an entire house or garden was out of the question for most women, the smaller unit of a room within a house was not. Within the home, the study provided women with an example to aim for. The study, however, was usually a man’s space. Women did not lay claim to studies for feminine spaces within the home were more

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conventionally communal than solitary. Jane Harrison in ‘Scientiae Sacra Fames’ notes that the drawing-room, the woman’s space par excellence, was not a room to withdraw into, by yourself, but essentially the room into which ‘visitors are shown’ – a room in which you can’t possibly settle down to think, because anyone may come in at any moment. The drawing room is the woman’s province; she must be able and ready to switch her mind off and on at any moment, to anyone’s concern. (128) In contrast, a man’s study rarely had two chairs: ‘there is always one – possibly for a human being to sit on. Well, that study stands for man’s insularity; he wants to be by himself’ (128).22 Spatial privacy was standard practice for a man, his spaces were set up for solitude but not so for a woman. This was to be challenged. Modernity ushered in not only an increased awareness of spatial politics but also attempts to reformulate a masculine practice of spatial privacy for female needs. In the rest of this chapter, I would like to consider the female appropriation of the masculine study and suggest that this process results in the rejection of the study in favour of the flexible and multi-tasking room of one’s own. One of the ways women were to legitimize requests for spatial privacy was to position themselves as noble seekers of knowledge in need of a study of their own. This was a line of argument that Nightingale had pursued in ‘Cassandra’. In pleading for a woman’s moral and intellectual right to worthwhile activity of benefit to society, Nightingale was attempting to win time and, by implication, space for women to be solitary and private. Jane Harrison, herself a scholar of renown, would in 1915 make a very similar plea in her essay deliberating the pursuit of knowledge by women. In ‘Scientiae Sacra Fames’, Harrison begins by recalling the time when, as a young girl, the only space that she could legitimately desire was a ‘home of her own’: A ‘home of her own’ was as near as the essentially decent aunt of those days might get to an address on sex and marriage, but the child understood: she was a little girl, and thereby damned to eternal domesticity; she heard the gates of Learning clang as they closed. (117)

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Her essay is largely an argument for the importance for women to move beyond the private sphere of domesticity and to pursue knowledge. Women need to be more detached from their involvement with their families, they need to a certain extent greater self-centredness to enable themselves to grow as individuals and thus improve the quality of domestic life. Though, presumably for strategic purposes, Harrison trots out this old chestnut of an argument that grants liberty to woman only to re-situate her, new and improved, back in the home, her general focus is nonetheless outward, away from the home: We must free women before we know what they are fit for intellectually and morally. We must experiment . . . We women may have all to go back into the harem tomorrow for the good of the race. If so, back we must go in the name of science. But, again in the name of science, we are not going till the experiment has been tried. (italics original, 139) The spatial focus of this outward movement away from ‘the harem’ is the study. As Harrison acknowledges, ‘[o]ne of the most ominous signs of the times is that woman is beginning to demand a study’ (128). The house with its accompanying trappings of domesticity was no longer the only space a woman was entitled to. The gates of learning were opening to her and, with that, the prospect of a study and a life of work and vocation and not of domesticity. The claiming of a different space could open up new vistas for a woman, a fact that Harrison’s essay celebrates. Though a study could be seen as a challenge to traditional female spatial entitlements, it was also a room that could be asked for and given to women without too many misgivings. As a room within the home, it was still within the private domestic sphere where women were supposed to be situated, subject to the control of the ruling patriarch.23 As a space of learning, it was also an ideal way of emphasizing the seriousness with which women would use their hard-won privacy. There would be no tomfoolery, no sexual delinquency, only rigorous intellectual pursuits. The study was an ideal space of privacy for women to negotiate for and benevolent fathers and husbands often gave daughters and wives studies of their own. Writer Enid Bagnold had her own study as did Naomi Mitchison.24

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The study pulses through women’s imaginations and yet, curiously, it is seldom named explicitly. Kathleen Woodward’s autobiography Jipping Street relates her working-class childhood in Bermondsey, London and her gradual politicization as a feminist and a socialist. First published in 1928, a year before Woolf’s iconic A Room of One’s Own, Jipping Street expresses Woodward’s desire for emancipation from the numerous oppressions of working-class life in the form of a room of her own:25 One day it came to me strong and clear – the end of all desires, the longing beneath all longing; and there shaped in my dreams a little room with white walls, clean white-washed walls, and bare floor boards, set far away on the brow of a hill I had never seen, remote, inaccessible . . . In the centre of the room was a square, solid white deal table, for scrubbing; there was a chair I could scrub and, in magnificent array about the room, the bookshelves I myself had builded supporting the books I had most strangely become possessed of; and in the room there dwelt peace and cleanness in perfect accord and sanctity. (48) The biblical tone and phrasing convey the intense, utopic impulse behind this desire for a room; it will become the heaven which she will strive for and eventually attain to a degree. Woodward’s much-longedfor room is a symbol of personal escape from an oppressive class and personal history but it is also a symbol of modernity. The form which this room will take is surprisingly modern. There is no Victorian clutter of knick-knacks and personal memorabilia but an extremely modern and minimal space of white walls and the barest minimum of white furniture. The purity of colour and set-up is in keeping with Woodward’s imagining of her room as heaven itself, a stark contrast to the spaces of her childhood home, a ‘Gethsemane’, as she calls it, of ‘cheap china pieces’, ‘photographs’ and ‘stuffed chairs smelling with age and the need for fresh air’ (139). The only concession the room makes towards personal possessions is books. Woodward’s ideal room is filled with books. Indeed, with its one chair and table and lined as it is with bookshelves and books, her ideal room is, in effect, a study, though not openly called so within the text. Heaven is a study of one’s own.

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In reality, when Woodward does achieve a room of her own, the space, scrubbed and painted white as in her dream, is more hybrid – part living space and part study – but still a welcome ‘citadel’ of privacy, ‘a world apart’ (133–4). Woodward’s limited income does not allow for a separate study so the solution is a bedsitting room, a hybrid personal space whose most important quality is its privacy. In Woodward’s case, it is the realities of her economic situation that prevent her from achieving her ultimate vision of that remote, inaccessible room with books, but the desire for a study was nonetheless problematic for women. While wanting and getting a study was a subtly subversive act for a woman, suggesting an encroachment of male domains and appropriation of masculinity, a woman in a study could also unwittingly perpetuate familiar masculine hierarchies once ensconced there. The overt masculinity of the space and its masculine practice of privacy were not easily reappropriated by a woman. Could one claim the study for women’s privacy without reverting to the insularity and exclusivity of the conventional practice of privacy? The study emerged in the fourteenth century in Europe as its predecessor, a locked cabinet or writing desk, expanded in function until it occupied a space of its own, usually adjoined to the bedroom. Initially called a closet, the study was where the master of the house studied and kept his and the household’s secrets. Mark Wigley has argued that the study was a means for a man to maintain ultimate control in a domestic arena where apparent power had been ceded to his wife: ‘The woman maintains a system without access to its secrets’ (348). The study as an exclusionary and private space is irrevocably bound up with preservation of masculine power within the home. Acquiring a study for a woman thus was not merely about acquiring privacy as it also implied a heritage of power expressed spatially. Victoria Rosner in examining the deployment of studies in Radclyffe Hall’s Well of Loneliness reveals that such spatial hierarchies of power are not easily dismissed with a change of owner. Stephen reproduces gendered divisions of space through her study much as her father did: Like her father, Stephen finds an ideal partner, and then retreats from her into the study. As with Anna, Mary is invited in, and then somehow made unwelcome. Philip excluded Anna with his bookishness; Stephen excludes Mary with her writing. (Rosner, Housing Modernism, 182)

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Stephen is an invert, and this repetition of spatial habits is her way of appropriating masculinity. As her father kept the secret of her inversion locked in his study, so does she now, having transferred her father’s secret books to her own study. The study with its secret becomes the key to her masculine identity. Thus, Rosner’s reading of Hall’s text suggests that the study spatially perpetuates a kind of masculinity, one that creates power through the safekeeping of secrets and exclusion of women. For a woman to thus lay claim to a study was a paradoxical move. Given that studies for women were desirable and yet fraught with ambiguous tensions that threatened to undermine the progressive potential of claiming such a space, we tend to find in women’s conceptions of privacy a move away from the insular study to the more neutral room with its capacity for multiple functions. Indeed, Woolf’s rallying call was for a room of one’s own, not a study of one’s own, though, crucially, she called for a room with ‘a lock on the door’ (96). Lady Stephen, in her history of Girton College, recounted that when the founder of Girton, Emily Davies, envisioned privacy for her students it was through the provision of a sitting-room (apart from a bedroom) where a student could ‘study undisturbed and . . . enjoy at her discretion the companionship of friends of her own choice’ (Lady Stephen, quoted in Marcus, Virginia Woolf, 30). The sitting room was meant to be a private study and yet it was also a kind of study where company could be allowed in if desired. The owner-occupier of the room was free to discern the function of her room – privacy or sociability.26 This echoes the pleasures of the garden as a space that allows for both privacy and community but with a crucial difference – a room offers a woman far more control over access, particularly as a woman could more easily lay claim to owning a room than an entire garden. Looking at Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, we continue to find rooms of hybrid function that provide the solitude necessary for contemplation and yet still offer a connection to the outside world and a degree of sociability. What is key throughout is the control of entry to these spaces: these are rooms with locks where the female owner-occupiers can police access to their private spaces, locking others out or letting them in. The exclusivity of the masculine study is transformed into the flexibility of the room. For a middle-class woman with an income and the use of a study of her own, Woolf herself is strangely reluctant to speak of studies for

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women. Yet Victoria Rosner has described Woolf’s vision of authorship as one of the author alone in her study. Examining A Room of One’s Own as her key text, Rosner argues that Woolf takes ‘the reader on a walking tour of the obstacles to female authorship and finally show[s] that nothing is more essential for women writers than a traditional, masculine study – a somewhat unsettling conclusion for a text committed to the construction of a separate female literary tradition’ (Rosner, Modernism, 120). Rosner speaks of the narrator entering ‘her study’ in Chapter Three and experiencing privacy and peace to contemplate, unlike the constant halting interruptions that had characterized the narrator’s wanderings in Oxbridge and her research at the British Library. This is taken to underline Woolf’s commitment to the power of the study: The generative fantasy of A Room of One’s Own . . . is that the male space of the Victorian study can become the crucible of an autonomous, potent, and female author figure. Rather than debunk the mystique of the study – as she might have used the example of Austen to do – Woolf wishes only to extend its privileges to women. (123) Woolf’s alleged allegiance to the insular masculine study is overstated by Rosner. We know the room the narrator enters in Chapter Three contains her impressive library that she proceeds to work through in search of answers; we know it is a room that affords her privacy, where she may draw the curtains and ‘shut out distractions’ (38). From this we could infer that such a room is a study and yet it is never named explicitly as such within the text. And, strikingly, the narrator, despite enjoying the benefits and privileges of her study, does not insist on studies for women but a mere room. Woolf’s emphasis is on spatial privacy and this need not equate to the study. An undefined room, as long as its access was controlled by its female inhabitant, would be adequate. Woolf, throughout A Room of One’s Own, never refers to a study specifically, and her diary, which records her talk to the Girton ODTAA (One Damned Thing After Another) Society, which eventually became the basis of A Room of One’s Own, speaks only of urging them to drink wine and to have a room of their own (Diary, 200). Yet if we wished to continue viewing the narrator’s book-lined room in Chapter Three as a study, this would nonetheless be a different

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study from the masculine exclusive space envisioned by Rosner. While a room where the narrator may lock others out and indulge in the privacy to read and think undisturbed, this is also a space where others may be let in, though on terms carefully dictated by the narrator. Georgia Johnston in her consideration of ‘A Sketch of the Past’ reveals in Woolf’s narrative of gendered spatial oppression a strategy of retrospective space. Woolf textually creates a specular position retrospectively that allows her to ‘create an inside/outside position in relation to the past’ (291). Thus while Woolf is a participant in her past, through her method of scene-making, she is also on the outside, giving shape to her childhood, creating a ‘platform’ of the present time where she is alone, and is an aware spectator of the forces at play in her past. Through these means, amidst the narrative of the oppressiveness of her Victorian home, Woolf carves out a space for the individual, for the outsider. The reverse occurs in A Room of One’s Own. Where ‘A Sketch’ is concerned to preserve a metaphorical space of privacy for Woolf, a reaction to the lack of spatial privacy in her childhood and adolescence that the essay narrates, A Room is instead focused on providing both solitude and community. A Room of One’s Own is a text interested in process, not product. Woolf demurs in her opening pages that she is unable to provide a solid outcome, ‘a nugget of pure truth’, after ‘an hour’s discourse’ (3). Instead she offers the story of a process, of how she came to reach her opinion regarding the necessity of money and a room of one’s own for budding women writers. This transforms the text from a direct transmission of facts and ideas into a narrative report of the narrator’s meandering both physically and mentally. When the narrator enters her private room or study after a frustrating morning at the British Library, we are allowed to follow into this private space as the reportage continues giving us details of what is and is not on her bookshelves, what books she picks out to read, when she halts reading to ponder, what she deliberates over, and when she returns to her reading. The impression is that of being present with the narrator in the privacy of her room and her innermost thoughts and it is a clever illusion as Woolf deftly mingles the use of the present tense conveying immediacy of thought with the past tense, reminding readers that we are belatedly part of her thought process. Just as we are immersed in her thinking, a subtly inserted ‘I continued’ or

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‘I concluded’ returns us to the reality that what the narrator describes has already happened (42). The effect is that of being simultaneously included and excluded in the narrator’s private thoughts and room, an ambivalent response very much like that generated by A Room’s playful rhetoric and the curiously ambiguous position of its narrator. With A Room, Woolf was experimenting with the rhetorical mode of the conversation as an alternative to ‘the authorial/authoritative dominance of patriarchal discourse’ (Cuddy-Keane, 137). Here is a lecture with a clearly defined topic, a form of patriarchal discourse, and Woolf refusing to play the expected role of the expert, expounding views with authority. Instead there are attempts at subverting the otherwise sure-footed genre. She shifts her persona to one Mary Beton; fiction and its lies are incorporated in the lecture’s methodology and the conversational informal freedom to challenge her views is worked in. The text famously begins with a ‘But’, recording right at its start an opposing thought, challenging the speaker’s authority. Yet, despite the effort to bring in other views, A Room is in essence a monologue. No matter how sensitive she is to her audience’s objections and alternative views, the narrator’s voice still dominates. Working within the generic boundaries of the lecture, Woolf’s innovations are playful disturbances rather than radical subversions. Just as she mocks conventional perorations to audiences of women as trite and better left to the male sex and yet cannot resist inserting one though in a newly revised form herself, A Room remains a lecture, though one which has been dissected, its inner workings exposed to scrutiny and reconstituted as it was but with small subtle differences. In a similar fashion, our delayed entry into the narrator’s private room or study protects the narrator’s privacy while also creating a relation to the outside world by sharing through discourse her private space and her equally private processes of thinking. Woolf deploys a Janus-faced strategy that placates as it disturbs conventions. We are both inside and outside that room of hers. The vision of A Room of One’s Own, in keeping with its deliberate rhetorical attempt at inclusiveness, is thus not of the female author in splendid isolation in her study excluding all but of the female author involved in a series of negotiations between private and public, aware of her need as a public figure to allow (and yet control) access to her private world. At the centre of these negotiations is the flexible room of one’s own with a lock on its door where a woman can

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exercise choice and autonomy in how private or public she wishes to be. Connection with the public world may come in the form of the private room launching a public career as a professional writer as Anna Snaith has duly noted in the case of Woolf: ‘Woolf’s move to Bloomsbury instigated her own entry into the world of professional work’ (27). Or it may come in the form of allowing the outside world selective entry into the private world as A Room of One’s Own attempts to do. As such, Woolf’s notion of spatial privacy always includes the possibility of community, even if it is only a discursive kind, satisfying contradictory desires for connection as well as solitude. If the ‘social space of the living room . . . is complemented by the solitary space of the study’, then the room functions to combine the two at the whim of its owner, softening the hard boundaries of the masculine private space of the study (Berry, 197). The move to annex a space for privacy for women thus began within the domestic home. The garden as a feminized and adjunct domestic space while offering a mix of privacy and companionable company did not give women sufficient control over its borders, meaning that company often intruded, eating away at a woman’s privacy. Looking within the domestic home, the increasing emancipation of women in early twentieth-century society offered women a chance to claim privacy via the study and in the process reformulate and feminize privacy from isolationist and masculinist to an ideal that has the potential for both solitude and community. The space par excellence for such an ideal would prove not to be the traditional study but the humble room – as long as it had a lock on the door.

2 Public Privacy: Women, the City and the Car

If she knows how to walk in the streets, self-possessed and quietly, with not too lagging and not too swift a step; if she avoids lounging about the shop-windows, and resolutely foregoes even the most tempting displays of finery; if she can attain that enviable streettalent, and pass men without looking at them yet all the while seeing them . . . she is for the most part as safe as if planting tulips and crocuses in her own garden. (Elizabeth Lynn Linton, quoted in Nead, 66) Written in 1862, the quotation by Elizabeth Lynn Linton reveals that respectable women had long had a presence on the streets of the nineteenth-century city. Undoubtedly, a woman had to exercise a great deal of self-restraint and skill, what Linton calls ‘street-talent’, in avoiding being mistaken for a loitering prostitute, but, by looking purposeful and in seeing but not recognizing men, she could remain as untouched while on the streets as in her own private garden. Linton’s emphasis is on the safety of women in the public spaces of the city but her choice of simile also suggests that a woman in public space could find herself in an unexpectedly private world. If the garden was increasingly being appropriated for women’s practices of privacy, Linton’s phrasing reveals that there were ways for women to privatize the public spaces of the city. Of course, the contortions a woman had to undergo to walk safely through the streets – walking neither too fast nor too slow, without any lingering – highlights the gendered nature of public space, but the possibility of being on the street nonetheless and feeling ‘as safe as if planting tulips and crocuses in her own garden’ 47

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suggests that the city could not only embrace women but provide an incidental pocket of privacy too. The novelty of this is the idea of privacy in a non-domestic public setting. The private sphere had been conceptualized as a means to provide public man a refuge from the public world but for a woman usually already ensconced in the private sphere, public space could offer a unique spatial opportunity to find the physical privacy not easily available to a woman within the home. With the social and technological changes taking place at the turn of the twentieth century and the gradual opening up of the public sphere to women, the search for privacy could thus take unusual forms and this chapter will look at two types of spaces outside the home with surprising potential to offer women physical privacy – the city with its public streets and the car. The privacy that a city can offer may appear to be only psychological but I would like to suggest that the anonymity of the city provides a bubble of mobile private space. As cities expanded and more and more middle-class single women entered urban centres in search of employment while their married sisters shopped at department stores, the city as a public and masculine space was challenged. For women, being in the city was an escape from the domestic world and an experience marked as a new kind of spatial freedom. This transgressive incursion into male territory, however, was not the only appeal of the city for the new urban modes of consciousness that privileged reserve and aversion, first described by sociologist Georg Simmel (and hinted at by Linton), also provided women with a way to transform public space into private, creating a kind of public privacy. The effects of the city’s modes of anonymity and impersonality were not only of mental privacy but also spatial – the familiar notion of being alone in the crowd meant that one was not only mentally alone but also physically left alone in the crowd. The city thus facilitated a privacy of mental and physical emancipation from the pressures of a fixed domestic identity. For Virginia Woolf, the choice of non-responsiveness that then cloaked a woman in privacy in the city allowed a turning inwards to evade a domestic identity and to explore multiplicity instead. In contrast to Woolf, Richardson’s appreciation of the public privacy of the city in Pilgrimage, her 13-novel masterpiece, leans more on the advantages of the more exposed side of public privacy while also signalling the importance of the city in offering a privacy that releases her heroine from

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herself. Miriam Henderson, the protagonist of Pilgrimage, enjoys the fact that the city gives her a kind of intermediate privacy where she may be alone but still part of a community of urbanites as opposed to oppressively alone in her own room. Privacy enabled women to access the emancipatory potential of modernity to escape domesticity, but on other occasions privacy was a refuge from the modern itself. Like the city, the car is often seen as the ultimate in modern experience. The city with its crowds and spectacle transfixes and yet dissolves identity; the car with its burst of speed similarly melts away the surroundings and in doing so unpins the self from solid reality. Both the experiences of city and car betray the contradictory hallmarks of modernity – excitement, transcendence, but also confusion and anomie. In the midst of this, however, both the city and the car nonetheless preserve a space of privacy. Privacy in the public sphere becomes a mechanism to not only evade the demands of domesticity but also the pressures of a modern urban world. The urban habits of aversion and reserve are, after all, ways to cope with the teeming masses of the city. The second section of this chapter looks at how the new technology of the car opened up a practice of privacy as both modern in its escape from domesticity and a refuge from modernity for women to explore and exploit. The car was a mobile room free to roam the public sphere while giving women a legitimate private retreat. Unless the car was shared with passengers, a woman driver was on her own in her car and thus able to be herself and with her own thoughts. Such a spatial retreat enabled women to focus on themselves and while much of the literature on modernity and the car has concentrated on the fragmentation of subjectivity a car engenders, I wish to argue that the car also offers the woman alone an ideal and private place to consolidate the fragmented self in preparation for a return to the private sphere. That epitome of modernity placed in a woman’s hands became a restorative space. The car may splinter the self but it was also an ideal place to regroup.

Public privacy: women, flânerie and the city The city has usually been perceived as unremittingly public and masculine. The gendered separate spheres ideology of the nineteenth century has done much to entrench this view: women were supposed to belong to the private sphere of hearth and home and men to the

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public sphere of the city with its institutions of politics and commerce. The division was clear-cut, or so it seemed, for the reality was rather more confused. Working-class women have always had a presence in the city as labourers, be they factory or sex workers, and with the rise of consumer culture, middle-class women were increasingly making themselves felt in the city as consummate consumers in the shopping arcades and emerging department stores. Lower-middle-class women were also entering the city in unprecedented numbers as positions as clerks and shop assistants were opening up to single women of their class. The city was changing and part of its inherent modernity was its challenge to the separate-spheres ideology. In fact, Amanda Vickery speculates that the vehemence with which the separate spheres ideology was being promulgated in the nineteenth century was a sign of the ideology’s failure (Vickery, 400). Private and public spheres could no longer be kept separate and the city was at the forefront of the ideology’s unravelling. Yet the debate about women in the city has tended to downplay the presence of women in the city and their role in dissolving private and public boundaries in deference to the perceived masculinity of the city. This has much to do with the centrality of the figure of the flâneur in discussions of modern ways of being in the city. Though women were penetrating the city, the city was still largely patriarchal and a man’s world, and the figure used to best understand the changes of modernity in an urban environment was, not surprisingly, male. Historically, the flâneur emerged in mid-nineteenth-century Paris, an artist-writer attuned to the commercialization of the city and the commodification of his own art. Observing the spectacle of the city and recording it for sale to the commercial press, the flâneur particularly as defined by Charles Baudelaire was a man mingling in the crowd, sympathetic and yet detached, free to deploy a privileged masculine gaze on the human sights of the city – the members of fashionable high society at one end of the social scale and at the other, the prostitute, the beggar, the rag-picker. The flâneur as a critical concept developed by Walter Benjamin, Baudelaire’s most sympathetic interpreter, has had the effect of placing at the heart of urban modernity a male observer roaming freely through the streets of the city, an autonomous individual yet still part of the crowd. If the flâneur represents the vanguard of modernity, then women, sidelined in the private domestic sphere and with

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partial and contested access to the public sphere, stand little chance of participating in the modern. This is what Janet Wolff, in her important article ‘The Invisible Flâneuse: Women and the Literature of Modernity’, complains of, for male-centred versions of modernity focused on the city tend to exclude women. Central to Wolff’s argument is her contention that the literature of the modern has tended to elide the experiences of women’s modernity in the private sphere by equating modernity with the masculine world of the public and the urban. The concentration on the urban at a time when women were present but still marginalized in the city skews the representation of modernity. This is a crucial point but in Wolff’s anxiety to highlight the validity of the feminine private sphere as modern, she is a little too quick to valorize the flâneur and to dismiss the experiences of women in the city and the changes to the private/public dichotomy that modernity was wreaking on the city. As Elizabeth Wilson has argued, the flâneur was not a symbol of the male’s right to the city and modernity – ‘the triumph of masculine power’ – but in fact a figure representing the attenuation of this same power in the city (109). The flâneur as a concept was a summation of a new masculine mode of urban consciousness, but inherent in his representation was the recognition that he was also on the verge of being eclipsed by the new city of capitalist modernity and the New Women surging into the formerly masculine territory of the city. Thus, with the collapse of the boundaries between private and public sphere and the flâneur’s decline comes room for the rise of the flâneuse and historians and literary scholars such as Lynne Walker, Erika Rappaport and Deborah Parsons have documented the different ways women were beginning to make the city their own. Walker, concentrating on Victorian London, writes of the reshaping of private and public as more women worked from home or close to home as well as the growth of women’s clubs in Mayfair which facilitated the entry of women into the public sphere. Rappaport, also examining the nineteenth century, writes of the rise of the female shopper in the city and, should anyone discount the shopper as a potential flâneuse, also discusses the expert lady city guides of the Lady Guide Association. Rappaport also examines the ways by which popular women’s magazines positioned their readers as women strollers in control of the city and expert consumers. Looking at early twentiethcentury women writers, Parsons remarks that women were carving

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out an ‘urban consciousness modelled on alternative values to those of their male counterparts, and urban narratives that present much more organic cities than the utopian/dystopian representations by hegemonic male modernism; cities that follow natural, temporal, and social rhythms’ (15–16). The flâneuse was no longer invisible but laying claim to her city. As a result flânerie has also become an important concept for feminist scholars in an assessment of women, modernity and the city. Not only does flânerie signal a woman’s right to be in the public sphere of the city but it also encourages the continued questioning of the modern woman’s role in society. As Parsons has put it, flânerie partakes of the search for self or identity, and, in their wanderings through the city, women were endeavouring to ‘identify and place the self in the uncertain environment of modernity’ (41). Parsons’s phrasing suggests that private and public were mingling in the city in ways not only represented by the physical presence of women, denizens of the private sphere, in the public sphere of the city. Attempting to place and understand the self – private – in an urban environment – public – implies that the city was a site which could be hospitable to the practices of a more introspective and private nature. The private self could be revealed or discovered in the public setting of the city for the city encouraged a new mode of urban consciousness that enabled the paradox of privacy in public. In ‘Metropolis and Mental Life’, Georg Simmel takes the first step in delineating emergent mental ways of being that the urban environment facilitates. Sensitive to the capitalist underpinnings of the city and the ways by which economics could shape human relations, Simmel recognizes a new matter-of-factness in urban relations derived from a flattening of individuality and the patterns of contractual exchange. Relationships in the city are less personal and largely professional economic ones. Building on the impersonality of urban ties as well as the insight that city life was over-stimulating, Simmel argues for a deliberate protective shield of reserve and, even at an extreme, aversion in the mental armoury of the urban inhabitant. To protect from the numerous shocks of the city, the city-dweller effects a mask of nonchalance. The valence of this urban reserve has typically been measured as negative, in particular when contrasted with the warmth and intimacy of village and small-town dealings, but, as Simmel remarks, the refusal to engage is in itself a key form of urban engagement: ‘What appears in the metropolitan style of life

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directly as dissociation is in reality only one of its elemental forms of socialization’ (180). The rules have changed and part of the freedom that the city offers is the freedom to be aloof, reserved and disengaged. In extremis, the city’s freedom can of course result in loneliness, even in the midst of a crowd, but its rewards are also rich: Impersonality . . . might be seen as an urban good, as a social form proper to the city as a ‘world of strangers’. It involves a certain kind of freedom in the city, the lonely liberty of knowing that no one is looking, nobody really is listening. (Tonkiss, 22) As Fran Tonkiss writes, borrowing from E. B. White, the city confers ‘the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy’ (22). Such gifts are not to be dismissed lightly, particularly for women. The city with its inward turn of consciousness thus grants invisibility, a boon to women who are all too often marked out by their sex. As Tonkiss remarks: anonymity, the ability to go unnoticed in the streets of the city, has particular resonance for women as well as for men whose bodies are marked in terms of racial, sexual or cultural difference. One version of freedom in the city for women is tied to not being seen. (23) Thus, what has popularly been seen as the disadvantages of urban social life – loneliness, invisibility, dissociation – can be transformed into virtues for the women in the city as these urban qualities allow a woman to preserve privacy in public and indeed a sense of self. That the mundane requirements of urban street life – impersonality and reserve – could promise a pocket of privacy and as a result an identity that might not be available in the private sphere of the domestic home nor in the public world of work is a sign of the potential that the city holds for women. The mental state of being that the city calls forth from its inhabitants thus provides women with a freedom that grants them surprising privacy and agency. The habit of reserve allows a woman to deflect unwanted attention in the city by seeing without recognizing the male gaze and in turning safely inwards to not only build ‘private dreams in public spaces’ but to explore multiple selves and identities not bound by the domestic sphere or convention as well (Laura Marcus, 76).

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Seeing without recognizing: deflecting objectification and being private Baudelaire’s poem ‘A une passante’ (‘To a Passing Woman’) from Les Fleurs du Mal invokes the magic and romance of chance encounters in the city.27 With strangers rubbing shoulders in the city, opportunities for love to be kindled in a look increase. Yet, written from a male perspective, the poem has also been held up as a familiar example of the male gaze at work. As Wolff puts it, the passante and the other women he observes in the city are nothing but ‘objects of his “botanising”’ (42). The passante nonetheless has her own agency and power. Moving through the crowds, she is often elusive, a quality captured in the passantes that also feature in Proust’s writing. Proust in his encounters with his mysterious passante is never able to catch up with her. Both his and Baudelaire’s experiences with the passante end in failure. In essence, the passante passes; she is fleeting and this quality has suggested to feminist critics Rachel Bowlby and Deborah Parsons the possibilities of the passante herself being a flâneuse in the city. The passante’s mobility is important but so is the inviolability of her urban reserve. Abroad in the city, with her own agenda to accomplish, she does not engage with the male observer of her movements; she remains her own person. Though the object of his gaze, she evades him not only by moving away but also by staying within her own bubble. Baudelaire’s passante transfixes him with her mourning clothes and her statuesque figure but even as she does return his gaze (the last line of the poem assumes that she has seen him – ‘o you who knew it!’), she chooses to ignore him. She sees him without choosing to recognize him and all that his gaze proffers – romance, eternal love. She refuses his designation as exalted object of his desire and in doing so, keeps within her own boundaries of identity. Though not written from her point of view, we have recorded for us her response – and it is a non-response, part of the privilege of being an urbanite. The art of being non-responsive, or seeing without recognition, that a woman is enabled to perform in the city is further developed by Virginia Woolf in a scene from Mrs. Dalloway. Written once again from a man’s perspective, Woolf focalizes the narrative through Peter Walsh and parodies the romance of the passante. Walking through London, Peter catches a glimpse of an attractive woman and begins to follow her. As he does so, he builds a fantasy of himself as well as of

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her. Passing by windows of merchandise, Peter takes on broad aspects of masculinity represented by the masculine gear on display, while his mysterious passante similarly begins to transform herself according to the clothes in the shop windows. A drama of predatory masculinity and elusive femininity is played out in Peter’s mind only for all to be deflated as Peter’s passante draws her key from her purse and enters a house. Peter’s game comes to an end with the ironic twist that his passante is a modern independent young woman with a key to her own door. To add injury to insult, she throws a glance in his general direction before entering her door, seeing him as part of the general street scene but yet not seeing him as an individual. This completely undermines his earlier fantasy of her calling out to him, her cloak as if opening arms towards only him (46). Woolf’s rendering of the classic episode of the flâneur and his passante thus undermines the power of the male gaze by revealing its basis in fiction. Peter himself is well aware of the unreality of the whole episode, seeing it as a bit of fun and games. Yet, it is not just the fact that it is make-believe that makes the scene a parody but also the passante’s non-engagement. She does not play the game at all and is merely intent on her own private plans. Peter’s fantasy falters because it is merely one-sided; in the freedom of the city, his quarry shrugs off the target on her back and dismisses him. Here the response of the passante is once again a non-response that indicates her preoccupation with her own thoughts and plans. The urban rules of reserve and non-engagement in city walking allow her to be blind to the objectifications of others. If we could overhear Peter’s passante on her own perambulations through the city, perhaps she would sound much like the persona of A Room of One’s Own or Clarissa Dalloway, both of whom betray a deep self-involvement when walking in the city. The persona of A Room of One’s Own in London is caught up with the question of women and writing, and, in listening to her intellectual ramblings as she physically rambles through London, we experience more of her interior workings than her exterior environment. When the landmarks of the city are mentioned such as Admiralty Arch and the Duke of Cambridge’s statue, they become material for her unravelling of the question of women and writing. The external world becomes subordinated to the internal. The city thus becomes a highly internalized and private world. Similarly Clarissa Dalloway’s experience of the city is

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surprisingly concentrated on an interior world rather than exterior. Though Clarissa does come out of her urban reverie to acknowledge her old friend Hugh Whitbread, for the most part what is intriguing about her interior monologue as she walks through Westminster to the florist for her party is how focused on personal memory it is. Though aspects of the city are mentioned – the roar of the traffic, the books in Hatchards’ shop window, the pearls and salmon and gloves of Bond Street – for the most part Clarissa, as she traipses through the London she loves, is wrapped up in thought about her past. In fact her first step into the city from her city doorstep – ‘What a lark! What a plunge!’ – immediately recalls her to her youth as she remembers flinging open the French windows at her family home at Bourton as a young woman and feeling the same way (1). This leads to memories of Peter Walsh before the present moment of London crowds back into her consciousness. This beginning marks the pattern of Clarissa’s journey through London for Clarissa’s walk is a deeply private tussle between the present and the past. Her unexpected meeting with Hugh brings back a flood of memories of the past once again and the present constantly jostles with stray memories, thoughts about her husband and worries about her daughter Elizabeth. Seeing that she is a city lover and proclaims walking in the city as better than a walk in the country, to discover that the bulk of her walk is taken up with private ruminations and reminiscences reveals that the joy of walking in the city is not an engagement with the city per se but the opportunity it provides to be private in public. Except for being briefly observed at the start of her walk by her neighbour, Scope Purvis (who presumably describes her for the benefit of the reader), and meeting Hugh, Clarissa is insular and undisturbed when abroad in London. This urban mantle of privacy thus allows Clarissa to be herself. At home, she is interrupted by callers such as Peter Walsh and by her family from Richard to Elizabeth, each with their claims to her as former suitor, husband, daughter, but, in the city, she may be simply herself: She had the oddest sense of being herself invisible; unseen; unknown; there being no more marrying, no more having of children now, but only this astonishing and rather solemn progress with the rest of them, up Bond Street . . . (8)

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Divested of husband and daughter, Clarissa’s conventional identities as wife and mother are unfixed, leaving her only with the act of walking in the city which provides her with the room for her private stream of consciousness to flow and expand. The emphasis on invisibility reminds us that not only is there freedom in the city in being invisible to other Londoners but also in the shedding of one’s responsibilities to family members and becoming invisible to them as well. This, too, is a form of privacy. Such sentiments are further explored in Woolf’s 1930 essay ‘Street Haunting’ where the city provides a release from the fixed identity of the domestic sphere. Escaping to the city streets with the hasty excuse of needing to buy a pencil, Woolf writes of the fixity of identity at home, ‘surrounded by objects which perpetually express the oddity of our own temperaments and enforce the memories of our own experiences’ (155). The words ‘perpetually’ and ‘enforce’ suggest the slight oppressiveness of the home and Woolf stresses the fixity of identity at home with the metaphor of the oyster shell. Poised on the threshold, Woolf describes the moment of entry into the public street as the breaking of the oyster shell of identity: The shell-like covering which our souls have excreted to house themselves, to make for themselves a shape distinct from others, is broken, and there is left of all these wrinkles and roughnesses a central oyster of perceptiveness, an enormous eye. (156) Curiously, the need for a protective oyster shell is not required on the ‘dangerous’ streets but at home as a sign of individuality as well as a means to hide away the soft oyster soul. In contrast, the city is the one place the shell may be removed to reveal a responsive and receptive oyster of a self that remains disembodied – all eye – and also strangely vulnerable with its ‘wrinkles and roughnesses’. For Woolf the anonymity of the streets enables a private disrobing of the familiar self. As she writes on joining the ‘army of anonymous trampers’ in the city, ‘[w]e are no longer quite ourselves . . . we shed the self our friends know us by’, leaving behind a self less known, ready to explore the city and be explored (155). Thus, in public one might find oneself most private with a self rarely acknowledged taken out for an airing. Woolf’s secret eye/I of a self is at

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first externally focused, drunk on the spectacle of the city, swooping onto the bright, glossy surfaces of the city. Curious about the outer world, the secret eye/I is also keen to penetrate into the lives of others and a hiatus in a bootshop introduces us to alterity in the city as a dwarf is introduced. The eye/I speculates on how it must feel to be a dwarf and after this encounter begins to recognize the city’s inequalities and underbelly. The eye/I, no longer satiated with the superficial beauty of the city, is drawn to the marginalized within the city – the foreigners, the working-classes, the Jew, an abandoned old woman lying on the step of a public building. The contrast between the city’s derelicts and the luxury consumer goods in the shop windows, both on display in the city, prompt ‘a question . . . which is never answered’ (159). The eye/I which seeks only surface beauty fails to ‘compose those trophies in such a way as to bring out the more obscure angles and relationships’ and the economic basis of the city and its inequalities are left unexplored, awaiting critique elsewhere (157).28 Though taken with the beautiful as well as the grotesque aspects of the city, ultimately the private self unknown to others that the city brings out is an internally focused one and one prone to splitting. Much as Clarissa was more engaged with her own inner world of memory than the actual city of London, the city becomes a springboard for private ruminations and the frisson of alternate identities. The city with its diversions encourages the multiplication and fragmentation of selves unlike the domestic sphere which Woolf suggests ‘compel[s] unity’ and punctures the private dream of multiple selves (161): The good citizen when he opens his door in the evening must be banker, golfer, husband, father; not a nomad wandering the desert, a mystic staring at the sky, a debauchee in the slums of San Francisco, a soldier heading a revolution, a pariah howling with scepticism and solitude. (161) The ‘good citizen’ on his return is still multiple – ‘banker, golfer, husband, father’ – but the multiple selves are nonetheless facets of a coherent domestic masculine identity. In contrast, the public space of the city allows for a private and pleasurable incoherence of self through personal fantasy and memory. External attractions such as the shop window displays lead to an inner world of fantasy. Looking

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at a pearl necklace transforms the eye/I into a sophisticated denizen of late-night Mayfair and turns winter into summer. In doing so, the self is split between present reality and fantasy. While the experience of window-shopping calls into being other imaginary selves, the palimpsest of time in the city also brings out other layers of selves. Near the Thames, a memory of a past self is resurrected and drawn by that, the eye/I of the essay ignores the demand to buy a pencil to indulge in a past self of six months ago standing by the river, ‘calm, aloof, content’ (164). Thus in the city, the private self is allowed to indulge in fragmentation. The point for Woolf is that the city liberates the hidden sides of the self. Home is where unity is demanded, and, though by the end of ‘Street Haunting’ the disembodied eye/I is happy to return to the solidity and banality of home after engaging with different external personalities as well as internal alternate selves, it is the city that provides the invisibility that allows for a series of private and personal pyrotechnics. Seen in this light, the essay’s title ‘Street Haunting’ is a positive rendering of the ghostly presence of the flâneuse. Where I have often felt the use of ‘haunting’ was an indication of the dubious claim of women to be on the city streets – present in the city but only as a ghost – the ghostly invisibility of the female street haunter can also be liberating and celebratory. In being unseen and hence private, the flâneuse haunts the streets with the ability to imagine herself as other or to fragment the self as she pleases without any fear of social consequence.29 In the public privacy of the streets, the flâneuse is free to be whoever and as multiple as she pleases.

Communal privacy: Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage and the city If part of the pleasure of the city for Woolf is being able to don the cloak of privacy, freeing a woman from domestic fixity, for Richardson, a writer equally invested in the city, the public privacy of the city presents a different appeal – that of a communal form of solitude and privacy. The idea is paradoxical, but, for Richardson’s heroine Miriam Henderson, solitude amongst urban strangers in the streets of London and other semi-public spaces such as the A. B. C. café and restaurants is a welcome antidote to the enforced loneliness of her room and her status as a single female worker in the city. Indeed for Miriam the city

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offers her a sense of belonging while yet allowing her to remain an unassimilated private individual. Pilgrimage, stretching over 13 volumes and still incomplete, its end only brought about by the death of Dorothy Richardson, is a remarkable historical and aesthetic record of the changes in a middle-class English woman’s life at the turn of the twentieth century. Focalized solely through the perspective of Miriam Henderson, the reader is submerged into Miriam’s stream of consciousness, a phrase coined by fellow modernist writer and critic May Sinclair in her 1918 review of one of Pilgrimage’s chapter-novels, and we see the world up-close as she does. The plunging into Miriam’s material, emotional and psychological universe is disorienting without an omniscient narrator to situate and position the reader and while Richardson’s early reviewers were attuned to her formal and content innovations, there was also a criticism of the work’s lack of critical distance, an absence of a vantagepoint to help with the filtering of the excess of information (Watts, 5). Yet this aggressive immersion into Miriam’s viewpoint, egotistical to Woolf, is a way to capture the visceral experience of modernity. As Carol Watts has put it, ‘Pilgrimage insistently records, with an obsessive eye for detail and nuance, the changing thoughts, memories, and desires of a woman living an ordinary life’ (4) and, in doing so, reveals ‘the impact of modernity on an ordinary life’ (56). Pilgrimage’s importance thus lies in its excess of detail as it records the ephemeral and mundane textures of daily life. The lack of critical distance is part of the point and a reason for the work’s greatness and literary and historical value. Working through Pilgrimage, we can see at its centre one key narrative of modernity: the journey of an educated middle-class woman ‘from the secure home of Victorian tradition into the shock of independent twentieth-century life’ (Watts, 31). ‘Shock’ is indeed an appropriate term, for, on this pilgrimage towards modernity, Miriam’s old certainties of economic security, class status, gender identity and domestic space are all questioned. Miriam as a young working woman in London has to consistently negotiate shifting terrain which continually affects her understanding of the world and herself. With regards to class, for example, Miriam’s place in the social hierarchy is awkward. From the upper-middle classes herself and yet forced by her father’s bankruptcy to earn her own living, Miriam occupies a class position that places her in terms of wealth and her need to work below

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her dentist-employer Mr Hancock and yet socially, being of the same class, she remains on par with him, a suitable companion to accompany him to scientific lectures, despite what the women of his family may think. Connected to Miriam’s uncertain class position is her loss of a particular classed and gendered identity. No longer the sheltered and leisured middle-class daughter and unwilling to marry simply to maintain this lifestyle, Miriam as an independent working woman has also to re-evaluate conventional femininity – the ‘sheltered life’ – and remake a modern feminine identity for herself framed by her work, her mobility and the opportunities of encountering numerous Others in the form of foreigners, other working single women, writers and bohemians (Pilgrimage 2, 90). Central to Miriam’s journey to comprehend her place in the changing and modernizing world is the city of London itself, the streets of which are ‘[t]he pavement of heaven’ (Pilgrimage 1, 416). The opening up of the city of London to increasing numbers of working single women signals a spatial dimension to Miriam’s experience of her changing life and times. The place of her work and thus her financial independence, London also marks her ability to control her own space in having a room of her own and her freedom of movement through the various urban spaces of the city, both public and semi-public. Carol Watts, in particular, has drawn attention to the proliferation of the latter spaces, some old, others mostly new to women, that Miriam moves through from ‘the dental practice that is also a place of work; the lodging house, both home and thoroughfare; the cafes, havens of rest and places of public discussion, the retreats of working men’ (48). These spaces mark ‘the passage of a woman from the domestic private interior, so long held to be the limit of her existence, into the male arena of public life’ (48). We can thus read Miriam’s pilgrimage as also a spatial journey as she enters and explores urban spaces, finding them conducive or not to her search for a modern feminine identity. Ultimately, the two spaces that remain core to Miriam’s existence and identity are her room in Tansley Street in Mrs Bailey’s lodging house and the city of London, both of which are spaces that allow her to be solitary though in different ways. Rooms have always been important to Miriam and each time she enters a new room, be it her new lodgings or a guest room, she takes pleasure in registering its details. On a weekend visit to Alma and Hypo Wilson, she soaks in the soft brightness of her bedroom, feeling so pleased with it that she

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feels that going downstairs to be with company will be a ‘sacrifice’ (Pilgrimage 2, 111). Spending a night in a hotel while on her cycling holiday, Miriam finds her room is ‘musty’ but nonetheless ‘beloved’, throbbing sympathetically as her heart throbs with excitement at her independence in cycling and staying in a hotel alone (Pilgrimage 2, 235). Such an ardent fervour for rooms is largely due to Miriam’s keen recognition of what a room of her own means – privacy and hence freedom. Though Richardson never uses the word ‘privacy’, preferring to speak of Miriam’s freedom, her ‘untouched self’ (Pilgrimage 2, 76) or ‘solitude’ (Pilgrimage 3, 31), privacy is, in effect, what Miriam enjoys in having her own room. Having just moved to her Tansley Street lodgings, Miriam abandons her unpacking mid-way to read and is suddenly aware of her freedom to deviate from convention: But there was no need to do anything or think about anything . . . ever, here. No interruption, no one watching or speculating or treating one in some particular way that had to be met. (italics and ellipsis original, Pilgrimage 2, 17) In the privacy of her own room, Miriam is free from social surveillance and strictures. A room is thus a necessity for Miriam: ‘There must always be a clear cold room to return to’ (Pilgrimage 2, 321). Yet, important as it is for ‘keeping the inward peace’, Miriam’s understanding of the centrality of her room does not disguise the flipside of being private and free – loneliness (Pilgrimage 2, 321). At times a place whose gift of solitude is worth any sacrifice, Miriam’s room can also turn on her, becoming ‘a cell of torturing mocking memories and apprehensions’, forcing her to seek out company from Mrs Bailey’s boarders by going downstairs and re-engaging with the games of social intercourse (Pilgrimage 3, 31). The choice between lonely room and sociable but tedious company is, however, not so stark, for Miriam has recourse to a space that brings together privacy and social contact – the city. Miriam’s love of the city is obvious. Even before moving to London to work, a trip to the city could invoke in Miriam great pleasure. Walking down Regent Street, she feels life as if streaming ‘from the close dense stone. With every footstep she felt she could fly’ (Pilgrimage 1, 416). On moving to London, Miriam adapts quickly to city life, walking the streets till late and diving with ease in and out of

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A. B. C. cafés, Ruscino, the cosmopolitan haunt of foreigners and bohemians, and the Italian restaurant Donizetti’s. Miriam’s city is primarily experienced alone. She walks the streets and eats at the A. B. C. and at Donizetti’s usually on her own and generally prefers it this way. After a musical evening at Mr Bowdoin’s, Miriam is horrified to discover that her fellow companions intend to walk to Highgate in North London together. Her revulsion is not only her knee-jerk reaction to North London, a tainted area in Miriam’s eyes for its provincial suburban values, but also at the thought of walking in the city at night with company, ‘talking all the time . . . they could never have a moment to realize anything at all; rushing along saying things that covered everything and never stopping to realize’ (ellipsis original, Pilgrimage 2, 372–3). Miriam’s solitary jaunts in the city are precious moments when she is allowed to think and debate quietly to herself. Walking in the city is thus meant to be a private and solitary experience, but it is nonetheless a qualified private experience. Unlike her room, the pressure of loneliness is less in the city where Miriam may be alone and untaxed by social effort and yet be amongst others. For Miriam then, London is both a private and a communal experience. The communal aspect is not in having to engage and talk as she imagines Mr Bowdoin’s friends doing as they walk to Highgate but in simply being a lone person in a community of strangers, fellow escapees of domesticity and social convention, bound together by being in London. Seated in an A. B. C. before the fire, Miriam thinks of London as a getaway and her fellow Londoners as fugitives, seeing on the faces of her fellow Londoners an expression of having ‘got away’ from their homes (Pilgrimage 2, 76). London is thus a place where she may be alone and yet be in a community of ‘strong free untouched people’ as herself (76). Looking about her she sees a commonality of spirit in people who were ‘in the secret of London and looked free’ (76). Ultimately London provides Miriam with a sense of belonging without imposing on her the price of belonging. She remains untouched still yet with the knowledge that London is full of others like her. The city offers her valuable privacy without the alienation of her room. Thus, in step with Woolf, the city is a place of solitude for Richardson. There are moments when a walk in the city is the perfect cover for Miriam to dive into herself and her thoughts, opening up, if not multiple selves, then multiple trains of thought that take in the urban

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landscape, literature and the question of good writing, and social questions of how to meet an old male acquaintance on the street (Pilgrimage 3, 274–8). Where Richardson differs from Woolf is in her emphasis of the city as a community of private individuals, disconnected from one another and yet bonded by their mutual exploitation of the conditions of the city to be private, individual and free.

Mobile capsules of privacy: women and cars While the city offered a surprisingly public space for women to claim physical and mental privacy for themselves, the changing modern world was also opening up new spaces for women to be private. If the city enabled privacy in public, new technologies of transportation, in particular the car, ushered in privacy while on the move. The speed of movement encouraged a fragmentation of self not unlike Woolf’s splintered city-walking self in ‘Street Haunting’, but the car as a private space also facilitated the consolidation of identity. The car’s modernity in the form of its speed and its capsule of private space thus could be appropriated by women seeking privacy to experiment with multiplicity and alternate selves before settling into a quiet repose reconfiguring the self for a return to the domestic world. The very modern car could offer a private place to counter the shattering effects of modernity. The car as represented in early twentieth-century texts has always signified a particular kind of kinetic and aggressive modernity, mostly because of its capacity for speed and fragmentation. The Futurist manifesto placed the car at the heart of its declaration of a new world. Rushing out from oppressive ‘moribund palaces’ decked with ‘mosque lamps’ and ‘opulent Persian carpets’, Marinetti and friends dash out to their cars and proceed to race through the streets, exhilarated by the speed and power of their predatory shark-like vehicles (Marinetti). Even a crash into a ditch in an attempt to avoid two wavering cyclists is part of the joy of the new and the disdain of the old. The crash is an act of indignation against the old world of outmoded transportation and an affirmation of the thrill of life that the seemingly indestructible car brings. Hoisted from the ditch, the car revives and the inspired Marinetti dictates his Futurist manifesto where speed takes pride of place and the car features as a central vehicle for transforming the aesthetics of modernity.

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The Futurist love of the car underscores the ways in which the car was imagined positively as modern. Its speed, its power and its freedom of movement, ensuring that one was no longer dependent on the fixed tracks and timetables of the train, were all elements that captured the romance of modernity. The car was the harbinger of new forms of being, the results of the car’s exciting and emancipatory possibilities. For some, however, the car also highlighted aspects of modernity’s darker underbelly – the listless nomadism of a society constantly on the move, the conspicuous consumption of an increasingly consumer society, the fear of social collapse symbolized by a speeding car’s fatal crash. Discourses concerning modernity and the car have thus tended to swing between the giddy potential of the car’s power to compress time and space and its destructive impact on human relations and the environment. What has been underplayed is the space of the car itself as a new and modern location offering drivers a mobile capsule of privacy. If the car’s capacity for privacy has been noticed in any way, it has usually been in alarm at the thought of sexual misbehaviour. Yet what is revealed by this awareness of the car as almost a private room, or rather bedroom, is how the car’s uniqueness in modernity is not only the speed at which it traverses space, closing the gap between distant places, but its provision of a new kind of space itself. Enclosed, domesticated and yet dislocated from the domestic sphere because of its mobility, the space of the car could become a liberating room of one’s own, a place given over to solitude and reflection. For women, especially those who were drivers of their own automobiles, the car was not only a symbol of independence and freedom but a pocket of space where they could be legitimately alone with their own thoughts and without interruption. For women writers, the car indeed becomes a spatial retreat, a place where no one can fault you for being on your own and where your thoughts can run free. As such, the car is also a unique space that allows for both the fragmentation and consolidation of identity. Much has been written on the fragmentation of the self, sometimes perceived as stressful and at other times celebratory and emancipatory, that the speed of the car brings. Driving, which breaks up the landscape into snatches of small, disconnected pieces, parallels the shock experience of modernity familiar to inhabitants of the dense and contradictory modern city, engendering split subjectivities.30 Yet

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women writers on the car, alive to both the car’s shock of speed and its potential as a space for privacy, have also identified the car as a space for the consolidation of identity already fractured by the stress of modernity and domestic ties.

Women and the history of cars The arrival of the car had wrought tremendous changes in society in a relatively short space of time. In a 1925 address to the Royal Society of the Arts on the future of the car, Colonel Sir Alan Burgoyne, MP recounted the progress of the car: ‘twenty-five years ago the motor-car was an eccentricity; just before the war it had become an established fact, but was still a luxury; to-day it is a necessity, and in the near future no artisan’s cottage will be built without its garage as part of the design’ (quoted in Thorold, 128). The car had become ‘basic equipment for the modern person’, and, if Tamara de Lempicka’s cool and confident 1925 portrait of herself behind the wheel of a sleek green Bugatti is an indication of how far the car and women had come, the car had become ‘basic equipment’ for the modern woman too (Thorold, 128). From the start, women were deeply intertwined with the history of the car both as the influential expert consumer behind the man and as driver of the car. This fact may surprise for car culture with its emphasis on speed, ruggedness and mechanical knowledge has usually been constructed as masculine. Patriarchal assumptions that cars were beyond most women and that women made poor drivers worked to exclude women from the culture of cars. Statistically this is also borne out for in the early twentieth century more men than women owned cars and held licences, and even by 1933 a Ministry of Transport survey suggested that women held only 12 per cent of all driving licences (O’Connell, 175). Yet, despite the small numbers and the strong patriarchal resistance to women and cars, women have always participated in car culture whether as drivers expanding the known boundaries of female ability or as non-driving passenger-seat consumers affecting the decisions of their husbands. Their place in car culture has been to both support and challenge a masculine vision of car culture. As consumers, women were to affect car culture decisively as car manufacturers began to pay more attention to comfort, convenience

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and aesthetics, aspects that were thought to appeal greatly to women. However the deliberate feminizing of car sales marketing, oft lamented by male commentators as a feminization of car culture, was not simply a recognition of the importance of the female passenger and consumer but also a means to deflect attention away from the fact that men too had consumer predilections that were similar to women’s. The constant parade of new models of cars, for example, was attributed to the female taste for frequent changes in fashion without acknowledging that men too might gain pleasure from purchasing the latest make of car. The motivation for the creation of the electric self-starter, a considerable advance from the hand crank, was also laid at the feet of women. It was claimed to have been developed for their convenience as most women found hand-cranking cars difficult and yet the self-starter would also have benefited and appealed to the considerably larger numbers of male drivers for whom cranking could also be a dangerous business. Legend has it that Henry F. Leland of the Cadillac Motor Company commissioned the electric self-starter after his friend and fellow auto-maker Byron Carter died from a broken jaw caused by a crank handle kicking back when he went to the rescue of a female driver (Scharff, 60). Women were thus crucial to masculine car culture in that they acted as convenient scapegoats, helping men ‘preserve their sense of masculinity by denying this existence of “feminine” traits in their own behaviour’ (O’Connell, 187). As drivers, however, women played a more active role in challenging the masculinized world of cars and stereotypes of feminine behaviour. Even in the early days of the car, women were already highly visible in their appropriation of this new technology and busy expanding the boundaries of what was expected of the fair sex. Expensive to run and complicated to drive, with hand cranking the norm and car bodies heavy and difficult to steer, cars were viewed as the rightful property of men, in particular well-off men. Yet the wives of wealthy early car owners were themselves causing a stir by driving cars themselves, and early automobile journals were quick to feature photographs of glamorous society women driving their cars (Wosk, 118–19). Certainly much of this was about garnering greater publicity for a new form of transport and using pretty and fashionable women to advertise cars became a tried and tested formula to highlight the car’s novelty and glamour but it was also a reminder that

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women could and would drive.31 Indeed some early women drivers like Joan Cuneo were proving to be such excellent drivers that they were winning motor races against men. The woman at the wheel of her car was thus a decidedly modern figure, rewriting representations of femininity:32 female drivers found a means not only to free themselves from social and geographic limitations but also to transcend prevailing gender stereotypes about their inherent mechanical naivete and ineptitude. Through their ability to drive, and sometimes repair, their own automobiles they found a way to forge a new identity for themselves that included the ability to master machines. (Wosk, 115) Feminists, particularly in America, were quick to take advantage of this new version of femininity facilitated by the car and in several driving tours through the country drew attention to feminism by highlighting the skill and pluck of the modern woman in her equally modern car. The modern independent woman with her car was aligned with the dawning of a new age of feminism. The car dramatically transformed women’s lives. The mastering of a car’s mechanical mysteries and commanding it to go where you wished was itself a material act of emancipation. As Christine Frederick declared, ‘Spark, throttle, cylinders, gear, magneto and steering wheel have yielded their secrets to me . . . learning to handle the car has wrought my emancipation, my freedom’ (quoted in Scharff, 68). Apart from the pleasures of control, the car’s wide-ranging mobility was also physically liberating. A woman with a car was no longer fixed to her home and there were opportunities to connect with friends, travel and see areas not usually accessible without a car. The car’s introduction of new spatial practices to women ensured that the world was growing bigger and smaller at the same time. As Virginia Woolf mused, the Woolfs’ newly bought car was a ‘great opening up’ in their lives, expanding ‘the map of the world in ones [sic] mind’ but while it widened their horizons, she also recognized how the car could ‘imperil complete privacy’ and ‘demolish loneliness’ by making everyone easier to reach than before (Diary, 147). For a woman less protective of her privacy than Woolf, however, the car’s ability to compress time and space ensured continued sociability, fending off isolation. The

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car was thus a great boon to many a woman who could afford one or gain access to one, even if only as a passenger. While women so usually tied to the domestic home were quick to appreciate the new physical freedoms that the car offered them, they were also sensitive to the space inside the car. For the car altered relations to space in two ways – through the rapid traversing of exterior space and through the interior space of the car which provided one with an extra room on wheels. The eponymous Mrs Miniver of Jan Struther’s column for The Times, for example, laments the passing of the old family car as a loss of mise-en-scène, elevating the old car to almost ‘the status of a room in one’s house’ (Struther, 6). A focus on the interior of the car has its conservative leanings: attention to this has often led to the return of women back into the domestic interior. Mrs Victor Bruce’s 1929 article on women and cars, for example, relegates women to keeping the garage tidy and making loose covers for the car seats. The woman of the house is thus not encouraged to drive but to ‘make a second home of the car’ (O’Connell, 179). Domesticity is reinscribed curtailing the transgressive potential of the car for women. The interior of the car replicates and extends the domestic home, an idea reflected in some of the early advertisements of cars featuring women: Women in these ads sit in a space that reconfirms their place within conventional social frameworks: rather than encasing an image of female assertiveness and independence, the windshield outlines a sphere of protectiveness, security, and family cohesion. (Wosk, 135) The car no longer becomes a symbol of female autonomy but a means of reframing the modern woman within the domestic family. Nevertheless the interior space of the car could still offer an alternative to domesticity in its privileging of individuality and privacy. The car, after all, is a highly individual form of travel. Freed from the regimented schedules and crowds of mass travel, one can indulge in individual whim, choosing to go anywhere at one’s leisure. It also has the potential of being a very private form of travel. With a car, you can choose to travel with a spouse, lover, family, or entirely alone. The space within a car can thus become personal space over which the driver/owner of the car exercises her right to be alone or social.

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Michael Bull, in his research on the use of sound in contemporary car use, highlights how car users privatize the public space they travel across by creating a personal soundscape within their cars. In this way, anonymous non-space is inhabited and transformed through the ‘sonic envelope’ of the car (Bull, 247). Now cars of the early twentieth century obviously did not have the audio capabilities to turn themselves into moving capsules of sound like today’s cars, but what Bull’s research captures is the latent capacity of the car to become a personal bubble: ‘The automobile offers drivers a space to be alone with their mediated thoughts’ (249). Such a space to be alone inside a car was especially valuable to women, especially in a domestic context that defined women as other-centred and often framed them as part of the domestic group. Even when being chauffeured, the car could still become a private room for a woman, particularly as enclosed rear seating, separate from the driver’s seat, provided greater privacy for the passenger.33

Women and the car as a room of one’s own The representations of women driving by women writers reveal their awareness of the car’s potential for privacy as the woman alone in a car, sometimes her own or else shared with her husband, is a familiar motif. Even when the woman driver is not alone or merely a passenger, the car in most women writers’ hands remains a solipsistic world. Nora in Rosamond Lehmann’s A Note in Music uses her car to escape from domesticity and her friend Grace is sometimes invited along to share in this joint escapade. The car in Elizabeth Bowen’s To the North is similarly a closed-off world, not for female camaraderie but for angst-ridden lovers. The car is a means for the lovers to speak privately, but, in the moments before the fatal car crash that ends the novel, the isolation of the car parallels the isolation of the lovers each in their own private bubble, unable to connect.34 Bowen’s take on the car’s solipsism is negative, yet there was still potential in the car providing a private platform for reflection and ultimately consolidation rather than dissolution. The car could become a room of one’s own, a sentiment Jan Struther acknowledges as her character Mrs Miniver recognizes how a car can become ‘a familiar piece of background’, providing ‘the aural and visual accompaniment to so many of one’s thoughts, feelings, conversations, decisions’ (5–6).

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But, for a consideration of the car as a room of one’s own, one should return to Virginia Woolf, the originator of the phrase. Though she was not thinking of cars when she insisted that women writers needed five hundred pounds and a room of their own, her representations of time spent alone in a car suggest that she was aware of the potential of the car to provide a measure of space and privacy whether as a driver or a passenger. Converted to the pleasures of motoring when the Woolfs purchased their first car in 1927, Woolf was quick to feature cars positively in her work of that time. Where before she had complained of the car’s dire role in ‘the ruin of the country road’ and in Mrs. Dalloway imagined the car as the aloof and mysterious sanctum of the ruling upper classes, Woolf was now far more attuned to one of the car’s many contributions to her own everyday life – a new space for personal reflection (‘Cheapening’, 440). Even though Woolf never managed to learn how to drive, despite taking a few lessons, she nonetheless was sensitive to the car’s potential for private thought for a woman, whether as a driver or a passenger. In her 1927 essay ‘Evening Over Sussex: Reflections in a Motor-car’, Woolf writes ostensibly of touring Sussex in a car (most likely as a passenger) but while the opening paragraph reveals the different facets of the Sussex landscape, the rest of the essay turns its focus inwards to the curious workings of the persona’s self in the face of a beautiful landscape framed by the speeding window of a car. Attempting to capture the beauty of Sussex in the evening, the persona finds herself defeated and in such a moment, simultaneously finds herself split between an eager self and a philosophical self debating the best course ‘to adopt in the presence of beauty’ (291). The act of motoring across Sussex, the speed of which brings only fragments of the landscape to notice – ‘a haystack; a rust red roof; a pond’ – seems to fracture the persona’s sense of self (291). Seeing the stretch of road just past, another melancholic self emerges drawn to the past and what is lost, while, on spotting a light in the distance, a fourth self alive to the possibilities of the future appears. This splitting into multiple selves while in a car is repeated in Orlando. Published in 1928 and written while Woolf was still infatuated with both Vita Sackville-West and the new car, the latter stages of the novel present us with Orlando in the present moment of October 1928 driving in and out of London. The process is frantic and stressful. Orlando, running late, dashes into London, contending with the

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crowds of inattentive pedestrians that, for a second, she irately recognizes only as bees, not humans. As Andrew Thacker has noted, motoring had ‘altered the visual apprehension of fellow inhabitants in the city’ (Moving, 177). Arriving at Marshall & Snelgrove’s with her list of shopping, Orlando’s annoyance and impatience drops away and she is seduced by the magic of elevators and smells of produce from all over the world gathered under one roof. Notably it is while Orlando is shopping that she begins to feel the impact of the past on her sense of self, fracturing her hold on the present. Assailed by memories of Elizabethan merchant ships, Sasha, the Persian mountains, for Orlando ‘[n]othing is any longer one thing’, and she returns to her car, aware of the multiplicity of selves, past and present, she holds within her (199). Already vulnerable to the pressures of her past selves, Orlando returns to her car and slips her way through the busy London streets. From her viewpoint as a driver, the city is seen only in snippets: Here was a market. Here a funeral. Here a procession with banners upon which was written ‘Ra – Un’, but what else? Meat was very red. Butchers stood at the door. Women almost had their heels sliced off. Amor Vin – that was over a porch . . . Applejohn and Applebed, Undert – . Nothing could be seen whole or read from start to finish. (200) While driving is not the only means by which the self may fracture, it is an activity that does tend to exacerbate the fragmentation. With nothing perceived as whole, the self threatens to dissolve and disappear and Woolf writes about ‘the process of motoring fast out of London’ as a ‘chopping up small of identity’, after twenty minutes of which, ‘the body and mind were like scraps of torn paper tumbling from a sack’ (200). This is a violent shredding of self, quite different from the leisurely quadrupling of self in ‘Evening Over Sussex’. Usually at ease with the idea of multiple selves, this is Woolf’s most negative representation of the increasingly common modern phenomenon of fragmentation. Motor car and city combine to provide a deep perceptual shock to the individual as Makiko Minow-Pinkney, bringing together Benjamin and Woolf, has argued (166). Orlando is almost ‘entirely disassembled’ except for her entry into the country

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where once again she can at least have the ‘illusion of holding things within itself’ (201). Woolf’s choice of the word ‘illusion’ is telling, for, even though Orlando can now see the cottage and the cows ‘life-size’ and complete, Orlando is far from whole and the countryside from her speeding car may not be broken up into as many pieces as in the city, but it is still a countryside seen piecemeal. Entering the country, however, does allow Orlando to recover the shreds of herself and in this the country does function as a place of relative harmony in contrast to the city. Where the car in the city is a projectile, a modern instrument of mobility cutting through the swathes of people and teeming activity, the car in the countryside becomes a place of solitude and reflection. In the quiet of her own car, Orlando searches for her ‘Key self’, the self which ‘amalgamates and controls’ all the other selves (202). With her ‘Key self’ slow to emerge, Orlando runs through a gamut of selves, ‘a new one at every corner’ (202). Here exterior and interior begin to connect for Orlando’s different selves enter often in response to the external world. On passing a clump of trees, her tree-loving self emerges; on driving through the High Street of her town on market day, her affinity with peasants and farmers is brought out. This plethora of selves is, of course, extraordinary and has caught the attention of critics interested in the interrelations of modernity, the motor car and subjectivity. Andrew Thacker finds Woolf using the car to produce ‘a kaleidoscopic sense of the modern self’ that she embraces ‘for its potential to unsettle fixed structures of power’ (‘Traffic, Gender, Modernism’, 183). Makiko Minow-Pinkney’s wideranging article on Woolf in the age of the motor car tracks how Woolf was sensitive to the ways new technologies such as the car and the cinema altered receptivity to phenomena and perceptions of subjectivity, and, rather like Thacker, she sees Woolf welcoming ‘the disruption of order’ that modernity brings (180). I do not disagree with these readings but what I find interesting is that often readings of this scene from Orlando and ‘Evening Over Sussex’ elide the later act of consolidation that also occurs in the car. As Orlando drives through the park gates of her ancestral home, her ‘Key self’ finally steps forward, and, in amalgamating her numerous selves, the various Orlandos fall silent and she becomes coherent again. Significantly, this occurs as Orlando comes into contact with her property, her land, and heritage. The past still anchors her and the car provides her with the space to

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collect herself before she enters her home as mistress of herself and of her home. In ‘Evening Over Sussex’, a similar act of consolidation occurs, though, interestingly, it happens while in the car and is unconnected to the exterior world. In fact, it is when darkness falls and ‘[n]othing is to be seen anymore’ that the consolidation of selves begins (292). Alone, tucked warmly in a rug, protected from the elements and cocooned in darkness, the selves meet to bring their various emotions and ideas together. What begins like a conference presided by ‘I’ ends in a creative output. The ‘trophies’ of the drive are shaped creatively into a figure representing beauty, death, the future, a figure which even comes with its own surroundings of ‘sheer slabs of rock’ and trees, almost as if it were a diorama (292). The car in its darkened surroundings thus has become a room where one can create, even if it is an odd little figure bringing together the disparate experiences of the day. Thus the car becomes an important space of respite and repose, a place to be legitimately alone to explore and recollect the fragments of oneself and even to create coherence from the scattered experiences of driving. The car was a place to restore a fractured self, all the better to face domestic life again. The severed selves regroup and ‘Evening Over Sussex’ ends with an expectation of the comforts of domesticity: ‘Eggs and bacon; toast and tea; fire and a bath . . . jugged hare . . . and red-currant jelly; a glass of wine; with coffee to follow, with coffee to follow – and then to bed; and then to bed’ (292). The unconventional public privacy of the city and the car thus reveals an oscillating pattern of escape and return. The public privacy of the city provides women with a cover for being legitimately alone and, in doing so, facilitates for women writers such as Woolf and Richardson a flight from the domestic and the privileging of being private in the city. Flâneuses taking urban walks are not only transgressing into masculinized city space, claiming the city for women, but also fleeing from the home to participate in the pleasures of being private and solitary, free and ‘untouched’ as Richardson would have described it. Such privacy also prepares for a re-entry into the domestic home as we can see from the uses of privacy that the car encourages. The car can be used as a means of escape from the domestic for women but this capsule of moving space is also a place to recover from the strains of modernity by allowing the consolidation of a fragmented

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self. One potential benefit of the car thus partakes of privacy as a means of emancipation, freeing the self from strictures and fixity; the other treats privacy as restorative, a rest before a return to the status quo. That privacy embraces both is a reminder of its political ambivalence. While it may challenge patriarchal hierarchies by insisting on a modern need for women to be solitary, it can also very easily ease a woman’s return to the domestic home.

3 Privileging Privacy: the Pre-Modern Role Models of the Witch and the Primitive

The late nineteenth century and the beginnings of the twentieth were opportune moments to reconsider and reinvent feminine identities. The New Woman was a creature newly minted and already hotly debated. In the early twentieth century, as Virginia Woolf was busy killing the selfless Angel in the House for the sake of her art, alternative feminine models such as the lesbian, the career woman, the redefined spinster and the middle-class working mother were being explored. In this tumult of new expressions of feminine identities, it is curious to see two novelists concerned with women’s privacy reach out towards the rather unlikely examples of the witch and the primitive. Though witches and primitives were rather in vogue, particularly between the wars, the oddness of these two categories nonetheless suggests that for privacy to be privileged as the core of a woman’s identity, one had to go beyond the mainstream of feminine identities.35 The identities of both the witch and the primitive look back to the past and the pre-modern instead of forwards to the future to make room for privacy in women’s lives. The process of turning towards the past raises questions of what being modern means for women, because the pursuit of privacy demands at times a retreat to and reinvention of older categories and identities. For Sylvia Townsend Warner, Laura Willowes in Lolly Willowes, in defiance of the usual progressive spinster narratives, transforms herself from spinster aunt into a witch, answering the call of nature and the Devil. Laura’s decision to become a witch is not due to an inclination towards evil or a desire for supernatural powers as stereotype would have it but simply because she wishes to be alone and undisturbed by patriarchy in her country haven 76

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of Great Mop. The witch is appropriated and reclaimed as a model of femininity that allows women to claim privacy and autonomy. For Rose Macaulay, the primitive functions in a similar way though her narrative reverses Warner’s. Where Laura Willowes moves towards the identity of a witch, Denham Dobie of Crewe Train is from the start already carefully defined as a kind of modern primitive – idle, antisocial, private and country-loving. Denham is in some ways the most modern character of the novel, but, with her assimilation into modern London society, she becomes conventional, and, in being tamed, she also loses the space to be private. In both these novels, what is usually conceived of as modernity, particularly the urban city of London and its social mores, is revealed as inadequate, and both writers instead privilege the country and pre-modern identities as more accommodating of their needs to be alone. Before turning to my primary texts, I would like to spend some time exploring the appeal of the country and the pre-modern for women hoping to find alternative models of femininity that privilege privacy and in doing so highlight the ways by which modernity could sometimes be expressed through its seeming antithesis.

The country as a source of the modern For some women in search of privacy, it is the country with its links to the pre-modern rather than the city that offers the most potential. Accounts of modernity have traditionally privileged the industrial man-made city as the spatial sign of the changes inherent in the coming of the modern, and yet its opposite term, the country, though somewhat more in the shadow, was similarly engaged in change and alternative discourses of the modern. The country as a source of modern identities seems paradoxical. Traditionally, as the opposite to the modern city, discourses on the country have been steeped in conservatism. The country is a whimsical place of escape, a nostalgic refuge for those running away from the realities of the modern city and economy. Or else the country is an anachronism where women are marginalized and harsh country realities are elided in favour of a fantasy of rural retirement and harmony. Yet there were also discourses that were reformulating these traditional assumptions of the country. So, while a return to nature via the country was still part of the familiar city–country binary and seen as a nostalgic and regressive remedy

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to the ills of alienated urban modernity, the country could also be understood as promulgating a new way of life, indeed a source of a modern way of integrating man with nature and community. The country’s past was surprisingly the key to its modernity. Reach back far enough into the ancient past and ideas to challenge the present and offer an alternative modernity can be found. The pre-modern was thus a means to reassess nature and the countryside in order to move it forward once again – the ideas may be old but the accent is definitely modern. David Matless, in his study of landscape and Englishness, provides us with an example of the various processes by which the old may be renovated and reformulated as modern. Matless highlights two ways in which the traditional English country landscape became the site of modernity in the early twentieth century. One such method explores country preservationists whom he designates as more obviously modern despite the conservative tenor of their label. Preservationists were naturally concerned with preserving the countryside but this did not mean a denial of modernity. Change was not the enemy marring the countryside; it was badly planned change that was. For it was bad planning that allowed unsightly ribbon development to spread and unaesthetic electric pylons to appear helter-skelter. The preservationists thus did not resent the march of progress in the countryside. They accepted change as inevitable; they merely resented the thoughtlessness and lack of order that characterized this progress. Preservation and progress were as such yoked and reveal how the countryside can also be viewed as a site registering the changes of modernity. In contrast to the preservationists, Matless positions the organicists who ‘set an organic sense of rural life against modern city living’ (15). The English organicists provided an alternative discourse of the country and thus reveal the heterogeneity of approaches to nature and the countryside at the time. For Matless, the organicists are deeply conservative in their harking back to the soil and its ‘soil-based wisdom’ as well as their traditional view of a woman’s place as in the domestic home (138). It is as such no surprise that amongst the organicists there were a few who were partial to the fascist politics of Oswald Mosley and Adolf Hitler. Yet despite their conservatism, the organicists could also be pioneering, paradoxically because of their regressive, old-fashioned beliefs. In the emphasis of the organicists on a diet of wholefood and vegetables, for example, they come across as

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being distinctly modern, in step with contemporary concerns about diet and fitness represented by the National Fitness Campaign and the popularity of the mass exercises of the Women’s League of Health and Beauty.36 That the organicists were participating in this debate is a sign of their engagement with modernity even though their views on the topic were not part of mainstream thought. Indeed, having gone so far back to the soil in their promotion of a diet insistent on freshness and as little processing as possible, even to the point of learning from exotic foreign and primitive sources such as the Chinese, the Eskimo and the Hunza, the organicists demonstrate how the traditional, when old and alien enough, can return to the present and paradoxically be seen as freshly modern. The past, then, in the organicists’ take on modernity is not to be renounced but recovered and reclaimed for modern appropriation. Such a perspective recognized that the resilient power of the past was very much alive in and useful still to the modern present and contained the potential to undermine upstart modernity for better or for worse. J. G. Frazer, in The Golden Bough, was influential in introducing this line of thinking for he first revealed to his late nineteenth-century readers the persistence of a heathenish past in the modern present. The primitive savage was still part and parcel of the modern man. As a reviewer from the Daily News commented in 1890, until The Golden Bough was published ‘we never knew how heathenish we are nor how old our heathenism is’ (quoted in Hutton, 123). Frazer suggested, for example, that Christianity’s central tenet was indebted to the dying and reviving god motif central to the older vegetative cults and deities it eventually replaced, thus revealing Christianity’s continuity with an older past that it has since denied.37 Frazer’s historical narrative of how the Dark Ages were a result of the Roman empire being weakened by the entry of these vegetative cults from the near Orient also opened up the vista of a primitive past bubbling under the surface threatening to disturb civilization. This ever-present primitive impulse combined with Sigmund Freud’s contemporaneous proposition of the radical and not-quite-fully-knowable unconscious undermining the rational individual thus conjured up a civilized world perched on the edge of a crumbling precipice, a precarious foothold away from chaos and unreason. Yet, for others, this recognition of a primitive undercurrent was not so much about a bestial humanity about to break free and wreak

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havoc but the potential of the wild past to reinvigorate an alienated modern present. Just as the organicists had found in ancient ways of country living a template for modern agriculture and modern country life, Frazer’s ideas of the continuity of the heathen in the contemporary found a place in the history of paganism as celebratory and redemptive. In The Triumph of the Moon: a History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft, Ronald Hutton, in combing through the semantics of the term ‘pagan’, identifies four strands of meaning, often interrelated. The fourth is of greatest interest to us but a runthrough of the other three is also instructive. The first draws on a conventional Christian Old Testament definition of one who bows down to an idol and offers blood sacrifices, with corresponding intimations of savagery. This version of the pagan was also handily applied in the nineteenth century to the indigenous cultures of Asia, Africa and the Americas that Europeans were increasingly encountering via the spread of imperialism and evangelism and thus useful in fostering an unequal and Eurocentric world view. The second language of paganism looks towards the ancient world of Greece and Rome and instead of envisioning violence and ignorance as part of the pagan heritage proposes ancient cultures as things to be admired and to learn from. The insistence that the worlds of Greece and Rome were second only to Christianity ensured that this paganism did not threaten the dominant religion and culture of Christianity. A third language of paganism, less orthodox than the first two, challenges the primacy of Christianity, relegating it to one of many spiritual systems and giving other religious traditions, especially from the East, greater prominence. This heterodox strand fed into the mystic investigation of spiritualism and theosophy as created by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky with its world view of a universal divine world soul and its interest in reincarnation. The fourth discourse of paganism returns to the ground covered by the second but with a distinct difference: Like the second language, it lauded the culture of classical Greece and Rome, but it demolished all the constraints placed upon admiration of their religions, characterizing them as joyous, liberationist, and life-affirming traditions, profoundly and valuably connected with both the natural world and with human spirit creativity. (Hutton, 20)

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Indebted to German Romanticism’s ‘admiration for ancient Greece, nostalgia for a vanished past, and desire for an organic unity between people, culture and nature’, this fourth strand with its adamantly positive focus also alters Frazer’s pessimism and fear of a savage history in favour of a return to a happier pagan past (21). If the primitive pagan remained within modern man, he was less a pagan in Hutton’s first sense and more in the fourth sense. The same could be said for the witch according to Margaret Murray’s controversial but influential book on witches, The Witchcult in Western Europe, published in 1921. Murray was a respected anthropologist and Egyptologist whose theories of witchcraft, written during a period when she was unable to conduct fieldwork in Egypt, have since become required reading for aspiring witches.38 Working within Frazer’s framework of the survival of the past within the present, Murray argued, based on a highly selective and debatable use of sources, that witchcraft was a pagan fertility cult (complete with blood sacrifices) and its presence in contemporary society meant that an ancient religion had persisted. In her second book on witchcraft in 1933, The God of the Witches, the cruelty and violence of witchcraft was softened, and, instead, witchcraft was characterized as ‘joyous and life-affirming’ in marked contrast to dour Christianity (Hutton, 196). The key note here is the challenge the pagan and the witch bring to a highly flawed orthodox society, now perceived as stifling and alienating rather than under threat and in need of protection. Thus an older power based in the country, the ‘Old Religion’ as some paganists called it, could be invoked as a means to critique and reinvigorate modern society. By the early twentieth century, however, interest in the pagan was gradually being displaced in favour of a more general reverence for nature. As a result, the places of nature, such as the country, took on more and more aspects of this liberationist version of paganism. The virtues of paganism and the pre-modern were being collapsed on to the country itself and as such the setting of the country could then generate new identities and ways of thinking through the resuscitation and reinterpretation of the ancient and the exotic. In this way it could become a source of modernity, becoming a site of contestation for how modern England and the modern English person could be constituted through the rediscovery of older forms of being and beliefs garnered from nature, the country and the past.

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Symbolically, the country, with its links to the pre-modern, could then represent an alternative modernity and even a subversive one. One example of this is that of the socialist and sex radical Edward Carpenter, who was a strong advocate of rustic country living and an apologist for homosexuality. Drawing on a pagan language of healthy sexual release and from pre-modern cultures and societies that had a place of regard for the homosexual, Carpenter, in Intermediate Types among Primitive Folk: a Study in Social Evolution, was able to argue for the naturalness and usefulness of the homosexual. By also associating homosexuality with the privileged seers of pre-modern society – the prophets, the priests, the witches and wizards – as well as warriors, Carpenter could claim the homosexual as spiritually advanced and a pioneer in such societies. Carpenter’s strategy for legitimizing the marginalized invert depended on the inversion of values that constructed the pagan as positive and worthy of serious consideration rather than condemnation. If pagan societies with their particular advantages over modern societies had been wise enough to appreciate the homosexual, then surely modernity should follow suit. Pre-modern values rooted in the country could thus be used to justify an alternative rendering of modernity and modern identities in the present. If pre-modern ways were indeed so forward-thinking, women too could exploit them for their own advancement. Yet, historically, country life for women was still largely traditional and oppressive. A country woman indeed had her work cut out for her. For all classes of women, country life usually meant the sticky webs of domestic life, and, for women less well-off than the gentry, country life also involved work at home or on the farm. Though an upper-class or middle-class country woman would have had opportunities to take long walks or rides in the country, luxuriating in being alone, they nonetheless were expected to play the role of ‘Lady Bountifuls’ to their inferiors (Horn, 45). Their mobility and leisure did not mean that they were outside of a social framework; in fact, within country society they had specific work to do to maintain class hierarchies. For farming women, their lives were taken up with ceaseless rounds of domestic and farm work. Thus, in reality, country life for women was not exactly modern and progressive. More pertinently for this study, it did not often provide much opportunity for a woman to indulge in being alone and private.

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Nonetheless, the symbolic potential of the country and its paradoxical pre-modern discourses of modernity were strong and available for appropriation, and both Warner and Macaulay take advantage of this discourse in an attempt to make privacy part of modernity for women. The country is less central to Macaulay but it still functions as a place of escape and solitude for her heroine Denham. Ultimately, the country also represents the physical privacy lost to Denham in her gradual assimilation into modern urban British society and remains a reminder of her unique primitive longings to be private. Warner uses the country as a promising base from which to reinvent her heroine, Laura, as well as to place privacy at the core of her new identity. The advantage, then, of the country for the woman writer writing on privacy was the possibility, facilitated by the country setting, of taking on a pre-modern identity other than that of a domestic woman and, in doing so, making privacy a priority.

Lolly Willowes: witchcraft as a means to be private The Times Literary Supplement (TLS) review of Sylvia Townsend Warner’s first and most popular novel Lolly Willowes, when it was first published in 1926, was highly complimentary. Congratulating Warner on her ‘charming story, beautifully told, spare in outline but emotionally rich’, the reviewer also noted that Lolly Willowes was a curious and surprising novel, deftly eluding definition by taking on the guise of several genres without ever fully committing itself to one or another (Times Literary Supplement, 4 February 1926, 78). The novel begins in a manner familiar to spinster fiction of the early twentieth century with a careful articulation of how Lolly is shaped into a sweet but unenterprising spinster. The question then is how to develop this beginning, and, as the TLS reviewer remarks, ‘the fear is that nothing is to come but one more study – though an unusually artistic one – of a frustrated woman’s life and death’ (78).39 On Lolly’s escape to the countryside, the novel changes register. The alert will recognize the characteristics of the rural novel – ‘Ah, yes, the country, nice old landladies, village worthies, landscape and echoes of Henry Ryecroft’ (78). Yet Lolly Willowes continues to confound, and, in retrospect, the conventional elements of the spinster and the country life genres are red herrings, for Warner is dancing to the tune of a very different narrative and agenda: she is in fact writing the Bildungsroman of a witch.

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It is a story of a very unusual witch, too, for Warner’s portrayal of Laura the witch and her master Satan is unlike what one would expect of Satan and witches. Though she is unmarried, Laura is no malicious hag with an evil eye but a kindly gentlewoman enjoying her freedom and privacy in the out of the way village of Great Mop in the Chilterns. The closest she ever comes to conforming to a stereotype of a witch is when she imagines herself as a henwife as she helps the poultry farmer Mr Saunter. The henwife, according to Laura’s knowledge of folklore, is cousin to the spaewife and the witch, and, for a brief moment, we see Laura’s natural inclination to witchcraft displayed. Even so, Warner continually frustrates stereotyping. Her Witches’ Sabbath is no orgy of sexual excess, though it does contain some spirited dancing and a sexually transgressive male figure wearing a mask of a young girl’s face whom Laura mistakes for Satan at first. In fact, Laura, at her first Witches’ Sabbath, cannot help feeling a sense of déjà vu for the Sabbath is reminiscent of the banality of the balls of her youth, and she is plagued with a feeling that ‘her first Sabbath was not going to open livelier vistas than were opened by her first ball’ (191). Warner’s Satan is also a surprise. He is not the slightly menacing young man with the mask and the mincing step of a girl who licks Laura’s cheek at the Sabbath – he is revealed to be a writer and one of Satan’s young acolytes – but is instead a polite, detached gamekeeper who, on stumbling upon Laura catching the sunrise, is hesitant to intrude. Warner’s Satan is a well-mannered ‘knight-errant’, a rescuer of women who does not advertise his status and patiently listens to his witch Laura as she embarks on an impassioned discourse on why women become witches (239). Yet he is not all gentleman, for Warner also defines him as a huntsman, a term that gives the book its alternate title The Loving Huntsman, an avid hunter keenly aware of his quarry’s value in a world where women are so seldom rated. Warner had read Margaret Murray’s influential The Witch-Cult in Western Europe when it was published in 1921 and Pitcairn’s Criminal Trials of Scotland before writing Lolly Willowes and felt that the witches from the trial were ‘witches for love; that witchcraft was more than Miss Murray’s Dianic cult; it was the romance of their hard lives, their release from dull futures’ (Harmon, 59). In Lolly Willowes, the Devil is a figure who understands women and, in desiring them as his witches, pays them the ultimate compliment of recognizing their extraordinariness. Witchcraft is an escape but also, as Warner paints it, an

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acknowledgement of and an outlet for a woman’s inner life, usually suppressed and in abeyance but nonetheless dangerously present. Warner’s idea of witchcraft hence differs from convention. While still a rural identity, being a witch for Warner is a feminist discovery of selfhood and one that is uniquely concerned with being alone in the country. There is no interest in supernatural powers, spells, or questions of good and evil, only an overwhelming desire to be in the country alone. As a result, the novel, though in three parts, is structured round two escapes into the country and privacy. The first is Laura’s flight from London, spinsterhood and her family into the country and the second happens while in Great Mop as she flees from her nephew Titus and all that he represents into the privacy that becoming a witch guarantees. Laura’s first escape echoes the narrative expectations for spinster fiction. With a demographic surplus of women in the early twentieth century that was to worsen further after the First World War, the spinster and her unmarried fate had become a highly visible problem in British society. Often viewed patronizingly as thwarted and even ‘unnatural’ for failing to fulfil a woman’s destiny of marriage and children, the spinster was a figure in need of feminist analysis and recuperation. Spinster fiction written by women thus could encompass bleak portrayals of spinsterhood that lay the blame for these wasted lives at the feet of a patriarchal society that educated its women only for marriage as well as more positive and feminist narratives that imagined new opportunities for spinsters through financial independence, work and female friendship.40 Lolly Willowes contains the familiar traits of spinster fiction, and the first part of the novel is clear-sighted yet sympathetic in its delineation of Laura’s aetiology as a spinster. Born into the country stock of the Willowes, Laura is very much a creature of her family’s conservatism and her unusual upbringing, where, happily isolated in the country with a free run of her father’s library, she grows up gentle, passive, unquestioning, and slightly odd to her contemporaries. Warner does not blame Laura’s parents, for, unlike novels such as Radclyffe Hall’s The Unlit Lamp or Lettice Cooper’s The New House, there are no monstrous and manipulative parents, particularly mothers, stunting the growth of their unmarried daughters by preventing them from marrying or pursuing an alternative life. Besides, Laura is perfectly content in her family home, Lady Place, where she is adored by her father and

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at ease with a country environment that allows her to indulge her passion for botany and brewery. The name Lady Place itself is a sign of how appropriate a home it is for Laura. If anyone or anything is to blame, it is the conservatism of the Willowes, including Laura herself. At the death of her father in 1902, despite an income of five hundred pounds a year (an amount Virginia Woolf deemed minimally necessary for an aspiring woman writer or artist to be independent) and the stirrings of ‘forward spirits’ pioneering independence for unmarried women, Laura, ‘feeling rather as if she were a piece of family property forgotten in the will’, accepts her disposal by the family without question and agrees to leave the country for London (6). Laura’s absorption into her brother Henry’s family marks the true start of her career as a spinster. Where at Lady Place she was, upon her mother’s death, mistress of the house, indifferent to marriage and uniquely her eccentric self, comfortably nestled within her immediate family’s bosom and the country rhythms of Lady Place, her removal to urban London disrupts her identity. Prised out of the country which she loves, Laura finds herself in the busy London household of Henry and Caroline Willowes, turning into an ‘extra wheel . . . part of the mechanism . . . interworking with the other wheels’ (46). The mechanical has taken over the natural. The move to London also results in the loss of Laura’s name: But when Laura went to London she left Laura behind, and entered into a state of Aunt Lolly . . . Or rather, she had become two persons, each different. One was Aunt Lolly, a middle-aging lady, light-footed upon stairs, and indispensable for Christmas Eve and birthday preparations. The other was Miss Willowes, ‘my sister-inlaw Miss Willowes,’ whom Caroline would introduce, and abandon to a feeling of being neither light-footed nor indispensable. (61) With the loss of her given name, the names that remain are constant reminders of her position as a spinster – the surplus woman who can only be part of a domestic household as an extraneous aunt and the perpetually unmarried woman, Miss instead of Mrs. In keeping with the more feminist varieties of spinster fiction, the novel champions the recovery of Laura’s sense of self. Indeed, how could it not when Warner has her heroine exclaim, ‘Nothing is impracticable for a single, middle-aged woman with an income of her own’ (102)? Yet, unusually, emancipation and a sense of self do

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not come from work, moving to the city, or new kinds of female friendships – the usual remedies for spinsters looking to redefine themselves – but a return to the country and to the Laura of old.41 In this, Warner uses an identification with nature and the country as a means to reconstruct an identity for Laura. Her conservative moorings shaken by the upheaval of the First World War, Laura begins post-war to feel an inexorable pull towards the country. Recalled to herself by a humble greengrocers full of country produce and smells, Laura realizes that her ‘autumnal fever’, a season of restlessness and strange dreams of marshes and fens, is not a recurrence of grief for her father but the beginnings of her rebellion at her incorporation into the sensible, thrifty and resolutely urban household of her brother. Awakened by the reminders of the country, Laura buys a guide and map to the Chilterns and announces to her astonished family her plan to move to the country effective almost immediately. That her escape is to a rural location links Lolly Willowes to the country and pagan discourses of release and liberty and the potential of the oceanic in a woman’s relation to nature. Utilizing this ‘rustic myth’, Warner enables her spinster Laura to rediscover her individuality for the country is a place of healing (Cavaliero, 42). After a shaky start where Laura, infected by too many years of ‘useless activity’, takes to appreciating the country in too harried a manner, even mentally making an appointment with the sunset, she slows down and begins to adopt a country pace and attitude to life to the point of proclaiming herself content with limited knowledge of the country by throwing her map and guidebook into a well (Warner, Lolly Willowes, 110). In the coming of summer, as Laura lies in a field of cowslips, her many years of unhappiness slip away from her, leaving her if not forgiving then forgetful of the ‘props of civilisation’ – family, law, society, European history, urban architecture – that had once oppressed her (150). In this rural idyll, Laura grows freckled and ‘more rooted in peace’; her life, though solitary, is in fact a constant communion with nature (150). Much has been made of Laura’s affinity with nature by critics. The intense bond with nature is a familiar trait in rural writing. Raymond Williams in his seminal The Country and the City had already identified a ‘green language’ that by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was morphing into a sexualized language, emphasizing man’s union with a feminized nature. This sexualized language was undoubtedly a masculine one, and critics, particularly feminist ones,

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were keen to redefine the relationship between women and nature in new ways. Reading Lolly Willowes as a female pastoral negotiating women’s position on the margins in the masculine city, Jane Marcus celebrates the way Warner gives ‘her heroine in marriage to the forest as other authors give them in marriage’ for in this escape to the country is the freedom a woman desires (Marcus, ‘Wilderness’, 148). Bruce Knoll similarly writes of Laura’s merger with nature as a way to assert her autonomy, and, more recently, Jane Garrity has highlighted Laura’s ‘eroticized relation to nature’ in an attempt to read Lolly Willowes as a lesbian text (151).42 For myself, Warner’s portrayal of Laura’s deep connection with nature is a means to represent a female kind of privacy – alone but still connected to a wider world. Laura is solitary, but, being sensitive and open to her surroundings, she is also willing to ‘merge with the land, and perceive [her identity] in and through it’ (Torgovnik, Primitive Passions, 63). Marianna Torgovnik has highlighted the frequency with which women writers in Africa, writing of their relation to the landscape, have identified this duality of finding a sense of self and yet also effacing themselves in response to nature. This rendering of feminine identity is also akin to Warner’s construction of Laura’s privacy in the countryside. She is alone and yet, in the company of nature, not fully alone. This different and gendered positioning is precarious, for, though Warner is indeed alive to the possibilities of the country for feminist appropriations of identity and privacy, she is also keenly aware of the patriarchal currents that underpin ideas and approaches to the country that may threaten Laura’s privacy. It is this understanding of the contested nature of the country that frames Laura’s second escape and final flight into the arms of the Devil. Though Laura has found a refuge in rural Great Mop, it is not a safe haven. When her nephew Titus comes to stay at Great Mop to write his book on Fuseli, Laura realizes that it is not geography that matters but power relations. Moving into the countryside may have given her a respite from social structures that label her as an insignificant spinster and remove the rights to autonomy and privacy from her, but the rural location itself cannot prevent such forces from invading her retreat. With Titus’s arrival in Great Mop, the power structures and relations that Laura had escaped return to haunt and taunt her. Not only is Laura back to being ‘the same old Aunt Lolly, so useful and obliging and negligible’ in Titus’s presence, she also realizes

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the alien and masculine ways of seeing that Titus brings to bear on the country and its landscapes (163). Where Laura had abandoned her map and guidebook and accepted the oddness and mysteries of Great Mop, Titus throws himself into country society and activities, brimming with plans for morris-dancing, the flower show, and performing Shakespeare with the Ancient Foresters. The country becomes a project, a self-conscious effort to participate in what passes in Titus’s mind for true country life. The landscape similarly is read by Titus in a different way from Laura. Coming from country stock, Titus’s love for the country is acknowledged as genuine, but his love is abhorrent to Laura with its comfortable possessiveness, its treatment of the landscape as a body, and his habit of appreciating the country as a connoisseur. Titus’s masculine attitude of presumed easy lordship towards the country grates on Laura, but it also has the effect of altering her relation to her environment: ‘Day by day the spirit of the place withdrew itself further from her’ (161). Subordinated to Titus as his meek spinster aunt, her approach to the country – non-possessive, subtly aware of nature’s terrors and powers – is similarly overwhelmed by his. The continuity between the urban metropolis and the country could not be more evident. If economically both sites are connected rather than opposed, as Raymond Williams insists and as Warner also demonstrates in a small section where Laura ponders on the cauliflowers leaving the Chilterns in trains to London, so are they joined in patriarchal structures. The country, as Titus’s presence brings forth, is also a patriarchal domain, leaving Laura no room for herself. At this point, Laura needs not a new location – where else can she run to? – but a power to contest patriarchy and its patterns of power and oppression. Fortunately for her, being in and of the country, she has access to an older and alternative power, that of the pagan gods, and, in this case, this means Satan. This is where fantasy, though lightly and cleverly done in that nothing happens that cannot be explained away more or less rationally, takes over in the novel, but, if our sympathies have been with Laura, this recourse to the fantastic and the supernatural is a logical step to enable Laura to keep her freedom and her privacy. Unable to fight off Titus’s invasion and her return to being Aunt Lolly on her own and without recourse to ‘[c]ustom, public opinion, law, church, and state’, all of which would have sent her back to ‘bondage’, her only hope is in Satan and Satan

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does not disappoint (220). Plagued by Satan with devilish mishaps from sour milk to a wounded thumb and even falling into a nest of wasps, Titus eventually quits the country leaving Laura at last in peace and alone in Great Mop. Though the end is happy, the novel ultimately reveals the pervasiveness of patriarchy and the difficulty faced by a woman trying to elude the forces of masculine oppression to be her own woman, even if her demands are minimal; Laura only wishes to be alone and private in a rural location of her choosing. As such for a simple life of her own and not ‘an existence doled out to [her] by others’, Laura is forced to turn to the Devil for protection and become a witch (239). Not that becoming a witch is such a disaster, for compared to the patriarchal system, at least Laura’s new master is one who understands her desire not to be disturbed and whose ownership of Laura is ‘indifferent’ rather than jealous and condescending (247). Yet, it is a sign of the extreme measures a woman must take to ensure her freedom to be private and herself.

Crewe Train: the primitive as modern, the modern as primitive While Laura discovers the identity of the witch as highly amenable to her pursuit of a privacy that is solitary and yet connected with nature, Rose Macaulay explores the primitive for the purposes of privacy and in the process highlights the difficulties of sustaining this alternative identity. Crewe Train constantly identifies its heroine Denham Dobie as a primitive and savage, setting her up as one who lives outside of the conventions and rules of civilized society, a child of nature. Macaulay’s deployment of Denham as primitive is congruent with her satirical scheme of the naïve outsider looking in and revealing the absurdities of middle-class British society, but it is also a means of essaying a version of primitive femininity that reveals itself as paradoxically modern. Underlying primitivism are investments in certain constructions of masculinity and femininity usually seen through male eyes. The primitive as masculine becomes a site of regenerative masculinity for the likes of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan and for D. H. Lawrence’s Oliver Mellors, while the primitive as feminine is often sexualized, perceived as irrational, and associated with death.43 Macaulay’s appropriation of the female primitive in her text bypasses these typical formulations of the female primitive. Denham

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is depicted as having a healthy sexual appetite but one within the bounds of reason. She is also shown to be ruthlessly rational in her anti-sentimentality with a natural integrity that recoils from gossip. Instead, Macaulay, taking a leaf from those who see the primitive as potentially regenerative, employs the primitive as a site for an alternative practice of femininity, one based on privileging privacy, idleness and concern for self over community and care for others. Her primitive female is individualistic and anti-social but, unlike the regenerated primitive males of Rice Burroughs and Lawrence, ultimately forced to conform to other social forces at work. The text thus reveals a desire for privacy in women but also the difficulty of achieving or sustaining privacy. Though Denham is willing to abandon other-centredness for a focus on privacy and self, society is less willing to allow her to do so, wishing her to remain fixed in her traditional role of the married woman and bound to the wider webs of society.44 Ultimately she is undone by the primitive forces of her own biology and of the group she finds herself part of. Crewe Train’s use of the primitive figure is exceedingly complex and contradictory. Macaulay’s deployment of what it means to be primitive constantly shifts and alters in the novel. Such instability in the meaning of the primitive is familiar. The primitive swings from being the Noble Savage as envisioned by Jean-Jacques Rousseau to being an ‘ignoble being’, viewed via Social Darwinism in the nineteenth century as ensconced on the lowest rung of the evolutionary ladder, ‘at the beginning of the social, cultural and psychological development of mankind’ (Rhodes, 15). The ideas of Social Darwinism were particularly influential in affecting discourses on the primitive. The early pioneers of the science of anthropology, for example, often believed in the primitive’s backwardness even as they were willing to grant primitive society a degree of structure, order and complexity. Modern science, on the contrary, shows that their social institutions have a very definite organisation, that they are governed by authority, law and order in their public and personal relations, while the latter are, besides, under the control of extremely complex ties of kinship and clanship. Indeed we see them entangled in a mesh of duties, functions and privileges which correspond to an elaborate tribal, communal and kinship organisation. (Malinowski, 10)

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The groundbreaking empirical work of ethnologists and anthropologists such as Bronislaw Malinowski (quoted above) in the early twentieth century consciously refuted some of the popular stereotypes of the lawless savage such as the primitive as a child of nature, a mere ‘childish caricature of a human being’, but nonetheless insisted that primitive society was still lagging behind the west, particularly lacking an emphasis on individuality and critical intelligence (Malinowski, 11). In the matter of individuality, R. R. Marrett declared that in primitive society ‘no one dreams of breaking the social rules’ and the primitive had no conception of self-consciousness (Berndt, 14). Individualization was reserved for more advanced and complex societies and cultures. As Charles Roberts Aldrich puts it, ‘the more primitive a group the more sternly does it repress individuality’ (231). This lack of individuality produces then an inability to step outside of primitive society to produce a metacritical framework. This was a job for the western anthropologist, one such as Malinowski, who, for example, assumes that primitive societies have no archives and historians, ‘intelligent members’ who can record and analyse their own habits (12). Therefore, there is a need for the western expert to enter the field and supply the necessary critical viewpoint.45 The primitive may not have been as backward as previously thought, but neither was the primitive an equal to his/her western counterpart. While the scientific discourses of the primitive in the early twentieth century were subtly confirming the primitive’s inferior status relative to the west, in artistic circles, the pendulum began to swing in the primitive’s favour with the primitive perceived as part of modernity’s break with its Victorian past as well as containing the potential to reinvigorate a decadent fin-de-siècle art. The horror expressed by Darwin in The Descent of Man on first sighting a group of Fuegians, naked, animal-like and seemingly without any culture, had turned by the early twentieth century into an admiration of primitive lifestyles and objects. Marianna Torgovnik describes the shift in perception with regards to primitive objects aptly in Gone Primitive: At the turn of [the twentieth] century, it was self-evident that primitive objects were ‘idols’ fit only to be burned by missionaries or to teach would-be colonialists about the territories they would enter; within twenty years it became equally clear that primitive statues were beautiful objects, suitable for collectors. (13)

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As she also wittily put it in her chapter on Roger Fry’s role in popularizing primitive art in England, ‘[p]araphrasing Woolf, we can say that in or about December 1910 . . . primitive objects became, in England, high art’ (86). Fry was not only interested in the seemingly savage art of the French Post-Impressionist painters, dubbed ‘les fauves’ (wild beasts), but also in primitive art itself. Fry often wrote enthusiastically extolling the virtues of primitive art, seeing its power and evocative form as lessons modern art could learn. Though, as Torgovnik carefully demonstrates, Fry’s embracing of primitive art was not without an underlying and possibly unconscious sense of imperialist superiority, his appreciation of primitive objects did mark an important sea-change in how the primitive was perceived amongst one section of society – as a figure not necessarily reviled or to be condescended to but valued. If primitive art was beginning to be taken as the basis for modernist aesthetics, primitive lifestyles were also becoming a topic of envy amongst the discontented in the early twentieth century. Primitive life imagined as simpler and less sophisticated was pitted against the confusions of modern, urban existence and seen as better. The Tarzan series of novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs, for example, gives short shrift to drab modernity that emasculates its men, substituting the adrenalin-pumping pleasures of swinging through the trees for the tedium of hanging from a strap on the subway train. Tarzan, in his travels in the west, finds its cities corrupted and, when accidentally stranded in Africa, declares, ‘Now he was living. Now indeed, was the happiness of true freedom his. Who would go back to the stifling, wicked cities of civilized man when the mighty reaches of the great jungle afforded peace and liberty? Not he’ (quoted in Torgovnik, Gone Primitive, 56). Primitive life, especially one that reconnected with nature, was considered more vital, more liberating, more life-affirming. Primitive life was real life. Such a view of primitive life lent itself easily to a sense of nostalgia whereby the lifestyles of a bygone era were idealized as utopic and Edenic. The lure of the primitive was also the lure of the return to home, to a place of comfort and belonging. Torgovnik again: ‘For “going home,” like “going primitive,” is inescapably a metaphor for the return to the origins’ (Gone Primitive, 185). If the jolts and upheavals of modernity have created a sense of out-of-placeness,

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a ‘transcendental homelessness’, as Lukács described it, the primitive, argues Torgovnik, is a channel or site which some, notably D. H. Lawrence, have attempted to use to return to wholeness, to return home (188). The primitive thus becomes a trope of modernity, enabling one to renounce and break from stifling and decadent strictures and return to primitive vitality, becoming paradoxically new and whole once more. Macaulay was well aware of the various discourses of primitivism in modern society. The primitive makes an occasional appearance in a number of droll essays by Macaulay collected in the aptly titled A Casual Commentary. Looking at how the primitive is invoked there reveals a plurality of possible interpretations. At times, the primitive emerges as an object of humour. In ‘How to Choose a Religion’, for example, Macaulay jokes about the ‘hymns of most so-called savage tribes’ monotonously going along the lines of: ‘ “Oh Boo-Boo” (or whatever the deity’s name may be), “to placate you we offer you this victim slain by the knife. Descend, therefore, and eat, and spare the rest of us this time” ’ (6–7). Or in ‘Problems of Married Life’, when she turns to our ‘unsophisticated brethren’ as studied by Professor Westermarck for amusing methods in avoiding ‘the weariness that comes from monotony’ in marriage such as the savage habits of regular spouse-swapping or concubinage (76). Underlining these examples is a familiar assumption of the primitive as other, both in their religious pagan habits marked by sacrifice (possibly human) and their ‘immoral’ (at least from a western perspective) sexual behaviour. The primitive in these essays are very much an object of amusement, not to be taken seriously. Yet, Macaulay is also able to claim the primitive as part of modern humankind’s heritage. After all, a common truism by the early twentieth century, helped along by the ideas of J. G. Frazer, Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, was the idea of the primitive still persisting in humankind just beneath the veneer of civilization.46 Though still maintaining a light tone, Macaulay’s acknowledgement of the primitive within betrays a certain seriousness. In ‘Into Evening Parties’, she teases that the love of parties perhaps derives from a primitive love of adornment as well as a primitive instinct to herd together for fear of solitude. In ‘Woman: Her Dark Future’, she confesses that ‘[w]e are still primeval men and women’, not quite as advanced or different from primitives as we think (228). Modern civilization is not as far along as one may think and in Crewe Train we find residual

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primitivism in the form of the herd mentality crushing the unique individual. One may think that the primitive figure in Crewe Train is easy to pick out. Denham Dobie is consistently described as ‘savage’ and ‘untutored’ (49). She is also marked by familiar stereotypes of the primitive; she is the typical innocent primitive: carefree, greedy, lazy, childlike in her desires to be alone, and in need of education in the ways of civilized society. Her London relatives think of her as refreshingly vital but desperately in need of being socialized. They have to impress on her basic social niceties such as the importance of small talk in social situations and how to throw dinner parties. Yet, primitive though she may be, in a move that echoes the modernist fascination with the superiority of the primitive, Denham is also presented as an example of admirable femininity: independent, individualistic, physically active (often happiest rowing and motorcycling in the countryside), unsentimental, and unmistakably dynamic and energetic. Denham shares the vitality admired in primitive art and lifestyles while also representing a new dimension of individuality which enables her to challenge past models of selfless femininity. Unlike her trend-following London relatives, Denham is a true original, unafraid to go her own way, even if that may break conventional models of femininity. This will ultimately be Denham’s downfall for Macaulay is keenly aware that the real primitive of the novel is not Denham but the primitive and more abstract power of the group to enforce conformity. The primitive individual Denham is to be subject to the more powerful primitive will of the group that she should bow to convention. Beyond that, there are also the primitive forces of biology that will also ultimately undo Denham’s fierce individuality and love of privacy. Impatient of the conformity and other-centredness demanded of women (and sometimes of men), Macaulay often reveals a playful pursuit of the holy grail of being selfishly private.47 In A Casual Commentary, in essays such as ‘Alone’, ‘Problems of a Women’s Life’, and ‘Problems of Married Life’, Macaulay discusses how best to live the good life, and by this is implied how best to be private, alone and idle, free from social and domestic responsibilities. As she puts it in her essay on problems of social life, the root problem for those who feel temporarily unsociable and who wish to ‘keep yourself to yourself’ is ‘How to Escape’ (66). How to escape indeed is Denham’s dilemma

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in Crewe Train, though what exactly she is fleeing from is rather more complicated than in Macaulay’s comic essays. The beginning of Crewe Train is a foretaste of the dangers that await Denham. The text begins with a search for elusive privacy. Denham’s widowed father, after years of enforced gregariousness and selflessness as a clergyman, retires to continental Europe in the hope of finding solitude and evading the demands required by society. Their first destination, Mallorca, though initially ideal, proves with time too sociable and too popular with English tourists. The Dobies flee and decamp to the lonely, mountainous republic of Andorra where the inhabitants are less sociable than the Mallorcans and the English less likely to visit. Having escaped the rituals of society and its enforced sociability, Denham’s father then commits a grave error – he falls in love with a local woman and remarries, thus involving him with Andorran society and ruining his much-loved solitude. Macaulay’s description of his fall is instructive: she describes him as ‘snared by passion’ (14). Indeed the language of ‘snares’ and ‘traps’ abounds in the novel – Chapter Four is even entitled ‘The Snare’ and Chapter Five ‘Trapped’ – for it is a reminder of other primitive impulses that may trip up those who prize their privacy. The tale of Denham’s father is thus one of a successful escape of one kind only to fall at another hurdle and it sets up a familiar pattern for Denham. Primitive and yet modern in her desire to be private and alone, she struggles to escape from other equally primitive instincts that would ensnare her and affect her privacy. The text is thus a record of the various snares that she fails to avoid and which result in her ever-shrinking ability to be private. Her first failure derives from her sense of adventure. Denham, after the death of her father, is dazzled by the ‘kind chatter’ of her metropolitan relatives and finds herself succumbing to their charms and submitting to their plans for her (28). Her love of adventure and fascination with the new, as represented by her glamorous relatives the Greshams, overwhelm her in-built strain of wariness and doubt. As Macaulay comments, in this situation, ‘[a] rabbit might as well as say it would not go with a snake’ (28). The laws of nature apply and such laws often contradict personal inclinations. Thus, Denham ‘who loved freedom and aloneness, was going to England with relations who knew neither’ (30). Similarly, falling in love just as her father had foolishly done before becomes another snare that life has set in place for Denham. Though

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self-aware enough to realize that ‘[h]er line of country . . . didn’t lead to matrimony at all’, Denham nonetheless ends up marrying Arnold Chapel, despite her better judgement (100). It is at this point that the enigmatic title of Macaulay’s novel becomes pertinent. Identified by Jane Emery in her introduction to the Virago edition of Crewe Train as the name of a popular ballad about a misdirected traveller who, wishing to go to Birmingham, has instead been placed on the train to Crewe, the ballad echoes the experience of Macaulay’s protagonist and her father. Two ‘selfish, idle, unsociable’ individuals who prefer to go their own ways, ‘aloof and content as long as no one bothered them’, Denham and her father are both travellers in life who aim for Birmingham but end up in Crewe (29). Yet unlike the hapless traveller of the ballad whose predicament is no fault of his own, both the Dobies choose, however misguidedly, their destinations and in choosing life, adventure and love over selfish privacy, both find themselves enmeshed in networks of kinship that privilege community. Denham’s journey into domesticity, into that world so often called the private sphere, is a journey into a world which is surprisingly public. On marrying, she contracts obligations with society. From her aunt, Evelyn, she learns of the duties expected of her as a dinner guest: If you go out to dinner, my dear child, you’ve got to talk. It’s not fair on your hostess if you don’t . . . Women who can’t or won’t speak when they’re out are a public nuisance. We’ve all got a duty to society, do you see. (114) Furthermore, as a wife, Denham is also expected to organize and host dinner parties of her own. From her aunt once again, she learns here of the intricacies of convention with regards to dinner parties that will constrain her strivings for ease. On her desire to serve dinner unconventionally buffet-style for the sake of convenience, her aunt advises: You mustn’t try to be original yet, Denham dear. You don’t know well enough yet how to keep the rules to break them safely . . . You see, when you break social rules, you should always seem to be ahead of fashion and convention, not lagging behind them, do you see what I mean? (118, italics original) Denham’s induction into social life reveals the weight of public expectation and convention placed on a woman and the shrinking of her

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personal freedoms as she is now part of a community of party-going and party-giving married couples. The irksome and public nature of social convention, of doing the right things at the right time for an audience of her peers, acts as a drag on Denham’s desires to be aloof and private, though none more so than the living in tandem that a marriage requires. On marrying, not only is one subject to society’s conventions but also to the predilections and prejudices of one’s spouse. As Denham herself recognizes with a sigh, ‘Perfect freedom was never attained, never while you had a companion’ (162). This tension surfaces several times in the text for Arnold and Denham have very different ideas as to how to live. Denham favours living simply in the countryside and Arnold the city. During their summer holidays, Denham is at ease in their rustic, rundown cottage while Arnold misses the physical comforts and social interactions of the Greshams’ holiday home. Thus far, Denham had largely given way to Arnold’s tastes, agreeing to live in London, doing her best to converse at dinner parties, even throwing a few dinner parties herself. As Denham ponders over the aftermath of one of their quarrels, she articulates unwittingly the fundamental problem of her marriage: Every one should go their own way and be happy, not try to go other people’s, to make other people go theirs. (165) The desire to herd and conform, resulting in the imposition of one’s will on the other, applies too in her marriage and the individualistic Denham rebels at this. Her rebellion against society’s conventions and marriage’s subtle coercions is channelled through a bid for privacy, represented by the dilapidated cottage in Cornwall that she rents. Ensconced in her own cottage, she is no longer on show, subject to the enforced sociability of the Greshams and society in general. She is also free from the Greshams’ impractical standards of housekeeping and puts into practice her own minimalist and functionalist philosophy. The furniture is basic, and mere functionality not aesthetics (for Denham does not envision entertaining guests in her cottage) is taken into consideration in the purchase of crockery. Meals are informal picnic affairs and washing up and cleaning done as few times as possible. The cave attached to the cottage provides perfect privacy as it allows Denham to escape from any unwanted visitor approaching her cottage, while

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the cottage’s location in Cornwall allows Denham the full scope of outdoor activities to occupy her time. This is the life where Denham is concerned and while Arnold is not unappreciative of it, he is less tolerant of its discomforts and far less accepting of low standards of housekeeping. The cottage becomes, for Denham, the bastion of her way of life and identity – one that prioritizes privacy and individuality over community. Yet her rebellion is futile, for the sticky web of talk, gossip, discourse fixes her into place. She cannot escape from the surveillance of this community she has inserted herself into through marriage and wishes to flee from. To see this at work, it is instructive to examine how the Sudanese guests to the Gresham party are presented. For a text that has been insistent on associating Denham with animals, identifying her style as ‘barbaric’ (37) and calling her ‘a savage captured by life’ (48), the entry of Africans, ‘real’ primitives, is a telling moment. A group of ‘handsome, chocolate-coloured men and women’ appears at the Gresham party unannounced and comparisons between Denham and the Africans are immediately forthcoming (70). Audrey, one of Denham’s Gresham cousins, declares: ‘They look a little like Denham, don’t they. But they smile more. I like them’ (70). An enamoured Arnold cannot help but compare his beloved Denham with the Sudanese, finding her exotic and strange ‘like beauty and adventure and far countries’ (73). The arrival of the Africans serves to underline Denham’s perceived primitivism but their presentation and how they are framed by discourse in the party episode also acts as an interesting commentary on Denham’s predicament as a fellow ‘savage’. There are two levels of discourse concerning the Africans in this episode. The omniscient narrator provides one, a level of discourse that is positive and admiring even though the admiration is sometimes expressed in stereotypical terms. The Sudanese are predictably compared to animals, ‘lithe and handsome as panthers’, as the text goes on in describing their dancing (72). The other is filtered through the perspectives of the Greshams and their party-goers, and the racism of their viewpoints can be seen in their use of the term ‘fuzzies’ to designate the Africans. The narrator, in contrast, is careful to refer to the Africans as ‘the Sudanese’ or ‘the brown people’ but never the derogatory ‘fuzzies’. This disparity in discourses reveals the ways the ‘primitive’ is framed and seen in western metropolitan society. At the level of the narrator’s discourse, there is an attempt to present the Sudanese as

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being simply themselves in their physical exuberance. They are merely indulging in their ‘ordinary evening habits’ (73).48 But, surrounding their activities are the actions and discourses of the Europeans who speak of the Sudanese as ‘fuzzies’ and treat them (and the Tibetan lamas who precede them as the attraction of the party) as objects of entertainment. As Guy Gresham says, ‘Well, they’ve [the lamas] done their turn; it’s the fuzzies’ number now’ (72). The Sudanese, as they dance in their non-European ways, become almost a variety act and this sense of the Africans being turned into a spectacle does not end even when they stop dancing. As they eat, they are watched by ‘the white people’ who gather around them, curious to see that the Africans like foie gras (72). While the text does attempt to present the Africans as dignified, it also weaves around them, consciously and at times unconsciously, a web of behaviour and language deployed by the ‘white people’ that objectifies the Africans as spectacle, as entertainment, as other. The Africans, so physically present in the text as fine, dancing and then eating, bodies, are never heard to speak and as a result can never counter how they are received and perceived in the talkative world of the Greshams and metropolitan London. In a similar manner, Denham, so often affectionately and romantically deemed a primitive, so often silent in her dislike of unnecessary talk, is enveloped by discourses generated by conventional society and by her voluble relatives that constrain and ultimately misidentify her. News of the secret cave broadcast to the world via Evelyn and a gossipy columnist ruins the privacy of Denham’s cottage and her cave as curious crowds gather, making the cottage uninhabitable for Denham. Even more insidious is the novella Paul and Barbara that Evelyn writes and whose plot she disseminates as truth to her circle of friends in gossip sessions. Based ostensibly on Arnold and Denham’s rocky marriage, the novella is in fact the result of Evelyn’s heightened and melodramatic imagination. Barbara, the Denham character, is reimagined as a lusty young woman, a primitive at heart, who after her break-up with the cultured Paul finds her blood stirred by the sight of a vigorous fisherman, a veritable ‘sea-god’ (202). The first chapter of the novella finds Barbara recognizing that she did not want aloneness after Paul but a new kind of man: She did not want to be alone; love of aloneness belongs only to the tired, to the sensitive, to the creators. Barbara in her strong

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young savagery had no use for it; she wanted her man, whom she had not yet found. Not a player with words, a taster of culture, but someone like herself, who would companion her, play with her, crush her with strong salt kisses, wasting no words. (203) No doubt, Paul and Barbara is Macaulay poking fun at the sexsensation bestsellers of the likes of Ethel Dell and E. M. Hull but the use of the word ‘savagery’ in the above quote is of note for it signals an important turning point in how the savagery of Denham is perceived by the Greshams and London society.49 The seeming savagery of her unconventional ways, her love of idleness and her incomprehension of modern polite habits of talk and dinner parties has been transformed into the primal lusts of Barbara. Denham’s primitivism has become sexualized and her love of freedom has narrowed into Barbara’s freedom to love in spite of Catholic church restrictions against divorce. Evelyn, caught up with her idea of Denham’s primal instincts of love, freely weaves around a conversation she sees Denham having with a fisherman at St Ives, a love affair, and a love child and unabashedly purports this as truth to friends and family as well as through her novella. Denham remains unaware of the gossip surrounding her stay in Cornwall, but Evelyn’s discourse about her nonetheless weaves a net around Denham, preventing future escapes by influencing Arnold, her husband. Evelyn’s constructions force Arnold to resolve to save his marriage but also undermines his faith in her and their love.50 The tenor of their love has changed: Arnold had welcomed back his wife, but rather with gentleness than ardour. Moments of ardour had come since, but between these moments was a kind of puzzled questioning of her, of himself, of their love . . . (251) Not only have Evelyn’s discourses on Denham and Arnold increased public scrutiny of their problems, but, privately, their relationship has been damaged by the doubts that Evelyn has sown in Arnold’s mind. Evelyn’s careless words framing and fixing Denham (and Arnold and Evelyn’s daughter Audrey too), in particular ways unbeknownst to Denham, have a real impact on her relationships and life. Denham’s personal capitulation to convention ultimately has little to do with Evelyn’s gossip and more to do with the vulnerabilities

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of the female body. Unlike her father, who, after his regrettable mistake of marrying and fathering four more children, is able to evade his new family by withdrawing and absenting himself from his family and social occasions, Denham is betrayed by her female body. Though perfectly capable of selfishly sloping off on her own to evade company, her marriage to Arnold begins to throw up new obstacles to her desire to live as she pleases that her father as a man did not have to face. The threat of maternity rears its head early in their marriage. While Arnold is delighted with the prospect of a baby, Denham is clear about the consequences for her as the one who would have to bear and look after the baby. In addition to the dreadful morning sickness she has been experiencing, the arrival of a baby, notes Denham unsentimentally, would be ‘a great nuisance’ (133) and an ‘encumbrance’ (138), spoiling their summer holiday plans as well as Denham’s regular habits of going to the countryside daily on her motorcycle or by train. Her callousness about the baby leads to a miscarriage, as, instead of resting as advised by her doctor, Denham keeps up with her physical activities.51 Denham experiences a reprieve though it results in the first serious rift in her marriage. But, when she finds that she is pregnant once again, Denham realizes that, as a married woman, and, indeed, as a pregnant married woman, she cannot escape her designated role in life. Having fallen in love and succumbed to marriage, she is trapped, no longer a free person: Love broke one in the end, ground one down, locked the fetters on one’s free limbs. If you had never loved, you could be happy, loafing, idle and alone, exploring new places, sufficient to yourself. Once committed to love, you couldn’t . . . You had to go back. Love was the great taming emotion . . . Further, to make quite sure of you, love set its seal on you by giving you a child. (250) Denham, because of her love for Arnold, will ‘become a wife and a mother instead of a free person’ (250). The final pages of the text detail Denham’s diminishing freedoms within sociable Great Missenden with fewer places to evade neighbours than the city and within the strict domestic regime meant to prevent ‘drifting and idling’ that her mother-in-law prescribes for her (256): ‘You see,’ said Mrs. Chapel, stepping lightly, though stoutly, from a chair on to the floor. ‘There needn’t really be any empty moments

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in one’s day, if it’s properly schemed out. Think of that! Not one empty, idle, useless minute.’ (256) Crewe Train reveals the absence of freedom and privacy at the heart of the private sphere for a woman, and the text closes with Denham in the only private space remaining to her – her thoughts – as she ponders silently on the vision that her mother-in-law has conjured before her. The primitive has been tamed by domesticity. As a modern object of pursuit for women, the quest for privacy is often a failed one. Crewe Train gives voice to such a desire but also articulates devastatingly the forces arrayed against its satisfaction, especially for a married woman. Its failure is a critique of the institution of domesticity which relentlessly absorbs the energies of women and of conventional society which fixes a woman within the domestic sphere. The failed search for privacy as such reinforces the post-Great War cult of domesticity, returning even alternative feminine models such as the primitive back to the yoke of domesticity. That Warner’s novel could envision her heroine’s break into the country and her obtaining a much sought-for privacy at last suggests an optimism Macaulay was finding harder to sustain. Lolly Willowes, on closer inspection, however, already betrays hints of its own undoing. The fact that the text has to slip into fantasy mode with the arrival of the Devil to protect Lolly’s privacy is a quiet reminder that Warner’s happy ending is not quite rooted in reality. Without the aid of the Devil, Laura would herself, like Denham, have been forced to return to a domestic identity. Escaping the clutches of domesticity would prove to be tougher than imagined.

4 ‘We Have Gone Recreation-mad’: Leisure, Privacy and Modern Domestic Identity

Though its title suggests a romantic coupling, Dorothy Richardson’s short story ‘Tryst’ is in fact about being alone. Her nameless protagonist, a married woman with grown children, steals out of her house for ten minutes to catch the sunset over the sea alone before tea-time and the return of her family from their walk. If there is any lover to meet, it is, at first glance, the glories of nature itself – the sunset ‘[r]oseopal above a ragged, smouldering cloud-bank’, the ‘patches of soft, rain-sodden moss, emerald, miming in velvet’ under her feet, the little stream’s ‘thread of molten rosy gold’ (‘Tryst’, 57–9). These sights, as the text reiterates, call out to her, drawing her out of her home, insisting that she stop and appreciate them. These are her ‘treasures’ that she has come to meet, yet there is a person she encounters in her tryst – herself: Approaching the house, she found herself longing for a little extra time. Time to dispose of her elastically expanded being, to reassemble the faculties demanded by the coming enclosure. (59) Her ten minutes have allowed her ‘inward life’ to burst forth and there is a realization that domesticity requires the repression of this other life. Teetering on the threshold between two worlds – the world of outside where her inner life can be set free and that of domestic community and her place within it as its lynchpin, finding the items her husband can never find for himself – she finds herself struggling to come back to her domestic role (60). But with an effort that transforms her released inner life back into covert interiority, she 104

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reconnects with her husband and children with a cry of ‘Toast ready, children?’ (60). ‘Tryst’ captures the other-centredness of a domestic woman’s existence and the pleasures of a stolen moment of private leisure that enables a woman to stop being a wife and mother and let an inner life untouched by those roles out for an airing. Its focus on that brief moment underlines the importance of physical privacy to women in preserving an autonomous sense of self but also its scarcity and the eventual turn to interiority to preserve privacy and a sense of self beneath the domestic role. Though first published in 1941, a few years outside my notional boundary for this study, Richardson’s short story about the simple act of a woman having ten minutes of leisure neatly encapsulates the shifts concerning domestic women, leisure and privacy that had been occurring through the first four decades of the twentieth century. The female search for privacy had begun at home with explorations of the garden, the study and the room with a lock on the door controlled by the woman. Such forays, usually begun by women from the well-off segments of the middle-classes, signalled a sea-change in thinking – privacy was becoming not merely a concept but a tangible object of interest to women. In conjunction with this, we see in the early twentieth century an increasing push for the importance of leisure for the classes of society not usually entitled to it. The world had gone ‘recreation-mad’ as Sir Herbert Nield put it in 1921 (Graves and Hodge, 114). Leisure was a relatively new demand that helped give the early twentieth century its modern air and housewives, both working-class and middle-class, were included in this newfangled call for leisure in their lives. While leisure is not the same as privacy, it shares with privacy the ability to refresh and restore an autonomous self. Leisure can also pave the way for privacy. The new opportunities for leisure, particularly the more solitary forms of leisure such as walks and holidays alone, could open up opportunities for a woman to be private as well. The paradox was that, caught between a new ideology of leisure as a sign of modernity and the realities of domestic life that allowed little or no time for leisure, both working-class and middle-class women struggled to include leisure as part of their lives and hence claim modern feminine identities. For working-class domestic women, leisure was so rare that it barely entered narratives of working-class life, but it maintained

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a presence as something to be advocated for, part of feminist and left-wing demands for social and domestic change. For middle-class women as represented in middlebrow novels, leisure and privacy were seen as desirable but as the domestic workloads of middle-class women grew, marking an increasing convergence with workingclass women’s lifestyles, narratives of holidays taken alone turn into stolen moments of leisure and privacy and ultimately into a return to interiority as a means to mark their class-status and claim their modernity.

The rise of leisure as modern The word ‘leisure’ prior to 1900 had been generally used in relation to the upper-classes alone for they were the only ones who could afford to be leisured. However, by the late nineteenth century, the meaning of ‘leisure’ went through a semantic expansion to include the non-work time of the rest of the classes of society (Tinkler, ‘Cause’, 235). Leisure as a concept and activity for the mass of people thus had been in existence since the nineteenth century but it was in the interwar period that leisure, as Penny Tinkler argues, was recognized as a significant part of contemporary life for all. This period between the wars, for example, ‘witnessed a range of leisure reforms’ from paid holidays to improved sports facilities and government investment in recreation that benefited the working-classes in particular (Jones, 7). The period also produced discourses on leisure that assumed that it was a right and an essential necessity in life for all citizens. Organized labour, appropriating Lloyd George’s promise of a ‘land fit for heroes’, demanded better working and living conditions in the form of more leisure: The war has changed the worker’s ideas of values. No longer will he be content to be a wage slave, existing to produce only that others may enjoy. The war has been won by the wage-earning classes . . . The worker in this country therefore claims that he is entitled to conditions of life that will enable him to live as a citizen of a wealthy, victorious nation. Good wages is not sufficient. Leisure is required to enable the worker to live up to the obligation that citizenship imposes. (quoted in Jones, 23)

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Leisure was now not only a badge of citizenship but also a necessary part of an improved standard of living that took into consideration not just ‘the physical side’, as Richard Wallhead, the MP for Merthyr Tydfil, put it, but also ‘intellectual development, artistic development and appreciation of the good things in life’ (quoted in Jones, 24). Life was not meant for work and mere drudgery but for better things, a notion echoed in the optimistic slogans used in working-class movements about the advantages of new technology: ‘ “Lighten the load of labour”, reduce the “bondage of incessant toil”, “liberate our folk from toil and moil”, decrease the “expenditure of human effort” and help men to “escape from the drudgery of toil” ’ ( Jones, 24). Technology was to reduce the burden of work, freeing up time for the worker to enjoy leisure, whether in the form of hobbies or holidays, and hence to develop an identity apart from one’s role as a labourer. Leisure had become a major good in life. The rise of leisure’s importance in interwar society across all classes had an effect too on domestic women, for leisure was recognized as a legitimate goal for both working-class and middle-class women. The implications of this were potentially far-reaching. Leisure as nondomestic work time would allow the domestic woman to disengage from home duties and achieve a measure of independence and an identity apart from domesticity. At one end of the spectrum, leisure could introduce new contexts for community for women through an institution like the church or the Women’s Institute. At the other end, as an escape from community and social duties, leisure could also offer the domestic woman a moment to be private and self-focused instead of other-centred. At its most ambitious, this discourse of leisure for women focused on holidays alone, away from family. Going on holiday for the British upper-classes as well as the higher echelons of the middle-classes was a familiar institution of family life. Even as the practice of a family holiday spread down the social ladder with paid holidays for employees becoming more common, as a leisure activity, it was nonetheless meant for the whole family, not for an individual. Thus going away on holiday as such did not guarantee leisure or privacy for the domestic woman who, despite being technically ‘on holiday’, was not at leisure to abandon her domestic role and duties. The stress on women’s leisure rights, however, theoretically permitted the modern domestic woman, middle-class or working-class, to contemplate the radical notion of holiday rights – alone.52 Much of

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this talk of leisure and holidays remained simply that – theoretical – as the domestic realities of women’s lives, both working-class and middle-class, quite often militated against women having leisure and privacy of their own.

The realities of working-class women’s leisure Reading the memoirs and autobiographies of working-class women growing up in early twentieth-century Britain, it is striking to note how seldom privacy and leisure are mentioned. An awareness of the importance of privacy and leisure seems to be lacking. Given that working-class girls and women were usually a part of large families in inadequate accommodation with no money to spare, it is no surprise that their experience of life was one lived in the common and in constant activity from day to night. Beds were often shared with as many as three or four (or more) to a bed, and, even from a tender age, children in the family were expected to pitch in with household chores and earn money running errands.53 There was no time or space for leisure or privacy, least of all if you were the harassed mother of a large working-class family. Reading the accounts of the daily schedules of working-class mothers in Pember Reeves’s seminal Round About a Pound a Week reveals the long hours, sometimes averaging 14 to 16 hours a day, workingclass mothers had to put in for the sake of their families (159–71). For most, these hours were also spent within the home, with no change of scene. Sometimes lacking the right footwear or good clothes, even the daily shopping, which would have provided women with a chance to leave the home, was left to the older children to do. While a few women, like Kathleen Dayus’s formidable mother, were able to have time away from the children by following their husbands down to the pub and making them pay for the wife’s drink, most working-class domestic women’s lives were about placing ‘perceived familial and social needs before those of the individual’, namely themselves (Roberts, A Woman’s Place, 203). Elizabeth Roberts’s oral history of working-class domestic women from the early twentieth century reveals working-class women as generally other-centred: Women did not seek self-fulfilment at the expense of the family because they saw little distinction between their own good and

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that of their families. There was a very low level of self-awareness. Women’s considerable powers were all exercised, firmly, in the perceived interests of their families – that is how they saw their ‘place’. (203) With an identity deeply bound up with their family, working-class domestic women understandably had little notion of demanding privacy or leisure for themselves. More urgent was the simple question of survival. There were signs of change, however, in fleeting mentions of rooms, solitude and holidays in several memoirs and autobiographies from working-class women writing in particular of their youth. Though mostly these young women were more concerned with the question of how to make a good marriage and avoid the hard lives of their parents, there were flickering moments when privacy and leisure were portrayed as desirable, even necessary, if sadly lacking.54 Margaret Powell, writing a memoir of her youth as a domestic servant, recalls the absence of privacy and dignity in her life: ‘Of privacy we had none. Working and sharing a bedroom as I did meant I was never alone; my life was what you would call an open book’ (160). Yet as young single women, their lives, though filled with work, would not have yet been crowded with the type of domestic demands made of a wife and mother. There was still some space for them to enjoy privacy if so desired, even though room for manoeuvre was limited. Rosina Harrison, as the high-status personal maid of Lady Astor, was privileged in having her own bedroom, even though it was often a space she had little time to enjoy. Besides, her work permeated her room as she did Lady Astor’s personal washing and ironing there. More promisingly, we have already seen Kathleen Woodward’s intense longing for a room of her own in Jipping Street and her achievement of that sought-after room. In A London Childhood, Angela Rodaway writes of badly needing a holiday where she could simply have a stretch of time to herself to read and write (127). Rodaway, too, eventually managed to rent an unfurnished room for herself. In Winifred Foley’s Child of the Forest, a childhood love of reading coupled with a habit of escaping into the privy to find the privacy to read undisturbed laid the foundations for Foley’s greater awareness of the pleasures and benefits of privacy. Working on a farm, one of her greatest joys was to take a country walk where for a few hours ‘unsupervised by my mistress’s

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sharp eye, I could belong to myself’ (Foley, 149). Foley, in the final volume of her three-part autobiography looking back at her younger self, stresses the importance of being alone walking the streets of London and being able to be herself: I see a seventeen-year-old girl running up the basement steps of a house. Upstairs in an attic room a servant’s cap, apron, and print dress are folded over the end of an iron bedstead. For the next eight hours she can enjoy her own identity, free from the incarceration of servitude. Her legs are lithe and long; London spreads out before her. (424)55 Foley’s depiction of her young working self taking her leisure alone and enjoying solitude as a means to locate her sense of self is unusual. While young working-class women with their earning power had greater freedom to spend their money on clothes, at the cinema or dances or even at a café, their days off from work were usually spent in the company of a friend or a group of friends. If home life had been communal, so too were working life and leisure activities.56 However, Foley’s love of getting away from her workplace and being on her own was an emergent sign that for some working-class women, privacy and leisure were gradually becoming priorities. This shift in attitude is best seen when we compare two important studies of working-class domestic women from the early twentieth century: Round About a Pound a Week and Working-class Wives: Their Health and Conditions. The former was first published in 1913. An exploration into the effects of additional nourishment on workingclass mothers and newborns by the Fabian Women’s Group, the study became an in-depth record of working-class domestic life. Round About a Pound a Week was comprehensive in its coverage of working-class domesticity with chapters on the housing stock available to the working classes, domestic arrangements regarding sleeping, bathing and cooking, the menus, budgets and daily schedules of working-class mothers and working-class children and the effects of unemployment on household budgets. Round About a Pound a Week was a pioneering and exhaustive study which interestingly barely makes mention of the importance of privacy and leisure. There is a recognition that privacy for the individual with regards to sleeping arrangements and privacy for the family with regards to living arrangements are important but little else. Leisure is not mentioned at all. The book, unsurprisingly,

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had its own agenda, concerned with the Fabian idea of the state subsidizing mothers hence enabling them to become better parents. Thus, its consideration of how to solve the unrelenting difficulty of working-class domestic life centred on state intervention and endowments. The focus was on monetary allowances to be given to mothers and other intangibles that could improve a working-class woman’s life were not considered. In contrast, sixteen years later, a similar report by the Women’s Health Enquiry Committee into the conditions of working-class women and what could be done by the state to improve the situation is keenly aware of the importance of leisure in raising the quality of women’s lives. Margery Spring Rice’s Working-class Wives: Their Health and Conditions is no doubt deeply indebted to Round About a Pound a Week. Much of what is reported is familiar – the detailed diets, the investigation into poor housing stock, the record of a woman’s daily work. What is unfamiliar is a new emphasis by Spring Rice on leisure for the working-class mother and the growing recognition by workingclass women themselves that privacy and leisure were desirable and highly necessary commodities. The opening of the chapter ‘The Day’s Work’ begins with a quotation from a letter from a working-class mother who writes: ‘I believe myself that one of the biggest difficulties our mothers have is our husbands do not realise we ever need any leisure time’ (94). Spring Rice quotes extensively from this letter whose writer manages to articulate the value of ‘an hour’s fresh air’ for a domestic woman and the need to break away from the home for a brief while (94). Spring Rice strongly advocates leisure and in her report writes of finding ways of giving working-class wives ‘time to rest, to make contacts with the outer world, and to enjoy some at least of those cultural and recreative pursuits which would release them spiritually as well as physically from their present slavery’ (106). She suggests better domestic training to promote domestic efficiency, recommends the gathering of women into clubs and even goes so far as to insist that working-class wives should have a ‘holiday “with pay” once a year’ where, for a week or two, she will do absolutely no work (107).57 Leisure, the concept of time off for working-class women to be focused privately on self instead of service to the family, was finally beginning to take root. The difficulty, as usual, was the physical scarcity of leisure. Though the idea of leisure was beginning to make an impact, forming a question to be asked of working-class wives in the committee’s enquiries

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and even commanding a section in Spring Rice’s report, the answers the committee received revealed that leisure was still rare for workingclass wives. At best the women were able to access a compromised home-bound leisure and, in desperate situations, the only escape was through illness and hospitalization. One of Spring Rice’s respondents writes of having two serious operations and being sent to the seaside for three weeks under the Hospital Saving Association scheme to recuperate. ‘It was the most lovely holiday’, she recalls (114).58 Leisure for working-class women as Spring Rice noticed was thus relative: ‘Anything which is slightly less arduous or gives a change of scene or occupation from the active hard work of the eight hours for which she has already been up is leisure’ (99). Leisure for working-class women was thus often a compromise. It was never a full escape from the family but a making-do with whatever was on hand in the home to give them a momentary respite. As Diana Gittins points out of the urban working-class woman in the period 1900–39, she ‘tended to gravitate . . . more to home-based activities either on her own or with her husband and/or children’ (58). Gittins discusses leisure pursuits such as reading or listening to the wireless, identifying their popularity through the interwar years but also their ‘home-based and isolated’ nature, which contributes ‘to an increasing emphasis on home and family’ (55). Claire Langhamer, in her study of working-class women’s leisure in England from 1920 to 1960, examines leisure through a woman’s life cycle from youth to courtship and life as a married adult. Similarly Langhamer establishes the largely home-based nature of married women’s leisure. While there were opportunities for leisure outside the home in the form of the cinema, the Women’s Institutes, or the Townswomen’s Guilds, a woman’s ability to exploit these opportunities was constrained. She would need assistance at home with housework or babysitting to enable her to enjoy leisure outside of the home, as well as additional financial resources which would not have been as forthcoming, as the assumption that a man had a right to separate leisure by himself did not apply necessarily to women. As such, home-based leisure pursuits such as reading, handicrafts and the wireless would have been the easiest leisure to access for a married woman. Home and family quite often then became a mixed source of work and leisure for women. Leisure for the married woman had to be seen in the context of her everyday experience and her view of what counted as work or leisure must

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be taken into consideration. The divisions between work and leisure were not clear-cut; knitting, for example, could be seen as domestic work or as leisure depending on a woman’s attitude towards it. Despite the ability of married women to access some leisure within the home, leisure was still a precious and fragile commodity for women. Langhamer notes that, as married adults, women’s personal leisure tended to decline as time for leisure was swallowed up by domestic duties and personal leisure was subordinated to husbands’ and children’s leisure: Most commonly, women’s own individual leisure preferences were subsumed into those of family, with ‘leisure’ becoming a vehicle for service to husband and children. (Langhamer, 144) Their sense of entitlement to leisure too was problematic as leisure was often seen as a privilege earned through paid work and, as such, the working male’s right. Feminist leisure theorists studying contemporary women’s leisure have tended to confirm Langhamer’s findings. As the title of a contemporary study of women’s leisure indicates – Women’s Leisure, What Leisure? – so little leisure do married women seem to have. In a time when leisure was perceived as a right and necessary to wellbeing, working-class domestic women could only aspire to leisure and privacy. Even as more and more of them recognized the importance of leisure, being private and self-focused, economic and social circumstances were still against them. The lack of money and the demand of family needs were still difficult obstacles to surmount. Thus for working-class domestic women, leisure and privacy were aspects of modernity constantly deferred, maintaining a presence in their lives as something to aspire to and to fight for.

Middle-class women, leisure and privacy If working-class housewives desired leisure and privacy but were struggling to incorporate them into their daily lives, for some middle-class domestic women this was a similar challenge that would involve a return to interiority as the only form of leisure and privacy available to them. Even among the middle-classes, access to leisure for the domestic woman was uneven. For the moneyed upper-middle-class domestic

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woman, able to hold on to her servants despite a servant shortage, the interwar period proved to be a golden age. Less constrained by convention than her Victorian and Edwardian predecessors and still benefiting from the availability of servants unlike her post-Second World War successors, the upper-middle-class housewife between the wars could afford to attend to her own personal needs and development as well as her family’s. Energetic and organized, she could combine a career and family and still maintain ample space and time for herself. Naomi Mitchison, upper-middle-class and married to a well-to-do professional, writes in her memoir of the twenties and thirties as a time when women had much free time and were thus able to use their resulting leisure to write, paint and work. This leisure, however, was, as the socialist Mitchison conceded, dependent on servants and her ability to afford them: ‘Clearly without domestic help I could not have had a family and been a successful writer’ (27). For women on the lower rungs of the middle classes, this kind of domestic idyll was projected as ideal but proved elusive. The conventional ideal of the middle-class domestic woman as other-centred and devoted to husband and family persisted into the post-First World War period but she was no longer to be solely a slave to her home and family. In an effort to engage with modernity and the changing conditions of women’s position in society, domesticity was re-presented as suitably modern and generous in accommodating the needs of the emancipated woman. Firstly, domesticity was repositioned as a career worthy of the modern woman as it became ‘scientific’ and professional in its concentration on the most efficient ways of housecleaning and childcare. The establishment of the Good Housekeeping Institute, where domestic products were tested and rated for the benefit of Good Housekeeping readers in laboratory-like settings, revealed a new tendency to treat housekeeping as an objective science. A similar trend in domestic-product advertisements emphasizing the rigorous testing of products further underlined the entry of scientific discourse into domesticity and the placing of the housewife in the flattering position of expert consumer. The housewife was to be a professional in the science of housekeeping, childcare and nutrition and the everrising standards demanded not only elbow grease but also the exercise of knowledge and intelligence. Indeed, these latter qualities would enable the housewife to deploy the scientific domestic products at her disposal to finish her work more quickly and use the resulting

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free time to engage in other activities that could allow her to focus on herself. With the discourse of scientific, efficient housekeeping and timesaving electrical appliances (which, however, only the more well-off sections of the middle-classes could afford), the domestic home was thus being positioned as a modern site of leisure for the middle-class woman: ‘Give her pleasure, give her leisure’ as the tagline for an Electrolux vacuum-cleaner advertisement went above an image of a pleased young woman dressed fashionably for a party as her husband unveils his gift, a new vacuum cleaner (Braithewaite et al., 33). In a similar vein, the copy for an advertisement for electric Standard washing machines and vacuum sweepers writes of ‘eliminating drudgery’ and offers a booklet promoting the use of electricity for housework called, interestingly, ‘The Home of Leisure’ (Braithewaite et al., 75). The advertisement’s accompanying images of life before and after using Standard electrical appliances are also noteworthy. Where the unenlightened housewife sweeps and washes in clouds of dust and steam with an apron and rolled-up sleeves, the housewife converted to Standard electrical appliances vacuums in a smart dress and lounges in a deckchair reading while her washing billows on a line behind her. Similarly The Electricity Handbook for Women, published in 1934, claimed that ‘electricity can serve in reducing drudgery, providing leisure for other things besides keeping the house comfortable and clean’ (quoted in Bowden and Offer, 244).59 The assumption was that leisure was the goal of the efficient housewife for leisure ensured that she did not turn into an unattractive drudge or a provincial, narrow-minded housewife concerned only with domestic issues. Marie Stopes, in her manual Married Love, best known today as the text that championed female sexuality and popularized sexology, insisted that marriage was not to be the end of a woman’s intellectual development and that true marriage did not result in provincialism: Every year one sees a widening of the independence and the range of the pursuits of women; but still, far too often, marriage puts an end to women’s intellectual life. Marriage can never reach its full stature until women possess as much intellectual freedom and freedom of opportunity within it as do their partners. (168)

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Good Housekeeping, in language reminiscent of the labour movement’s slogans, was similarly insistent that, though a woman’s place was in the home, it did not mean that she was to become dull, without time to enjoy life: There should be no drudgery in the house. There must be time to think, to read, to enjoy life, to be young with the growing generation, to have time for their pleasures, to have leisure for one’s own – to hold one’s youth as long as possible, to have beauty around us – line and colour in dress, form and colour in our surroundings; to have good food without monotony, and good service without jangled tempers. (quoted in Braithwaite et al., 11) The modern housewife was hence to be different, modern, and the inclusion of leisure as part of her entitlement was an example of the break with the past. She would have leisure and the freedom to extend the scope of her life beyond the cares of housewifery, the implication being that the middle-class housewife would maintain an identity other than that of her domestic self. Yet the reality was quite different. With a shortage of servants and smaller incomes, there was less time to enjoy leisure as more and more middle-class women had to engage in the physical side of housework. The creation of middle-class women’s magazines such as Good Housekeeping and Woman and Home were in part to meet the needs of this new interwar situation by providing advice to women who had little or no experience in housework. The introduction of electrical household appliances was meant to ease the middle-class woman’s domestic situation and appliances were marketed as reducing drudgery, as time-saving and as reducing dependence on live-in help at home. Yet, ‘[t]ime saved was . . . depicted not as time released for leisure or paid employment but as time well spent on achieving higher standards of cleanliness at home’ (Bowden and Offer, 267). As Bowden and Offer have argued, the rise of electrical household appliances fed into a domestic ideology that was obsessively focused on cleanliness and higher and higher standards of housekeeping and maternal care. Though a middle-class housewife may have had the income to purchase household appliances and to have limited domestic help through the employment of a daily live-out char, any leisure that would have been gained was to be reinvested into the care of

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home and family once again.60 Thus the attempt to carve out more leisure and independence for the middle-class domestic woman was short-circuited in ways that bound her even closer to home. The realities too of smaller homes and the changed dynamics between middle-class mistresses and their servants, be they live-in maids or merely daily chars, affected the amount of privacy a middleclass housewife had access to. While smaller homes, either in the form of a flat or a new suburban semi-detached, were easier to clean, their small size and lack of suitable servant accommodation also meant that mistresses and servants were in closer proximity than ever before. Preserving one’s privacy and enjoying solitary leisure could be difficult in such a tight space. Monica Dickens, upper-middle-class herself but with no skills to earn a living other than a liking for cooking, hired herself out as a cook-general during the thirties. Writing up her experiences blithely in One Pair of Hands, Dickens records overhearing conversations while working in Miss Faulkener’s small one-bedroom flat and even catching her mistress’s boyfriend flirting beneath the dining table with Miss Faulkener’s foot as Dickens served dinner. These smaller spaces also had an impact on the dynamics between employer and employee. With servants no longer relegated to the basement or attic and with their presence far more tangible and visible in a small domestic space, mistresses and their servants began to redefine their relationship.61 In another household, Dickens remarks on this shift: It was a curious casual attitude [the Randalls] had towards me, and the world in general for that matter. They were perfectly friendly, so friendly in fact that they behaved with an almost detached lack of reticence, and certainly no feeling of self-consciousness. I suppose it’s a sign of these modern times, this breaking of every rule and pretence observed by our grandparents and their forbears in order to keep their servants ‘in their place’. (103) Mrs Randall was more likely to treat Dickens as a friend than as hired help and Dickens herself was quite apt to forget herself with Mrs Randall, comforting her after a quarrel with Mr Randall as if Dickens were an equal to her. Similarly, in E. H. Young’s Celia, the relationship between middle-aged Celia Marston and her char Miss Riggs is perfectly friendly. Living in a small flat with two almost-grown children, the Marston family treats Miss Riggs as one of their own, and, in

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fact, Miss Riggs cannot help viewing her employer, who is also her contemporary, rather like a child for her dreamy, non-practical ways. The class gap was closing with an increasing convergence between some middle-class and working-class domestic women. This could be seen not only in terms of domestic workloads as some middle-class wives had to shoulder more of the burdens of housework much like their working-class counterparts, but also in the ways those middleclass women who still had the good fortune to have servants or help of any kind began to see them as allies in a common domestic struggle.62 The middle-class home was visibly changing and, in many ways, closing ranks with its working-class counterpart. At the same time, domesticity was an identity that middle-class women were finding harder and harder to shrug off, even temporarily.

The holiday alone: narratives of separation and return It is in the context of these changes that the narrative of the middle-class woman taking a holiday alone needs to be placed. That middle-class domestic fiction began to produce middle-class married female characters desiring to go on holiday alone, and actually achieving this, speaks volumes of an awareness then of a need for leisure, escape and alternative identities in the life of the middle-class domestic woman. The fact that the desired form of leisure is a holiday away from husband and family is also significant. The holiday involving a physical removal from the domestic site is a particularly spatial form of leisure-taking and is another example of the spatial turn in the female pursuit of privacy. One had to leave home and family and enter a different space to truly be at leisure and to fully enjoy privacy. Such a need within the middle-class domestic woman to be solitary, private and at leisure was no longer surprising considering the new domestic burdens placed upon her. Besides, in a period when middle-class women’s domestic roles and identities were open to question with the reality of alternative identities apart from domesticity, taking advantage of new perceptions of the importance of leisure to snatch some time and space alone for oneself was a means of reformulating middleclass domestic identity. Going on holiday alone without husband and family signified a preservation of autonomy and the promotion of individuality. It was an opportunity to facilitate a separation from a domestic identity and recover another self and, in doing so, shift the middle-class domestic role in new directions.

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However, this attempt to alter middle-class domesticity through the inclusion of female personal space and privacy proved ultimately unsustainable. The range of texts I examine in the rest of this chapter reveal an increasing conservatism as the grasping of leisure is first imagined as a physical and spatial removal from the domestic space via a holiday alone; then transformed into a stolen moment from domestic work; and, eventually, a mere mental interlude, an interiority located within middle-class domesticity; and, ultimately, affirming a domestic identity. The potential of a space for privacy outside of domesticity momentarily tantalizes with its prospects of autonomy and emancipation before domestic reality intrudes and privacy as situated within everyday interiority is returned to. This conservative drift is revealed even in texts that allow their middle-class domestic-women characters a radical holiday alone without their husbands or families. Leisure in these texts is conceived of as a physical removal from home that emphasizes female agency, independence and a desire to be alone and private. Yet, the time and space away from domestic responsibilities in both Elizabeth von Arnim’s The Enchanted April and Rosamond Lehmann’s A Note in Music end up reinforcing a middle-class woman’s domestic ties. It is tempting to call Elizabeth von Arnim the novelist of middleclass women’s leisure for her novels constantly depict the flight of women from the home into adjunct spaces and beyond. Her first book, Elizabeth and Her German Garden, begins the exodus with an escape into the garden, and, in her later novels, her heroines go further afield: Ingeborg Bullivant of The Pastor’s Wife takes an unlicensed holiday to Switzerland and a potentially adulterous trip to Italy, while Lotty and Rose from The Enchanted April (1922) optimistically journey to Italy for a month-long holiday without their husbands. Von Arnim’s consistent portrayal of women on holiday alone, without family attachments, is unusual. The middle-classes were familiar with annual paid holidays – abroad if one could afford it or to the longtime British holiday institution, the seaside, during summer for the less well-off. Holidays as a norm, however, were taken as a family, and, though it could sometimes be liberating for women ‘to escape temporarily from the tyranny of domestic chores’, being on holiday with family was still restrictive as they remained fixed to their traditional gender roles within the family set-up (Hill, 91). Married middle-class women had little say as to where the family holiday was to be spent and, without an income of their own, could hardly go on holiday

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alone without support from their partners. The holiday alone was a rare thing for a middle-class married woman and when we understand, as von Arnim does, that home is often a man’s private space and not a woman’s, the privacy that a holiday alone affords a middleclass wife becomes a radical gesture of independence.63 So, if home is no longer a woman’s space, nurturing and safe, von Arnim imagines a holiday space that her married middle-class women can escape to alone and which allows them to explore and restore their sense of selves and, in the process, renegotiate the gendered power and spatial dynamics of the home. Home is first depicted in The Enchanted April as a place that distorts and negates women. Lotty Wilkins is trapped in a marriage where she is an unfortunate adjunct to her respectable and reliable solicitor husband, an insignificant figure who ensures his home life is smooth and his dinners excellent. Shy, with her clothes ‘infested by thrift’, she is considered to be a nobody, best left at home and not seen in company (5). Even her husband has doubts as to whether he has married the right wife and, on contemplating a holiday in Italy, feels compelled to take her for not to do so would otherwise raise eyebrows. In his mind, she would only come in useful when travelling ‘for holding things, for waiting with the luggage’ (The Enchanted April, 56). Lotty’s misery and unhappiness with her life erupts on reading an advertisement for an Italian medieval castle, San Salvatore, for rent in April. When the opportunity to rent it together with another unhappy Hampstead housewife, Rose Arbuthnot, arises, Lotty implores Rose to agree with ‘the eyes of an imprisoned dog’ (9) and breaks down: And I – I’ve done nothing but duties, things for other people, ever since I was a girl, and I don’t believe anybody loves me a bit – a bit – the b-better – and I long – oh, I long – for something else – something else – . (22) Having lived for others all her life, Lotty Wilkins is in the throes of a minor rebellion and becoming more and more acute in her critique of her home life. After experiencing a traumatic time telling her husband that she was going on holiday without him, she grouses: We’ve been too good – much too good . . . and that’s why we feel as though we’re doing wrong. We’re brow-beaten – we’re not any

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longer real human beings. Real human beings aren’t ever as good as we’ve been. (58) Lotty is aware of her negation as a person at home and within her marriage and going away on holiday on her own is her first step towards regaining herself. Though Rose Arbuthnot and the other two tenants of the castle, Lady Caroline Dester (also known as Scrap) and Mrs Fisher, are less browbeaten than Lotty, they all nonetheless experience their identities at home as rigid and inflexible. Rose’s marriage has stalemated and she herself is frozen into a routine of good works at church, Scrap has been typecast as the beautiful young woman in need of a husband and longs to escape from such assumptions and other amorous attentions, while Mrs Fisher has become fossilized, a living walking mausoleum of reminiscences of the ‘illustrious Victorian dead’ (45). Like the Green World of a Shakespearean comedy, San Salvatore becomes a restorative and transformative space for all four tenants. Entering the holiday space with a desire for solitude, each one experiences a process of reflection, re-examination and redefinition. Having come to San Salvatore as individuals locked into particular ways of being, all four begin to re-forge and re-form relational identities once more. Lotty is the first to react to the new atmosphere and in an act of good will, invites Mellersh, the husband she had been escaping from, to join her in Italy. His entry on to the scene allows for the Wilkins to renegotiate their marriage dynamics. Impressed by his wife’s help in introducing him to potential clients such as Lady Caroline Dester and Mrs Fisher, as well as her ease and friendliness with the former, Mellersh reassesses his once-dull wife and deems her charming, attractive, and ‘most valuable’ (268). With his estimation of Lotty rising and his treatment of her matching accordingly, the Wilkins’ marriage is transformed into a more equitable one, with Lotty no longer a mere drudge but a respected partner in Mellersh’s career aspirations. Rose, inspired by the success of Lotty inviting Mellersh, writes to her husband as well and is rewarded with his arrival and the rekindling of their romance and marriage, halted in the past by her religiosity and unspoken condemnation of his work. Scrap, who had been running away from the attentions of her numerous admirers and her family and finding herself turning into a ‘selfish spinster’, begins to accept the love of the owner of San Salvatore, Mr Briggs, who is deeply smitten

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with her (348). Mrs Fisher, feeling the effects of the beauty of her new environment, experiences a second spring as she feels as if she were going to ‘come out all over [in] buds’ (294), and begins to recognize her home in London as a ‘sarcophagus’ (295). The presence of the youthful Mr Briggs makes her maternal, gay and benevolent and as she grows increasingly responsive to the blossoming life about her, Mrs Fisher sheds her forbidding demeanour and opens herself to Lotty’s warmth and friendship. As Lotty, Rose and Scrap are paired up with their respective lovers, Mrs Fisher finds her partner in Lotty who, in a flash of insight, sees the two of them as becoming ‘fast friends’ (358). The novel closes with a group exit. Where before each had entered San Salvatore separately and disgruntled, they leave happily as a group, with newly-formed relational identities. The holiday taken alone by women as a radical assertion of self-autonomy in The Enchanted April becomes a means of reinserting the women back into no longer repressive but transformed relational identities. Von Arnim is critical of patriarchal relations in the home but, in this novel, optimistically sees the holiday space as an opportunity for renegotiating and transforming those very same relations for the benefit of browbeaten women such as Lotty. The destination is always a conservative return to marriage, home and family, but not without improvements for the woman involved, and leisure, in the form of the holiday, is where von Arnim envisions these adjustments are to be made. Leisure, with the privacy it brings, mediates and allows for a more benevolent patriarchal domestic set-up; it does not supplant it. The conservatism implicit in the otherwise celebratory The Enchanted April is more evident in Rosamond Lehmann’s oftenforgotten second novel, A Note in Music (1930). The times when the novel’s heroines Grace Fairfax and Norah Seddon experience leisure alone are used as moments when they recover a past self while also reconciling themselves to their present selves. If, as Ralph Glasser suggests, leisure is ‘a therapeutic process of repairing the wear and tear resulting from work and its stresses . . . to return to an original or ideal state’, the novel explores this notion of leisure to imply that a ‘return to an original or ideal state’ is unattainable (64). Instead both Grace and Norah use their leisure time alone to negotiate the past in an attempt to face their present domestic selves.64 A Note in Music begins much as The Enchanted April does with a critique of domesticity. Grace Fairfax’s domestic landscape is leisurely

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but barren. The opening pages, when Grace is first introduced to the reader, echo with the repetition of the word ‘nothing’. There is nothing in her past to look back to, nothing to look forward to, ‘[n]othing mattered, nothing would ever happen for her again’ (7). Grace even imagines a fortune-teller reading her palm and saying: ‘There is nothing here: nothing in your past, nothing in your future’ (2, italics original). Grace’s sense of barrenness is reinforced by her inability to sustain life: a puppy she had loved had soon died under her care and her baby eight years ago had been stillborn: She had taken his death for a sign that nothing would ever come right for her now; that whatever she touched would wither without blossoming. (8) Married to a dull but respectable man in a northern town that she dislikes, Grace’s life is dull and unfulfilling except for the comforts of reading before the fire and occasional drives in the country with her friend Norah Seddon. In contrast, Norah’s domestic life is too full and too demanding. Norah, married to a difficult war-traumatized professor and with two young sons, returns home after a long and happy afternoon spent with Grace and Hugh Miller to be confronted with guilt and silent accusations: Why should this vampire family so prey on her and pin her down that even one afternoon’s freedom became a matter of importance, to be regretted afterwards? Why should she let him for ever drain her to sustain himself? (52) Normally content with her ability to soothe her irritable husband Gerald, Norah nonetheless acknowledges the cost of her family to herself. She is a victim of their vampire-like need for her; she is constantly emptied out of herself for their sakes: she . . . wanted to have rest from this perpetual crumbling of the edges, this shredding out of one’s personality upon minute obligations and responsibilities. She wanted, even for a few moments, to

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feel her identity peacefully floating apart from them all, confined and dissolved within a shell upon which other people’s sensibilities made no impression. But this was not possible, never for a second, in one’s own home. (52–3) Solitude, peace, and a sense of impermeable self are only achieved outside of the house, away from the demands of domesticity, something that she achieves touring with Grace in her second-hand car and again, but only momentarily, at the Seddon estate later in the novel. The arrival of young aristocratic Hugh Miller and his glamorous sister Clare show up in strong relief the inadequacies of domestic life. The balance of their lives upset by the newcomers, Grace and Norah find the need to escape to re-evaluate their lives and, in doing so, come to terms with the past and who they have become. For Norah, escape comes from unexpectedly being left out as her husband, Clare, Hugh and Grace play tennis on the Seddon estate: For one afternoon, no ties, no dependants. She was free as a ghost. She turned her back on the four, and escaped to find an old self among remembered haunts. (141) Removed from domestic responsibilities, Norah sees herself as a ghost, free and cut off from ties. This ambiguous freedom allows her to reconnect with her pre-war self – her teenage talent and enjoyment of dancing, past flirtations with cousin George and friendships with cousins Mary and Christopher with whom she had lost touch after her marriage to Gerald. Reclaiming an old self, however, proves problematic, for the unspoken past, in the form of Norah’s unexpressed grief for her dead war-time lover Jimmy, is the ‘poison’ feeding upon the ‘healthy body’ of Norah’s marriage with Gerald (289). The shadow of the Great War hangs over their marriage and Norah’s momentary freedom from Gerald allows her to begin the process of integrating her past self with her present self as wife and mother.65 Likewise, the summer holiday that Grace takes on her own becomes a means for her to reconcile past and present. She escapes to the countryside somewhere in her native south where she enters a ‘summer trance’, ecstatic to be idling in a rural landscape reminiscent of her

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old home and buoyed by the thought of Hugh and the new life he represents and promises (190). The holiday begins with the gladdening prospect of a return to her childhood past and the possibilities of a new future but ends with the realization of the futility of such imaginings: Let her remember why she had come here. She had come here, not to prepare for change, for further flight, for life and love, but for the resumption, after a little rest and change of air, of her duties as a housewife. Let her remember there was no escape. (226) Her holiday alone, initially taken in a rebellious and selfish spirit inspired by Hugh’s dynamism, is a gesture of Grace’s restlessness with her own life and her desire for independence and change, but the reality that she is a married woman with husband and domestic responsibilities impinges on her happiness. Tom’s presence is never far off with his dutiful weekly letter and his proposal to join her at the end of her holiday. The injured swallow she had thought she had nursed to health is found dead beneath her window sill, a reminder of her inability to sustain life. Her holiday alone is no longer a reckless gesture meant to usher in further recklessness but a farewell to a past landscape, a past self that Hugh had inadvertently stirred up, and an acceptance of her present situation and her future with Tom. As Grace admits to Tom, her summer was a ‘wild-goose chase’ after an illusion (297). If ‘nothing’ had been the watchword in Grace’s life in the early part of the novel, ‘reconciling’ is now the key word in the closing pages as it is repeated twice within five pages. The holiday space is a temporary escape from the tensions and frustrations of domestic life, a chance to reclaim a past identity and assert independence, but, unlike The Enchanted April, where it is at least allowed to be transformative of patriarchal relations, in A Note in Music, it is nothing more than an illusion whose end reveals the immutable reality of the present. In the case of Norah, it is a reminder to let go of the past, particularly her grief for Jimmy, and to build on her present with Gerald. For Grace, her reconciliation is with her lot as a domestic married woman. Any attempt at autonomy for the middleclass domestic woman is ultimately futile for her status as a domestic woman already compromises her.

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Stolen moments and mental interludes: domestic interiority as leisure In the face of a growing realization that the bonds of domesticity hold a woman tightly within her own home and that her identification as a married woman is difficult to shrug off, the representation of domestic women’s leisure and access to privacy shifts from a cutting off of domestic ties through a physical removal to more home-based representations of stolen moments of leisure and privacy and ultimately to privacy as mental space. Hostages to Fortune (1933), a novel by Elizabeth Cambridge, in its detailed depiction of a middle-class domestic woman’s everyday life in the countryside, reveals this gradual shift.66 The title of the text is drawn from Francis Bacon’s essay ‘Of Marriage and Single Life’ where he writes: ‘He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune; for they are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief’ (Cambridge, n.p.). Writing from a woman’s perspective, Cambridge’s appropriation of Bacon’s line speaks of thwarted female ambition, especially that of a married woman with children. Her protagonist Catherine, newly married and with a young baby, has literary aspirations: And Catherine went on writing a long novel in the Wessex manner; full of strong-minded dark women and farms in lonely places and Nature and Destiny . . . For more than anything else, more than William [her husband] or Audrey [her baby daughter], Catherine loved ink. (18) But struggling to raise a family in straitened post-war circumstances, Catherine’s life is soon engulfed with the day-to-day battles of housekeeping and childcare with limited servant help and money. When her novel manuscript is rejected and returned, she takes off to a nearby field to deal with her disappointment, utilizing a spare moment alone that should have been used for picking strawberries for the household. This is the closest that Catherine ever comes in the whole novel to experiencing leisure alone and away from home and it is a regenerative experience: She felt rested all over, clean and new. She felt as if she had been a very long way away . . . not in space or in time but into some unknown dimension of the spirit. (118)

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It is also a moment when she realizes that given her domestic circumstances, she will have to give up her literary ambitions, that her children will ultimately be her only worthwhile creation. Experiencing momentarily a sense of privacy and autonomy, Catherine, like Grace Fairfax from A Note in Music, comes to the conclusion that her life is too bound up with others, namely her family, for the solitary act of writing and literary achievement. As a consolation, the novel offers the redeeming feature of Catherine’s rich family life. As she herself admits in the closing pages of the novel: We’ve had hard times, we’ve been hungry, we’ve been starved for amusement, interest and friends. We’ve been desperately tired. I’ve sat down again and again and howled with disappointment. I’ve made mistakes. I’ve been angry. I haven’t often understood what I was doing for the children. But I’ve loved them. I’ve had a wonderful time. (334–5) Focalized largely though not exclusively through Catherine, the novel consistently uses free indirect speech to slip into the minds of its characters. The quotation above is exceptional in its use of the first person. Voiced at the end of the novel as Catherine reflects over her children almost grown and what her life has had to show for all her domestic work, the switch from third person to first person underlines the one thing she has left – herself: ‘Of all the things I once thought I had, I have only my own thoughts left’ (335). In addition to the wealth of domestic experience that makes Catherine’s sacrifices worthwhile, the text also offers as a reward the careful literary representation of Catherine’s interiority captured in the gaps of her domestic routine, preserving in readers’ minds her sense of self, ever present though battered by domestic demands. This suggests that Catherine may have given up her writing, autonomy and leisure but she has retained an interiority, a private mental space that guarantees her middleclass subjectivity. This subjectivity, though, is a domestic subjectivity. Much like the experience of the protagonist of ‘Tryst’ with which I began this chapter, domestic identity is so all-encompassing that it allows no room for Catherine to have any other identity apart from that of wife and mother. While for the protagonist of ‘Tryst’, escape and recourse to a different inner life are needed, for Catherine, the implication is that domesticity is enough.

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The satisfaction of this solely domestic subjectivity is epitomized by Jan Struther’s creation, Mrs. Miniver (1939), where a middle-class domestic woman’s experience of leisure, privacy and identity is firmly and pleasingly located in the domestic world. In ‘Mrs. Miniver Comes Home’, the opening piece of the text, Mrs Miniver disdains the summer holiday abroad her family has just taken in favour of the pleasures of home where everything is knowable: Tea was already laid: there were honey sandwiches, brandy-snaps, and small ratafia biscuits; and there would, she knew, be crumpets. Three new library books lay virginally on the fender-stool, their bright paper wrappers unsullied by subscriber’s hand. The clock on the mantelpiece chimed, very softly and precisely, five times. A tug hooted from the river. A sudden breeze brought the sharp tang of a bonfire in at the window. The jig-saw was almost complete, but there was still one piece missing. And then, from the other end of the square, came the familiar sound of the Wednesday barrelorgan, playing, with a hundred apocryphal trills and arpeggios, the ‘Blue Danube’ waltz. And Mrs. Miniver, with a little sigh of contentment, rang for tea. (2–3) Home becomes paradoxically the room of her own that Virginia Woolf insisted on as one of the conditions for producing women writers. Struther does not hide the struggles of domestic life, allowing Mrs Miniver to recognize the ‘debit side of parenthood’ (19) and to redeem domesticity with humour and homely observations about life. We find her in ‘The Khelim Rug’ bowed under with domestic duties and disasters but taking the few moments she is kept waiting for a friend to reflect and recover a sense of self less bound to the duties of domesticity: ‘She leant back in Badger’s armchair and prepared to let her mind stray wherever it liked’ (93). At first, her mind is unable to move beyond the domestic details that plague her but soon she is able to pass from the ‘mechanics of life’ to the art of living as her scrutiny of the colours of the Khelim hearth rug before her leads her to a meditation on the relativity of experience and memories. Mundane banal episodes of domestic life are continually transformed into minor epiphanies, whether she is at the dentist’s, in her car, or watching her children open their Christmas presents. Constrained though domestic life may be, for Mrs Miniver it still contains a wealth of insights

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that these snatched moments of leisure and privacy allow her to discover and, ultimately, it is the well-spring of her identity. Though her first name, Caroline, is revealed late in the text, it is as Mrs Miniver and not Caroline that the reader remembers her. Her unique personality and personal insights are made known to the reader through her iconic married name, a key reminder of her domestic identity. In her chapter on the representations of the middle-class home in the feminine middlebrow novel, Nicola Humble argues that a middleclass life of inevitable domesticity in the face of diminishing servants was made more palatable by a ‘shared cultural fantasy of a middle class freed to a degree from the restraints it had traditionally imposed upon itself’ (148). Humble discusses this freedom from restraints in terms of a bohemianism and new casualness in interior decoration and entertaining. This chimerical freedom was also peddled in the form of the increased leisure a middle-class housewife was supposed to have at her disposal. While women writers in the twenties such as von Arnim embraced and endorsed leisure and hence privacy as the domestic woman’s prerogative, the difficulty of actually achieving personal time off for the middle-class housewife resulted in the creation of another palliative: the exchange of leisure and autonomy for the satisfactions of a sensitively articulated domestic interiority and identity. The delicate ruminations of a Mrs Miniver were another consolation for the increasingly hedged-in middle-class domestic woman, faced with little else in life beyond domesticity. Thus though leisure and privacy were recommended for both working-class and middle-class women, the constraints of domesticity often failed to deliver these to housewives. For working-class domestic women, the interwar period saw an increased awareness of the importance of leisure and privacy to women, but, for many, these were qualities only to aspire to and dream of. On the ground the reality was quite different. For middle-class women a similar situation prevailed, though the illusion of privacy and leisure could still be conjured up through the representation of interiority in a middle-class domestic woman’s life. Despite the call to be modern by adopting leisure and privacy, the space for women to be private, instead of expanding, was receding.

5 The Loss of a Private World: Women, Privacy and Novels of Adultery

For a brief moment in Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, being alone is a welcome relief. With her husband Maxim away in London for business, the young and diffident nameless heroine of the novel is aware of ‘a sense of freedom’ that surprises her for she is normally devoted to Maxim (150). It is a sign of the hidden tensions of their relationship that it is only in his absence that she is able to relax and enjoy the beautiful grounds of their home Manderley. For the most part, however, being alone is a burden. Though in love and married to the man of her dreams, the nameless heroine of Rebecca is nevertheless isolated and left with too much time on her hands. Lacking confidence in herself and in Maxim’s love for her, she drifts through Manderley in a lonely bubble of doubt and fear, curious about her deceased predecessor, the beautiful and vibrant Rebecca, but also threatened by her. In a strained atmosphere where no one apart from Rebecca’s devoted housekeeper Mrs Danvers is willing to speak openly of Rebecca, the heroine escapes from her unhappiness into a world of private fantasy creating a version of Rebecca that consistently leaves her in Rebecca’s shadow. Left too much to her own devices and too reserved to speak her mind, she has no one to disabuse her of her views of Rebecca and the heroine unwittingly finds herself over-identifying with Rebecca at the expense of her sense of self and to the detriment of her marriage. Being too private in Rebecca is thus largely perceived as destructive, resulting in a distortion or even negation of identity, and, in this case, the identity in question is defined by the heroine’s relation to her husband. Though happy to be alone while Maxim is away, the heroine 130

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nevertheless feels a pang of guilt at her delight and recalls herself to her new identity as Mrs de Winter: ‘Maxim was my life and my world’ (151). This is who she truly feels she should be and in being alone and happy or too privately obsessed with Rebecca, she undermines her new identity as Maxim’s lover and wife. The nameless heroine, however, stands little chance of holding firm to her position as Mrs de Winter until the practices of privacy and reserve endemic in the novel come to a close. The characters in Rebecca tend to be too private, to the point of secrecy, and it is not until everyone’s secrets and private thoughts are revealed that things improve. Rebecca is exposed as a monster, Maxim reveals his true feelings regarding Rebecca and for the heroine, and, as a result, the heroine’s private fantasy world built around Rebecca is broken down and she is finally able to assume her place in the novel as the real Mrs de Winter. Transparency and the unity of husband and wife triumph. Sure of Maxim’s love for her, she now has no need to retreat to her own private world separate from Maxim. This is in marked contrast to the first Mrs de Winter. Running in parallel to the heroine’s story is that of Rebecca. Beautiful, intelligent, and with a mind of her own, she makes a bargain with Maxim to run the family mansion and make it famous in exchange for her sexual freedom. Unlike the nameless heroine who only wishes to subsume herself with Maxim, Rebecca desires to preserve her autonomy, and she does so by maintaining a fluid sense of self and spaces to be private in. Rebecca has her own boathouse at the edge of the estate and her flat in London to conduct her affairs and is at ease with being more than Mrs de Winter, mistress of Manderley; she is in fact her own woman, not fully defined by her married identity. Thus if the breaking of the nameless heroine’s private world is a boon fulfilling her desire to connect more closely with Maxim, the revelations about Rebecca from her vileness to the very personal information of her cancer and malformed uterus are a means to cut Rebecca down to size and to fix her in place as the fallen and thoroughly bad woman. For Rebecca the adulteress the collapse of her private world and indeed invasion of her privacy – after all her medical records are meant to be confidential – is a form of punishment. If we then read Rebecca as a novel of contesting femininities, the effect is sobering. The good and nameless wife does not desire a private world of her own; she is joined to her husband. The bad adulterous

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wife insists on her privacy and identity – Rebecca, not Mrs de Winter – only to be stripped of the former, if not also the latter as the idealized and idolized first Mrs de Winter who could do no wrong is revealed as a mere front.67 At the heart of this tussle is a woman’s access to and attitude towards being private. This was a familiar concern in interwar novels of adultery. A pattern was forming: in reaction to the inadequacies of her daily life, a woman would escape into a private world beyond the supervision of men, whether in thought or physically. While in that private space, alternative identities and relationships could be explored, particularly adulterous ones. The price paid for such autonomy was often the loss of a private world and the return to the fixity of identity. The novels I examine in this chapter lament this movement for just as modernity was opening the space for women to be private and to escape, any infraction of social codes could also result in the withdrawal of such privileges.

The interwar novel of adultery Adultery, especially wifely adultery, has always been seen as threatening and on numerous fronts. An unfaithful wife poses a danger to dynasty and legitimacy, making a family vulnerable to interlopers in the form of illegitimate children passed off as legitimate. An adulteress also makes a mockery of her husband’s rights over her and, in doing so, subverts the patriarchal order of marriage and society. Unleashing her untrammelled sexuality, the adulteress is a sign of disorder, even, as Judith Armstrong suggests, a sign of death and destruction: From having been first the traitor who betrayed the family religion, then the cuckoo threatening to deprive the true offspring of their rightful inheritance, she is now seen to be the invitation to passion, death, and the destruction of society. (12) The disorder represented by the adulteress is interpreted as having radical potential by Tony Tanner, as a way to draw attention to the failings within society, marriage and family: Both society and the novel, in their different ways, center on the family, and yet that binding, stabilizing unit turns out to contain potentially antagonistic and disruptive elements that make

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it a center that cannot hold, an illusory center, or perhaps not a center at all. And this, I think, the novel sensed and discovered at an early stage in its development, no matter how committed it seemed to the contemporary middle-class orthodoxies. (373) In his seminal book on the novel of adultery, Tanner notes that the nineteenth-century European novel, for all its bourgeois concentration on marriage and family, was consistently and irresistibly drawn to the topic of adultery. Adultery in the novel was thus a means to express anxieties about society and the family unit that made up society, a form of critique of bourgeois marriage and life. Tanner identifies adultery in the novel as the ‘gap, or silence’ that in the end leads to the nineteenth-century European novel’s ‘dissolution and displacement’ by more modernist novelistic forms (14). For Tanner, adultery in the novel functions as the nineteenthcentury European bourgeois novel’s unconscious, disturbing the façade of normality until it succeeds in subverting it. For other literary critics, adultery in the European novel conveys a more conservative impetus, particularly for women. At the heart of adultery in the novel is the question of unruly female sexuality – what is its impact on society, how is it best contained, and how should transgression be dealt with? Felicia Gordon identifies the misogynistic impulse that lies behind many a European novel of adultery: One function of novels of adultery, it will be argued, was to legitimise women’s exclusion from the public sphere by demonstrating that marriage was their only safe haven and that outside marriage they were doomed. Novelists as disparate as Flaubert and Tolstoy represent women’s lapse from marital fidelity as deserving the most severe form of punishment. (85) Often such novels are about the containment of disorderly female sexuality as represented by the adulteress even as they disrupt the strictures and structures of bourgeois marriage and family life.68 The novel of adultery read from a female perspective simply reinforces marriage as the only safe repository for female sexuality. To stray from marriage is thus to invite a series of punishments on oneself – ejection from the domestic home, the loss of one’s children either through the adulteress’s removal or through a child’s death, and even death for the adulteress herself.

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In the English context, adultery in the nineteenth century echoes with Gordon’s conclusions. Portrayed as a source of anxiety, requiring, as Barbara Leckie in Culture and Adultery: the Novel, the Newspaper, and the Law, 1857–1914 has argued, detection and vigilance, adultery in English discourses was less about subversion than a force of domestic destruction to be preached against. For the English adulteress (and it was often the woman who was unfaithful in Victorian narratives), the story was one of the dissolution of domestic harmony and ultimate degradation. Painter Augustus Egg’s adultery triptych Past and Present relates the fall of one such adulteress, and the text accompanying the paintings stresses the severe consequences for the entire family: ‘August the 4th. Have just heard that B— has been dead more than a fortnight, so his poor children have now lost both parents. I hear She was seen on Friday last near the Strand, evidently without a place to lay her head. What a fall hers has been!’ (quoted in Leckie, 73, italics original). The family is thus destroyed and the adulteress abandoned and alone. Reflecting the double-edged nature of the novel of adultery, however, in the hands of some female authors, its misogyny could be transformed into social criticism, revealing the ‘afflictions suffered by women in the home’ that compel them to stray (Overton, 64). It is this possibility of feminist critique that interwar novels of adultery by women were conscious of, especially since two high-profile court cases involving adultery and murder – the Thompson and Bywaters case in 1922 and the Rattenbury and Stoner case in 1935 – had heightened awareness of both the plight of unhappily married women in the suburbs and the importance of privacy to women and the dangers of this privacy to conventional society. The fallout from adultery that these novels explore is thus less to do with the destruction of the family and more concerned with the failings of society and marriage where women and their sexuality are concerned. Instead of functioning as a safe haven for female sexuality, marriage is now seen as inadequate for the self-expression of the wife, so that only in private and, allied to this, in adultery can a woman find the means to define and express herself in alternative and more fulfilling ways. The withdrawal of privacy and hence autonomy from the guilty wife in these novels are thus experienced as punitive measures, meant to return the woman to a fixed identity with no other options.

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That two court cases were central to the sensibilities of the interwar novel of adultery may seem surprising but there is a tradition of the legal courts affecting the structures of adulterous feeling. Barbara Leckie, for example, argues that nineteenth-century divorce courts influenced the English novel of adultery. In the courts’ emphasis on establishing the facts and requiring a jury to interpret them, the ‘English representation of adultery in the novel [tended to] take this inherent undecidability, which is an unavoidable function of the trial’s form, and make it self-consciously explicit’ (92). Leckie suggests that the novel of adultery becomes a ‘domestic detective story’ often written from the perspective of the betrayed party and, in its form – ‘the serial format, the multiple points of view, the non-linear narration, the equivocal closure’ – would anticipate modernism (91–2). If in the nineteenth century the divorce courts’ official probing into criminal conversation, the legal term for adultery then, provided the exposure and titillation a curious and gossipy readership demanded and influenced the form of the English novel of adultery, in the early twentieth century, particularly between the wars, it was the criminal courts with the high-profile event that now satisfied the public’s prurient interests and would shape adultery narratives to come. If, as Leckie argues, the nineteenth century and pre-war English novel of adultery was inspired by the need to know if adultery had indeed occurred and the accompanying uncertainties this search for knowledge entailed, post-First World War, in an environment where divorce was becoming less difficult to obtain, the focus was more on the reasons behind and circumstances that facilitated female adultery. The attention was on the psychology and sexuality of the woman and in these novels of adultery by women the female point of view is thoroughly explored, encompassing the female take on marriage as well as the desire for a romanticism that transcends marriage. Often central to these narratives is the importance of access to privacy in female sexual transgression but also the punishing loss of privacy for women. The privileging of privacy in adultery narratives is unusual and represents a shift in thinking about adultery and its consequences. Where, before, punishment for the adulteress would have taken the form of a death of a beloved child, disfigurement, or her own death, these interwar novels of adultery by women add the loss of privacy and thus a means of defining selfhood as one of the potential costs of adultery.69

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In the section to follow, I will examine the two books that were directly inspired by the Thompson and Bywaters trial, E. M. Delafield’s Messalina of the Suburbs and F. Tennyson Jesse’s A Pin to See the Peepshow as well as Delafield’s consideration of adultery in an upper-middleclass milieu more familiar to her in The Way Things Are.70 I will also look at Rosamond Lehman’s The Weather in the Streets. First, however, I would like to cover the Thompson and Bywaters and the Rattenbury and Stoner cases and examine the place of the suburbs and suburban marriage in women’s lives.

Adultery, the criminal courts and the suburbs On 9 January 1923, Edith Thompson and Frederick Bywaters were hanged for the murder of Edith’s husband, Percy Thompson. Her role was supposedly that of instigator and planner; his was to execute the deed. They had first met, most likely, in early 1920 at Edith Thompson’s family home in Manor Park where Bywaters was a former schoolmate of one of Edith’s brothers and seemingly paying court to Avis Graydon, Edith’s younger sister. Though Edith Thompson was already married and eight years his senior, Bywaters was nonetheless attracted to the handsome and glamorously modern Mrs Thompson of Ilford, who was still very profitably employed as a fashion buyer for the London milliners Carlton & Prior. Not entirely satisfied with her marriage to Percy Thompson, she was similarly drawn to the confident, good-looking young man. A family holiday to the Isle of Wight where Bywaters had been invited as companion to Avis Graydon in June 1921 cemented their mutual attraction and shortly thereafter the two became lovers. With Bywaters lodging with them in their house in Ilford, it was not long before Percy Thompson grew suspicious and tensions ran high. Though Bywaters eventually moved out and, as a seaman, was often away, the affair lived on through an exchange of highly charged love letters, which were to prove extremely damaging to Edith Thompson during the trial, and clandestine meetings near her workplace whenever Bywaters was back in port. On the night of 3 October 1922, just before he was to go back to his ship, he ambushed the Thompsons on their way home from the theatre and stabbed Percy Thompson fatally. Edith Thompson, though she had no inkling of this attack, was indicted together with Bywaters on account of her love letters which mentioned attempts at harming her husband.

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Twelve years after Edith Thompson and Freddy Bywaters met their deaths, a similar case of adultery and murder in the Bournemouth suburbs would capture the nation’s attention. The broad strokes of this case were reminiscent of the earlier case. Thirty-eight-year-old Alma Rattenbury, much like Edith Thompson, was beautiful, glamorous and talented, still earning an occasional living as a popular song-writer even after her marriage. Her husband, Francis Rattenbury, was considerably older, less gregarious than she, and inclined to grow depressed and anxious over his financial dealings and failures. Though on the surface they managed to get along, the marriage had in fact broken down and Alma Rattenbury was, in her own words, ‘living her own life’ while Francis Rattenbury had his own separate bedroom on the ground floor ( Jesse, Trial, 11). Part of ‘living her own life’ meant having a lover and here it was, as in the Thompson and Bywaters case, a younger man. George Percy Stoner, who had entered the Rattenbury household as a chauffeur-cum-handyman in September 1934, was eighteen. When on 24 March 1935, Stoner, in a likely fit of jealousy, bludgeoned Francis Rattenbury to death with a mallet in his own home and Alma Rattenbury on discovering this, half hysterical, half drunk, admitted to the murder to cover for her lover, history looked poised to repeat itself. Yet, legally, the lessons of the Thompson and Bywaters case had been learned. In the years after the conclusion of Thompson and Bywaters, there had been a growing public consensus that Thompson had been wrongly convicted, judged more for her morals than her culpability in her husband’s murder. The memory of Edith Thompson helped ensure that Alma Rattenbury was fairly tried and she was. With a judge ‘who knew how to point out firmly and clearly to the jury that a woman must not, because of her moral character, be convicted of murder’ and a jury ‘who were determined that no confusion of thought or prejudice should lead them into giving a wrong verdict’, Alma Rattenbury was acquitted ( Jesse, Trial, 12). But with her reputation in shreds and her sorrow and fear for Stoner’s life, she committed suicide. George Percy Stoner was found guilty but his death sentence was eventually commuted to penal servitude. If the circumstances of sensual suburban wives committing adultery with men considerably younger than themselves and even possibly committing murder were not lurid enough, there was the sensationalist, at times titillating, evidence that ensured the prurient attention of the nation. The Thompson and Bywaters case had Edith

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Thompson’s love letters to Bywaters and the Rattenbury and Stoner case had what the judge had labelled the ‘orgy in London’, an outing that Alma Rattenbury undertook with Stoner where they stayed at the Royal Palace Hotel, Kensington and where she lavished him with gifts of crêpe-de-chine pyjamas and a made-to-measure suit ( Jesse, Trial, 18). The combination of sex, beautiful women, younger male lovers, and murder was a winning one but I would like to suggest that the suburban origins of these cases held a certain fascination too. That Edith Thompson was christened by the press ‘Messalina of Ilford’, a pithy label that succeeds by bringing together promiscuous and murderous female sexuality and mundane suburbia, hints that there was a recognition that all was not as it seemed in the suburban home.71 From the pleasant banality of suburbia could emerge the sexually excessive and monstrous feminine. The criminal cases were thus a reminder of the contradictions of suburbia. The suburbs had the makings of a pastoral idyll and yet they were also commonly perceived as emasculating and dystopic. Motivated by the push factor of cramped urban conditions and the pull factors of privacy in single family dwellings and closeness to nature via the possession of a garden, the middle classes and increasingly the lower-middle classes in the interwar period were escaping to the fringes of the city in droves. The growth of the suburbs particularly in London from the mid-nineteenth century on was rapid and startling. Between 1901 and 1911, the London suburbs of Woodford grew by a steady 34 per cent, Wanstead by 51 per cent, Chingford by 86 per cent, and Ilford spectacularly by almost 90 per cent (Jackson, 36). For many who had the opportunity to move to the suburbs, suburbia could be a promising glimpse of better things. Indeed, recent work by social historians and literary scholars such as Gary Cross, Judy Giles, Gail Cunningham and Lynne Hapgood have underlined the positive aspects of suburban culture, suggesting that the suburbs may be seen as the location of modernity and the future. These narratives re-work the far more familiar negative complaints of suburban culture and help us see the potential in the suburban dream. Suburban masculinity, usually perceived as emasculated, is refigured as the development of an alternative masculinity of a gentler kind, keen to embrace the domestic idyll of the suburb in response to the harsh dehumanization of the work world. Lynne Hapgood,

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writing about Shan Bullock’s suburban novel Robert Thorne: the Story of a London Clerk, notes that for Robert: it is leaving the workplace that returns him to his manhood as ‘the self that at four o’clock flung off its office coat and strode manfully out’. Paradoxically, then, his manhood is rediscovered in the suburbs. (183) Historically, Gary Cross affirms a new ‘masculine domesticity’ as suburban lifestyles began to include male-orientated forms of leisure in the form of gardening, handicrafts and popular mechanics, integrating men into the domestic sphere while preserving their masculine ‘technological competency’ (116). Similarly, Judy Giles reinterprets the fetishization of the suburban home by women not as an act of vainglorious individualism or a flawed desire to acquire material goods but as a sign of modernity and progress. As Giles very rightly points out, having a home of one’s own was for many women a new experience and one that only the advances of modernity would have delivered. Writing of one of her oral history respondents, working-class Bristolian Joyce Storey, Giles says: ‘For Joyce, modernity means a bathroom, an indoor toilet and “up-to-date drawer space” ’ (49). The new suburban house with its bathroom, indoor toilet, and modern layout and amenities was for women such as Joyce tangible evidence of modern life. Giles is thus concerned with recovering the essential modernity of suburbia, particularly for women, though she is also quick to recognize that the modern suburban ideal of a better life came with its compromises. The desire for an improved standard of living usually meant for workingclass and lower-middle-class women a ‘prudential marriage’ to a man who could offer stability and companionship, but such a marriage might also entail sexual repression (60–1). This is the point where suburbia can tip into a dystopia of repression and emasculation, reaffirming the worst fears of the critics of suburbia. The more usual story of suburbia has been more negative than positive. From its beginnings, the rise of suburbia has drawn the ire of social critics and writers angry at the spread of villas and semi-detached houses at the expense of the rural landscape. As such, the suburbs have conventionally been burdened with negativity, its

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derivatives – ‘suburban’, ‘suburbia’ – used as pejoratives to indicate monotony, respectable conformity, domestic pettiness, and pretentious gentility. In this dystopic line of thinking, the ruler of this suburban world was undoubtedly woman: Working patterns, which took the male breadwinner on a daily journey into the city, created a suburban space which for six days a week was predominantly female-orientated. (Cunningham, 54) Not only were women physically more present in suburbia but, according to Thomas Sharp, their innate individualism also made them the perfect arbiter of bad taste in a suburban world dedicated to a display of sham decorativeness and the accumulation of trivial novelties (91–2). Suburban women, materialistic and limited, were thus imagined as ‘perpetrators of all [suburbia’s] worst features’ (Cunningham, 59). Indeed so identified was suburbia with femininity that Gail Cunningham notes that many a fin-de-siècle suburban novel stages a scene where the hapless man lured by love crosses the suburban threshold and is eventually entrapped in the dark, slightly sinister suburban interior ruled by a female figure (60–1). In this construction, the suburban home thus becomes the lair of women, where their sexuality entices men into marriage and where trapped men are forced to service the material acquisitiveness of their suburban womenfolk. The image of the dominant, almost vampire-like suburban woman draining her victim-husband of energy and wealth to sustain her version of the suburban ideal popular at the turn of the twentieth century shifted slightly in the interwar period.72 This did not mean, however, that suburbia was developing a better reputation nor was it losing its feminine associations. With the arrival of ‘suburban neurosis’, predominantly a female ailment, Dr Stephen Taylor continued to stress the identification of dreary suburbia with women though in this case they were now its victims, not champions: Mrs. Everyman is 28 or 30 years old. She and her dress are clean, but there is a slovenly look about her. She has given up the permanent wave she was so proud of when she was engaged. Her clothes, always respectable and never as smart as those young hussies who work in the biscuit factory, are, like her furniture, getting a little shabby. (759)

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Based on his observations while working at the outpatient department of the Royal Free Hospital in London, Taylor diagnosed Mrs Everyman as suffering from the failings of suburban life which, in his article in The Lancet, he breaks down as: boredom from a lack of friends, of things to do, or things to think about; anxiety over money and keeping the house as well as the fear of another baby; and belief in the false values of materialism that ultimately fail to satisfy (760). Taylor’s summary of the suburban woman’s predicament is demoralizing: ‘They have nothing to look forward to, nothing to look up to, and little to live for’ (761). The suburban house was no longer a woman’s lair, a nest to feather with pride, but a prison with no hope of escape. Suburbia thus becomes empty, a place of unremitting repression even for women. While some women may have sacrificed ‘their sexuality for economic safety in marriage’ resulting in suburbia’s ‘passionless environment’, the impact of this was not limited to men alone (Hapgood, 76). Suburbia’s insistence on the family, domesticated sexuality and respectability meant that women who did not conform to the suburban feminine mould suffered too in the suburbs. Even those who did conform struggled as Taylor’s patients demonstrate. The demands of the suburban ideal were exacting a price from its inhabitants, and yet, by the interwar period, the return of the suburban repressed was becoming a less remote possibility. The suburbs could become a place of possibility, of sexual potential. The Golders Green affair in 1927 was perhaps a sign of some of the changes rippling through suburbia. Following up on complaints by residents of excessive noise after dark, suspicious deliveries of wine and spirits several times a day, and the frequency of cars coming and going, private detectives hired by Hendon Council infiltrated a house in Golders Gardens and were treated to ‘performances of an indecent nature’ by six young ladies, one of whom even danced on top of a piano while scantily clad in only her silk stockings and garters ( Jackson, 185). The occupiers were eventually sentenced to six months’ imprisonment for running a house of ill-repute. That they were brought to justice was not surprising – the suburbs has its own means of surveillance; that this was taking place in the respectable suburbs in the first place was a little more so. And yet, where better to have a brothel than in the suburbs where everyone supposedly kept to themselves? The privacy of the suburbs had given rise to illicit sexuality.

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Privacy is one of the hallmarks of suburban life. The point of moving away from the city into the suburbs is to avoid the prying masses, especially at home, and to find within a single family dwelling, detached if one could afford it, otherwise semi-detached, peace and seclusion. The other much-vaunted aspect of suburbia, the garden (and primarily the back garden), is not only an expression of a longing for country living but also another spatial feature of the suburban home that ensured separation and privacy. Suburbia is, as such, spatially organized to preserve the privacy of specifically the married couple or the domestic family, of legitimate entities. Yet the privacy of suburbia could also be exploited to provide cover for less legitimate activities as the inner workings of the house at Golders Gardens has illustrated and the seclusion of the suburban home could easily turn into isolation and then opportunity for a bored suburban wife with no children to mind and a lover in hand. The privacy of suburbia could indeed be double-edged, especially with a suburban woman not quite willing to forgo her sexuality and her desires. Thus, the criminal cases brought to light that the suburbs, despite appearances, were hardly homogeneous in reality. Behind the front door of the suburban home lay dysfunctional couples and families, suburban wives who no longer fitted the familiar suburban profile and disgruntled men resorting to domestic violence. Despite appearances, all was not well in the suburbs for some of its women were changing, demanding more of life than their suburban marriages and homes. Neither Edith Thompson nor Alma Rattenbury was your typical suburban wife. Thompson was a working wife who was extremely successful in her career, earning as much as if not more than her husband.73 She went to Paris regularly as a buyer for Carlton & Prior and was seen as indispensable to her firm. Alma Rattenbury, twice-divorced, with a song-writing career as ‘Lozanne’ and generous and flamboyant to a fault, was similarly an unlikely suburban wife. Rattenbury, with her fondness for cocktails and music, was a touch too Bohemian for suburbia. They were no doubt exceptions to the norm, but their presence in suburbia suggests that some women were beginning to test the conventional limits of suburban femininity and marriage. In response, the men were becoming violent. In both cases, incidents where the husbands had engaged in violence were highlighted. Percy Thompson in a fight struck Edith Thompson, causing her to knock a chair over and Bywaters to intervene in her defence. Francis

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Rattenbury, depressed and angry, in a quarrel with his wife gave her a black eye. The men, in recognition that their control over their wives and their suburban idyll was slipping, were resorting to desperate measures.74 The suburban paradigm of privacy was also changing. If suburbia was meant to be couple- or family-centred, a site that reaffirmed domestic privacy, the trials of Thompson and Bywaters and Rattenbury and Stoner also revealed the ways by which this suburban privacy could be redeployed for the expression of illicit female sexuality. René Weis, in a reconstruction of the affair in his biography of Edith Thompson, postulates that the consummation of the affair occurred in the Thompson home. On 27 June 1921, Edith Thompson took a day off from work. With the Thompsons’ tenants, the Lesters, away on their holiday, the lovers had the house to themselves: Short of a holiday together for just the two of them – one of Edith’s favourite fantasies – the privacy afforded them by the empty house has been ideal for this mutual discovery of one another. (Weis, 52) Similarly for Alma Rattenbury the privacy of separate rooms within the suburban home played a crucial part in her own affair. With her husband sleeping in a room downstairs and her own room upstairs, Alma Rattenbury had the privacy she needed to conduct her liaison with Stoner discreetly. Thus the privacy of the suburban home could offer opportunities for sexual licence, particularly on the part of the woman whose sphere the home was. These two cases revealed the fragility of the suburban ideal of a cosy and private home centred on the happily married couple and family but they also demonstrated the cost of destroying the suburban illusion exacted from the transgressive suburban woman. Both cases, but especially the Thompson and Bywaters case, attracted tremendous media attention and captured the imagination of the nation: the failings of lower-middle-class suburban culture were laid bare from the unhappy marriages and domestic violence to the rigid refusal to grant divorces for respectability’s sake; the worst anxieties over the modern suburban woman such as Edith Thompson were realized from her sexual transgressiveness to her romantic sentimentalism fuelled by lowbrow fiction. What was also memorable was the complete and utter loss of privacy suffered by Edith Thompson as her private

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love letters were read out and she was interrogated in court over the details. Fantasies of poisoning her husband, feeding him glass, of a suicide pact between herself and her lover written only for Bywaters’ eyes became public knowledge and evidence of at best her foolish romanticism, at worst her intent to kill her husband. The Rattenbury case had no revealing love letters but nonetheless the details of her indifferent marriage and her passionate affair were laid open to the public and, through them, her flawed character and behaviour were open to scrutiny.75 The price of transgression as experienced by Edith Thompson and Alma Rattenbury was complete public revelation of character, behaviour, private fantasy, and soul.

The impact of Thompson and Bywaters: F. Tennyson Jesse, E. M. Delafield and Rosamond Lehmann Of the two novels inspired by the Thompson and Bywaters case, F. Tennyson Jesse’s A Pin to See the Peepshow is the stronger. Related on her father’s side to the Tennysons, F. Tennyson Jesse was a successful novelist and playwright with a vast range. She could turn out lighthearted picaresque in The Milky Way, sea-faring tales to rival Conrad in Tom Fool, colonial fiction set in Burma as in The Lacquer Lady, but also flex her clear, analytical mind in dissecting criminal motives and the proceedings of real-life criminal cases. With her interest in criminology, it was no surprise that Jesse followed the Thompson and Bywaters case carefully, saving press clippings as well as keeping records of all that was said in Parliament and in court about the case. Shocked by the verdict on Edith Thompson, the germ of a novel based on the case grew, but busy at that time with a criminological book, another novel and a play, Jesse laid aside her idea for this novel. Yet the story continued to haunt her and in the early thirties she returned to her idea of a novel based on the case. Published in 1934, A Pin to See the Peepshow was a critical and commercial success, requiring a reprint within the same year. Since then the book has had several leases of life which attest to its longevity and power. Jesse and her husband collaborated on a version of the novel for the stage in 1948; Penguin reprinted it in 1952 in paperback; a BBC television dramatization of the play was made in 1973 and Heinemann reprinted the novel to coincide with the dramatization; the Hearst Corporation serialized

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the novel in 1976; and in 1979, Virago included the novel in their Virago Modern Classics series, resulting in another paperback edition (Colenbrander, 191). A feminist by instinct, who felt divorce ‘should be at least as easy for a wife as for a husband’, that abortion was a woman’s right, and that no woman should ‘remain married, or submit to bearing children, to a man she did not love’, Jesse’s imaginative rendering of Julia Almond, the character in the novel based on Edith Thompson, is decidedly sympathetic and keenly aware of the interplay of social, class and psychological factors that shape and constrain Julia (Colenbrander, 85). Familiar with the case, Jesse was faithful to the broad sweep of the narrative established in court but nonetheless she took a few liberties with the details. Herbert Starling, unlike his real-life counterpart Percy Thompson, is transformed into a considerably older widower who even when still married to his first wife had already had his eye on Julia. Edith’s sister Avis Graydon becomes a younger, pesky cousin, Elsa, the epitome of young suburban femininity. The bare facts of the case are also imaginatively filled in by Jesse. She carefully depicts Julia’s varying social worlds: her suburban home with weak conservative parents and later, with the death of her father, a bullying aunt and uncle who, together with Elsa, move in with Julia and her mother, thus making home life crowded and difficult; her work life at the boutique, l’Etrangère, dominated by the social mores of her aristocratic employer Marian Lestrange and the upper-class ‘Darlings’ who patronize the dress shop; her after-work social life enjoyed with her actress friend Ruby (with her trail of lovers), at the theatre, at restaurants and at nightclubs. Jesse also inserts a wartime romance with Ruby’s cousin Alfie, who awakens sexual desire in Julia but, with his untimely death at the front, leaves her physical longings frustrated. More boldly, Jesse has Julia seeking an abortion and having been warned by her lawyers not to speak of it in court for fear of prejudicing the jury, her veiled comments in her letters to Leo about the abortion are read in court as an intent to poison her husband. Amongst the imaginative contributions that Jesse makes to her fictionalized version of the Edith Thompson story, the most noteworthy to my mind is Julia’s love of privacy. Julia is in many ways a familiar character. Elaine Morgan, who adapted the book for television, in her afterword to the Virago edition describes Julia as an ‘updated English Madame Bovary’ (406). Like Emma Bovary, Julia is sensual,

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romantic and a dreamer whose fantasies are fed by her habit of novel-reading and her abiding belief in her exceptionality, a quality that she believes will be made manifest through romantic love. Unlike Emma, Julia is also a modern career woman with a good business mind and with enough financial independence to pay for her own clothes and accessories, and, unlike Emma, who luxuriated in the privacy of the bourgeois home to the point of ennui, Julia is highly protective of her own personal space and highly desirous of privacy when lacking a space of her own. Her hunger for privacy is symptomatic of the social realities of suburban life she is in flight from. When we are first introduced to Julia’s suburban semi-detached home, Julia’s room on the top floor is clearly marked as personal and private: No one, after the daily woman had ‘done’ Julia’s room in the morning, ever went up there, save Julia herself. It was her own, and she loved it fiercely. It stood for something very special in her life, for decency and freedom, above all for possession. (31–2) Julia’s room is sacrosanct, her one true possession (apart from Bobby, her dog) and her refuge. In there, she escapes the mediocrity of her parents and the difficulties of work to indulge in her own dreams of a wonderful future or to imagine herself the heroine of each novel she reads. So identified is her room with herself that Julia proclaims the room ‘her own soul’ (124). The privacy of her room thus provides Julia with the space and the autonomy to fashion herself in new ways from humdrum, suburban Julia living at Two Beresford to a more exotic romantic creature. This facilitates Julia’s tendency to lead a double life. The game of the peepshow that begins the novel and gives it its title is a reminder of Julia’s facile ability to switch between her two worlds of real life and dream. One moment she is the authoritative substitute teacher calling up a child with his cardboard box peepshow and the next, looking through the peephole, she is far from school in a wintry wonderland in snowshoes and furs. Likewise away from school, Julia slips with ease between her real life of work and family – the world of professional, practical and competent Julia – and her imaginary life of romance and adventure as a secret agent and an acclaimed actress – the world of Julia, the imaginative daydreamer. The danger in Julia’s eyes is the threat of the real world taking over the imaginary one and in having to

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share her precious room with her cousin Elsa, Julia feels not only her sanctuary invaded but her potential to transcend her surroundings and environment diminished: ‘How could she ever have any peace or freedom at Two Beresford? How could she ever become the self that she felt she had it in her to become?’ (145). A line from a play – ‘A squirrel cannot keep to the ground’ – plays on Julia, representing her desire to live among the treetops, to be someone. This fear that her loss of privacy and its corollaries – peace, freedom, autonomy – will stifle her authentic self eventually drives Julia to accept Herbert Starling’s proposal even though she is far from in love with him. Julia thus marries not for the familiar feminine reasons of money, respectability or control of a household, but for privacy: ‘She didn’t tell him that it was a room to herself that was beckoning her’ (150). Even as Julia feels her identity obliterated at the marriage ceremony in exchanging her name ‘Julia Almond’ for ‘Julia Starling’, the fact that she will have Herbert’s apartment all to herself while he is away on war duty is enough to restore her identity to herself. Alone, in a space to her liking, and free to indulge her secret life of the imagination, Julia is, for the first time, in sync with her environment. For Julia is a misfit in her lower-middle-class suburban world. A social chameleon with upwardly mobile aspirations, Julia is an awkward fit for her class position. A quick learner, her exposure to the upper-class habits of her employers and customers teaches her new forms of speech, new modes of behaviour and a different style of dress far removed from her lower-middle-class realities. Yet even as she assimilates this mode of self-fashioning, her class-bound values of respectability and, to a certain degree, social conformity ensure that she will be left in limbo, neither truly belonging to the upper class nor the lower-middle class. Julia’s sexuality also prevents her from resting comfortably within her class. Though blessed with sex appeal and the gift of sensuality, Julia will never have the opportunities for the self-expression and development of these advantages amidst the narrow-mindedness and prudery of her lower-middle-class environment. While her brainy friend Anne may seek fulfilment through her studies to be a doctor, Julia’s self-fulfilment does not have an acceptable lower-middle-class outlet apart from marriage, and Julia is far from being the typical suburban wife, what with her career and her glamorous aesthetics. Julia’s maladjustment to her social class and environment is further highlighted by her realization of

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the limitations that her class and even national status impose on her. While Marion Lestrange can have affairs and divorce at will and Julia’s widowed shop manager Gipsy can have a semi-official liaison with an elderly married banker with barely any fuss kicked up about it, Julia’s own affair with Leonard Carr and desire for a divorce from Herbert would be a scandal in her own class. As Julia’s prison doctor affirms, if she had been aristocratic, a divorce would have been par for the course and an independent income would have enabled her to live with her lover even without the sanction of a divorce. If Julia had been born to a class several rungs lower, her irregular love life would not have raised eyebrows either. If she had been French, as René Imbert, the commission agent Julia works with while on a buying trip to Paris, recognizes, she would have been free to employ her gift for sensuality in an environment that does not condemn affairs or mistresses. Julia’s life is thus marked by a lack of a sense of belonging, and, with the constraints of class and nationality hampering her, she is constantly searching in vain for her place in the world. At home, she retreats to her room and into a regressive private world of fantasy for fulfilment. When the privacy of her room is disturbed by Elsa, she ends up marrying Herbert to run away from her dreaded family, where it is not the role of wife that appeals as much as the size and quality of Herbert’s rooms and his absence from these spaces. Julia runs from one private space to another in search of herself, but it is not until she meets Leonard Carr, the character based on Frederick Bywaters, that Julia moves towards an identity and emotion for fulfilment. To escape from Herbert’s constant presence in the flat and her unsatisfactory identity as a middle-class suburban wife, on his return from the war, she begins an affair with Leo, taking on the role of a romantic lover who would do all for the sake of love. Significantly, the escape from her dull marriage into the affair intersects with Julia’s deployment of privacy. Julia, with an income close to her husband’s, has the resources to holiday on her own, and, after a scene with her husband at a family holiday in Torquay, Julia takes herself away to a farmhouse in Essex to spend the rest of her summer holiday alone. It is while alone in Essex that Leo comes to join her and in the privacy of the countryside that their affair is finally consummated. Julia’s private world associated with escape from reality collides here with adultery, and the combination of privacy and adulterous love

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becomes the means to transcend her environment and be the person she had always imagined herself to be. With the murder of Herbert Starling, however, Julia’s escape into a private world of personal fantasy and into transcendent imaginary love is cut off. As disciplinary surveillance takes over her life when she is remanded in custody for collusion in the murder of her husband, Julia realizes with horror her loss of privacy. Locked in a tiny cell with a chair and a toilet, she has little choice but to use the toilet even though anyone could look in through an opening cut into the door. Later brought to the prison hospital, she is frustrated by the constant company of her fellow inmates and the presence of attendants. For a woman who had ‘always wanted her room to herself’ and who had been independent enough mostly to evade surveillance, Julia as a prisoner is now constantly watched and never alone (331). If the lack of physical privacy was not bad enough, Julia’s inner world of private fantasy is similarly invaded and exposed. During the trial, her intimate love letters are read out, and, in the harsh realities of a law court, the web of romantic make-believe that she spun for Leo in her letters cannot hold. Fighting for their lives, love loses its saliency and the fear of losing Leo that had gripped her and prompted her to be reckless in her letters, Julia now realizes, was not real. Her first glance at Leo in court reveals the fundamental lack of reality in her affair with him: they were strangers . . . Together in their trouble, they yet seemed to look at each other across a vast desert of amazement. His eyes said to her the same thing that hers said to him. How has it happened that we’re here? It wasn’t worth it. It was none of it real. (339, italics original) Her grand romance seen in the clear light of day becomes mundane, insignificant and ephemeral. Julia’s illusions about romance are shattered through this very public display of her dreams and letters in court. Julia by the end is left with no escape. There is no private space for her to retreat to, no private fantasy world for her to luxuriate in, no lover to project herself onto, nothing but the grim reality of prison and her looming death. Julia, who had so often lived a double life, is forced to live the only one she has – that of the present

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in court and in prison. Jesse writes the trial scene and Julia’s final hours almost entirely through Julia’s eyes, and, though she presents Julia as often tired and sleepy, sometimes hysterical under the emotional strain, Jesse also depicts a Julia who for the first time is intently focused on her present reality, not escaping into her imagination or living in another reality; she is merely ordinary Julia ‘who ate and drank, and smoked, and dressed, and sent clothes to the wash’ (400). Stripped of her physical privacy and her personal romantic notions indulged in when in private, with no other place to be, no other identity to become, Julia is fixed into her position as a wife and adulteress of lower-middle-class extraction and ultimately as a murderess. If Julia’s love of privacy and dreams of love were about fluidity, the possibilities of transcending the familiar, this grim novel of adultery suggests instead that patriarchy still has the means to hold the transgressive woman in her place through the withdrawal of the privilege of privacy.76 The loss of privacy acts as a strong deterrent against adulterous transgression and in E. M. Delafield’s novels concerning adultery it is this horror that is underlined. Delafield, best known for her comic depictions of an upper-middle-class woman struggling with domesticity in the country in Diary of a Provincial Lady, was sufficiently affected by the Thompson and Bywaters case to venture writing a novel based on it. Taking her title Messalina of the Suburbs partially from the popular press’s name for Edith Thompson, ‘Messalina of Ilford’, the novel was written, as the novel’s dedication indicates, as an attempt to reconstruct the psychology of the personalities involved, particularly the key female figure. The novel thus was meant to be an ‘impression’ of Edith Thompson’s personality cast into the shape of Elsie Palmer, Delafield’s protagonist (Delafield, Messalina, v). No doubt Delafield hoped to explain and humanize her Messalina but her decision to use the label Messalina suggests that Delafield had already fallen into the habit of seeing Elsie as somewhat sexually monstrous. So delicately alive to the nuances of upper-middle-class women’s lives, Delafield, when writing about the lower-middle classes, can only follow stereotype. Delving into lower-middle-class suburban life, Delafield imagines a world of sordidness, barely disguised by the pretence of respectability. Her Elsie Palmer is an accomplished flirt at sixteen, rarely without a male admirer. When we first meet her, she is plotting to evade her chores to see a film with a male lodger who,

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in the darkened cinema and on walking her back, takes the liberty of kissing her several times. Often in Delafield’s rendering, Elsie has the abandoned sexuality more familiar amongst stereotypes of workingclass women. In her job as a mother’s companion to a doctor’s wife, she is seduced, very much like a servant, within the corridors of the house by the doctor before being found out by his wife and thrown out in disgrace. Elsie is defined by her sexual magnetism and when, with a little teaching from her much shrewder friend Irene, she deploys her sexuality with a veil of demure virtue, she manages to snare the widowed Horace Williams. Thus, with some cunning, Elsie climbs the social ladder, moving from the daughter of a dubiously middle-class mother who keeps lodgings to the wife of a solicitor of means living in a suburban villa with a servant. Elsie’s adventures are presented with a certain amount of distaste. The world she inhabits is undeniably sordid, from the sexual encounters with Dr Woolley in his office and in a hotel room to the occasions when out on the street she allows herself to be picked up by strange men, though she never goes so far as to sleep with them. Even Horace Williams himself, the man she eventually manipulates into proposing to her, is no gentleman. Freshly widowed, he offers Elsie a job as a typist, and, once he has moved her into the privacy of his office, he indulges in ‘furtive touches’ on her neck and dress and even propositions her by suggesting a weekend in Brighton alone (105). Once married and ensconced in respectable suburbia, however, Elsie becomes less a sexual predator and more a victim of Horace’s jealous possessiveness. Within the first few minutes of becoming Horace’s wife, she learns that she now belongs to him: ‘We’re man and wife now, and you’re mine to do as I please with’ (135, italics original). Trapped in a marriage with a domineering man she fears and bored by her empty suburban life, Elsie now becomes a sympathetic figure for whom an affair with a younger man is not sordid but touching and humanizing. Unlike her previous flirtations, Elsie’s affair with Leslie Morrison comes across as romantic and genuine and it becomes a means to critique the narrow choices women face in life, especially with regards to marriage. Though Elsie indeed marries Horace for the material security and improved status he offers her, Delafield makes clear that Elsie herself has few options. There is the possibility of work but for one unsuited to its rigours, Elsie only has marriage left open to her, and, amongst potential suitors, Elsie is limited by her

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circumstances and environment to only the one – Horace Williams. Elsie’s affair with Leslie also serves to highlight the petty tyrannies of her suburban life – Horace’s sexual demands on Elsie, his jealousy that prevents her from going out much alone, his insistence that she belongs in the home and should be waiting eagerly for him on his return from work. For Delafield, Elsie’s adulterous affair is the result of her ‘remarkable animal magnetism’, her suburban entrapment and a fondness for romantic fiction (145). Unlike A Pin to See the Peepshow, privacy and its ability to foster a desire for transcendence is less of a central theme here. Nonetheless, Delafield is alive to the possibilities of privacy licensing unlawful sexuality – the darkened cinema as a place for stolen kisses and Dr Woolley’s office as a site for Elsie’s seduction, and her transformation of professional Edith Thompson into bored suburban housewife Elsie Williams also reveals her understanding that the privacy of the suburban home could be subverted. Elsie, with plenty of time on her hands and the house to herself in the daytime, entertains her lover in her own home in the afternoons, sometimes even escaping into the country with him while her husband is at work. Privacy, or rather the lack of privacy, makes more of an impact on Elsie in the aftermath of Horace’s murder. With the seriousness of the situation finally dawning on her, Elsie realizes that, in the time to come, all will be revealed – her affair, her wild letters to Leslie threatening suicide, articulating a desire for Horace’s death, asking to be taken away: There would be no more concealments, everything would be dragged out into a publicity that could only bring with it dishonour, and shameful notoriety, and hatred, and execration. (248) As a result of her adulterous affair and the murder of her husband, Elsie will lose all privacy and with that will come the familiar accompaniment of shame and dishonour for the adulteress. Delafield was particularly taken with the horror of a loss of privacy, more so than notoriety and dishonour. When she returned to the topic of adultery in her later novel, The Way Things Are, this idea of having one’s love letters read out in court once again features as does Edith Thompson’s lamentable end, revealing how deeply stamped the case was in her psyche. In the throes of a moral dilemma of what to do

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next, married Laura Temple writes to her lover Duke Ayland a letter attempting to clarify her position: Instantly, the letter, assuming gigantic proportions, began to torment her, suggesting to her mind terrible possibilities. Letters read aloud in the divorce courts – indiscreet letters in blackmail cases – letters, even, figuring sensationally in certain well known murder trials. Laura’s imagination, leaping every intermediate stage, placed her momentarily up on the scaffold. (Delafield, Way, 161) Laura’s guilt no doubt brings to mind the scaffold, but, in her heightened state of anxiety, it is also the thought of her privacy invaded and her private affairs indecorously made public that prevents her from falling asleep and strengthens her resolve to end her affair. The Way Things Are transposes the theme of wifely adultery to a setting Delafield was familiar and comfortable with – that of the upper-middle classes in the country. Much like Delafield’s better known Provincial Lady, Laura Temple has a good-natured if rather passionless marriage to the decent but reticent Alfred and endless comic struggles with her domestic duties of keeping the servants and children happy. Though on the surface her domestic life is a success, if a trifle chaotic, Laura, with a romantic and creative nature, still has unfulfilled desires for a ‘mental and spiritual affinity’ with another (124). Having been disappointed with her marriage, Laura had sublimated her longings into domestic life and her children with the result that ‘[s]piritually and mentally, she had remained static for years. Emotionally she had ceased to exist’ (151). The arrival of the composer Duke Ayland upsets Laura’s delicate equilibrium, shattering her delusions that Alfred and she have a companionable marriage. In Duke, Laura finds the kinship she yearns for, and, having succumbed to her attraction to Duke, much of the rest of the novel is concerned with her moral dilemma, her questioning of her identity, and the difficulties of conducting an affair. Unlike bored suburban housewife Elsie Palmer, Laura can barely find the time and space to have an affair. Noticeably, it is when she is in London at her sister’s, away from the beck and call of her family and with time to call her own, that her affair with Duke truly takes off. Once back in the countryside, however, domestic emergencies overwhelm and cut off the meetings between lovers that feed affairs.

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Laura’s hopes of meeting Duke at nearby Great Quinn while he is there for business are thwarted by a catalogue of domestic mishaps from the new cook failing to arrive on time to the children coming down with whooping cough. When she next breezes into London for her sister’s wedding, she can only spend an hour with Duke in between errands for the wedding and the family. If her affair with Duke has revived in her a different Laura – creative, intelligent and vibrant – her domestic identity is so all-encompassing that it is in danger of swallowing any other version of her whole. Away in the countryside, even her letters to Duke are becoming dull and domestic. Dealing constantly with the everyday reality of the ‘children, her marriage vows, the house, the ordering of meals, the servants, the making of a laundry list every Monday’, Laura simply has no room in her busy domestic life to engage in a private world of ‘[i]magination, emotionalism, sentimentalism’ that adultery thrives on (286–7). In recognizing her lack of privacy and thus an inability to escape her reality, Laura accepts ‘the limitations of her surroundings’ and renounces adultery (287). Laura, unlike Julia in A Pin to See the Peepshow, chooses to remain who she is, despite the dissatisfactions of her identity, preferring fixity over the potential of privacy, adultery and fluidity. Though there is no evidence that Rosamond Lehmann was affected by the Thompson and Bywaters case, her novel of adultery The Weather in the Streets is similarly concerned with privacy and the space it provides her protagonist with for alternative renderings of self as well as the processes which shut down such alternatives. Crisscrossing the worlds of aristocracy and the bohemian fringes of artistic London, The Weather in the Streets chronicles the affair between the middle-class divorcee Olivia and the married aristocrat Rollo Spencer. Olivia, first introduced to us as the innocent romantic adolescent on the verge of a promising future in Invitation to the Waltz is now older, more cynical, and very much the modern young woman who has broken away from convention. With a failed marriage behind her and as a woman who works for a living in London and associates with bohemia, Olivia has travelled a great distance from her sister Kate who, in opting for middle-class domesticity in the countryside, has not strayed far from the familiar mould of middle-class femininity. Olivia’s difference prepares us for her transgressive role as mistress to Rollo Spencer. Long infatuated with Rollo since her adolescence, a chance encounter with him on a train back home kindles a connection that eventually leads

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to an affair. The moral codes have changed as have the circumstances of young women such as Olivia. Independent, sexually aware, and with urban contemporaries who barely look askance at her sexual conduct, Olivia is enabled by modernity to begin her liaison with the married Rollo. Privacy is key to the affair and an important signal of female modernity – Olivia’s room of her own offers the lovers their first location for a sexual tryst. Yet Olivia’s access to privacy is double-edged: while a sign of her modernity and her emancipation, having a room of her own in which to conduct affairs appears to her sordid and cheap, a reminder that Olivia’s modernity has within it the seeds of an older stereotype of the fallen woman. The house she shares with her cousin Etty is, in the end, not a space that trumpets the triumph of female independence but is instead described as ‘strangled’ and ‘peevish’ (Lehmann, Weather, 7–8). The house hints of decadence, discontent and strain, containing faint echoes of a not-quite-respectable female life, a fact borne out when Olivia later becomes pregnant and is forced to undergo an abortion. Olivia’s access to privacy is also imperfect. Her room in a house shared with Etty does not provide complete privacy; Olivia’s lack of wealth prevents her from obtaining the kind of privacy she needs for her affair with a married man. Rollo, however, does have the money, and, in entering the world of upper-class adultery, Olivia slips behind a wall of wealth and privilege offering protection and privacy: Beyond the glass casing I was in, was the weather, were the winter streets in rain, wind, fog, in the fine frosty days and nights, the mild, damp grey ones. Pictures of London winter the other side of the glass – not reaching the body: no wet ankles, muddy stockings, blown hair, cold-aching cheeks, fog-smarting eyes, throat, nose . . . not my usual bus-taking London winter. It was always indoors or in taxis or in his warm car; it was mostly in the safe dark, or in half light in the deepest corner of the restaurant, as out of sight as possible. Drawn curtains, shaded lamp, or only the fire . . . (156) Cut off from the realities of her everyday life by the protective casing of Rollo’s wealth, Olivia can now afford to come in from the harsh outside and be in privileged, private spaces – the interior of a warm car, the most private table in a restaurant. Yet even as Olivia retreats into

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shaded spaces safe from prying eyes, her affair has only enveloped her in glass. The glass separates her from her regular existence but, in its transparency, only offers incomplete privacy. The movement from the third person that begins the novel into the first person in this phase of the narrative highlights this ambiguity. The use of firstperson narration underlines Olivia’s entry into the highly subjective, private and solipsistic world of adultery but its intimacy draw us in too, laying bare her every thought and emotion, leaving her no room to hide, no privacy. Like the glass, it isolates but also exposes. The lovers’ hold on privacy is thus always precarious. The hotel rooms have thin walls and there is the danger of running into friends at restaurants, at hotels outside of London. The fear of exposure is constant: We don’t live by lakes and under clipped chestnuts, but in the streets where the eyes, ambushed, come out on stalks as we pass; in the illicit rooms where eyes are glued to keyholes. (353) Olivia’s paranoia may seem extreme, but, as the novel makes clear, it is the women who have the most to lose when adultery and its consequences surface and become visible. Pregnant with Rollo’s child but with no hope of marriage and with Rollo recently reconciled to his wife, Olivia is left on her own to deal with ‘Dame Nature’s revenge’, the public bodily exposure of a private sexual decision (357). The Weather in the Streets thus suggests that, while the emancipated woman now has access to privacy and opportunities for sexual autonomy and adventure, this hold on privacy and new resulting identities is tenuous, liable to dissipate through a woman’s biological failings or through other means of surveillance. A letter, for example, from Olivia to Rollo is intercepted by the latter’s mother, Lady Spencer, and their affair is thus discovered. By the end of the novel, Olivia’s transgression, enabled by her ability as well as Rollo’s ability to be private, is paid for by a loss of privacy in a variety of ways.77 Olivia is forced to expose herself and her indiscretions in seeking help from Etty regarding her unwanted pregnancy, and, when Lady Spencer pays Olivia a visit to persuade her to end her liaison with Rollo, her private romance is resituated in a more public and social framework involving the Spencer family and their reputation. It is at this point that the modernity of Olivia’s story collapses into the retrograde narratives of

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the fallen woman and the mistress as home-wrecker. Once positioned and labelled as the mistress, Olivia’s romance with Rollo becomes undeniably public. Finally Olivia’s abortion is the most traumatic sign of her loss of privacy as some of the innermost areas of her body are invaded. What was once a private affair has become in many ways a public matter. The novel, however, ends ambiguously. Though the end of the affair sees Olivia hemmed in and identified as the mistress and fallen woman, her final meeting with Rollo on which the novel ends once more opens up the possibility of the relationship being rekindled. For Olivia, unlike Julia and Elsie, remains a free and single woman with the option to again slip back behind the tenuous privacy of the glass wall of adultery. Rollo and the temptations of once more escaping into another world call. We never find out if Olivia returns to being Rollo’s mistress but her choice reveals that for some the loss of a private world was not permanent. A woman’s access to privacy and consequently to alternative fluid identities was thus a crucial part of the experience of modernity. Yet, this aspect of modernity, when misappropriated for sexual misbehaviour, was also a reason for alarm. Privacy as a means of opening up other worlds to women apart from the fixity of their identities as married and domesticated housewives offered too much of an escape from patriarchy, too much of a tantalizing vision of another self, another way of being and doing things. For the women who took too much advantage of the modern opportunities of privacy, including an indulgence of its alternatives, the punishment was a loss of that window into that other world – the withdrawal of the privileges of privacy. Privacy was an escape route but one that could so easily be closed off to the woman desiring to flee.

Conclusion Looking for an appropriate cover image for this book, I very quickly realized that visually privacy has been largely imaged through the act of reading. So widespread was this practice that there is arguably a whole genre of reading pictures that has generated academic and even commercial interest. Garrett Stewart has written an entire book arguing for the existence of this genre of painting; Stefan Bollmann has edited a lavishly illustrated book focused on the woman reader in all her different pictorial manifestations and, on the more popular front, even the literary novelty company Bas Blue markets a line of stationery called The Reading Woman with images of women readers culled from nineteenth- and early twentieth-century paintings. The reader as a subject has fascinated painters through the centuries and continues to intrigue viewers today as well.78 If the portrayal of reading and books in pictures began, as Stewart argues, as a means to reference biblical texts in religious painting and remind one of mortality in still lifes, such pictures very soon transformed themselves into visual essays representing the interior world of the subject, something invisible to the eye. Reading was a way to invoke visually what was virtually impossible to paint – the mysteries of the inner mind. Pictures of the woman reader offered additional pleasures to a viewer. Not only did the female reader draw one into a contemplation of the privacy of a mental world but with her comeliness, quite often eroticized, she enticed as well. Two birds were then killed with one stone: the viewer was allowed to think profound thoughts about the opacity and unknowability of the other, locked away in a private interior world which reading can allude to but not reveal, while more basely indulging in a voyeurism that allowed the viewer to gaze on a female subject who might reveal, in a physical sense, all. Theodore Roussel’s picture of his young model nonchalantly reading completely in the nude, with her elegant robe draped behind her on her deckchair, as if she had deliberately taken it off to read, is a perfect example of how the reading woman has often been ambivalently depicted. She may elude you in her thoughts but at least her body is open to view. 158

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There is perhaps something difficult to tolerate in a woman being private as Roussel’s The Reading Girl suggests, so much so that there is a need to disrobe her, to render her visible and readable in other ways. Her very privateness, the inviolability of her mind, is a threat to patriarchy. As Karen Joy Fowler writes in her foreword to Stefan Bollmann’s book of pictures of reading women, women who could read were considered dangerous: For the woman who reads acquires a space to which she and no one else has access, and together with this she develops an independent sense of self-esteem; furthermore, she creates her own view of the world that does not necessarily correspond with that conveyed by tradition or with that of men. All this does not signify the liberation of women from patriarchal guardianship, but it does push open the door that leads to freedom. (27–8) Reading for women was thus an ‘assertion of individuality, a separation from societal restrictions and expectations’ but even as reading and accessing privacy allowed the door to freedom to be further nudged open, the reading woman at least visually was also circumscribed and subject to scrutiny (Badia and Phegley, 5). Jennifer Phegley and Janet Badia in their consideration of the Bas Blue range of stationery featuring women readers highlight how reading women are often pictured reading precariously – standing, walking or sitting on edge: [These images] suggest a conflict between women’s desire to read and any number of competing demands, including the tentative and fleeting nature of the act of reading itself for women, their need to be elsewhere, and their lack of privacy within the home. (11) These are women readers in flight, stealing a private moment to read but even when pictured reading at ease, lost in their books, women readers continue to have their private reading surveyed. The title of Bollmann’s book, Reading Women, is revealingly ambiguous. Seemingly a simple description of the subject matter – pictures of women reading – the title also carries another connotation of attempting to understand and interpret these women engaged in the private

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activity of reading. It thus expresses a wish to read these reading women, once more making these private opaque women transparent. This excursion into art history is simply a way to highlight how subversive women engaging in privacy (in this case via reading) can be, as well as the forces besieging and attempting to break down a woman’s privacy. Privacy for women was a means of garnering greater freedom for themselves and, in doing so, participating in a particular narrative of modernity that privileged emancipation from old bonds. Accessing privacy through annexing domestic space or through a physical removal from domestic space was thus a challenge to patriarchy and the fixed identities imposed on women. In enjoying privacy, a woman could escape, elude, slip through the grasp of patriarchal definition, and, by doing so, return to or even create a preferred sense of self – individual or multiple. Virginia Woolf, in imaginatively constructing for her narrative persona a room with books in A Room of One’s Own, creates a feminine and feminist space to think about and question the absence of women in literary history, thus escaping from patriarchal narratives that condemn women to secondary literary status. This room with books also enables her persona to redefine a woman’s relation to society, creating a self that is both solitary and communal. Mrs Dalloway, finding privacy in the city, similarly finds a place to shed her domestic identity and shuffle through a multiplicity of selves – her youthful self, her chic urban self, her present self. This multiplicity of selves is also echoed in Woolf’s essay ‘Street Haunting’ where the city brings forth a playful splitting of a coherent identity. Dorothy Richardson’s Miriam Henderson needs the clarity of her solitary room and the anonymous camaraderie of the city to focus on the process of discovering who she wants to be in an age of transition. Laura Willowes in Lolly Willowes ensconced in the privacy of the countryside can relieve herself of being the selfless spinster aunt and relish being alone, indulging in her country-loving self at last. Lottie, on holiday without her domineering husband in The Enchanted April, recovers her confidence, and her once-suppressed natural intelligence and buoyancy shine through in the more nurturing environment of San Salvatore in Italy. These are women characters who recognize the emancipatory potential of privacy and relish the joys of privacy in helping them discover or rediscover a personal identity free from patriarchal imposition.

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Privacy for women then tended to be emancipatory but it also had a restorative side to it. Privacy offered a much-needed rest to replenish depleted energies before a return to the domestic front. We see this in the way the interior of the car is used to fragment the self and float multiple selves in ‘Evening Over Sussex’ and Orlando, after the stresses of the day, particularly after the jagged modernity of driving through London in the latter, before becoming a space of consolidation, allowing the self to return to coherence and domesticity. This pattern is repeated as domestic women in novels such as The Enchanted April and A Note in Music use the privacy of a holiday alone to heal a frayed sense of self and return to their domestic identities refreshed. This is privacy’s more conservative-modern aspect, a way to reconcile its subversive, emancipatory potential with the status quo of patriarchy. Though the old order’s inhabitants are allowed a temporary break from its strictures through the practice of privacy, the old order is not ultimately radically disturbed. In the end, the story of privacy for women in early twentiethcentury Britain is one of diminishing opportunities even as the desire for and value of privacy increased. If privacy allowed women to elude the hand of patriarchy, privacy itself proved to be highly elusive as well. The ties of domesticity eroded claims to privacy ensuring that a privacy-loving rebel like Denham Dobie, once married and with child, would ultimately succumb and conform. The space of privacy for women caught in the folds of domestic life thus grew smaller, shrinking to a mental interlude stolen between chores. Small as this space was, it was nonetheless treasured as privacy still in representations of middle-class domestic women as a marker of their modernity and hence their class. If one could indulge in privacy, even if only for a fraction and only mentally, it was still better than having none or no awareness of the need to be private at all. That small shift to an emancipatory or restorative practice of privacy could well be a harried housewife’s only stab at feeling modern and separate from her domestic identity. Indeed it is a mark of privacy’s growing importance for women that the fear of a loss of personal privacy is all that holds Laura back from committing adultery with Duke Ayland in The Way Things Are. Similarly, Julia’s agonizing loss of privacy in prison after being indicted with her lover for the murder of her husband is a reminder that for a woman like Julia, privacy had become more crucial to her

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sense of self than other identity markers such as being a daughter or a wife. Women were thus protective of their privacy but besieged by the demands of domesticity and hampered by a patriarchal world suspicious of women abusing privacy, often the only recourse was a return to psychological privacy. As women returned to the privacy of the mind as a means to preserve their sense of self, their private space, we are reminded once more of the picture of the woman reader – the perfect image of privacy located in the inner spaces of the mind. Her thoughts are inaccessible just as her reading material is often hidden from us as well and yet her body is open to our gaze. Stefan Bollmann’s Reading Women may have attempted to read these reading women but a perusal of the fascinating colour reproductions within the book reveals instead a sense of inscrutability. These reading women are not easily read at all and even Roussel’s notorious reading girl, despite her nakedness, is surprisingly impenetrable. What is she reading? What is she thinking? What is she feeling? We can only speculate. What we learn from these pictures is that as long as women can preserve a space of privacy for themselves, be it a physical or merely a psychological space, the possibilities of eluding capture will always remain. In that space of privacy lies the promise of freedom.

Notes 1. In arguing along these lines, Shiach is part of a recent critical shift that has begun to focus on the modernity of domestic interiors. See Christopher Reed’s Bloomsbury Rooms and Victoria Rosner’s Modernism and the Architecture of Private Life. 2. ‘March Moonlight’ was published posthumously and there is no indication that it was intended as Richardson’s final chapter. Pilgrimage simply came to an end with Richardson’s death. 3. Elizabeth Mazzola and Corinne S. Abate thus argue that the ‘prevalence of shared female privacy accounts for the emphasis on women’s alliances’ in the writing and culture of the Renaissance (7). 4. Stella Deen has written perceptively on the connection between privacy of the domestic sphere and the private turn in national and political culture. Her take on privacy within the home as mirroring the isolationist mood of British national policy, however, reveals privacy as a danger. For example, Celia, E. H. Young’s eponymous heroine, in Deen’s eyes, is too private, succumbing to fantasy and self-deception which prevents her from truly engaging with and appreciating her husband. In contrast to Deen, this book will be more focused on the positive aspects of privacy for women. In fact, the privacy I tend to consider is usually of the kind that enables a woman to see her world in a more clear-eyed way, rather than obscuring her vision. 5. Von Arnim is not the only sceptic. Feminist scholars working on privacy in the home in the late twentieth century have also found privacy to be lacking for women. See Moira Munro and Ruth Madigan’s ‘Privacy in the Private Sphere’ and the feminist architectural collective, Matrix’s Making Space: Women and the Man-made Environment. 6. There were also women in the city whose experiences of breaking away from home and tradition were far less celebratory. The novels of Jean Rhys, for example, are full of female characters for whom modernity is a punishing experience of loss, instability and exploitation. 7. There is in some texts a hint of the pastoral as escapist fantasy, denying the hard work required of the manual labourer and farmer to create the beauty of the rural landscape and thus conforming to a more pejorative definition of pastoral as lightweight escapism. 8. In fact, Woolf makes mention of Nightingale’s ‘Cassandra’ in A Room of One’s Own. See Chapter 4. 9. In using ‘renovation’, I follow Victoria Rosner for, as she suggests, rightly I feel, Bloomsbury renovated Victorian homes to create modernist ones (Housing Modernism, 99). Instead of razing the old to the ground, they negotiated with the old to make new spaces. It is an idea that is also in keeping with the lack of modernist architecture in Britain. Unlike America 163

164 Notes

10.

11.

12.

13. 14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

20. 21.

and the European continent, modernist architecture failed to take hold in Britain. The result for Britain was that modernity meant modernist interiors within old buildings. The conversion of the night nursery into Woolf’s bedroom was paid for by George Duckworth, which implies that though the room was hers, it was also not hers, paid for and ‘owned’ as it were by her half-brother. These autobiographical sketches and essays not only record Woolf’s historical struggle for and eventual achievement of personal, private space but also her rhetorical moves to make some space of her own, to carve out a place for individuality amidst a life lived too much in community. I will discuss this in greater detail at a later stage of the chapter. See Chapter 4 for more evidence of a growing working-class awareness of the importance of privacy, particularly in the form of leaving the home, either for a while or for a holiday. See Chapter 4 for a discussion of working-class women’s leisure and the difficulty of finding time and space to be private. See for example Winifred Foley’s Child of the Forest and Margaret Penn’s Manchester Fourteen Miles. For Angela Rodaway, the library was her escape as a girl. When post-First World War plans for low-density housing were executed, one consequence was the provision of a garden. For the working-class and lower-middle-class families able to afford these new houses, gardening was a male preserve. Olechnowicz, in his study of one such working-class estate, the Becontree Estate, notes that gardening was man’s work and was a means to deter the male head of the family from excessive pub-going. So while more and more working-class women had access to a garden, it was not necessarily a space they could claim for themselves. Anne of Denmark (1574–1619), Lucy, Countess of Bedford (1581–1627), and Henrietta Maria (1609–69) were some of the well-off aristocratic women who could afford to commission gardens of their own. In 1901 there were 1.2 million more women than men. 1911 was no better with 1.3 million more women than men. The imbalance peaked unsurprisingly in the postwar period with 1.9 million more women than men in 1921. Ten years on the situation was barely improved with 1.8 million surplus women. Beverly Seaton has christened this genre of garden writing as the garden autobiography, seeing it as an autobiography of a garden. Lynne Hapgood has called it the garden romance, seeing that it draws on Romanticist notions of nature. Von Arnim’s insistence on escaping and being private earned her the label of ‘selfish’ when reviewed by Arthur Quiller-Couch in The Spectator (de Charms, 78). Barbara Campbell was the pseudonym of Mabel Osgood Wright. Elizabeth von Arnim’s husband is referred to as either the Sage (with a touch of irony) or the Man of Wrath. Notice that Campbell merely calls her husband by his name, Evan.

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22. Victoria Rosner notes an illustration of a study with only one chair in it in John Gloag and Leslie Mansfield’s The House We Ought to Live In and makes a similar point (Modernism and the Architecture of Private Life, 100–1). 23. Unless it was the woman who paid for the house herself. This is where the five hundred pounds that Woolf spoke of becomes important. 24. Mitchison often ended up writing her novels in the drawing room anyway, perpetuating the familiar female tradition of writing in common domestic rooms as Jane Austen did. Alternatively she did her writing on the Tube or on trains. See You May Well Ask, 38. 25. This was not an uncommon longing for young working-class women who had grown up in cramped environments, never having any privacy. Angela Rodaway writes of wanting for two years to move out of the family home into a room of her own before finally being able to do so. Winifred Foley speaks fondly too of her rented room. Woodward’s intense focus on her longed-for room, however, is distinctive. 26. Oxbridge students had a particular system of signalling privacy or sociability when in residence at their college. Each student had rooms called a set, consisting of a bedroom and sitting room-cum-study. There were also two doors at the entrance, the outermost one being called the oak. If the oak was left open, it indicated that the resident of the set was in and open to visitors; if closed, the resident was either out or desired to be private and undisturbed. Thanks to Douglas Kerr for this piece of information. 27. Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal (1861); reprinted in Œuvres Complètes. Paris: Seuil, 1968, 101. Quoted in Bowlby, Feminist Destinations and Further Essays, 199. The deafening street around me was shouting. Tall, slim, in heavy mourning, majestic grief, A woman passed, with a proud hand Lifting, balancing the garland and the hem; Agile and noble, with her statue’s leg. Me, I was drinking, clenched like a madman, In her eye, livid sky where the hurricane germinates, The gentleness that fascinates and the pleasure that kills One flash . . . then night! Fugitive beauty Whose look made me suddenly reborn, Will I see you no more but in eternity? Elsewhere, very far from here! too late! never, perhaps! For I know not where you are fleeing, you know not where I am going, O you whom I would have loved, o you who knew it! 28. Woolf’s London Scene essays for Good Housekeeping, however, make much more of an effort to draw the connections between the city and economics. See in particular ‘London Docks’ and ‘Oxford Street’.

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29. The fragmentation of self in ‘Street Haunting’ appears to have little political consequence, unlike the splitting of consciousness when walking down Whitehall as a woman that the persona of A Room of One’s Own recalls. There is no sense of being ‘alien and critical’, outside of civilization, only a pleasure in being free and fluid (88). 30. The breaking up of the landscape that driving creates has similarly had a bifurcated response. It has been viewed as traumatic, a fragmentation of wholeness, but also as a way of seeing the landscape anew. 31. The pattern of using pretty and sometimes scantily clad women to sell cars began in the early days of the car’s history. These women were sometimes positioned as drivers but more often than not were decorative. See colour plates 8 and 28 in Julie Wosk’s Women and the Machine. 32. Michael Arlen’s popular novel The Green Hat pushes this link between women drivers and modernity to a sensationalist extreme. His protagonist Iris Storm is not only a confident driver of a glamorous and striking Hispano-Suiza but also a déclassé member of the aristocracy known for her sexual license. 33. Rear seating also preserved hierarchies and class boundaries by separating employer from employee. See Scharff, 18. The social position of chauffeurs was vexed. They were employees, yet, being highly skilled and technologically advanced, could not be treated exactly like a servant either. 34. The fatal car crash was a familiar ending for resolving the excesses, sexual or otherwise, of the modern woman. Michael Arlen’s sexually liberated heroine of The Green Hat, Iris Storm, dies in a self-inflicted car crash and the aggressively modern but self-deluded Claudia of E. M. Delafield’s Faster, Faster! also perishes in a car crash while driving home in her car. In a more comic vein, party-animal Agatha Runcible of Vile Bodies takes over as a race-car driver, veers off the track and crashes, losing her wits along the way. She eventually dies in a nursing home, agitated at the thought of having to drive faster and faster. 35. Macaulay’s primitive Denham has a male counterpart in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), and Sylvia Townsend Warner’s second novel, Mr. Fortune’s Maggot, was set in the South Seas. Laura the witch is also but one of many representations of rural witchcraft in her time with Eric Benfield, Frances Carmichael, Charlotte M. Peake, and even popular bestseller, John Buchan, attempting novels about witches and witchcraft. See Glen Cavaliero’s The Rural Tradition in the English Novel, 1900–1939 for brief descriptions of Benfield, Carmichael and Peake (39–40). 36. Reading Matless’s account of the organicists’ belief in the ecology of the soil and the rule of return, I am reminded of the language of current green and organic movements. This language has become very modern and fashionable indeed. 37. Frazer’s argument was an attempt to discredit Christianity. 38. Sylvia Townsend Warner herself read The Witch-cult in Western Europe when it was first published and writes of meeting Margaret Murray

Notes

39.

40.

41.

42.

43.

44.

45.

46.

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after the success of Lolly Willowes. Murray, ‘an imposing elderly lady’, liked Warner’s heroine but was ‘doubtful’ about her take on the Devil (Harmon, 65). The reviewer, Orlo Williams, was undoubtedly familiar with the narrative trends of spinster fiction, many of which ended up being bleak appraisals of a spinster’s empty life. See May Sinclair’s The Life and Death of Harriet Frean and F. M. Mayor’s The Third Miss Symonds. The nothingness of the plot was also the political point. See my article ‘A Return to Romance: Winifred Holtby’s Spinster Novels from Between the Wars’, for more on spinster fiction and the ways women writers tackled the question of the spinster. Winifred Holtby’s Muriel from The Crowded Street does all three – she moves to London, becomes her feminist activist friend Delia’s flatmate and begins to work for Delia’s organization. Monica in The New House also plans to move to the city to take up a job. While I can accept that Laura does have an eroticized approach to nature, I am more hesitant about the rest of Garrity’s argument. Garrity reads Warner’s choice of the witch as code for the transgressive figure of the lesbian. Though some elements of her argument are persuasive, in her eagerness to map onto Lolly Willowes a lesbian reading, she misreads the village of Great Mop as a lesbian community – men are present in the village, though marginalized in Warner’s account; neglects the fact that the Witches’ Sabbath also includes warlocks as well as Laura’s momentary infatuation with noble Mr Saunter, the poultry farmer; and mistakes the androgynous man in mask at the Witches’ Sabbath as Satan himself. She is also a little too quick to turn all spinsters into lesbians. The potential is there, of course, but sometimes a spinster is simply a spinster and there are other ways to turn a spinster into a radical figure. Laura, happy to be unattached and wanting to be undisturbed and private, is already an unsettling challenge to patriarchal society. See Marianna Torgovnik on the African woman in Heart of Darkness (154–5) and her chapter on Michel Leiris (111) in Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives. When married, Denham’s focus on privacy and self includes her husband. It is the rest of extraneous society that she wishes to exclude in her desire to be private. This is an assumption much like that of Roger Fry who assumed that primitive societies lacked critics and critical discourse and that was what the west could do for the primitives. Charles Roberts Aldrich quotes a poem by Barrington Gates, printed in the London Mercury, June 1921, of which the first few lines are: ‘I am, they say, a darkling pool/Where huge and cunning lurks a fool/Childish and monstrous, untaught of time;/Still wallowing in primeval slime’ (34). Though the poem was titled ‘Abnormal Psychology’, the point really was that this was believed to be now normal psychology! See also Ronald E. Martin, The Language of Difference, 24.

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47. Interested in women’s rights and often contesting misogynistic representations of women by men, yet disliking special pleading for women, Macaulay in her essays rarely acknowledges that the odds against women to escape and be private are far greater than they are for men. Looking at Crewe Train, however, reveals her awareness of the specific difficulties a woman faces as opposed to a man. 48. There is an attempt at this level of discourse to be as non-racist as possible though, as I have already discussed briefly above, there are moments when the language slips into ambivalence. 49. In these sex-sensation novels it is usually the man who is designated as the savage other. In Dell’s The Way of an Eagle, the English hero Nick Ratcliffe has the yellow skin of a Chinaman that enables him to pass for a native tribesman and is often referred to as a wild devil by the heroine. Hull’s bestseller The Sheik similarly titillates with the hero’s savagery and foreignness as a sheik. 50. Evelyn’s imaginings also affect Arnold’s friendship with Audrey for she imagines Arnold and Audrey are in love. In a moment that perfectly demonstrates how discourse can affect reality, Arnold on thinking about Audrey, finds himself using Evelyn’s language in her novella to describe Audrey: ‘She had grown so pretty, too . . . No, that was Dorothea in the book’ (221). 51. The text is careful to mitigate Denham’s callousness by portraying her as a thoughtless child, absorbed in her own play and thus not appropriate for motherhood: ‘You might as well expect a child of twelve to mind a baby’ (134). 52. Whether a woman on a practical level could go on holiday alone was a different matter and was heavily dependent on economic status. As such, married women characters in novels who do go on holiday alone tend to be middle-class women with access to a small private income. 53. A 1938 survey of Shoreditch revealed that amongst 315 children, 33 per cent slept with four or more to a bed and 13 per cent slept incredibly with six or more to a bed. Ten per cent slept in the same room as their parents (Tinkler, Constructing, 16). 54. A look at popular working-class fiction magazines like Peg’s Paper reveals that privacy is rarely mentioned. The short stories, serials and problem pages were all focused on romance and relationship issues. Indeed, at the heart of many a working-class woman’s memoir is the question of who to marry, though Joyce Storey’s and Dorothy Scannell’s texts work against the happy endings familiar to Peg’s Paper readers in favour of rather more ambiguous romantic endings. 55. Like Dorothy Richardson’s Miriam Henderson, the city of London offered Foley an escape from the servitude of work and a means to be solitary and herself. See Chapter 2 for more on privacy in the city. 56. Both Dorothy Scannell and Joyce Storey depict their leisure time as young working women as a giddy round of activity with friends. Scannell had her sister Marjorie as a constant playmate and later joined a tennis club,

Notes

57.

58.

59.

60.

61.

62. 63. 64.

65.

169

hence ensuring that any leisure spent was a group activity. Storey writes of her time off work in the first-person plural, a reminder of the communal nature of leisure. Along similar lines, working-class writer Ethel Carnie Holdsworth, in her novel The House That Jill Built (1920), imagines a rest house for tired working-class mothers. However, the rest house, while allowing tired mothers a respite from their families, is still set up communally. Meals are taken together and the women even hold concerts in the evenings. When the rest house is threatened financially, all the women pull together to save on expenses. Dorothy Richardson, in her short story ‘Ordeal’ (1930), also suggests that being hospitalized is a way for a middle-class woman to be alone at last. Her protagonist Fan relishes the solitude in her hospital room as she waits alone for a potentially life-threatening operation. It was ‘the first holiday of her adult life’ (73, italics original). This was one of the key selling points of electricity when marketed to women. Caroline Haslett, director of the Electrical Association for Women (EAW), wrote in 1934 that electricity in the home would help ‘set [women] free from drudgery’ and allow them to have ‘time for reflection; for self respect’ (‘The New Adventure’, An Electrical Adventure, 108). See Bill Luckin’s Question of Power: Electricity and Environment in Inter-war Britain, and, specifically for a history of the EAW, see Carroll Pursell’s ‘Domesticating Modernity: the Electrical Association for Women, 1924–86’. Bowden and Offer’s article interestingly reveals that the diffusion rates for new, non-gendered electrical appliances such as the radio and television were far faster than for domestic appliances that would have only benefited the female members of a family. Their findings are a reminder of the subjugated position of the housewife within the family as her needs are often not prioritized in the family budget. We recall Woolf’s comment about the Georgian cook being a different creature from her predecessor. Where the latter was dour and left in the darkness of the basement kitchen, the former is a brighter and less rigid personality, relaxed enough to go to her employers to borrow the newspaper. Woolf’s point is more to do with the subtle changes in modern life and less intent on the lack of privacy with servants about, however. Indeed, in Celia, Young describes her middle-class protagonist with her sleeves rolled up scrubbing the bath tub (47). For more on this, see my analysis of von Arnim’s Vera in the introduction. This use of leisure in the novel echoes Lehmann’s epigraph from W. S. Landor, from whom she also derives the title of her book: ‘But the present, like a note in music, is nothing but as it appertains to what is past and what is to come.’ Women’s leisure is the moment in the present when past and future are addressed, with conservative implications. Lehmann’s writing in general is finely attuned to the devastations of the First World War. As she herself commented, the Great War ‘cracked the whole structure of our secure, privileged and very happy life. The bath

170 Notes

66. 67.

68.

69.

70.

71.

72.

73.

water grew cold, the huge lawn was dug up for potatoes, the sons of friends were killed. I became aware of grief – other people’s grief, world grief’ (quoted in Simon, 8–9). Elizabeth Cambridge was a pseudonym for Barbara Hodges née Webber. Hostages to Fortune was her first novel and echoes her life. It is highly debatable whether Rebecca is ever stripped of her identity. Her brilliance as the first Mrs de Winter has been undeniably tarnished, but her presence as the inimitable Rebecca haunts the novel right to its end. Tanner recognizes the Janus-faced nature of adultery in the novel, realizing that while it sympathized with the ‘adulterous violator’ undermining the system, it also worked to maintain the law (14). He preferred to emphasize the former rather than the latter, however. Interestingly, privacy also plays an important role in Evelyn Waugh’s novel of wifely adultery, A Handful of Dust. Brenda Last convinces her husband Tony to buy her a small flat in London. The pretext is to facilitate her classes in economics but the reality is that she needs a place in London to conduct her affair with John Beaver. Brenda’s punishment for adultery, unlike the novels written by women, is not less privacy but too much. At the novel’s end, she is left with little else but the flat – she has no money, her lover has gone to America, her friends have deserted London and her for the summer, and Tony is away in Brazil. In an alternate ending Waugh wrote for an American magazine serializing the novel as ‘A Flat in London’, however, Brenda willingly gives up the flat, her privacy, and autonomy, returning to Tony. Tony, instead of selling the flat, keeps it for himself and a possible future affair. Private space has been reclaimed by the man. The Thompson and Bywaters trial inspired a number of novels in addition to F. Tennyson Jesse’s A Pin to See the Peepshow and E. M. Delafield’s Messalina of the Suburbs. Dorothy Sayers’s The Documents in the Case was also indebted to the same case. Even today, the story of Thompson and Bywaters has continued to inspire, with Mark Eden and Bill Hill co-authoring a novel based on this event. A film drawing on the Thompson and Bywaters case entitled Another Life was also made in 2001. Messalina was the wife of the Roman Emperor Claudius and was notorious for her sexual promiscuity, her influence on her husband, and her capacity for political and sexual intrigue. She is believed to have manipulated him into committing numerous murders and other acts of cruelty and she was not above poisoning enemies as well. This construction of women and suburbia still had a great deal of life in it though, and harried Hilda draining the life and joy from George in George Orwell’s Coming Up for Air and smug Gwendoline boxing August into prim suburbia in Joanna Cannan’s Princes in the Land are good examples of this stereotyping still alive and well in the interwar period. During the trial, it was revealed that Percy Thompson earned six pounds a week. Edith Thompson earned the same but with bonuses. She was insistent on the plural. See Daily Mail, 11 December 1922.

Notes

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74. Indeed, vengeful cuckolded husbands began to appear in adultery narratives suggesting that the men were becoming upholders of the status quo, intent on preserving marriage, family and domesticity and punishing transgressive women. In Expiation, the adulteress discovers that she has been disinherited by her dead husband and in ‘The Canary’, one of F. Tennyson Jesse’s Solange stories, a jealous husband commits suicide in the hope of incriminating his wife and her lover. 75. While in the witness stand, Alma Rattenbury admitted that she had had intercourse with Stoner while her son John was sleeping in the same room – an admission that shocked even the seemingly unshockable F. Tennyson Jesse and one which Alma Rattenbury later insisted had no truth in it. She claimed it was a statement she had made while confused. See Trial of Alma Victoria Rattenbury and George Percy Stoner, 8–9. 76. This contrasts with E. H. Young’s novel Celia. Young’s middle-aged heroine, so used to retreating into her private world and being mentally unfaithful to her decent but dull husband, finds her private fantasies unravelled and is forced to face a reality that she has blinded herself to through being excessively private. Reality is, however, better than Celia’s delusions – her husband is not as mediocre as she believes, for example. Jesse, however, sees Julia’s loss of privacy and her private world as unfortunate. Untenable as Julia’s private world may be, it nonetheless offered her a way to deal with the narrowness of her lower-middle-class suburban life. 77. Rollo does not suffer for his infidelity as Olivia does, though he is injured in a car crash and that is the closest thing in the novel to a ‘punishment’ for Rollo. His family are only too willing to excuse his indiscretions with Olivia. 78. The reader, especially the woman reader, has also intrigued literary scholars and social historians. See for example Kate Flint, The Woman Reader, 1837–1914 and Janet Badia and Jennifer Phegley’s Reading Women: Literary Figures and Cultural Icons.

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Index Austen, Jane 20, 43, 165 Northanger Abbey 21 Pride and Prejudice 21 Sense and Sensibility 20

flâneur 2, 50–1, 55 flâneuse 2, 51–2, 54, 59, 74 Foley, Winifred 9, 165, 168 Child of the Forest 109–10, 164 Futurism 64–5

Baudelaire, Charles 50, 54, 165 Benjamin, Walter 50, 72

Hall, Radclyffe Well of Loneliness 41–2 holidays middle-classes 107, 118–21 women 14, 122, 125 working-classes 107, 111–12 housing 164 Eyles, Margaret Leonora 28–30 middle-class 5, 9–10, 18, 26, 30, 116 suburbs 9, 139, 141 Women’s Housing Sub-Committee 29 working-class 5, 9–10, 28–9, 110–11, 139

Cambridge, Elizabeth 170 Hostages to Fortune 126 Campbell, Barbara 164 The Garden of a Commuter’s Wife 34–6 class middle-class 5, 7, 9–10, 12–18, 164, 168, 169, 176 working-class 7, 9–10, 13–15, 17, 164, 165, 168, 169 Delafield, E. M. 144–53, 166 Messalina of the Suburbs 136, 138, 150, 170 The Way Things Are 136, 152–3, 161 Dickens, Monica 117 One Pair of Hands 117 domesticity 4, 7, 10, 12–15, 25, 35, 38–9, 49, 63, 69–70, 74, 97, 103–4, 107, 110, 114, 118–19, 122, 124, 126–9, 139, 150, 154, 161–2, 171 domestic space 2, 7, 22–30, 46, 60, 117, 119, 160 Du Maurier, Daphne Rebecca 130–2, 170

identity feminine/female 3, 9, 17, 34, 61 fluid 17, 35, 49, 52, 57, 68, 154 middle-class 10, 15, 18 interiority and class 106, 113, 119, 127, 129 interwar adultery 18, 132, 134–5 marriage 113–14 suburbs 7, 138, 140–1, 170 Jesse, F. Tennyson 74, 137–8 A Pin to See the Peepshow 136, 144–6, 150, 152, 154, 170

Eyles, Margaret Leonora The Woman in the Little House 28–30

Klickmann, Flora The Flower-Patch Among the Hills 34–6 181

182 Index

Lehmann, Rosamond 154, 169 A Note in Music 70, 119, 122 The Weather in the Streets 136, 144, 154–7 Macaulay, Rose 18, 77, 83, 94, 101 A Casual Commentary 94–5 Crewe Train 77, 90–1, 94–103, 166, 168 murder 18, 134, 136–8, 149–53, 161, 170 Nightingale, Florence 23, 38 ‘Cassandra’ 23–5, 27, 38, 163 paganism 80–1 passante 54–5 Pember Reeves, Maud Round About a Pound a Week 108 Richardson, Dorothy 1, 74 ‘Ordeal’ 169 Pilgrimage 1–3, 12–13, 48–9, 59–64, 160, 163, 168 ‘Tryst’ 104–5, 127 Rodaway, Angela 9, 109, 164, 165 A London Childhood 109 servants Dickens, Monica: One Pair of Hands 117 domestic 5, 10, 18, 33, 114, 116–18, 129, 153–4, 169 Mitchison, Naomi 114 Simmel, Georg 48, 52 spinster fiction 83–6, 167 Spring Rice, Margery Working-class Wives: Their Health and Conditions 110–12 Struther, Jan Mrs. Miniver 10, 69, 70, 128 suburbs gardens 30, 33, 142

housing 5, 117 masculinity 36, 139 neurosis 140–1 sexuality 18, 140–3 Women’s Housing Sub-Committee 29 Von Arnim, Elizabeth 7, 9–10, 35, 129, 163, 164 Elizabeth and Her German Garden 7, 16, 32–4, 119 Enchanted April 119–25 Solitary Summer 34, 36 The Pastor’s Wife 119 Vera 7–8, 169 Warner, Sylvia Townsend 166 Lolly Willowes 16, 18, 76–7, 83–90, 167 Williams, Mrs Leslie A Garden in the Suburbs 34, 36 Woodward, Kathleen 165 Jipping Street 40–1, 109 Woolf, Virginia 2, 3, 21, 25–8, 48, 68, 76, 86, 93, 128, 164, 165, 169 A Room of One’s Own 23, 25, 38, 40, 42–6, 55, 65, 160, 163, 166 ‘Evening over Sussex: Reflections in a Motor-car’ 71–4, 161 Mrs. Dalloway 54–6, 71, 160 Night and Day 12 Orlando 71–4 Sketch of the Past 26, 44 ‘Street Haunting’ 57–9, 64, 160, 166 working-class leisure 29–30, 105–13, 164 Pember Reeves, Maud 108 privacy 9, 17, 29, 164, 165, 168 Spring Rice, Margery 111–12